 Before we start real quick, I wanted to let you know that Matt Brennan, our guest today, is the author of Kick It, a Social History of the Drum Kit, and he gave us a promo code to use in case you wanted to buy that book. I'll put a link in the show notes, but you can go to global.oup.com and use the code AAFLYG6, AAFLYG6 at global.oup.com. Welcome to the Drum History Podcast. I'm your host Bart van der Zee, and today is really cool because we are speaking with Matt Brennan of the University of Glasgow about his book Kick It, a Social History of the Drum Kit. Matt, what's going on? Hey, how's it going? Thanks for having me. Good. Absolutely. I'm just really honored too, because you were recommended to be on the show by Rob Cook, who is a great friend of the show and is the founder of the Chicago Drum Show, which you'll be speaking at on this upcoming 30th anniversary of the Drum Show. It's really cool. Yeah, that's right. In May 2020, I'll be heading over from Scotland to Chicago, thanks to Rob, the loveliest man in the history of drums. Yes, that's awesome. A little bit about you, born in Nova Scotia, you grew up in New Brunswick, and as you said, about an hour away from the Sabian Factory, which is drumming in your blood right there. That's right. Percussion is making its way all the way down the river from the factory in Medectic to Frederton, New Brunswick, which is where I was raised. Cool. I definitely grew up with that on my radar, and I don't know whether that was some sort of subconscious influence on me thinking about the broader history of the instrument, and how did this thing called the drum kit come to be, but certainly it's been something that I've been curious about ever since I started playing when I was maybe nine or 10. Gotcha. You're a very long time drummer, obviously. You've written multiple books, correct, from what I can see online here? Yeah, this is my first book on the drum kit, actually. Previous to that, I guess my job is a little bit unusual. I work in a music department at this university in Scotland, and it's more of a classical music-focused department, and I am the token popular music person, if that makes sense. That can mean that I'm teaching anything from like 19th century variety theater up to Beyonce and copyright law and anything in between. It's sort of a large remit. We have one person who teaches the 18th century, and I'm sort of the pop guy. You're everything else? Wow. That's exactly right, yeah. Cool. So this book, though, you sent me the chapters and I should say the index, and I looked through it, and I decided that I think it would be cool to talk about what you have as chapter five, which is titled Working Drummers, Musical Labor, Role Playing, and Authorship, because it's just very different from a lot of the other topics, and it's really just unique and interesting. So why don't you just take us through this chapter and explain all of this? And I think it's really cool. It kind of sets it up. You have at the top of the chapter a Clyde Stubblefield quote that says, question, like a Q&A, question, what's the difference between a drummer and a savings bond? Answer, one will mature and make money. And he says, all my life I've been wondering about my money. So I think that's a very great way to set it up about drummers being marginalized with money and being broke. So take it away. Thanks, man. Yeah, that was definitely a big part of the rationale for the book, because obviously this isn't the first book on the history of the drum kit in any way, shape, or form. There are so many excellent books and so much great material that's out there that's been written by other folks. So I thought when I was kind of designing the structure of the book that I needed to do something different or to try and tell this story in a slightly different way. And there's been from the folk who regularly attend, say, the Chicago Drum Show, so much great research existing outside of universities on the construction of drum kits, and literally the nuts and bolts of them, and also lots of great work on what you might call the canonical drummers of music history, the most famous, the most influential. And so that work is out there. And I really wanted to try and think of approaching the history of the instrument and also drummers from a slightly different lens. And the funny thing about doing drum kit scholarship in the world of academia is that as soon as I would tell anyone that I was working on this book, I would often get hit by non-drummer academics with this or that drummer joke that they'd heard, which of course drummers love. So for a while I was thinking, okay, that's great. I'll kind of ignore it and just keep on moving along with the research. But it actually came up so consistently that I decided that I would partly frame the book by looking at the different stereotypes about drummers that are contained in some of these jokes because they have a history too. And so one way of kind of dismantling those stereotypes and robbing them of their power is to actually say, where do they come from? Why do people think drummers are broke? How old is that idea? And that ended up in a funny sort of way giving me these different themes that I could look at with the book on the idea of drummers as being inventors or drummers as being students. And then in the case of this chapter, drummers as being workers, right? Thinking about what is the job professionally speaking of sitting behind that kit? How long has that been around for? How has it changed over history and across culture? This is a question which there hasn't been a lot of in-depth work on and which I think is just super fascinating to me at least. What's really cool to me also is you have just what you're describing as one of those topics that we all know about. I mean, drummer jokes. Who would think about that though as a historical thing? You kind of think that it's just always been there, but they obviously are based in some sort of historical fact. And you've got some cool... It's jumping ahead here a little bit, but in this chapter there's very cool images and there's things like it says the drummer's nightmare and it's a human octopus and it's a guy who can play all the things at one time. I love that historical element as well where it's early on there was the worry of someone coming in and taking your job. It's just the humor with drummers seems to go back a long ways. That illustration in the book that you're referring to, that actually is from the Musicians Union Journal in 1913. So back when musicians were just starting to form trade unions and not just musicians, but the trade union movement itself is really a 19th century phenomenon. So by the end of the 19th century not only do you have factory workers starting to organize and mobilize and protest for labor rights, but you also have musicians starting to do the same. And one of the earliest examples that I could find of drummers being described explicitly as a certain kind of laborer was in this Musicians Union archive, which is in the UK, but there are analogous examples in the United States and elsewhere. And so if you think of the turn of the 20th century, being a musician is a precarious job in the 21st century. And it has always been, right? It's never been a secure form of work. And that was the same not just for drummers, but for lots of musicians. And in 1906 in London, Pitt Orchestra drummers and other musicians, all Pitt Orchestra musicians in fact, got themselves together and went on strike throughout all the music halls in London demanding better working conditions and better pay because these music halls and theaters that they were working in were hazardous, they were being paid poorly, very little security in any of their jobs. And so they actually managed to organize a successful strike, which is an incredible accomplishment in itself. And there was a barrister named Lord Asquith who arranged this negotiation where they outlined exactly what sort of pay and conditions these musicians working in music halls would receive. And that happened in 1907, that this agreement was reached. And what was fascinating to me reading this little pamphlet, and this was the, you know, in this archive, you can actually look at the these original documents, right? You kind of put on your gloves and dust off the pamphlet. So I don't know, maybe I'm just some sort of extreme nerd, but I find that super exciting, like looking at this old document that no one has looked at in a hundred years, right? It's original, yeah. Exactly, yeah. And then opening it up and what do I find? But this pay agreement where it says that all musicians from, you know, here forward are entitled to a salary of 30 shillings a week, except for drummers who are entitled to 28 shillings. Now, why that discrepancy? Like, doesn't that just speak volumes about the status accorded to drummers as workers? Yeah. And they kind of go into the rationale of why this decision was made. And basically, in these negotiations sat, you know, the first violins of orchestras and theater managers and all sorts of different stakeholders with something to win or lose in this argument. And it was agreed in that culture of music hall that basically, drumming was considered relative to other instruments, a kind of unskilled labor that basically, you know, the thinking was not that this was categorically true in any way, but the thinking was that essentially in order to train up and become a first violinist, you needed to go into a formal conservatoire, you probably need to have a degree of some kind. Whereas a drummer, you could just kind of rock up and fake it, right? And within six months, you could be sitting in that orchestra pit. And, you know, we sort of think, you know, I've encountered that sort of situation maybe in a band rehearsal room or some sort of other professional context during my time as a drummer. And then you sort of read this happening like at the beginning of the 20th century, and it's just a real eye-opener, right? It is. And of course, that has a lot to do with the fact that at this time, the drum kit was a brand new instrument, right? Yeah. People didn't really understand this instrument. They probably thought it was a fad, something that wasn't going to last. And also, it was new enough that there was no tradition of it being studied in university departments or conservatoires, right? This was an outsider instrument. How would people typically learn the drums then? If there's obviously classically trained violinists and all this, was it typically like your dad's a drummer, your dad teaches you? Most often in the late 19th century, this would have been actually through the military, right? Yeah, okay. So the 19th century saw the kind of rise of brass bands and marching bands in particular, and the drums were an extremely important part of not just keeping morale up for troops, but actually also communicating battle strategies, right? There were different signals like the revay, the call to arms, and all sorts of like, well, we would now think of like some hot licks, right? But they actually would signal troops into action. But the other thing about this was that the military provided a kind of training ground for drummers to learn rudiments. And so rudimental drumming was extremely important throughout the 19th century and was probably about as formal in terms of schooling as it would get for drummers. And then of course, there are all sorts of informal ways. So what's really unique about, say, the city of New Orleans is that this tradition of marching band drumming existed. But then African American musicians put their own spin on that performance practice and came up with something totally new and original, second line drumming, right? So it was always this kind of blend of formality or informality, but at least at that time, there was no such thing as going to a university or conservatoire and studying even percussion, let alone the drum kit, right? It just wasn't on the table as an option. So military was important. And then also, I guess, when you sort of think about the main types of jobs available to drummers at the turn of the century, theater drumming was another big thing. So I know on previous episodes of your podcast, you've talked about the notion of trap drummers before. And that was definitely a main source of employment for drummers in the late 19th and early 20th century. And it's not just a silent film thing. It actually goes back into musical theater and operetta from prior to the invention of cinema. Drummers were hugely important in the orchestra, not just to conjure up that military scene that was trying to be staged in performance as part of a play, but also to provide those sound effects, provide all that ambient sound and special effects that were needed for theater. And that's something which kind of feeds into and translates into the tradition of trap drummers playing for silent film. That's fascinating. And I know in the previous, the trap drumming episode with Nick White, he did mention how it would even say in the manual, find young boys to come and play some of the instruments because they're cheaper labor. And it just goes to show that it's not, you wouldn't say, oh, you need an extra violin part, go out and find the young... Go find a kid off the street. Yeah, it's not. So, okay, that's kind of setting the scene here pretty well of we are just, we meaning drummers are just seen as laborers. So, yeah, okay. That's right. But on the other hand, what became very clear was that in the best sorts of theatrical performances or cinema houses, in fact, drumming did become this very skilled form of labor. And it was always skilled. You go back to that military tradition, drum cores had competitions. It was clear from one perspective that you can be a rudimental virtuoso and not everyone can. That is specialized, highly skilled work. And that was longstanding. It was just a matter of those types of skills being recognized by other people once the drum kit moved into other spheres of culture, say, indoor theaters, the music hall, these sorts of things. But these roles that we sort of think of maybe nowadays, session drummers or even dance bands, right? When we think about the different spheres of work that are available to drummers today, sure, you can be a kind of star recording artist, but for a lot of drummers, they're playing in function bands, playing in wedding bands. That's a really key source of income for many players. And in the 19th century, what you didn't see was drummers really being present in those sort of social dancing ensembles. That is something which is introduced really only at the, you begin to see it at the tail end of the 19th century, where suddenly drummers are becoming a core part of that ensemble, because guess what? People like to dance with a beat, right? With a beat, yeah, exactly. That's interesting. Yeah. Okay. So that was something which became increasingly formalized. And by the early 20th century, you see the concept of the dance band with the drummer as an absolutely essential component of that ensemble. And also the idea of the rhythm section, right? This is a pretty new concept in the early 20th century. So the idea of the bassist or some sort of low chordal instrument like the tuba or the sousaphone, you know, sousaphone and drums holding it down, right? Yeah, the classic combo. Exactly. But that notion of a kind of bass instrument and then a percussive instrument providing that pulse of dance music is certainly something that dates back to the turn of the 20th century. But you wouldn't find that in 1800. So like 1800, drummers don't really have jobs playing in dance bands. By 1900, you start to see that increasingly. And then by 1935, you can't have a dance band without, you know, someone really leading on that drum kit. It's absolutely vital. I would of course say it is the most important instrument in that band. But maybe we're preaching to the converted here, right? Yeah. But in that time, in that kind of time period that you just said there, it seemed like they went from being, let's say, non-existent in the band to being, in a lot of cases, the star of the band. Yeah, that's absolutely right. But getting back to like the, you know, the rest of the band would get 30, what was it, shillings, and then they would get 28. How long did that last? I mean, like, is it still going on? Don't answer that question because I'm sure it's... And it's never changed. No, that's a really great question. Unfortunately, the documents that we have, you know, you sometimes find these sort of landmark agreements that are also from an historian's point of view, an absolute gem in identifying, like, what was happening in the culture at the time. But there isn't always that follow-up. So for instance, you know, in 1907 when this agreement was reached, you could think, oh, you know, that is something which they're going to continue to negotiate. But then 1914, World War I breaks out. People have other priorities, right? So all of this history in the Musicians' Union suddenly, you know, A, it becomes very messy, and B, by 1920, or, you know, after World War I, say 1918 to 1920, the concern is no longer whether people should be getting salary X or salary Y within these music halls. But actually, at the time that the key concern in the Musicians' Union, at least in the UK, was foreign workers coming in and in the aftermath of the war. And, you know, in the perspective of the time, it was this kind of xenophobic thing where they were worried about musicians stealing musician jobs for British musicians, right? And that was only compounded with the advent of jazz, right? Where suddenly you have this American music with this truly global impact. You know, jazz, obviously, American popular music has had these waves of global impact over the past century or so. But the first genre to really be invented in the United States, and then suddenly you find it's not just an American thing, but people are demanding and craving this music throughout Europe, but also Australia, also Africa, like everywhere, China, Shanghai. That's jazz, right? And when people talk about the jazz age in the 1920s, you know, what they mean is that like people moved from maybe, you know, a European motive of cultural practices where if you were looking to see what was trendy and hip, you would be looking to see what was happening in Paris. Suddenly that flips with jazz and all that you hear in Paris is American jazz and these musicians kind of flowing back and forth. And that actually creates outside of the United States this kind of anxiety of work, in fact, that, you know, when people start thinking that this music emanates from a particular country and the best musicians playing that style have to therefore be American, it causes a sort of workforce crisis. Yeah, yeah, they're like, well, I'm not American. But how did, and with jazz scene, I mean, jazz is a very skilled kind of music. All genres are very skilled. But was it seen then as a very careful here, Bart? Let me rephrase. So jazz is very skilled. Was it seen then as something that was like a, how did they view it? Was it like a commoner's music or was it? They viewed it with suspicion. Okay. Yeah. And this is really evident as well, actually, you know, particularly when people are writing about drummers. The first thing to say that I found to be incredibly fascinating was that for a lot of countries, say in France, I know this is the case also Germany, also Australia, when people mentioned the word jazz band, the difference between a jazz band and a regular band was not improvisation, not soloing. It was the presence of the drum kit as an instrument. Yeah, super interesting, right? So when you read some of these early periodicals from the 1920s in other countries, when jazz first arrives on those shores and people are writing about it and trying to make sense of it, people really focus on the drummer and the drum kit as an instrument because that is the thing that really distinguishes that ensemble from previous social music ensembles that were playing in those territories at the time. And that, of course, accords the drummer kind of newfound status on the one hand, but also suspicion like, who is this person? What is this instrument? And also it brings to question this idea of expertise, right? You know, are they a real musician? You know, you can think of the introduction of another new technology around this time, like say the player piano, where you have this kind of mechanized music being cranked out. It sounds crazy to think about it in the 21st century like this, but people viewed the drum kit as not being not a million miles away from that kind of terrifying machine that was producing sound, right? And you can sort of see it. When people were describing how the drum kit sounds, they were saying it's the sound of the industrial landscape, the sound of noise. And that was only augmented by the fact that actually drum kits in the 1910s and 1920s frequently did have like motor car horns and klaxons that were kind of part of the traps, right? Rattles and yeah. Yeah. So for a lot of people, they thought this was a terrifying machine, not a musical instrument. And the person sitting behind that kit was sort of equally dubious, right? That's so funny. It's like people are scared of what's new. And especially in this era, you just think of people watching the silent movie where the train's coming at them and they're running out of the theater in horror because they haven't seen it. It's like what's new is scary. And drummers are scary. Exactly. And some drummers still are, let's be honest. Yes. Now, I just have like a kind of a side note question. So what was the, like you may not know this, but what was the process like of applying to be in the musicians union? Was that like something where you literally just, you know, you go down and you file and you get your card and you're out? Or was there a proving of your abilities that you have to play so many gigs or what was I like? Well, the first thing to say is that musicians unions were regionalized. So there wasn't like a particular set of regulations that worked the whole way across the country, be that the UK or the USA or anywhere else. It tended to operate more by regional branches and more by city branches. And many branches claimed that there would be some sort of musicianship test where you would have to say, sight read musical notation in order to be eligible to be a member of the musicians union to, you know, just like any sort of trade union, basically to show that you had this set of core skills which were specialized. And that if you all collectively went on strike together, for instance, those skills would no longer be available. That was hugely important to, you know, the everyday working operations and also the power of unions. But then you quickly, when you start digging into the historical documents, discover that, you know, that may have been what was down on paper in some of these branches, but it didn't always happen. Gene Krupa, for instance, talks about signing up to the musicians union in Chicago in order to get gigs. And he recalled that there was, on the one hand, this rule that you had to be able to read sheet music. But then in practice, when he rocked up to the union, the guy just said, do you have 50 bucks? Okay, you're in. Give me your money. Because, you know, not all drummers were readers of musical notation at that time. And, you know, and many still are not, you know, it's this instrument where, you know, maybe in a certain musical context, say you're playing in an orchestra pit, that's an essential skill to have. But, you know, you're playing in a rock band, you're probably learning by, you know, listening to records by going to gigs, watching other people play by jamming with folks. So there are like multiple traditions of skilling yourself up as a drummer. And, and that means that you have, you know, not one single set of skills that applies across the whole board, but actually different pockets of skills that, you know, depend according to the context that you're playing and then working in. Gotcha. And then to actually, so to function as a musician, in these times, you would need to, let's say, you're a card carrying member, you have to have a card and be a part of the union to work as a musician. If you, I'm assuming there was some sort of, there's probably historically some stories of musicians playing who weren't in the union, would they be, like, would you be penalized if you were a working musician who maybe your card expired or you weren't in the union? Yeah, so in theory you would be penalized, you know, and this would be something that would probably only tend to happen in very organized urban centers, right? And it's also something which is much easier to police when, say, you're working in a theater pit for a West End or Broadway musical show, and you're going there day after day, right? Sure. Where people can kind of, you know, have a look and say, is that a member of the union or not, you know, and then chase you up on your fourth day into the job if you weren't. Yeah. But for many musicians, then as now, this is itinerant labor. So you're moving from one place to the next, very hard to regulate, very hard to enforce. And you also got to remember in the 1920s, you know, in the United States, you have prohibition, right? Yeah. So, you know, people are not serving alcohol in venues, but that's not to say that you can't go to venues where alcohol isn't served, it's just illegal, right? Yeah. And so the whole jazz scene in Chicago in the 1920s is, you know, and this is extremely well documented in a fascinating history in itself, you know, is essentially super tied up with the mob and, you know, the Chicago mafia. Sure. And jazz musicians were absolutely embedded in that. And so how the union sort of polices those venues, you know, it quickly becomes very complicated, right? So you would often, I guess you can sort of think of the history of drummers as working musicians as being this kind of constant tension between, you know, suddenly people trying to develop consensus over what type of work it is, what kind of credentials you need in order to perform that work competently or legitimately, and then people subverting those rules, right? Yeah, really. And there's this kind of constant ebb and flow back between, you know, subversion and control that, you know, you could really chart a whole path of working as a drummer over the course of the late 19th and throughout the 20th century in those terms if you wanted to. Yeah, that's fascinating. Now, stop me if I'm jumping way ahead. But like just while we're on the union side of things, I feel like I've heard of musicians in like, like a friend of mine's dad, he was in the union in like, he had his card in like the 70s. When did it, like I am currently, I'm not in, I actually, so where I work, my boss is in the musicians union to get union paying jobs for like, let's say commercial work. But as a functioning musician going and playing at a bar nowadays, I'm not in the union, I don't, no one's asked me, I don't need to be, when did it kind of become less important? And if am I going to be taken to jail because I'm not in the musicians union is what I'm asking. I don't think you need to worry. Okay, good. So, you know, you can breathe easy. But this kind of goes back to what I was talking about with sort of control and subversion. Say you're working in the 1920s. Jazz music is this brand new music that's happening. The musicians union, the people who are the decision makers in that organization are probably the old guard, right? They're the classical symphonic players who are struggling to make sense of jazz, its conventions, its rules, just like everyone else. In the 1950s and 60s, it's the same thing but with rock music, right? So, it's very clear looking at the history of musical labor in the 1960s that musicians unions existed. They were set up in order to, you know, guarantee good pay for professional musicians and also to control the workforce or to regulate the workforce in some way. And that certainly happened if you were a session musician in a recording studio in Hollywood, right? But on the rock circuit playing bars and clubs, not only did those sorts of controls not exist, the musicians union didn't know what to do with rock musicians, right? And rock musicians looked at the union and said, you know, what are you doing for us? You don't understand this culture. You have very little to offer us. And so it's, you know, you kind of again see this sort of back and forth between unions suddenly and often very gradually cluing up that actually the workforce has fundamentally changed. And we either keep up and try and encourage, you know, basically broaden our remit to provide things like insurance for amplifiers, right? In the 40s, you didn't need it. In the 60s, suddenly you do, right? They needed to update the services that they were providing in exchange for that, you know, annual fee or face existential threat, right? Yeah, face their membership dwindle to the point of extinction. And that constantly happens, you know, to up to say the 1990s, where you're thinking about whether DJs can join the musicians union or not, right? You know, these are discussions which were, you know, you can sort of think, aha, half, half jokingly, you know, they're not real musicians until you realize that like, going back 50 years, that's exactly the kind of joke they were making about drummers, right? I was just thinking that, like, we gotta be fair in rock compared to jazz where it's coming out of nowhere. And it's like, what is this? And it's scary for the new generation, you know? Well, this is the point, though. The definition of what constitutes real musicianship is not fixed over time. It's not this constant universal thing that you can point to is the same in 1910 as it is in 2019. You know, it changes over time. And so that's the situation that unions constantly had to deal with. You know, when new technologies are introduced, when new instruments, when new forms of working, when new touring circuits are introduced, you know, this is all sort of a back and forth. You can really take a look at, you know, what's interesting to me, I guess, is sort of thinking about these new types of job that may have simply not existed, say, you know, drummer in a dance band in the 19th century, very rare, 20th century, very common, we can think of jobs like the session drummer, on the other hand, which, you know, I know when I was a kid, you know, on the one hand, I had the poster of Neil Peart on my wall, you know, wanted to be a rock star drummer. And, but then, you know, you sort of move into your, into your later teens and you discover Steve Gad and you're like, holy moly, I want to be a session drummer. You know, like, that is where the players are. And you listen to folk like, I don't know, Jim Keltner or whoever it might be. And you sort of realize, oh, wow, there's this whole other world. But to me, those were kind of like two paradigmatic types of work, you know, as a drummer that, that were the sort of dream job, the kind of rock star or musical star of some sort of genre on the one hand, or the session drummer on the other. The idea of a session drummer is this concept which did not exist in 1900, right? By the 1930s, suddenly it does, right? What I'm really interested in tracing when I think about, you know, drumming as a form of musical labor and as a job is, you know, how do these jobs work? How do they evolve? Where do they come from? Yeah. And you just beautifully transitioned into a next segment of the chapter here called the job of a session drummer. Can you explain a little more? Because I was just going to say, like, when did it start? Obviously, session drummer has to correspond with the change in technology for recording for it to be necessary for there to be a session drummer. You hit the nail on the head there. So session drumming is something that you begin to see increasingly, you know, A with as recording becomes more important. When we think about musical hits, you know, we think about the charts in, at the beginning of the 20th century, records were really, although they did exist as phonograph cylinders and 78 RPM gramophone discs, they were not the main way in which people consumed music. If you had a hit song, you were selling sheet music, right? Yeah. And it's really only by World War Two that that paradigm starts to shift over and people even begin to care about the record charts. In fact, the record charts as we sort of know them are really invented, you could say, by trade publications like Billboard at the end of the 1930s. But the other important thing to consider, I guess, when talking about the history of the session drummer is film music. And so when silent film transitions over to talkies or talking sound movies in the second half of the 1920s, A, lots of these trap drummers playing for silent film lose their jobs. I remember reading a book by Rob Cook, who we were talking about earlier, estimating that about 18,000 drummers lost their jobs in the United States between the end of the 20s and the beginning of the 1930s. Like, wow. Yeah, that's a lot. Yeah. It's a huge, basically a job that used to be the most secure form of employment is suddenly the least secure over an extremely short space of time. But that's also the time when suddenly recording these soundtracks to these talkies and films becomes this new form of work. So there's a drummer named Vic Burton, who was an important jazz player in Chicago in the 1920s. And he was seen by Lewis Armstrong and others to be like, you know, among the most technically skilled drummers working in the United States at that time. What does this super highly skilled virtuoso drummer decide to do near the tail end of the jazz age? Well, of course, he moves to Hollywood, right, and starts drumming for film scores, doing all sorts of different work. Another really famous session drummer of the 1930s, one of the earliest ones, again working in the West Coast, I believe, was Rudy van Gelder. That name may sound familiar or may not to you. Does it ring any bells? No, not for me. No. Okay, so Rudy van Gelder. I used to, when I initially came across this name, I was so shocked because it did ring a bell for me that I had to go and investigate. And I thought it couldn't possibly be the same person. It isn't. There's a very famous Rudy van Gelder, who's a recording engineer who basically engineered all of these classic blue note and prestige albums, jazz albums in the 1950s and 60s. And it turns out that he was named after his uncle, also Rudy van Gelder. And his job was session drummer in the 1930s. So I remember going through these archival documents and thinking like, Rudy van Gelder, like, this can't possibly be the same person. How old is this guy? How old is this guy? You know, and like, what are the chances of having that name at me? It kind of has to be. Turns out it wasn't, but one was named after the other. Got it. So folk like Vic Burton and Rudy van Gelder began playing in Hollywood studios, essentially when film soundtracks were coming up. And that was the sort of most lucrative session work at the time. The idea of having a session drummer for recording albums was not a thing because the album itself wasn't invented until 1948. You didn't have a vinyl LP prior to that. And you only had these gramophone discs, which were contained about three minutes of sound each. It's not to say that you didn't have a record industry, which was financially important, but it wasn't at the center of the music industry as it as recording was in say the second half of the 20th century. But the other key place where you had resident drummers, and although they didn't call them session drummers, the job was not that dissimilar was on radio. So you would have dance bands that would play regular radio slots broadcasting from hotels. And this was, I guess in the same way that when I was growing up, I was thinking, oh, to be a rock star or to be like a Steve Gad session drummer, you know, that that's that's the dream. In the 1930s in the swing era, the dream job was really having that that swish hotel gig with the national radio broadcast. And that's of course, how Gene Krupa came to fame when Benny Goodman got a national weekly radio broadcast and suddenly started disseminating their music, you know, across the country and creating this this national audience, which they could then capitalize on on touring. But other drummers as well were playing these hotels. And what's super interesting from a history of the instrument perspective is that you can see the moment when this happens, because the name of drum kits change at this time. So if you want to know when this kind of like positioning of the hotel national broadcast drummer comes into being this this sort of idealized form of work, you only need to look at the names of drum kits. Why are the drums that Krupa famously collaborated with Slingerland to design called Radio Kings? Why are the most famous Gretch kits of the 1940s called broadcasters? It is to signal that these were ideal drums for playing over the radio, right? Fascinating. I'm very heavily shaking my head. Yes, right now, that's so interesting. And it's pretty cool, right? Very cool. Just puts you right there in that time period where it's like, I mean, radio radio was king. Yeah. But it's it's funny. We you know, in the 21st century, we we just don't make that connection. No, you know, I remember for many years, like looking at Slingerland Radio Kings, and I never thought for two seconds about why call it that, you know, where does that name come from? But it was because in the same way I listened to a really great program that you did with an expert on stencil drums. Yeah. So in the same way that you kind of have like, you know, star drums in the 1960s, right? Yeah, that these these brands are being marketed as such, you know, not completely by accident, but they sort of signal to a larger cultural trend occurring in the times. And there are important clues in terms of thinking about like, what kind of job was seen to be emblematic of a particular instrument, say the drum kit in the 1930s versus, you know, the the 60s or or the 80s or the rest of it, right? Yeah. And it's the historian's job to kind of hunt down these clues to resituate them in that original context and then try and create that missing narrative, right? It's a it's a super fun project to to work on for sure. Yeah, that's fascinating. I mean, so at that point, we're in the hotels, then it went from the hotel to was it just quickly from, all right, the hotels there, now we're getting more, like you said, I believe in 1947, when you get more into recording vinyl that I'm sure created an entire more of an entire industry. People who find music they're taking it home. Was it almost like I could see it being like a research, like the opposite of when the trap drummers died, like a were they hiring drummers left and right, like we need we have studios, we have musicians. And one thing that's also interesting is a lot of times with studio drummers, it's like, there's musicians who are a guitarist is a singer or a pianist who wrote a piece of music. But it's just funny that they don't really like, they need a drummer, they don't have a drummer, drummers are like a hired gun. Yeah. You know, like they don't come with their own drummer a lot. That's just an interesting kind of part to it. Yeah, it I find this tension to be super fascinating, because you can really chart the history of music over the 20th century as being on the one hand, the establishment of this drummers this kind of low status worker, where they're very rarely the person on the cover of the album, or, you know, often not even listed in the credits, right? Yeah. They're these sort of invisible workers, they might as well be have the same status as a as a fader on a mixing desk, right? Yeah. Just not important to utility. Exactly. You know, just this kind of replaceable, you know, part on the other hand, increasingly over the 20th century, the drum kit moves from this position of, you know, say, absence in popular culture, you know, around the moment of its invention. It's, of course, when it's just starting to take root to becoming ubiquitous, to becoming absolutely central to the recording process, to the mix process, to the point where, you know, you can't think of having a hit song without having that kick snare and some form of cymbal, right? Yeah. And that's the era that we currently live in. So like, how do you move from that absolute marginalization on the one hand to this status of total ubiquity on the other? And you can sort of chart that through the field of work, I guess. Yeah. Now, clearly, the drum kit has a sort of first global heyday with Krupa and the Swing era in the 1930s, where you begin to see drummers as band leaders, drummers as stars who are even more famous than the band leaders. You know, many say that the reason why the Benny Goodman band split with Krupa is because Krupa had become, by that moment of that 1938 Carnegie Hall concert, more famous than Goodman himself, and it was Irking Goodman that he was stealing so much of the spotlight. Yeah. You then have this second sort of heyday with rock music and with rock and roll. So when we think about how rock and roll was packaged in the 1950s, beat music is what it was commonly referred to as, right? Again, look to the names of bands for clues as to like the broader culture. Why are they called the Beatles, right? The clue is in the name. You know, they're not called, you know, the guitar eagles. It's, right? In the early 1960s, the defining sound of what became the British invasion, the thing that became so revolutionary, was this hard pounding beat. They didn't call it rock music in the early 1960s. They called it beat music. They were beat groups. It was the Mersey Beat sound, and that isn't because the guitar was cranking out a beat. It was absolutely the drummer, right? Yeah. And this is central to that culture in the early 1960s. So with that, you know, what we now think of as, you know, we no longer refer to those groups as beat groups, retrospectively, we think of them as rock groups. But if you go to the newspapers and journals writing about these groups at the time, it's beat music, beat groups, and so on and so forth. And so that becomes another really key moment for thinking about the importance of the drummer as a profession, I guess, and a different sort of profession. And the Beatles are obviously absolutely crucial in that. And you can go to any history of the drum kit, you know, be it Ludwig or Slinger, Linda Gretchen, they'll all notice this massive spike in sales and demand for drum kits as well as other rock instruments, you know, from the moment of, say, that Ed Sullivan appearance onwards. Yeah. Happens about a year earlier in the UK. What was really interesting to me as I was sort of investigating that transition was that, you know, typically, if you watch a TV documentary, you sort of have this moment in any history of popular music on television where it's 1964, the Beatles get off the plane in February, and suddenly the world changes. Super interesting to me that reading newspapers in 1963, the New York Times were already writing about the Beatles before that happened, right? Yeah. The audience in America was being primed to react in a certain way. And this different culture of how to respond to music of appropriate behavior to it was something which, you know, maybe too much to say people were being educated to behave like this. But certainly there was publicity, you know, well in advance of that moment when they step off the airplane to create and generate and train that reaction in people. It's like the machine, not in a bad way or a good way, but it's really like almost like being groomed by the media to not to get all conspiracies. But really. No, but that's, it's not conspiracy theory, it's just show business, right? Yeah. And what was interesting, you know, reading this New York Times article that predated this February first landing or first visit by the Beatles, it almost sounds like they're aliens from the planet, was this focus on the drums, right? They sent this New York Times journalist out to Liverpool to kind of figure out what was going on in the Merzy beat sound in the autumn of 1963 before the Beatles became to America. And they, you know, there's just this wonderful line about the journalist kind of looking quizzically at, you know, all these teenagers reacting in this extreme way to this drummer with his eyes closed just hammering the drums, you know, and playing louder than this person had ever seen drummers play before. I also recently came across, sorry, I'm just sort of, I get so excited about talking about this, Bart. Go for it. You know, it's hard to get me to shut up, but I came across this bootleg recording of the Beatles in Hamburg in 1962, I think it was, yeah, it would have have to have been just after they hired Ringo Starr. So obviously, the Beatles went to Hamburg a couple of times once with Pete Best, their former drummer prior to Ringo. And then once with Ringo. And man, oh man, if you haven't heard it, go to YouTube, do yourself a favor and check out this Hamburg bootleg of the Beatles with Ringo Starr on the drums. He sounds like John Bonham and the Ramones rolled into one man, no word of a lie. He is furiously heavy and loud. And it just made me realize, listening to this bootleg, how much they had to like tone it down and especially Ringo going into those first 1962 studio recordings, which we now think of as, you know, being on the one hand, absolute classics, but we don't think of the drums as being like earth-shattering, you know, like earth-shatteringly powerful, right? But man, go to those bootlegs just before they entered that studio, you'll hear something else entirely. And you'll hear, I think, what all the fuss was about and why that band was so important at that time. Yeah, like just a great live band where I think, I mean, we've all seen bands live where if the drummer's really into it, we as drummers have the ability to really make the show and push it forward. And obviously, we are kind of in a great way, we support the song and the musicians, but we can make or break something. 100%. It's that old saying, right? You know, a band is only as good as its drummer, right? Yeah. You know, there's another saying, I was kind of thinking to myself, where does that come from? And the earliest that I can find is about 1940, in fact. So again, swing era, you have this, it's in the book and I forget exactly who said it, one of the kind of key swing drummers, maybe George Wettling or someone, but basically just saying that any dance band is only as good as its rhythm section and the rhythm section is only as good as its drummer. And I was like, wow, that's something that I've been saying without, you know, thinking how old it was or like, or basically how core it is to the drum kits status in the wider musical culture. But it's absolutely key. And it's been there for a very long time. Yeah. Well, people realize it then. And finally, we can hopefully get paid a little bit more. Exactly. So on that note, so there are, I want to, so moving forward here, so there's a ton of great session drummers in that era. I think we have to talk about the great, the late great, Hal Blaine, who you were born in 1929. I'm reading kind of your bit about him here in the chapter. Let's talk about him and just refer to him as kind of an embodiment of all of the session drummers at that time. And by that, I mean, there's tons of great ones. We can't talk about them all because there's, we could do a whole episode on session drummers, which maybe we'll do down the road. But like when I think of him, I think of him as the guy who at 9 a.m., he's in one session at 10 a.m., he's doing a movie at 11 a.m., he's going to do a TV show at noon. He's going to play on a huge Grammy-winning album at one, he's back to a movie just all day, every day. Amazing session drummer. What's just kind of that climate like that with him? Where did he come from and how did he get to that role? Sure thing. So as you point out, Hal Blaine born near the end of the 1920s, so he's too young to be a swing era drummer, right? But where he does learn his chops is actually at the Roy C. Knapp School of Drumming in Chicago, which was hugely important. Roy C. Knapp taught croupa, taught loads of famous drummers, including Hal Blaine. And Hal Blaine makes this really interesting comparison between the types of skills that he learns in that kind of formal setting, this school of drums and percussion, versus honing those skills in more informal settings. He claimed to have become an excellent sight reader actually by playing in strip clubs throughout Chicago, where basically it wasn't as if you were going home to study the music that was played in strip clubs. But at the same time, you had to know what kind of music went with what sort of dance, and there were charts essentially. And so you'd have new charts all the time playing at one club to another, and he had to become a good sight reader through kind of paying his dues on the on the Chicago circuit of strip clubs. But by the end of the 1950s, or I should say the second half of the 50s, he relocates to the Los Angeles, Hollywood area, and starts getting involved in making demos for songs. Because this is just at the time where you're sort of you can kind of think of it as the sort of dying days of publishing as being this the center of the music industry where people are sort of still thinking in terms of a hit song rather than a hit record. And where this association of star performers writing their own material wasn't yet the convention, it wasn't yet embedded. So before songs would be matched with particular performers and artists, they would do demos of these songs, and then shop them around and and A&R departments artists and repertoire were about doing exactly that, matching featured vocalist or artist with repertoire, i.e. with the songs that came from the publishing industry. And so Hal Blaine and a few other musicians who were younger than the other session musicians who were in work in Hollywood at that time were playing on these demos and they were playing on these rock and roll tunes. And at the time, the session drummers, according to Blaine in the LA area, had no interest in rock and roll and saw it again as like this passive passing fad, you know, wasn't kind of last who needs to invest in that. And so they weren't interested in playing on these on these rock and roll tunes, which by that point we kind of moved beyond rock and roll as being as almost kind of folk music in the mid 1950s, Memphis, Sun Records and all of that, and towards it becoming a more professionalized industry moving out west to Hollywood. But Hal Blaine was getting asked by engineers and producers to basically move from this demo way of working and making records for publishers to actually playing on the commercial record releases themselves and playing this new thing called rock and roll, because he and his younger session pals kind of knew how to do this and were also interested in doing it, whereas other session players were not more established session players, I mean. And he talks about this moment where suddenly it becomes clear that rock and roll is not this passing fad that it's here to stay that like playing with straight eighth notes and not swinging is actually something that's, you know, that is not just a flash in the pan. And they start to move in and become known as the kind of key session musicians to play that style of music. And it's at that point when the that older guard of session musicians starts telling them that they're wrecking the business, which is where Hal Blaine says the name wrecking crew came from, this group of session musicians who were who were wrecking the the previous jazz based way of doing things. So then throughout the 60s, obviously Blaine plays on countless hits rarely credited in the sleeve notes, which is something we were talking about earlier. You know, obviously, his skill as a drummer was seen as absolutely integral to producing that hit record. And yet, you know, was never the star never being recognized as such. And neither were the rest of the wrecking crew session musicians throughout the the 1960s, even though they were playing on all of these massive tunes. But by virtue of having that position of influence and playing on so many records, Blaine really influenced a few things. First of all, the size of drum kits he famously had this large kit set up where he would have just loads of toms that he would be able to do these incredible runs down the kind of thing that as a child, I would just kind of sort of dream that one day I've actually still never got to do it. Like you're played on a kit with like eight or nine toms. I had a giant Ludwig rocker kit as a kid. But at the Chicago show, we'll get you to like the remote setup with a ton of toms and okay, yeah, and then my dream can finally be realized. In any case, you know, you know, some people might think that that it's, I don't know, Neil Peart or or Bill Bruford or or, you know, some of these progressive rock dramas of the 70s who established that. But actually, it's Blaine, who in the 1960s is using like these mega kits on all these studio sessions, which as you pointed out in the very beginning of your question, made it I'm sure very hard for his technician who was hauling all these drum kits around. It wasn't Blaine by the time he was successful. His ability to go from one session to the other in a single day, often three or more sessions in a day was down to the fact that he had three different drum kits. And he had this technician who was hauling the drum kits from one studio to another across Los Angeles throughout the day, setting them up in advance so Blaine could just kind of rock up, do what he did and then go on to the next gig. The same happened to Earl Palmer, who was the other kind of like key session musician working in LA. And we could go on to like, you know, talk about, as you say, you could do a whole episode on session drummers themselves, but like, how Blaine and Earl Palmer really have a heavy influence on on defining that whole sound of West Coast pop throughout the 1960s, just in the same way that like Benny Benjamin and Pistol Allen kind of defined the Detroit sound in Motown through their work on those records. Or, you know, we can think of other examples like Al Jackson playing on Stax Records in Memphis, all these regional sounds, you know, a lot of that comes from, you know, the very distinctive styles of these individual session drummers, who are maybe like, not the names that our parents would know, unless your parents are drummers part, they might be. No, they're not. Yeah, mine neither. Anyway, so like my mom has no idea who Al Jackson is, but like drummers know, right? Sure. You know, and my mom certainly heard and danced to Al Jackson, she just doesn't know it, right? Yeah, exactly. And this is the influence of these session drummers. They're not necessarily household names, except among musos, but they're nevertheless hugely important. No, and I think that maybe that's a part of our personalities as drummers is like, is knowing that we're in the back of the stage. But we almost have this like little secret that's like, you guys wouldn't be having as much fun without us here. You know what I mean? It's like, we were confident with that. We hope, you know, we don't make two shillings less than everyone, but we're happy. And one kind of interesting thing about how Blaine it's like, not really even session related that I think is cool is just, I think I heard it on the I'd hit that podcast, which is a great drumming podcast, where he was talking about, first off, he's a very clean guy. He was not caught up in all of the, you know, in drugs and alcohol and stuff. But I believe, I don't really know what the right term for it was, but I think he was like, deputized, where I think he had like, he would have a gun and he would in Los Angeles would be like a deputy and had some police involvement where he could he had a badge. So I just think that's a really cool thing. And I was kind of briefly trying to Google it here on my phone. And I'm like, I'm not seeing much, but he talked about it and was like, then I'd hop in the police car with these guys and go do this. And it was like, wow, that's super fascinating. I can't say I've come across that myself, but I want to know more for sure. I'll send you the interview. I'll send you a link to it. But okay, so we're about halfway through the chapter here. And we're like an hour or more into the conversation. Yeah. So now we're at the point where we're so we're at this. Listen, Bart, I'll tell you, I'd be happy to talk to you and geek out about drums at any time. So if we want to go through the second half of the chapter or any other chapter at that point, you know, at a later stage, you know, more than happy because this is one of my favorite things to do is just nerd it up about the drum kit. Okay. Well, you know, maybe we do that to not have a, because I mean, we have a good another hour that we can talk here. And then let's set it up as a part two. We'll be talking about working drummers further into like the Rockstar drummers. So yeah, sure thing. And I think it's actually appropriate because we don't want to put like the John Bonham's and the Keith Moons in 70 minutes into an episode because I think people really love that and want to hear a lot about that. So yeah, yeah, absolutely. So we just got too excited talking about the first half of the 20th century. I mean, who would have thought that talking about musicians unions and stuff would be so cool? No, I think the key thing I'm taking from that is, well, let me ask you to kind of wrap it up. Did it ever really I guess I know the answer is it seems like it's like the age old it's one of those jokes that like the drummer is driving an old Honda Accord and the singer is driving a Ferrari. You know what I mean? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I think that it goes to say that drummers need to be like any musician need to be smart about licensing and rights and all that stuff and protecting themselves and having an attorney. But that's a whole thing. It is a whole thing. And I kind of feel like actually that would be a great thing to include in any sort of part two of the discussion, which we didn't really get around to, which is drummers as authors, right? Because the key reason why that stereotype exists, you know, the singer or the guitarist driving the Ferrari and, you know, the drummer driving some sort of, you know, beat up jalopy on the other hand, it comes from songwriting, authorship and royalties. Right? Yeah. And that is absolutely central to talking about the job of drummers as stars and the link that we sort of alluded to earlier of performers suddenly needing to write their own material in order to be considered as authentic musicians. And it's also something where you see a huge amount of change actually from the beginning of the rock and roll period onward. So, you know, in the 1950s, 1960s, the odds of the drummer getting listed as, you know, an author or songwriter formally in the credits of a song, which of course then trigger financial remuneration, royalties, all the rest of it, very rare, right? Yeah. You know, it didn't happen because the song was considered really to be two components, the melody, the top line melody, in fact, and the lyric, right? Yeah. The beat, not so much. Fast forward to 2019, completely different scenario, right? The, you know, songwriter, songwriting credits are distributed across loads of people, but beat makers and producers, i.e., the people writing the drum parts are now formally and, you know, frequently considered to be core authors of a song. So, how do we get from, you know, that situation in the 1950s where that was never the case up to the current situation in 2019, 2020? This we will talk about in part two. That's awesome. And immediately, we'll talk about this too, but my mind goes to Cream Sunshine of Your Love, where I believe Ginger Baker kind of infamously was, there was, I think, lawsuits of he didn't get any credit for that, where his beat was very pivotal in that. So, we'll leave that for part two. So, down the road, part two we'll do, we'll talk about Rockstar drummers, drummers getting credit, authorship obviously kind of falls in that, and it'll be great. So, Matt, where can, why don't you tell people where they can find you, where they can, because when this is out, I'm assuming, I think the book will be releasing very soon. So, where can people find you in the book? Yeah. So, the book, Kick It! A Social History of the Drum Kit is going to be published by Oxford University Press in the United States at the beginning of February and in the UK and Europe at the end of March. Don't ask me why those are two different dates, but it's what the publisher has told me. And then, you know, basically from February onwards, you should just be able to google Matt Brennan, Kick It! or Matt Brennan, Kick It! Drum Kit! And that book should be, with any luck, coming up on Amazon and all your traditional booksellers as well. And then, I will also be giving a talk in May 2020 at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on the History of the Drum Kit, followed shortly thereafter by a talk at the Chicago Drum Show, where I'm super keen to meet all these amazing people who are all historians of the drum kit and who I've certainly learned loads from while researching the book. And yeah, super excited to attend and learn some more and get to hang with folk then. Yeah, no, I'm looking forward to it. I mean, that's pretty big time, getting at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Chicago Show. Yes, super lucky. For the Chicago Show, I've got to really thank Rob Cook, who has just been the thing I love most about researching and writing about the drum kit is just how supportive the community of fellow drummers and drum researchers and drum scholars, whether they're at universities or outside of universities, just like how much everyone wants to learn, share information, help one another. It's been really, really heartwarming. And it's what makes me still so excited about talking about the drum kit and with other people who are interested. Absolutely. And then, actually at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I've got to thank Mandy Smith, the education program manager there, who is herself a drummer and actually completing a PhD on the drum kit and Rock and Roll. So, yeah, there's lots of secret drummers out there. We're everywhere. There are. We're everywhere. And we want equal pay. No, cool. Well, Matt, so it's Matt Brennan, B-R-E-N-N-A-N. The book is called Kick It, A Social History of the Drum Kit. And we have discussed in this episode, chapter five, which is we've covered working drummers and musical labor. And there will be a part two that will be coming out a little bit down the road. So, Matt, man, this has been awesome talking to you. And I appreciate you taking the time to share your immense knowledge and research with us. Likewise, Bart. Thanks so much for having me. It's been a pleasure. Awesome. All right. Thanks, Matt. Bye-bye. You