This is the second of a two-part post about drummers. In this post… Gaetan the knife-weilding percussionist. Drum machines? Another disastrous gig for the band Tambana. Ringo’s genius. Crazy drummers Drummers have a reputation of acting wild and crazy: getting drunk, trashing hotel rooms, throwing televisions out of windows, driving cars into swimming pools, etc... Rock mythology is full of such stories of drummers’ antics. Prime examples of madcap drummers from history would be Keith Moon of the Who, John Bonham of Led Zeppelin and Animal from The Muppet Show. In my experience, drummers, true to their stereotype, are often a breed apart from the regular musician. I don’t know why. Take for example, Gaetan, a talented percussionist. I once hired Gaetan to play a day-time corporate gig in one of the buildings of the E.U. Commission in Brussels. I told the band to come early as there was a security check at the entrance of the building. On the day of the gig, at the appointed time, the harmonica player, the bassist and myself were waiting inside the building. There was no sign of Gaetan. He wasn’t answering his phone either, so I made my way to the front lobby to see if I could see him. There he was having a heated discussion with two security guards. Eventually, they let him and his percussion instruments into the building. I asked Gaetan what had happened. He explained that the guards did not want him to bring in the knife he had with him. It was a large hunting knife. It may have even qualified as being a small sword. I said, “Why on earth did you bring a knife? I told you there would be a security check!”. He replied, “To protect myself!” Gaetan was 6 foot 4 and well built. The chances of him being attacked in the street in the middle of the day in a European city pre-migrant crisis were close to zero. However, the real crazy thing was not that Gaetan had brought a large hunting knife with him, but that security let him bring it into the building! He had told the guards that he needed it to cut his drum skins, which was obviously bulls**t. Drum machine Is it possible to do without a drummer altogether? My old band, Tambana, could not find a decent drummer for love nor money. And the date of our first ever gig was fast approaching. We were booked to play The Apsley House pub in Portsmouth on the south coast of England on New Year’s Eve, 1998. As time was running out, we made the radical decision to play the gig without a drummer. Instead, our plan was to use a drum machine supplemented by some real percussion instruments, such as maracas, which were to be played by our singer Tommy. We were inspired by Mick Jagger playing maracas at Rolling Stones gigs. We had already jammed along to some electronic drum beats supplied by Hammond Cheese’s Casio keyboard. (Hammond Cheese being the nickname of our keyboard player.) Surprisingly, these beats had sounded pretty good. The only problem was, these Casio keyboard drum beats could not be programmed. You just set the beat going and it would remain the same for the rest of the song. As luck would have it, our guitarist, Careless Santana, already owned a programmable drum machine. It was a model made by the manufacturer Boss. Since Careless had no idea how to programme his own machine (being a gearophobe), I ended up with the job of entering in all the drum parts for the songs we would play. I spent hours and hours in my bedroom fiddling around with the little buttons, squinting at the tiny LCD screen and consulting the manual. All this effort would be worth it to have some more sophisticated drum arrangements than the Casio keyboard could supply. Meanwhile, Tommy the singer was tasked with buying the percussion instruments. When he returned from the local music store he had with him one tambourine and, rather unexpectedly… one banana. The banana was made of plastic and filled with dried seeds. It was a novelty shaker designed to amuse a small child. Incidentally, our band name derived from these purchases: Tambourine + Banana = Tambana. A week later and I had finished programming the Boss drum machine. The band started practising in earnest. It took a while for us to fall in line with the unwavering, precise beat of the Boss, but we eventually got the hang of it. The evening of the gig finally arrived. The Apsley House was jam-packed with drunken New Year’s Eve revellers. We had to squeeze ourselves through the crowd to get to the stage. They were chanting “TAM-BA-NA! TAM-BA-NA!” Tommy, as well as being our singer, was the landlord of The Apsley House, so there was a lot of anticipation from the audience who all knew him. They had never heard him sing before. For our opening song, we had opted to use a drum beat from the Casio keyboard. This song went down great and ended to loud applause. Now it was time to unleash the real drum machine, the Boss. Here we go. I pressed play. I’m not sure what had happened since the sound-check earlier, but the Boss now sounded so pathetically weak that the audience spontaneously burst into laughter. They were all laughing! Hammond Cheese was laughing! And they all continued laughing while Tommy, Careless Santana and I scrambled around the stage frantically checking connections and trying to rectify the situation. All the low and middle frequencies had disappeared from the drum sound. We couldn’t figure out why. The Boss drum sound suddenly had all the tonal qualities of two stick insects having sex inside a Walker’s crisp packet. We ended up ditching the Boss and relied only on the Casio keyboard drum beats, the tambourine and the banana for percussion for the rest of the evening. All that wasted time programming the damn thing! Tommy later told me that his regular drinkers at the bar were still laughing about this incident months afterwards, which annoyed him no end. I imagine the Boss machine is currently decomposing at the bottom of a landfill somewhere near Portsmouth and polluting the ground water for generations to come. Drummers are underestimated As I mentioned at the start of this post, finding a good drummer is essential for your band. The drummer is often the determining factor in the quality of a band. In the words of Duke Ellington: "If you have a great band with a mediocre drummer, you have a mediocre band. If you have a mediocre band with a great drummer, you have a great band!" Despite this, I get the impression that casual listeners of music often fail to realise the value of a good drummer; the magic they can bring. When listeners “feel” the music is good, they attribute all of this good feeling to the superstars at the front of the stage: the musicians the cameras focus on most when recording live concerts and music videos. The singer and maybe the guitar player get the majority of the air time. The drummer gets the occasional two-second close up. The drummer is, along with the bassist, simply a side man in many listeners eyes. He or she can easily be replaced. They are non-essential. Take, for example, the drummer of the most revered of bands, The Beatles. Ringo Starr has been much maligned over the years as being the least talented of the Fab Four. He’s been regarded as hanging on the coat-tails of the other three’s stellar songwriting talents. Paul of course wrote such classics as Yesterday, Michelle, Hey Jude, Let it be, Paperback writer, Eleanor Rigby, Penny Lane… the list goes on and on. John wrote Help!, Strawberry fields forever, Lucy in the sky with diamonds, All you need is love, Revolution, Come together... to name but a few. George also wrote much-loved classics such as While my guitar gently weeps, Taxman, Something and Here comes the sun. In addition, Paul surely has a claim on being the greatest melody writer of the 20th century, regardless of genre. Ringo wrote Octopus’s Garden. So, I can see where Ringo’s critics are coming from. However, I consider Ringo to be an absolutely essential part of The Beatles. His great sense of groove provides the not-so-obvious magic that his band mates’ great compositions rest upon. The Beatles would not have achieved anything like the success they did without Ringo in my opinion. When John Lennon was asked in an interview whether Ringo is the best drummer in the world, he replied “He’s not even the best drummer in The Beatles.” He was joking of course. Paul McCartney tells of the hairs standing up on the back of his neck the first time the band played with Ringo. You only need to listen to The Beatles’ Hamburg recordings pre-Ringo to know the value of Ringo. All my life, I’ve heard stories of how Pete Best, the original drummer, was unfairly kicked out of The Beatles when they were just on the brink of stardom. John, Paul and George were jealous of Pete’s good looks, so the theory goes. They denied him his rightful place in rock history and all the adulation and money! The truth of the matter was that he was nowhere near as good a drummer as Ringo was. Ringo was special. Drummers know this. Casual listeners do not. When I was younger, I used to love certain guitar solos by Steve Howe of Yes, Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin and Eric Clapton of Cream. In fact, I still love these solos, but I realise now how much of their magic was supplied by the great drumming that was underpinning them. Without the immense grooves of Bill Bruford, Alan White, John Bonham and Ginger Baker, these solos would have been much less impressive. Conclusions about drummers As we have seen, it can be difficult to find a good drummer for your amateur rock band: one who grooves, has good subdivision, plays at reasonable volume levels, turns up to at least some rehearsals and acts in a somewhat sane manner. Due to the difficulty of this task, you may consider paying a good drummer to play or even using a drum machine, despite these two options not being ideal.
Hopefully you have a good network of contacts within the community of musicians where you live, and you can draw on this network in order to find a decent drummer. (Some names of musicians have been changed in the above blog) Mark Baxter (c)2024 Names of some individual and bands have been changed
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Blog: How to form a rock band. Also, how NOT to form a rock band.About this blog
These blog posts contain info I would like to pass on to my music students when they form their first bands and start to play live gigs. I explain more here in my first blog post.
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Mark Baxter, musician, music teacher, guitarist, bassist, drummer. English expat living in Belgium.
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