Blog post#12: Excessive Goosers

In this blog post… Famous goosers in rock history. Good goosing versus goosing gone too far. Avocado Disappointment and Victor Movlove. Bob Marley and The Wailers, starring Family Man. How to cure a bad case of goosing.

In his autobiography, jazz legend Miles Davis mentions a player who ‘gooses” the rhythm. Goosing is a slang term which means pinching another person’s buttock in order to hurry them up. The gooser, in a musical sense, is a musician or a singer who plays slightly ahead of the beat, and this has the effect of accelerating the tempo of the band as a whole.

A gooser can be of two kinds: a player who occasionally plays notes too impatiently (e.g., due to getting overly excited at choruses or crescendos) or a player who consistently plays every note slightly early (a.k.a. playing on top of the beat).

The other players in the band can try to ignore a gooser and maintain the original tempo, but the rhythm will then seem like it is slowly deflating. The music’s vitality will start to drain away. Realistically, once a musician plays even one note slightly ahead of the beat, the other band members must react. They have to follow the gooser and step up to the new, faster tempo he or she has set. The gooser may then goose again, and the other musicians will have to step up again, and so the cycle continues, with the song getting faster and faster...

Having a gooser in the band is not necessarily a bad thing, especially when playing energetic rock music. Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones is a famous gooser of the tempo. Live and on studio recordings, you can hear him dragging the rest of the band along behind him. Charlie Watts, the band’s drummer, was a master of following Keith’s every acceleration. Take a listen to the original version of Honky Tonk Woman. The cowbell and drums start off the song at a steady 111bpm. Keith’s very first guitar lick is impatiently played and this immediately gooses the tempo up to 113bpm. Then the roller coaster ride begins... The song reaches 118bpm by the end of the first verse. A lot of acceleration then happens during the first chorus. By the end of the song, the band are playing at 126bpm. Quite an increase in tempo! (A 14% increase.) The song is a classic though. It has loads of energy because of the continual acceleration and it sounds great.

Other great performances that are goosed and which accelerate considerably:

• You can’t always get what you want (live), from The Rolling Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus. Starts at 80bpm. Ends at 98bpm. A 22% increase in tempo.
  
• Roundabout, live at the Rainbow 1972 by Yes. Starts 129bpm. Peaks at 148bpm. 15% increase.
  
• Rock me Baby, live at Monterey 1967 by The Jimi Hendrix Experience. Starts 147bpm. Ends 162bpm. 12% increase.
  
• Common People, Glastonbury 1995, by Pulp. Starts 136bpm. Ends 168bpm. 23% increase.
  

As an aside… Most studio music is made to a metronome (click track) today. Many professional performers now also use a click track when playing live. It’s refreshing to hear the songs listed above which were played without a click track. The flexibility in the tempo makes the music more human, and more energetic and alive.

Goosing becomes a problem when it is excessive and when the other musicians have a hard time keeping up. An amateur musician or singer may get overly excited when they reach a chorus or a crescendo part in the song. Their intention is to give a boost of energy to the music at this moment. They hit harder, increase their volume (often a good thing) and push the tempo too fast in too short a space of time (NOT a good thing). The effect is the opposite of the one intended: the song’s energy is lost.

Another way goosing can be a problem is when there is more than one gooser in the band. In this scenario, tempos can get out of hand quickly!

Victor Movlove

One excessive gooser I knew was a bassist called Victor Movlove. We briefly played in the band Avocado Disappointment together. Victor was a tall, joyful guy and renowned gooser (only in the musical sense, I hasten to add). At one Avocado Disappointment concert, I began to play the guitar intro to Chuck Berry’s Johnny B Goode at the regular tempo, which is already fast, only for Victor to push the tempo so fast, it was impossible for me to play the solo I had planned in the second half of the song. Abort! Abort! I had to improvise a much simpler solo on the spot; one that was possible to play at the now ridiculous tempo. The drummer was also dragged along. He dropped beats in order to catch up and messed up drum fills which were now impossible to play at this break-neck speed. This was probably the most punk rock version of Johnny B Goode ever played.

On another occasion, Avocado Disappointment were recording a demo song in a recording studio. Victor Movlove laid down his bass line on top of a pre-recorded percussion track. The producer noticed Victor playing was on top of the beat and in the DAW (recording software) was able to move the bass back by a certain number of milliseconds relative to the percussion track. The track immediately sounded groovier.

How to deal with an excessive gooser

The gooser may not be aware they are pushing the beat, so it’s best to tell them: “Roger, you are f***ing up the rhythm!”, or words to that effect. You should probably sugar-coat the message a little. A fellow musician once told me that I was pushing the beat. His comment stung me. It hurt my feelings. After listening back to some of our recordings though, I knew he was right. I felt deflated. I then spent a month focusing on this aspect of my playing and I largely sorted it out. So, I urge you to tell it to the gooser straight, at the risk of offending him or her. It will be better for the band and for the gooser also (although, don’t expect to be thanked for delivering this message!) And, of course, make sure YOUR playing is on point before giving them the bad news!

Things an Excessive Gooser can do to improve

• Record band rehearsals. Listen to the recordings and notice when a song gets faster, either suddenly or gradually. Listen for impatiently played notes that goose the tempo.
• Work on time-keeping in general and on subdividing precisely at slow tempos. Use a metronome (the Gooser’s nemesis). Perfect slow tempo practice feeds into a musician’s playing at full tempo.
• When playing with the band, pay more attention to the drums. Follow rather than lead the drums. (The gooser will need to know their parts very well, so they will have enough attention spare to focus on the drums).
• At home, practice band songs at the correct, agreed upon tempo. Use a metronome. (If the gooser previously practised a song at a faster tempo than the band play it, this would have caused him to ‘hear’ the song as being faster, and so he would have a natural tendency to want to speed the song up when playing with the band.)
• Set the metronome going and play one note on your instrument to every metronome beat. Try to play at the exact same time as the metronome beat (you may even obscure it, if your note and the note of the metronome are similar frequencies). Next try to play slightly ahead of the beat on purpose and then slightly behind it. Get used to the different feel of these three ways of playing.

Ultimately, if the excessive gooser doesn’t stop excessively goosing the tempo, it may be better that you let them go and find a replacement.


Another related aside… While gradually goosing the rhythm can give a lot of energy to a song such as Honky Tonk Woman, other classic performances slow down during the song and sound great nonetheless. For example, Stir it up (live at The Old Grey Whistle Test, 1973) by Bob Marley and The Wailers. Family Man Barrett, the bassist, pulls on the rhythm (plays very slightly behind the beat of the drums) and this gradually decelerates the tempo of the band during the song. It is interesting to listen to the start of the song and then skip to the end, to hear just how much of a reduction in tempo has occurred. The effect of Family Man playing slightly behind the beat is a very grooving, relaxed rhythm; the opposite of the ‘rocking’, goosed rhythms of the songs mentioned earlier. And certainly the opposite of Victor Movlove.

(Some musician and band names in this article have been changed to protect identities.)


Mark Baxter (c) 2024