8
SECRET DRUMMERS
Life doesn’t always pan out the way we want it to. We may set our hearts on becoming a sporting legend, a software billionaire, or a globally adored supermodel, but we end up flipping burgers, driving buses, or balancing the books for small-time fire-hydrant manufacturers. So it goes. And this happens to drummers as well. Many young, percussively able people dream of spending their lives sitting behind a gleaming drum kit, bashing out multiplatinum hits for an audience of insanely devoted fans; and while a few will realize that ambition, many others end up among the buses, the burgers, and the fire-hydrant ledgers, wondering where it all went wrong.
What you need, if you’re going to be a successful drummer, is not necessarily insanity or flashiness or tattoos, but an unfailing determination to work hard in order to achieve your dream. On top of that, of course, you need luck. Without luck, all the hard work in the world won’t give you the opportunities you need to show your skills and get yourself noticed.
However, there are a good many drummers whose luck took them in a different direction—not to a disappointingly dull job, but into the limelight. These are the people who may have initially thought they were going to spend their professional lives drumming, but instead found great success in a different occupation. And it is astonishing how many famous singers played the drums before they found the vocal vocation that would change their lives. Vocals and percussion are the earliest musical instruments used by the human race, and these artists hit the big time after merely switching from one primitive means of making noise to another.
Several important makers of soul music started out with sticks in their hands. Before he began belting out impassioned soul songs like “If You Don’t Know Me by Now” as part of Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, Teddy Pendergrass was belting a drum kit in the Cadillacs, a 1960s doo-wop group from Harlem, New York. The songwriter Lamont Dozier would go on to co-write many No. 1 Motown records as part of the Holland-Dozier-Holland songwriting and production team, but as a teenager he played drums in a band in Detroit, and in the early 1960s became a session drummer for the pre-Motown label Anna Records. One of his colleagues at Anna was the future soul legend Marvin Gaye, who was also playing drums there. Gaye was also a session drummer for another Detroit label, Tri-Phi Records, and he progressed to playing drums for Motown, backing acts such as the Miracles and the Marvelettes. But in 1962 he had his first solo hit, “Stubborn Kind of Fellow,” and Gaye was on the way to stardom as a singer.
Years before James Brown told us to “Get Up Offa That Thing” and declared that he wanted to be a “Sex Machine,” this African-American bundle of energy from Barnwell, South Carolina, spent time in a juvenile detention center for robbery. After his release, he tried a series of different jobs and activities, including boxing, baseball, shining shoes, and singing in a gospel group before becoming a drummer and singer in a band called the Famous Flames in the 1950s. He soon left the drum kit behind when his vocal talent and showmanship became evident, and he was crowned the Godfather of Soul. But what he learned behind the kit didn’t go to waste: Brown’s most successful records display an extraordinary understanding of rhythm, and as a bandleader he employed some exceptionally skillful drummers, such as Jabo Starks and Clyde Stubblefield.
Though he is miles apart stylistically from the Godfather of Soul, the Godfather of Punk also had an early passion for the drum kit. Jimmy Osterberg, born in the US in 1947, was a lively boy who was raised in a shabby trailer park in Michigan. While at high school in the town of Ann Arbor, little Jimmy pursued his enthusiasm for the drums, keeping the beat in a series of bands, including one called the Iguanas. He kept up the drumming after moving to Chicago, where he played behind the drum set in blues clubs. But that wasn’t how Osterberg eventually made his name. The world had to wait until he left the drums behind, formed a group in 1967 called the Psychedelic Stooges, and launched himself as their highly energetic lead vocalist. The band eventually dropped the “Psychedelic” and Osterberg changed his name too. At school he had been nicknamed Iggy, because of the Iguanas, and a local newspaper journalist resurrected the name in a review of one of the band’s gigs. Osterberg changed his second name to Pop, and Iggy Pop, the wild man of rock, was born.
One of the world’s most unlikely ex-drummers is Donovan Leitch, known simply as Donovan. Born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1946, he became a prolific Dylanesque folk singer and scored a string of hits in the 1960s including the US-chart-topping “Sunshine Superman.” Donovan joined the Beatles during their Transcendental Meditation adventure in India in 1968, and even passed on some of his guitar-picking skills to members of the Fab Four. But in his teens, Donovan had worshipped jazz drummers such as Gene Krupa and Art Blakey, and he looked set to become a professional drummer himself. As a young man he was seized by wanderlust and was desperate to run away from home, to hit the road and become a traveling musician. But that was only possible when he changed his instrument to the much more portable acoustic guitar. As he later explained, “You can’t carry drums on your back.”
Donovan has revealed that his experience as a young drummer gave him a rhythmic sense that strongly affected the way he plays guitar: “I can cook up rhythms, and I had to cook them up myself, because I only had one guitar. So I’d be doing bass parts, I’d be doing Latin rhythms out of the middle of the guitar, and I’d be picking melodies out of the top of the guitar. I was a one-man band . . . And drummers would say, ‘I don’t have to find a pattern, because you’re playing the pattern inside the guitar anyway.’”
The gravelly, bluesy voice of Joe Cocker has graced many hit songs, from his storming version of the Beatles’ “With a Little Help from My Friends” (played to great effect at Woodstock in 1969) to his duet with Jennifer Warnes, “Up Where We Belong,” which boosts the tear-jerking ending of the 1982 film An Officer and a Gentleman. But in his first band in the late 1950s, the Sheffield-born singer was behind the drums. As the 1960s dawned, he came out from behind the kit and fronted the band Vance Arnold and the Avengers, which toured the pubs of Britain playing standards such as “Sixteen Tons” and “Georgia on My Mind.” Cocker has a peculiar habit of moving his arms around while singing, which he has connected to his former job as a drummer, saying that when he started singing without drums in front of him, he wasn’t sure what to do with his hands.
David Essex and Suzi Quatro were both singers who found fame and UK chart success in the early 1970s. Born as David Cook in 1947, Essex became the drummer in a semiprofessional band called the Everons after leaving school, bashing his kit in east London pubs for a while in the 1960s. After switching to vocals and releasing a series of flop singles, Essex received his big break in 1971 when he was cast as Jesus Christ in the religious rock musical Godspell. His self-composed 1973 single, “Rock On,” featuring a sparse percussive backing track, launched the former drummer’s face onto the bedroom walls of thousands of British girls and kicked off a long chart career.
Born as Suzi Quatrocchio in Detroit in 1950, Suzi Quatro was taught to play drums and piano by her father, and played basic hand drums as a small child in his jazz band, the Art Quatro Trio. As a diminutive student at high school, she was encouraged to play the big bass drum. “I’m sure the music teacher was a sadist,” she joked years later. “Little, tiny kid like me with a mammoth bass drum!” She took off in the 1970s as a leather-clad singer, dwarfed this time by a big bass guitar, scoring glam-rock hits such as “Can the Can” and “Devil Gate Drive.”
Another bass player and sometime singer who flirted with the drum kit was John Ritchie, who came into the world in 1957 not far from Ginger Baker’s birthplace in Lewisham, southeast London. Ritchie was given the sobriquet “Sid Vicious” by his friend and future bandmate John Lydon, and the two of them would busk in the streets, with Vicious bashing a cheap tambourine. Caught up in the burgeoning British punk-rock scene, nineteen-year-old Vicious was behind the drum kit when Siouxsie and the Banshees played their debut gig on September 20, 1976, at the 100 Club Punk Festival, organized by punk svengali Malcolm McLaren. Vicious, of course, would join Lydon in the Sex Pistols, attempting to play bass guitar. The punk icon died in 1979, just twenty-one years old, his death certificate blaming “acute intravenous narcotism.”
Before she co-founded the Go-Go’s in the 1980s, Belinda Carlisle enjoyed a brief spell as a punk-rock drummer. In 1977 she joined the Los Angeles band the Germs on drums, calling herself Dottie Danger. But Carlisle never had the chance to show what a dangerous drummer she was in public, because she never played with the band live, owing to an extended bout of glandular fever.
Dana Gillespie played Mary Magdalene in the first London production of the musical Jesus Christ Superstar, and has since had a long career as a singer and movie actress. But as a teenager, her passion was drumming. While attending theater school, she worked in the mornings and evenings to raise money for a drum kit and drum lessons. Around that time, she became the drummer in a band, but when the singer pulled out, she stepped to the microphone and began her career as a vocalist.
Soon after the little-known Madonna Ciccone began dating the musician Dan Gilroy in New York in the late 1970s, they formed a rock band called the Breakfast Club, in which the charismatic Ciccone was frequently seen wielding a pair of sticks behind the drum kit. But the band was just one of a series of stepping stones to Madonna’s ultimate destiny as a singing, dancing, acting, self-reinventing, children’s-book-writing, African-child-adopting megastar.
Steven Tallarico, better known as Steven Tyler of Aerosmith, was a back-of-the stage man before he was a front man. By the age of sixteen, the Yonkers-born Mick Jagger lookalike was playing the drums in his first band, the Strangeurs (apparently an attempt to Frenchify and exoticize “Strangers”). Peter Gabriel played drums in bands while he studied at Charterhouse, the English public school in Surrey, but when the band Genesis emerged from that institution, he became the lead singer. Onstage, he wasn’t completely divorced from his previous role: he often had his own bass drum to play at the front of the stage. After leaving Genesis in 1975, he became a successful solo singer with a taste for powerful and distinctive drum sounds.
Shortly before becoming a 1990s grunge god as the lead singer and guitarist in Nirvana, Kurt Cobain played the drums in short-lived mid-1980s bands with his bass-playing and guitar-playing buddy Krist Novoselic, including the Sellouts—a covers band playing, improbably, the songs of the West Coast band Creedence Clearwater Revival—and the Stiff Woodies, which had various guitarists and vocalists, and which changed its rather adolescent name to Skid Row and then to Nirvana.
Cobain went from playing the drums to smashing them up. In 2011, I found a sad remnant of a smashed Tama bass drum on display in the showroom of Christie’s South Kensington auction house in London. It had been played twenty years before by both Dave Grohl and Cobain during a Nirvana gig at the Cabaret Metro in Chicago on October 12, 1991. Grohl had switched to guitar and Cobain had moved behind the drum kit for the last two numbers of the evening, “Four Enclosed Walls” (the PiL song) and “Endless, Nameless.” Cobain had deliberately destroyed the drums at the end of the gig, and this piece at Christie’s had been thrown into the crowd and claimed as a trophy by a member of the audience. After the auctioneer’s hammer fell, the drum remnant—plus a set list from the same gig, scrawled on a paper plate—went to an anonymous buyer for more than $13,000.
Becoming a charismatic lead singer is certainly not the only road to success for failed drummers. Why not try photography, acting, modeling, movie directing, politics, or the food industry? David M. Overton founded the American restaurant chain the Cheesecake Factory, but he is also a music lover who played drums in a band from the early 1960s, when he was a teenager. He later moved to San Francisco to try to make his fortune as a drummer, but eventually gave up and joined his parents in their small wholesale cheesecake business in Los Angeles in the mid-1970s.
Jamie Oliver started playing in the British band Scarlet Division in the late 1980s, when he was just thirteen, and played many gigs across the UK in the 1990s. But Oliver had also started working as a restaurant chef, for which he seemed to have a special talent. In 1996 he was spotted by a television producer who was making a documentary—he was cooking in an Italian restaurant in London at the time, rather than playing the drums—and he was given his own TV show, The Naked Chef. Although his band was signed by Sony and released a single, “Sundial,” Jamie Oliver’s culinary career quickly overshadowed his percussive life. He became a household name in the world of cookery, selling millions of cookbooks and his own brand of culinary equipment, and promoting high-profile campaigns to improve the nutritional value of Britain’s school meals and to encourage Americans to eat more healthily. Since then, he has occasionally been seen out of the kitchen and behind the drums, as when he appeared onstage with Blur bassist Alex James at the Big Feastival [sic] in the Cotswolds in the summer of 2013. He is sometimes confused with another drummer called Jamie Oliver, who is a longtime member of the British punk band UK Subs but may not be quite as handy with pots and pans in the kitchen as his namesake.
Long before LA Reid was a Grammy-award-winning American record executive and a judge on The X Factor, he was captivated by the drums. As a young man growing up in Cincinnati, Ohio, he worked in a barbershop and saved up a few dollars from tips to buy a pair of drumsticks, which he used to bang on his floor as he listened to records by James Brown. His real name was Antonio Reid, but one day, when he was drumming in a band, he happened to be wearing a Los Angeles Dodgers T-shirt, and one of his bandmates called him “LA” because of it.
In the early 1980s, Reid became the drummer in the local band the Deele, who had R&B hits with “Body Talk” in 1983 and “Two Occasions” five years later. He then moved into songwriting and production, forming the record label LaFace with his business partner, Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds. In 2000, LA Reid succeeded Clive Davis as president of Arista Records, and he later became CEO of the Island Def Jam Music Group and subsequently CEO of Epic Records. If Reid had stayed put behind the drum kit rather than becoming a music-business hotshot, several big-selling artists would probably have been a good deal less successful: he was the man who signed Avril Lavigne and Pink to Arista, and he has assisted the careers of artists as diverse as Mariah Carey and Justin Bieber.
As one of Britain’s most prolific and stylish photographers, Terry O’Neill has photographed a long list of famous and beautiful people since the 1960s, from Frank Sinatra to Brigitte Bardot, and from David Bowie to Amy Winehouse. He even married into celebrity in 1983, tying the knot with the Hollywood icon Faye Dunaway. But O’Neill may have never lifted a professional camera if he hadn’t picked up a pair of drumsticks first. As a teenager in London in the 1950s, his ambition was to travel to the USA to study with the country’s greatest jazz drummers, and he decided he could cross the Atlantic Ocean frequently and inexpensively if he became an air steward. He applied to the airline BOAC (British Overseas Airways Corporation, which would later merge with another airline to create British Airways), which had no steward vacancies but did have a vacancy in its technical photographic unit, which sounded intriguing. O’Neill took the job and began learning about photography, and went on to take pictures at airports for the British press. In the early 1960s he was swept up in the excitement of Swinging London, with its feast of highly photogenic actors, models, and pop stars, and his drumming ambitions were left far behind.
There are American politicians who might have become famous drummers if life had taken a different turn. Mary “Tipper” Aitcheson married the Democratic politician Al Gore in 1970, having dated him since an encounter at his senior prom five years before. Tipper Gore became the woman who protected young people from overtly sexual lyrics on records in 1985, when she helped to create the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), which pressured the recording industry to put warning labels on albums with “explicit lyrics.” This followed her purchase of Prince’s Purple Rain album for her daughter, and her outrage at some of the naughty words in the song “Darling Nikki.” Opponents complained she was anti-music in general, but that was far from the truth: as a teenager, Tipper had been the drummer in a 1960s all-girl band, the Wildcats. She had received a drum kit at the age of fourteen and played along to records at home in Washington, DC, including Sandy Nelson’s classic “Let There Be Drums.” The band—named after her mother’s car, a Buick Wildcat—were allowed to practice at the Aitcheson home, and played covers of Beatles and Bob Dylan songs. You can be sure that there were no offensive words in anything they performed.
Another famous Democrat, the former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, recently discovered the drums in her seventies. Albright made a surprise appearance onstage at the Kennedy Center in 2011, accompanying the jazz trumpeter Chris Botti, and the following year was back on the kit at the same venue, hitting cymbals and toms with a pair of mallets as Botti played Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma.”
Great dancers need an excellent sense of rhythm, and many dancers have shown an aptitude for the drum kit. Sammy Davis Jr. was a true all-around entertainer who could not only dance but could sing, act, tell jokes, and play the piano and the vibraphone. He was also a competent jazz drummer, and showed off his skin bashing on various television shows, including The Ed Sullivan Show in 1963.
The young British supermodel and Vogue cover star Cara Delevingne, known for her luxuriant eyebrows, enjoys posing for fashion shoots, but she also loves playing drums when she gets a chance. In 2013 she made a public appearance at the launch of a makeup collection at the Selfridges store in London, drawing an appreciative crowd as she played a Pearl drum kit with a Zildjian Custom Dark Crash cymbal. And in true drummer style, Delevingne has had her lucrative body decorated with tattoos, including the words MADE IN ENGLAND on her left foot, the head of a lion on her right forefinger, and her lucky number, 12, in Roman numerals (XII) near her right breast.
Given the fact that so many drummers have a penchant for comedy, it is not all that surprising that other professional comedians, besides Sammy Davis Jr., have had a bash on the drums from time to time. Rosie O’Donnell has whacked the skins behind Cyndi Lauper, and on a 1998 edition of her TV show, Rosie, she performed in a drum battle with the singer (and drummer) Chaka Khan. As a boy growing up in Philadelphia, Bill Cosby was obsessed with jazz and yearned to be a cool, swinging drummer in a band. The comedian has said that he would shine people’s shoes until he had a few dollars, and then go to a local musical-instrument store called Wurlitzer’s, where a man charged $1.25 for half an hour’s worth of drum lessons. Cosby’s mother eventually bought young Bill a kit for seventy-five dollars from a pawn shop, and he would play along to jazz records in his bedroom. Cultivating his image as a cool young drummer, he painted the tips of his drumsticks blue and would walk around town with them poking out of his back pocket.
After the drum legend Max Roach died in 2007, Cosby paid tribute to his hero with a comical speech about how, as a “boy from the projects,” he desperately tried and failed to imitate his favorite jazz drummers, including Roach and Art Blakey, on that seventy-five-dollar kit. When he finally met Max Roach, he claimed, Cosby told him: “Let me tell you something. You owe me seventy-five dollars.”
Mel Brooks, the Brooklyn-born director responsible for laugh-a-minute movies such as The Producers, High Anxiety, and Robin Hood: Men in Tights, had aspirations as a young man to be a jazz drummer in a big band, and he had a fantastic start: he was taught to play in the early 1940s by none other than Buddy Rich. Brooks once told Billboard magazine that Rich had become emotional in 1974 after the filmmaker found success with his famous comedy western, Blazing Saddles: “When I made Blazing Saddles, which was the first big hit I ever had, Buddy Rich hugged me and he was weeping. I said, ‘Buddy, why are you crying?’ And he said, ‘It’s such a great movie, Mel. You’re going to be a movie director.’ I said, ‘So? So?’ He said, ‘You coulda been a good drummer.’ Brooks found the master’s choice of adjective amusing: “He didn’t even say ‘great drummer.’ He said, ‘You coulda been a good drummer.’”
Chevy Chase, who found fame on Saturday Night Live and starred in many comedy movies, including National Lampoon’s Vacation series, could have been a reasonably good drummer too. He was lucky enough to go to Bard College, in New York State, at the same time as two even more promising musicians, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. The three students played together in an ensemble called the Leather Canary, which Chase later remembered as “a bad jazz band.” In his twenties, Chase played drums in the short-lived late-1960s rock band Chamaeleon Church (he clearly had a fondness for the “Ch” digraph), also contributing keyboards to their one and only album, now something of a cult psychedelia favorite. Meanwhile, Becker and Fagen went off and formed Steely Dan, recorded several classic albums, and sold tens of millions of copies.
Peter Sellers, the London-born comedian who would achieve global fame playing characters such as Inspector Clouseau on the big screen, played the drums for local dance bands when he was a teenager in the early 1940s. Other British comedians with drum chops include John Thomson, whose TV appearances include many episodes of The Fast Show (the catchphrase-based sketch comedy adored by Johnny Depp), and Al Murray, famous for playing his character “the Pub Landlord” on stage and TV. “When I was sixteen, all I wanted to do was play the drums,” Rowland Rivron told me. Rivron, a familiar face in British television comedy since the 1980s, had his drum epiphany as a boy at Abbotsford secondary school in Middlesex, which had its own jazz band. “The guy running the band was a French teacher called, bizarrely, Mr. Bean,” Rivron recalled, “and he would actively recruit kids and encourage them to take up various instruments. Of course, when people left the school, they had to leave the band as well, and the drummer was due to leave in two years, so I was asked if I wanted to take up the drums. I gave it a go and I became very interested in it. And the drummer I took over from was Ian Mosley, who went on to become the drummer in the band Marillion.”
Rivron would stay behind for an hour after school, sitting behind the kit and playing along to big-band music on a reel-to-reel tape recorder. “I was about sixteen when I played my first professional gig,” he said. “My mother drove me to a hotel near Heathrow Airport, where I played in a band, and she came back after midnight and picked me up. And from there I got onto the jazz circuit in west London. I ditched school, and when I was eighteen and nineteen I was gigging almost every night.”
In Rivron’s case, playing the drums became an accidental route to a career in comedy. But first he was in on the birth of the New Romantic movement, which spawned bands such as Culture Club and Duran Duran, when he became the resident drummer for a cabaret act at London’s famous Blitz club. Then he became the drummer for the Comic Strip, a group of alternative comedians who performed above Raymond’s Revue Bar, the city’s most famous strip club. The rising stars he accompanied included Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders, Rik Mayall, Ade Edmonson, and Alexei Sayle. While performing as a warm-up man for the American comedienne Ruby Wax, Rivron was spotted by a TV producer, which led to him fronting The Bunker Show, a late-night showcase for pop videos, and then becoming the comic foil to a young Jonathan Ross on The Last Resort.
Rivron has been on and off the kit for most of his life. He has toured with bands including Jools Holland and His Rhythm & Blues Orchestra, stepping in when their regular player Gilson Lavis fell ill, and he has played in an ensemble of musically talented British comedians known as the Idiot Bastard Band, comprising Rivron, Ade Edmonson, Neil Innes, and Phill Jupitus. Rivron told me he had his own idea about why so many drummers are comedians, and vice versa. This relates to the kind of personality that is drawn to the drums—or, perhaps, the kind of personality you develop by playing them. “I think there’s something about the drum kit that makes drummers a lot more slapdash in their approach to playing,” he said. “As a drummer, what you have to do in a band isn’t nearly as introverted as someone playing a melodic instrument.”
However, some of those players of melodic instruments are versatile musicians, and it’s not uncommon for guitarists, bass players, and keyboardists to play a little percussion on the side. Paul McCartney enjoyed having an occasional bash on the kit when the Beatles were in the studio. In Ringo Starr’s own words, “Every time I went for a cup of tea, he was on the drums!” And when Starr briefly left the band during the sessions for The White Album in 1968, following an argument with McCartney about the drum part on “Back in the USSR,” it was McCartney who filled in, contributing drums to that song as well as “Dear Prudence.” The following year, when Starr was away again, acting on the set of the movie The Magic Christian, Macca was back on the drums for “The Ballad of John and Yoko.”
Drums were one of the instruments played by McCartney on his 1970 debut solo album, McCartney. And he was obliged to pick up the sticks again three years later when the drummer Denny Seiwell abruptly left Wings before they flew out to record the album Band on the Run in Lagos, Nigeria.
In addition to being a skilled songwriter, singer, and harmonica player, Stevie Wonder is also an accomplished drummer who has laid down cool grooves on many of his own compositions, such as “Superstition.” He is particularly admired for his distinctive hi-hat work. Listen to his inspired, funky drum pattern on “I Wish” from Songs in the Key of Life; the drums were credited to a session player on the album, but Wonder has since revealed that he was behind the kit on that song. And who was the musician named the “greatest drummer of our time” by Eric Clapton in 1974? Stevie Wonder.
Prince has played drums on many of his own records. He once said that he started drumming at the age of thirteen, when he would turn on the radio and drum along on cardboard boxes to whatever song was playing. One of his biggest influences as a drummer was another multi-instrumentalist: Morris Day of the Time.
Graham Coxon is best known as the guitarist in Blur, but he too has hidden talents. “Graham’s a very good drummer,” said the producer Ben Hillier, who has worked with him on some of Coxon’s solo albums. “It’s not his first instrument, but his feel and his musicianship are so good that it totally works.”
Lenny Kravitz isn’t averse to playing the drums, in addition to other instruments, on his own records. A few years ago, a choir of high school students from Lewisville, Texas, began performing in a park during a visit to New Orleans. They happened to be singing Kravitz’s hit song “Fly Away” and, to their amazement, Kravitz himself suddenly appeared in person, sat behind their drum kit, and started playing along. Kravitz, who had a residence in New Orleans at the time, just happened to be nearby and had pricked up his ears when he heard the familiar music.
Steven Drozd told me he had been “playing keyboards and guitar and all kinds of stuff for years” before he joined the Flaming Lips. In fact, back when he was about twelve years old, it looked as if Drozd might devote his life to keyboards. “We had this old Yamaha organ in the den of our house that was just gathering dust, and I’d try to pick out things from the radio, and I learned a couple of Beatles songs. And after a couple of years, my dad bought a junky old upright piano and we put that in the living room, and that’s when I really started teaching myself piano and music theory.”
But multi-instrumentalism can bring its own complications. When he joined the Lips in 1991, he “just wanted to be a crazy, intense rock drummer.” But as he settled into the band, it seemed natural for Drozd to start playing keyboards and guitar on their albums, as well as drums. That created a problem when the band played live, since even Drozd couldn’t play drums and guitar, or drums and keyboards, simultaneously. The drummer Kliph Scurlock told me how they solved the problem. In 2002, when Scurlock was roadying for them, the band was due to go on tour with Beck, playing as his backing band for the main set. The Lips’ lead singer, Wayne Coyne, was discussing the arrangements for the tour with Beck. “As it was getting nearer the time to go to LA for rehearsals,” said Scurlock, “Wayne said at one point, ‘Y’know, I’m not entirely sure that he knows we don’t have a drummer per se, that our drummer plays all this other stuff when we play live.’ And he said to me, ‘You’re going to LA with us anyway. Maybe bring your drums just in case, because we need some drums.’ We got there and, sure enough, there was nobody else to play drums. So I started practicing with them, and they said maybe I should play with the Lips properly sometime. I started playing that night, and they haven’t been able to get rid of me since,” he laughed. (Scurlock may have been tempting fate with that joke: he left the band in 2014.)
Roger Taylor of Queen has earned considerable praise as a percussionist since the 1970s. In 1975 his bandmate Brian May called him a “great drummer,” explaining: “He’s got his own special style. I don’t know what it is, but when he plays, I know immediately that it is him. It’s so distinctive.” I was surprised, therefore, when Taylor told me recently that he didn’t specifically identify himself a drummer. “I think of myself as a musician, really, more than just a drummer,” he said. “I just think of it as all one thing—just being musical.” In 2013 he released his fifth solo album, Fun on Earth, on which he sang lead vocals and played keyboards, guitar, bass guitar, and a Stylophone toy electronic keyboard as well as drums and percussion.
Omar Hakim enjoys playing so many instruments that he has been criticized by fans for not playing enough drums on his solo albums. He corrected that on his 2014 release, We Are One, by the Omar Hakim Experience: in addition to writing his own compositions and playing guitar, keyboards, bass, and vocals, he contributes exciting drumming of the kind he has performed in the past for Weather Report, Miles Davis, and Daft Punk. Hakim’s multi-instrumentalism started early, when he made a deal with his music teacher at elementary school in New York. “I was falling in love with the drums,” he said, “but I was in third grade and too young to join the school concert band—you had to be in fourth grade. But my teacher said that if I played violin that year, he’d make sure I was in the band playing drums the following year. I guess the school needed a violinist. I ended up learning violin and liking it, and I won an award for it.”
When you look back at the story of Foo Fighters now, it might seem like Dave Grohl’s master plan to reinvent himself, effecting an extraordinary transformation from drummer to singing guitarist, but it didn’t happen that way at all. Grohl simply decided to record some songs he had been writing in the Nirvana and pre-Nirvana days. He played most of the instruments on the songs, used “Foo Fighters” as a pseudonym, and released them in 1995 as a limited-edition album on cassette for some friends. It was only after the music attracted serious attention within the industry that Grohl signed to a major label, formed a proper band, and stepped into the spotlight. Although Foo Fighters became a phenomenal success, there was considerable whinging from some die-hard fans who wished that Grohl would get back behind the drum kit for keeps, instead of fannying about with a guitar and a microphone at the front of the stage like some grunge dilettante.
The miracle for Grohl is that he is still highly regarded as a drummer. When other drummers diversify, they don’t always receive the praise and fame they deserve as percussionists. Ndugu Chancler is a case in point: his drumming is all over Michael Jackson’s Thriller, the best-selling album of all time. Chancler played on “Billie Jean,” “Baby Be Mine,” “P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing),” “Human Nature,” and the title track, and yet somehow has not achieved household-name status, perhaps because he has also been a composer and producer and played a lot of vibraphone during his career. “I was having this discussion with someone recently,” Chancler told me. “Myself and the other drummers that have also been songwriters and producers, like Narada Michael Walden, who produced soul singers including Whitney Houston—we never got as much acclaim as drummers. We were always doing more than playing drums, so we got overlooked on that level a lot.”
I remember meeting Phil Collins briefly in January 1974 outside the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London, after a particularly enjoyable Genesis gig. I was a fifteen-year-old fan waiting by the stage door, happy to meet any members of the band—such as Peter Gabriel, keyboardist Tony Banks, or Collins, whose drumming I considered exciting and technically brilliant. Two men eventually emerged into the frosty London night: the very tall guitarist and bassist Mike Rutherford, and a much shorter man in a tatty sheepskin jacket, his small face almost hidden by his longish hair and his beard. It took a few seconds for me to realize that this unprepossessing, stoop-shouldered man in his early twenties was the mighty Phil Collins. I blurted something witty like “Great gig, Phil!” and he grunted something back.
Little more than a decade later, this man was a singing superstar, selling millions of records, with a single at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, and his face—now beardless and with considerably less hair—plastered across thousands of billboards. It was hard enough to believe when it happened, and it would have been impossible to predict back in 1974, when his only featured vocal on the latest Genesis album was on a drumless ballad called “More Fool Me” (cowritten with Rutherford), a track I usually skipped when I played the record. Considering the trajectory of his career, the title of his first American No. 1 hit seems very appropriate now: “Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now).”
By the mid-1970s Collins had become the lead singer in Genesis, but fortunately he hadn’t abandoned the drums completely. He continued to play them on Genesis records; he drummed on the first Band Aid charity single, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”; and he famously played on both sides of the Atlantic for Live Aid, using the supersonic aircraft Concorde to carry him swiftly across the ocean. He also played brilliantly on a series of albums by Brand X, the British jazz fusion band.
Because he was now mostly front-of-stage when he toured with Genesis or as a solo artist, Collins had to hire another drummer, but he still managed to do some drumming himself during the shows. Nevertheless, owing to the success of his solo records, there are whole generations of fans who regard him as a singer rather than a drummer, and many people don’t even know he plays the drums. “Yes, that’s true,” said Collins when we spoke again, thirty-nine years after that first encounter outside the Theatre Royal. “There have been people who have come to a gig and seen two drum kits onstage, and they’ve wondered why. Then they realize, ‘Oh! He plays a bit of drums as well.’ I find it quite humorous that they think, ‘He can knock about a bit on the drums,’ because they don’t know my history. It all depends on what period of my career you come in on.”
Skill, and the mysterious workings of chance, may determine whether someone has a successful career as a drummer. Some exceptional drummers are highly successful part-timers who sing or play other instruments, like McCartney, Collins, Grohl, Wonder, Hakim, Taylor, Coxon, Drozd, and Kravitz. And there are many other potential drummers who go off and find success elsewhere and end up being would-be drummers, former drummers, or occasional drummers.
But we still haven’t discovered exactly why anybody becomes a drummer. It’s time now to enter murkier territory, and to investigate a possibility that has been bothering me for some time. Do people begin playing this instrument because they have something a little bit naughty on their minds?