Tony Barrell - Born to Drum: The Truth About the Worlds Greatest Drummers--from John Bonham and Keith Moon to Sheila E. and Dave Grohl

FOR THE FIRST MUSICIAN I EVER MET:
MY MOTHER, JOAN BARRELL

I think drummers are amazing. Ive been listening to them and watching them now for a long time, having been a fan of pop and rock music since I was a boy. Drummers play the most wonderful, exciting, and complex rhythms. A band without a drummer is like a rocking chair that somebody has cruelly bolted to the floor: while it may appear to rock, it actually doesnt. And yet drums dont simply add rhythm to the music we listen to: these apparently primitive acoustic instruments bring drama, warmth, texture, and humanity to it as well.

Are you a drummer? the brilliant British drummer Bill Bruford asked me outright when I requested an interview for this book. Other percussionists seemed equally anxious to know whether I played the kit, whether I was one of them or not, as though a non-drummer would not be sufficiently qualified to understand them properly. I can immediately see why they would be so cautious, if not paranoid. A heck of a lot of writing about drummers seems to recycle the same old clichs about these people being crazy, stupid, or somehow so different from their fellow humans that they might as well be six-legged aliens from the planet Zildjian.

No, Bill, Im not a drummer. But I am a musician as well as a writer, I do know a great deal about music, and I had no intention of writing a book about the insanity or dumbness or weirdness of drummers. Instead I wanted to go deeper and examine what it really takes to be one of them. What kind of person becomes a professional drummer? What qualities do they need? What makes drummers different from ordinary people who dont use wooden sticks for a living? What sort of kicks do people get out of drumming? I wanted to take the clichs apart, separate the tired old mythology from the truth, and see if I could reach some profound or thought-provoking conclusions about the role of the drummer in a band and in the wider world, as well as the culture, history, and psychology of drumming.

I ended up talking to around forty brilliant professional drummers, plus other important musicians who have worked closely with drummers, and I came away with some great stories and some ideas and opinions that surprised and amazed me. I also found that most drummers are great company: theyre sane, intelligent people with interesting things to say. Whether I was shooting the breeze backstage with Clem Burke of Blondie, having a long chat with Phil Collins, or on the receiving end of a stream of jokes from Nick Mason of Pink Floyd, I had enormous fun. I learned a heap of stuff, too: every single drummer I spoke to had different insights to offer me, which only goes to prove that drumming is a more complex and sophisticated subject than some people would have you believe.

This book is dedicated to drummers everywhere. But it certainly isnt just a book for drummers: its for everybody who loves music, and wants to know much more about these incredible musicians. Take it from this non-drummerdrummers really do rock.

I magine this. One day, youre given the opportunity to be a musician in a band. Its a really cool band, playing powerful and addictive rock music for an army of appreciative fans worldwide. Youre going to travel the globe and bring pleasure to hundreds of thousands of people, with fans screaming your name and queuing round the block to say hello and touch the hem of your garment. How awesome is that?

Except that theres a catch. Every night you will be relegated to the back of the stage, all but concealed behind an assortment of hefty, round objects that you are required to whack continually using a pair of wooden sticks. You have to hit a snare drum, a big drum that stands on the floor (appropriately known as a floor tom), a series of other toms, and God knows what else. Oh, yes, and there is a whole array of cymbals that you need to ding and bash and caress as you go. And maybe you should think about striking that cowbell or that other oojamaflip on the offbeat during the second part of the middle eight in the fifth song of the second half.

Meanwhile, your feet are operating pedals to hit the big bass drum in front of you, the one emblazoned with the name of the manufacturer or the name of the band (also known as the kick drum), and to activate the hi-hat, which is a special pair of cymbals on a stand that crash together. You cant do all this stuff randomly and haphazardly, either: it all has to fit with the music the bands playing. In fact, its your job to keep all the other musicians in time and playing to the correct rhythms. And in case all that isnt daunting enough for you, lets say youre a prog-rock band and several of your numbers are epic twenty-two-minute suites with about fourteen tempo changes in each one, along with several bars of seriously tricky time signatureslike 13/8 (thirteen quavers to the bar) instead of the 4/4 of standard, no-nonsense rock music (four crotchets to the bar).

Your arms and legs are beginning to ache. The sweat pouring down your face, your chest, your arms, and your legs is partly the result of the physical exertion that is required to play your instrument, and partly the result of a profound terror that youre going to screw up, momentarily forget how one of the songs goes, play one half beat out of place that confuses the bass player, the guitarist, the singer, the backing singers, and the entire horn section and turns a great number into a chaotic cacophony.

On top of all that, while youre playing, youre mostly hidden from view; while hundreds of adoring fans are ogling the lead singer and the guitarist, regarding them as the ultimate sex gods, youre being seriously ignored. Whats more, you have the most enormous collection of equipment to transport from gig to gig, to laboriously set up and take down again. So do you really want that gig? Do you really fancy being a drummer?

Well, somebody has to do it. What is the most important instrument in a band? asked a recent online poll on musicbanter.com, an American website where tens of thousands of music lovers chew the fat over their favorite subject. When the dust had settled, the clear winner was the drum kit, with nearly 36 percent of the vote, ahead of guitar (nearly 29 percent), bass (just over 18 percent), and vocals (just over 14 percent). The result confirms that drummers are absolutely vital to modern music.

So its just as well, isnt it, that plenty of people want to be drummers. Thousands of willing volunteers step forward and accept the challenge of playing this monstrously cumbersome instrument, and most of them not only do it well but absolutely love doing it. In many cases, they cant imagine anything that would give them greater pleasure.

The big question that has bothered me, for more years than I care to remember, is: Why? Why would anybody choose to be a drummer? It was a question that ultimately took me on a long journey, into a long series of concert venues, hotel rooms, and recording studios, as I met dozens of top drummers and tried to get to the bottom of their peculiar, percussive passion.

For some people, there is one quick and easy answer to the big why. This is an idea about drummers that is so powerful, and so deeply ingrained in our culture, that it will not go away. Exactly how this idea arrived in the world is unknown. It may have been conceived in the early twentieth century by a jealous boyfriend who discovered that his girlfriend was sexually attracted to a man who played the drums in a band. It might go back much, much earlier, to a time when a bunch of prehistoric humans noticed, to their intense irritation, that one rogue member of their tribe enjoyed beating stretched animal skins instead of doing something more useful, such as making flint tools or hunting saber-toothed tigers. The idea is this: people who play the drums are crazy. Insane. Nuts. Cracked. Several hit records short of a jukebox.