Get Drunk, Break All Your Heads, Express Yourself

At any rate, picking up where things left off some weeks ago...

Tthe whole volleying of drummage & riddim t'ings has continued all this time that I've been on involuntary hiatus. Simon's latest roundup on the matter hinges on the role of the crucial role of the drummer in a power-trio context, he observing "by definition a power trio must have a good drummer because otherwise the whole thing topples, there's no compensating for a subpar limb when the animal is three-legged."

Which brings to mind some straggling thoughts I'd had after I figured I spent my thoughts on the topic. Something that falls outside the prior funk/jazz/soul spectrum. Although maybe not entirely outside that spectrum because it requires a sidestep into the prog/fusion canon.

But something having to do with crucial role of a drummer in a trio situation, especially in the instance when the drums is not only very primary in a very central and frontal way, but also when the drummer in pulling double duty as vocalist.

Anyway: "Prog" and its jazz-derived time signatures, its basis in rhythmic gymnastics and the like. Admittedly, I've never been much into prog. With the one main exception being Soft Machine, who I finally cottoned to quite late. Or at least Soft Machine while Robert Wyatt was in the outfit, since it was his presence that proved the main point of appeal to my ears. The voice, the songwriting, the wee bits of whimsy and humor he at times brought to the music.






Sadly, drumming exited the equation altogether after Wyatt suffering his crippling accident in 1973. As far as technique and skill are concerned, I can't say how Wyatt rated as a drummer when stacked up to contemporaries like Ginger Baker or Mitch Mitchell. There are times, especially on the first Soft Machine album, where you sense he and the band are getting a little too ambitious, slightly overshooting their abilities on some of the more complicated twists.*  Having had a lifelong interest in jazz, Wyatt once said in an interview that he knew he'd never consider himself an accomplished drummer, if only because he would always compare himself to the drummers he admired -- first-league jazz drummers like Max Roach, Tony Williams, and Elvin Jones. For that reason, he said, he'd learned to content himself with his abilities as they were, choosing instead to concentrate of exploring and developing what he could do with his voice, instead.








(In another old interview clip, Wyatt explained why he and the band opted to play in non-stop suite form -- having all the song run together with nary a break between them. He said they opted for that format when touring the U.S. as the opener for the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Feeling meekly overshadowed by Hendrix & co., they expected they'd meet with a negative -- if not hostile -- response from the American audience. So by eliminating pauses and stringing all the songs together, they figured they could stave off the jeers, or at least drown them out.)

At one point, a contributor to an earlier installment of Simon's thread cited This Heat's "24 Track Loop." Not so much a power trio, but a trio capable of delivering a great deal of power, thanks to vocalist and kitman Charles Hayward as the dynamic core of the much of the action; and -- as with Soft Machine -- the drums frequently playing a very central and prominent role, being the engine that propels the material. The same being often the case with Hayward's post-This Heat project Camberwell Now...








This Heat were one of those odd, slightly incongruous entities at the time -- another instance, as was the case with a few other groups of the era, of a unit made up of members who were older that many of their punk/post-punk peers, and who came from a background that ran contrary to the usual punk pedigree, but were draw to the music and to the scene for the experimental potential it offered. In this case, Hayward and Christopher Bullen came to post-punk by way of playing free-form, improvised music; and had spent a good portion of the 1970s kicking around on the margins of the prog scene, with the former having started out playing in an outfit with Phil Manzanera and Matching Mole bassist Bill MacCormick. This latter prog connection makes perfect sense in a way, if you consider This Heat as a post-punk equiv of Soft Machine, except with the Canterbury and overtly jazz aspects replaced with a krautrock-ish minimalism and experimentation.

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* Which in a way connects with something about Wyatt that I immediately found endearing, something that you hear in his voice and his lyrics, as well. That being a bristling against limitations, which disarmingly suggests an all-too-human frailty and a sense of humility. (Which, in its turn, runs to the contrary of so much of the pomposity and mystical bullshit that plagues large portions of the prog canon.)

When the Bomb Drops

In response to Simon's drummage thing, something about a favorite thing from and a least-favorite decade -- a bit about D.C. go-go music for '80s blog.

Also appropriate I suppose, seeing how the passing of Chuck Brown was among this past year's more notable musical RIPs.

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A couple of related items I came across while writing...

1)  A 1985 article from The Face on the go-go scene, written by David Toop relayed here. A couple of interesting quote from the thing that align with my own points...

"Surely, this is just hard funk? Well, yes and no. It's those bass drum body shots, booming over 40, 60, or 90 minutes without a break, that make for the subtle difference.

"Though Go-Go, like New York's Hip-Hop, is the grandchild of The Meters' second-line rhythms,...it has produced its own distinctive relationship between the kick drum and the snare, overlaying it with a unique blend of elements...

"The commitment to live performance is total. ...The members of E.U. raise their voices in derision against drum machines and sequencers, mocking the idea of pressing a button and then hearing the machine play on as you walk away from it. ...Players like E.U.'s Shorty Tim, Trouble Funk's T-Bone and Chick Brown's Mack Cery seem to possess endless reserves of stamina. It was the Godfather of Go-Go, Chuck Brown, who started the idea of keeping the beat going through the whole set."

And later, quoting Maxx Kidd, chief of D.C. go-go label T.T.E.D. Records:

"...'They started creating it from the playgrounds, from the rec centers, from the garages, from alleys. The kids would get anything from trash can to a hand-me-down conga. ...It was almost like they said, "Fuck society and fuck that Top 40 radio. They're not doing anything for us but look what we're doing for ourselves." They took a lot of pride in that. The next thing you know they couldn't afford to go to the big concerts. They couldn't afford to go to the clubs that were bringing the national acts or the so-called classy local acts.'"

Which in its own parallels what some have said about the origins of hip-hop in the late '70s and early '80 -- about how, as far as making music went, a DJ sound system and a microphone were default street-level alternatives to funding cuts to music programs in public schools.

2)  Also, a documentary about the music circa 1990 that I found on Youtube. It looks like someone at Dangerous Minds was kind enough to corral the links for all six part of the film.

Throw That Beat in the Trashcan

Taking a break from the drummage faves to mention an un-fave...

I'll admit that as a teen I feel into the stereotypical Beatles/Stones dichotomy trap, favoring the former over the latter. Over the years I've made slight and sporadic attempts at offsetting the short shrift that I gave the Stones. And lately, likewise with the group that was considered (for a time, at least) the Stones's UK rivals -- the Pretty Things.

Perhaps on account of being one of the most inappropriately-named bands in rock, the Pretty Things never made any significant blip on U.S. shores. But this is the tune what pulled me in:





Baron Saturday being Baron Samedi, the Haitian vodou loa of death; the ancestral spirit presiding over the afterworld. Which would explain the percussion breakdown/tangent/flurry towards the end of the tune -- it's supposed to be the group's approximation of vodou ceremonial drumming

Don't get me wrong -- I love everything about this song. That is, I love everything about it EXCEPT for the percussion break. It's clumsy, ill-fitting, and might very well be the worst rock'n'roll faux-ethnomusicological jaunt ever committed to tape.*  I usually find myself wandering out of the room when that part comes along, leaving for just long enough for it to be over.


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At any rate, for those who might be lost and not sure what all this drummage banter is about: Simon Reynold's been culling the results from the throwdown (be they in bloggal or direct correspondence mode) over at his primary venue. Part one is here, and part two is here.

As an aside on the topic: I all but fell over when I saw that Kudwo Eshun had cited the Duke/Mingus/Roach Money Jungle album, which has been a favorite of mine. It's an intriguing one too, considering the difficult chemistry between the participants. (Ellington having fired Mingus from his band years earlier. But being the one that had to coax Mingus into returning to the studio in the middle of the Money Jungle session, after Mingus had packed up his bass and headed for the elevator because he couldn't stand working with Roach.)

When I was young, I pretty much hated drum solos in rock. I equated it with prog-y indulgence & such -- a tedious, insufferable breakage of form. And I didn't much care for for them when I first started listening to jazz in early adulthood. It took a few years before that changed -- of getting what the whole point of the solo was, in terms of the whole aesthetic point of "shifting and twisting the rhythmic center of the song" (or whatever) all over the place. Finally hearing some of Max Roach's work was what finally got that notion across to me.

Also: Drummage props due to Pere Lebrun and to (once again) ATTT.

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* (Okay, I realize that's a harsh and unfair exaggeration. But, anyway...)

First-Degree Batterie

Alex Niven chimes in, offering the equation of "Drumming in pop: shittier = better." As far as rock is concerned, I admit I favor that aesthetic; or I do about half the time. Which brings to mind another favorite of mine, quite different from the prior nominees...




In their day, the Velvet Underground were reputedly considered by many to be the most wretched band in existence. Or they were as far as most people were concerned. A fair amount of this had to do with their art-damaged experimentalism, which many considered an offense to the ear. But there were also charges of gross musical incompetence, and many of those allegation of ineptitude were directed at drummer Maureen Tucker.

The above is anatypical VU number, which may be why I've always liked it so much. An instrumental outtake belatedly made available to the public in 1986, it's as raw as the vocal version of the tune that had circulated in bootleg form, if not a little moreso. But definitely faster and more crazed. It's a raging garage banger, or the incessant sound of banging inside of a garage, a pounding that rattles all the tools off the walls. Brute, merciless sonic minimalism of the most wonderfully primitive sort. Reed's rhythm guitar, Cale's bass -- the entire band is banging away in strictly percussive mode, an engine firing on all pistons, save for the occasional sidestep of Sterling Morrison's yakkety blues-tinged soloing. All with maximal fuzz-tonage. But it's the drumming -- there, in the center, the swollen heart of the thing pounding furiously and tirelessly away -- that always puts a smile on my face, all but makes me laugh with idiot glee sometimes.

But I guess it could be argued that the idea of a chugga-chugga musical-combo-as-(strictly)rhythm-unit was pretty much what rock'n'roll was all about in the first place. Case in point:




...The original version of the tune "Bo Diddley" (the one w/o the "Hey...,") having been perhaps be one of the greatest rock'n'roll records ever, or at least the best rock'n'roll drum song ever recorded.

And maybe one could split minimalistic musicological hairs and argue that the above are contrasts in centrifugal versus centripetal force. Dunno. Whatever.

Drums!

Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Skins

(Or: Drunmmage, Sample-Ready Crescent City Breakbeat Edition)


As I've probably made clear here before, when it comes to certain strains of music, I have my prejudices -- a subjective region-specific bias. The South factors into this in a big way, in which the city of New Orleans figures heavily.*  It's pretty much where funk -- the sound, and most notions attached to it -- hails from. Bearing that in mind, if it's drums you're looking for then there's the larger chunk of The Meters' discography to scratch that itch a myriad times over:




Beyond that, another thing that grabbed my ear (and etc.) many years ago were deep-grooving jazz tracks and albums that -- as it turned out -- shared a common element. That element being the part played by New Orleans-born drummer Idris Muhammad.

Admittedly, I never had much luck getting into Muhammad's 1970s CTI albums as bandleader. But other than that -- as a sideman he has a discog running through the 1960s and early '70s that's a first-rate treasure trove. Aside from playing on over half a dozen Lou Donaldson joints and also backing a number of other CTI labelmates, he also laid down kitwork behind Charles Earland, Grant Green, Houston Person, Gene Ammons, Melvin Sparks, Leon Spencer Jr., and a host of others. The groove that Muhammad lays down is often deeply New Orleans -- with deep traces of the distinct N.O. bottom-heavy swing, as well as the slight asymmetrical accents and contrapunction that gives the beat its roll and punch. But whereas the standard N.O. style of the era usually meant leaning heavily into the beat and striking the kit hard, Muhammad's sound was usually much more understated -- more quiet, paring back on the punch and the volume, letting the beat speak for itself without pushing it into the foreground...






Stylistically, the two above are a study in contrasts; with the second demonstrating just how subtly on-point Muhammad could be. But then there's the sessions he did with Grant Green and Rusty Bryant, where he gave it the full wallop...

Skin Damage

Early root reggae would be another area that's quite rich for a batteria-related throwdown. A number of very strong session drummer who helped write the books of reggae riddims. For years, Sly Dunbar was the one who got much of the credit. Leroy 'Horsemouth' Wallace was a fave for a number of folk. The above was always a favorite of mine, with Carlton Barrett behind the kit. Rightfully regarded by many as one of the top dub tracks of all time, it was one of several reversions that Pablo did of Jacob Miller's "Baby, I Love You So." Perhaps too obvious a choice, but definitely a killer drum track.

As far as Leroy Wallace goes -- his and Noel Alphonso's work on Horace Andy's In The Light was another one I always dug. Best heard on the dub version of the album.

Meanwhile, it looks like Airport Through The Trees pops up with the first of his own contributions, devoted to "Drummage 1960s," a good bit of which consists of material from the R&B and jazz canons. So I may take that as a green light.

Holiday for Skins

It's that season, once again. The season when the venues of various decades-blogs' contributors erupt in a friendly competition of musical whatsis. Two years ago it was guitar riffs, last year it was guitar solos. And now it appears that Simon has called it for this year -- drummage.

As much as I enjoyed contributing to last year's community throwdown, I might have to sit this one out -- merely spectate. It's at times like this that I realize that my "rock" enthusiasm isn't what it could be, and perhaps never was, because I'm hard-pressed to think of any candidates that I'd nominate for this thing.

Jazz? That's another matter entirely. Funk breakbeats and tracks? That would take a while -- in fact, I wouldn't know where to begin.

But the topic reminds of a related oddity we had around the university/community radio station where I had a show for about 5 years. When I'd work the late-morning slot, it meant that my shift butt-ended with the format change-over in which the Classical crew came in and took over. That is, providing the DJ showed up for his or her shift. Which was a constant problem, because the classical DJs were the station's worst when it came to being chronically late or not showing up at all. Which of course left the preceding DJ stuck in the booth and on the airwaves, manning the helm under a station manager or format chief could make it in to take over. Which resulted in my being late for my office gig many times; with other DJs being late for class, if not missing it completely. Naturally, this didn't go over well. After a while, it became common among DJs in the Rock format to retaliate against the situation by wrecking the Classical slot they were forced to fill -- picking the worst discs out of the Classical bins and spinning them in their entirety. Yeahyeah, I know I know...not the most mature or professional thing to do. But the rationale was: if the Classical division didn't care about its format and its listeners, why should anyone else?

At any rate, this one was a unanimous favorite for such occasions...




Which was an entire disc of former Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo banging the kit along with Vivaldi. Yep.

Product Placement

And given the Chi-centric nature of that last mixtape, I probably should've used this as the graphic. But then agian, had I fully gone with my own inclinations toward a period-specif Chi comp, it'd stack up to little more than "A Beginner's Guide to Charles Stepney." Which I would assume is already knowd territory (or should already be, at least).

Anyway: Peavey. Seems like from various magazines back the day -- everything from Hit Parader to Musician -- used to regularly feature the Peavey celebrity-endorsement ad. Quite the aggressive marketing campaign, they had. Rudy Sarzo of Quiet Riot uses Peavey. Gary Richrath of REO Speedwagon uses Peavey. Carmine Appice used some Peavey product or another. Sure they do. Because talk to any musician you knew, and chances were very high that the scoffing unanimous consensus was that Peavey absolutely sucked. Maybe get one of their low-end guitars if you're teaching yourself how to play, they'd shrug, but from thereonout -- nuh uh.

As I recall, Golden Earring reputedly used an all-Peavey PA system when touring stateside. Which I can believe. Because the consensus from the same quarters would have it that the two deserved each other.