 Welcome to the drum history podcast. I'm your host Bart van der Zee, and we have a return guest today, Mr. Matt Brennan from the University of Glasgow. Matt, how are you? I'm doing great, man. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. So we're picking up here. We're doing part two of the history of working drummers, which is going off of your book, Kick It, a social history of the drum kit, which was recently released. This came out in February of 2020, and I'm a big fan of it, and love it, man. Good work. Congratulations. Thank you so much. I'm so glad you enjoyed it. Yeah. So in the first part, which I recommend people go back and listen to, but I don't think this is a thing where you can't listen to part two without hearing part one. I think this can stand on its own, but I do recommend that people go back and basically part one is about the turn of the 20th century up to 1960. And now today we're going to pick it up at 1960 to today. So rockstar drummers, all that stuff. We ended with session drummers. So why don't you go ahead and take it away here and pick up where we left off? Yeah, sure thing, man. So I guess in part one, we got up to the point where we were talking about session drummers like Earl Palmer and Hal Blaine, who... It's not as though there weren't session drummers who were working before those two figures, but Blaine and Palmer are very special because they were the... Among the first drummers to really be recognized as rhythm and blues and rock and roll drummers, and that's what they were being called to perform. So you had a sort of paradigm shift, I guess, in the kind of skills that were being sought after in, for instance, West Coast session drumming situations where both Hal Blaine and Earl Palmer were located in Los Angeles. At that time, folks who will know Earl Palmer know, of course, that he was based for a lot of his career in New Orleans and played on lots of seminal recordings throughout the 1940s and 1950s. But in the tail end of the 1950s, rock and roll becomes what many people think of that time is a temporary fad and something that's looked upon with a lot of disdain by other session musicians who were working in the Los Angeles area at that time. And Blaine and some of his other buddies who include notable figures like Glenn Campbell, for instance, formed this collective called the Wrecking Crew. The reason for that name is that the other session musicians who were working in the area at that time consistently were telling this group that they were going to wreck the business. And so they sort of made a name for themselves, playing this kind of pariah music, this unacceptable music called rock and roll that was looked down upon that everyone thought would kind of fade away, except it didn't fade away. Of course, it became, you know, ever more influential, ever more commercially lucrative. And that's why they ended up playing on so many sessions throughout the 1960s. But around that time, you also, of course, have another really important shift in Anglo American musical culture. And that is this shift where previously, in the 1950s and earlier, you would generally have performers recording artists who would perform material that was written by someone else. So these were two different kinds of work, the role of a songwriter on the one hand, and then the role of the performer on the other. And when we talk about people working in the A&R business, the artist and repertoire business, that is essentially the business of linking those two different spheres of work up together, linking artists with repertoire that were created separately and are then put together by the A&R man, usually a man, almost always in that year. Now, why was like, why did that happen? Why was it less likely that a musician would write their music and go out and perform it? I guess they were seen as two different types of skill sets that required different types of experience. And you'll also, of course, have to put that into a context where often, you know, songs were being arranged for large bands, right? So, following on from the big band era, the type of skills that it would take to arrange a 20-piece brass section are different from those that are needed for carving out a great top-line melody or lyric in the 1960s playing in a four-piece band, right? Gotcha, yeah. So they were, you know, for historical reasons, seen as sort of separate spheres of work, specialized work, and there wasn't a whole lot of overlap in between. Now, that gets dissolved a little bit when you start thinking of jazz musicians who are composing their own material, but they weren't really considered part of the mainstream of the music industry in that time. They were, you know, still outliers. And certainly in terms of, you know, putting songs onto the radio and having commercial success of that scale, you know, jazz was sort of an outlier. That starts to change, of course, with rock and roll music. So, you know, people often talk about rock and roll being this really revolutionary music because it challenged the boundaries between, you know, tense race relations in the United States, because it was a generational difference where, you know, teenagers were really picking up on this music and their parents hated it. We could say that it was a transition from listening to music more in a live sphere to picking up singles on seven inches, which we have to remember, you know, the seven inch single was only invented in 1948, right? So, you know, rock and roll is kind of one of the, and prior to that rhythm and blues, these are the first genres to really start working around that technological format. But I guess where that takes us is that bands start getting smaller and you start to have artists, you know, as opposed to say Elvis Presley, who actually operates according to that old paradigm, you know, doesn't write his own material, gets paired with repertoire written by other people, right? Chuck Berry, on the other hand, and other pioneering artists of that ilk are writing their own material. Little Richard would be another one. And, you know, sometimes they're working with other people's material, sometimes they're writing their own material. And this is kind of a transitional phase. But by the time you get to the early 1960s, and you start to have bands like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, one of the biggest differences that separates them from their predecessors is that they begin writing their own material. And again, you still see that transition happening, you know, say on the early Beatles and The Stones albums where, you know, they're playing a mix of original songs that they've written, and then cover versions of songs that they haven't written. Exactly. So that is absolutely emblematic of that period in history. It's not that they were doing something strange by performing those cover versions. Actually, performing an entire album of covers was the norm, right? It was inserting their own material that marked the change, if that makes sense. That's totally, yeah. Yeah. So this starts to create a new perception of what musical work is like in the popular music sphere. So suddenly musical creativity starts to be more closely tied to, you know, basically writing and performing your own material. And in the 1950s, you could be a perfectly credible authentic quote unquote act without writing your own material. By the time of The Beatles and The Stones, that sort of ceases to be the case. If you're not writing your own material, then you'll get tagged as being manufactured or inauthentic or commercialized, right? Gosh, yeah. And it's interesting to think about the differences between those two different modes of making music. Now, the other key difference from a perspective of work, of course, is that the songwriter has a different revenue stream from the performer. And this is where it really begins to matter for drummers, right? Yeah. Because in the early 1960s, in guitar based bands like The Stones and The Beatles, the songwriter was traditionally conceived as being the one who wrote the top line melody and the lyric. And the drummer was not usually involved in that part of creative work. So they are kind of relegated to the bottom of this new musical hierarchy, which is being formed in that time. So, you know, we can think about where the drummer sat in terms of the hierarchy of a bebop group. You know, drummers like Max Roach, for instance, were, you know, recognized as artists. And of course, Max did write some of his own material as well. You know, before The Beatles were putting out their albums, Max Roach had already put out the Freedom Now Suite, for instance. But with drummers like Charlie Watts and Ringo Starr, they're not writing those top line melodies and lyrics. And so that actually matters, has a lot of consequence, not only just for their pocketbooks and who's getting remunerated in those bands more than others. It creates an economic hierarchy, but it also creates another hierarchy of status in which they're perceived to be by critics, for instance, who are working at that time as being lesser musicians than their bandmates. I mean, that goes right back to part one of, as we said, in the Musicians Union, the drummers should make, they can make two shillings less than the other musicians. And it's just this, it's all just kind of a connotation of, like, I guess you could say the tonal instrument making the top line melody, just being the more important thing where it is interesting, though, because obviously the drummer, we get the benefit of just being able to come in and sit down and make everything better. I'm saying that kind of biased as a drummer, but we can kind of like, we can put the icing on the cake and make everything really, really great without spending six days writing the song, but that's just interesting that it continues through this feeling of, you're the low man on the totem pole. You're just sit down, shut up and play your drums. You don't get paid as much. Well, what's also interesting, though, and what people don't often realize with some of these bands is that, say, the Beatles, also the Rolling Stones, also the Who, also the Led Zeppelin, they had to go through several temporary drummers, right, before settling on a permanent drummer who sort of becomes the final member of this core lineup that turns that band into the band that we recognize it today. Absolutely. So, like, when you see it from that perspective, actually the work that the drummer is performing is incredibly important. Yes. If you don't find that right drummer, you don't have a successful band, right? Yeah. Those three, especially that you just named, are legendary. And you can't imagine the Beatles without Ringo, Zeppelin without Bonham, the Stones without Charlie Watts, the Who without Keith Moon. I mean, it is, it's just not right without them. Yeah. And not only that, you know, when people knock Ringo's star, what they're often forgetting is that, you know, the Beatles had previously had, you know, Pete Best. Also, you know, if you're going back to the Quorum in days like drummers like Colin Hanton and other Liverpool drummers, the Beatles were on this trajectory of a sentence. And as they started being taken more seriously as a band, they had, you know, they could have picked any drummer that they wanted to, to replace Pete Best, right? Yeah. They chose Ringo because he was the best. He's good. Yeah. You know, in Liverpool at making that kind of beat music. Yeah. And man, if you listen to, there's an amazing bootleg recording that's made in Hamburg just after Ringo joined the band. And it is absolutely like off the wall. It sounds like the Ramones almost, like the, you know, extremely powerful drumming. You know, you can see why they were attracted to Ringo and the difference that, you know, you could hear between, you know, previous incarnations of that band and then the Beatles with Ringo. Absolutely. It's a different band, right? Yeah. And it's a band that probably wouldn't have had that success without Ringo, as we're talking about. So it's clear that, like, the drummer is doing something extremely important, but what they're not doing is writing the melody and top-line lyric and therefore they have this weird low status in the hierarchy for, you know, due to sort of arbitrary criteria. And you sort of can see why those criteria, like, you know, prioritizing top-line melody and lyric are arbitrary because they change over the decades. If we think about music made in the 21st century, right, beatmakers are highly prioritized, right? Yes. You go to a beatmaker as much as you go to a top-line melodist, right? Yeah. And there's remuneration that gets divided up, you know, in the songwriting credits that really privileges the beat and how important that is in a contemporary pop song. But that's, you know, a shift in culture, a shift in attitude, a shift in remuneration and in perception of what type of musical work matters that's changed between the early 1960s and now. Yeah. But we're sort of getting ahead of ourselves. Sure. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I do think it's interesting, though, how you, it kind of speaks to the how you can't copyright a drumbeat kind of thing. Yeah. That's, it all kind of into perspective of we're all, but maybe, maybe there's a part of that that is our amazing drumming community where we all build off of each other and we learn from each other and we, our beats kind of evolve after one guy does something and then the next guy does something. Whereas if you do that with guitar and bass or something, it's like, okay, you just stole my guitar riff. Whereas, I think, yeah, you know what I'm saying? Where we can just kind of like, like drums are a little more communal where, yeah, you can't copyright it, but we just grow together and you hear Ringo and you go, oh man, that just changed the style of drumming for the rest of, you know, the rest of time. Albeit it's not Solos and Keith Moon style, John Bonham style, but it's got its own very special place of, you need to stick out as a drummer with your sound and your technique and that's, I guess, how you can, you know, rise to the top. Yeah, but I guess the point in all of that is that it's not as if that's the natural order of things, right? Yeah. It could be different, but it's not. History is sort of unfolded in a particular way. Sure. And it's no accident that the melody and top line lyric are, you know, being so heavily valued in that time because copyright law was written, you know, based on the influence of a European concert classical tradition. You're right, yeah. There was a moment in history when rhythms and percussion and drums were being derided and, you know, and that was, you know, a product of, you know, race relations in the 19th century of European colonial power. And, you know, that's where those laws get put into place, right, in the early 20th century. So it makes sense that drummers are being marginalized, but it's not as if they deserve to be. You know, there's a... No, you're right. So we really need to question, like, why that's the case, right? Drummers are kind of put in a funny situation. Yeah. It's like, oh, I just said, you can't copyright a drumbeat. And it's like, well, why? You're absolutely right. It's true. You can't. Yeah. But there's a particular set of, you know, historical and sociological reasons for why that's the case. It's not as if, like, you know, in the Ten Commandments or something, you know, God said, and by the way, you can't copyright drumbeats, right? Yeah. That shall not copyright drumbeats. Yeah. There are particular reasons for that being the case. Wow. And yeah, we need to sort of interrogate them. And one way of doing that is through, you know, historical work. Geez. Okay. Well, you got me thinking now. I mean, but the drums are such a, it's different than having a, you know, a piano where there's like, if you could copyright a drumbeat. And then let's say you couldn't play a beat like a regular two for money beat, because let's just say Ringo did it. I don't know who the first one to do it was, but let's say Ringo did it. Wouldn't that, that would really change the face of music because it's like, all right, well, we're out of, we're out of beats now. Music history would never have unfolded in the way that it did. And, you know, it's, you know, there are in terms of musical creativity, certain building blocks, which, you know, there is a, there's a good reason for them to not be enforced by copyright law. You could say the same with, you know, certain chord progressions. So like, you know, a five one cadence, right? Sure. Like moving from a dominant to the tonic chord. If you copyrighted that move, you know, then again, you know, music history would not be able to unfold as it did. That has to be something that we can borrow and make freely available in order to make work. Interesting. But this does change over time. So I don't know, you know, we're sort of going in many different tangential directions. Sure. Yeah, you can take us back on track here. So exactly to get back to the 1960s. Let's let's take it back to Ringo and Charlie and how they're feeling being in these bands for which there are no precedent really in terms of commercial success, in terms of, you know, groups that are collectively putting out material that they have also written. And then how that affects the dynamics of those bands as businesses and also as artistic enterprises, right? So there's the issue of getting paid here and that all the publishing is going to, for instance, Lenny McCartney in the case of the Beatles or Richard Jagger in the case of the Stones. But also in terms of art, you know, there's a transitional phase in terms of how the drummer is being valued for their work. And this is really interesting in the case of Charlie Watts, actually, because Charlie's coming from a jazz background. So both Ringo and Charlie so many times in their interviews, they play down their own importance in those bands. Yeah. You can go to interview after interview where they're saying, you know, all I'm doing is just playing the drums, you know, either Lenny McCartney or Jagger Richards or whoever happens to be whichever band they're doing all the heavy lifting. But in Watts, he also talks about basically how he sees his skills as a drummer relative to a completely different paradigm, which is the jazz paradigm. Right? Yeah. And so, you know, he's saying, not only am I a drummer who's just there to serve the song, which he'll often say in an interview. And the song is something which he sees as being different from something that he's produced, even though like for many drummers, you know, that Charlie Watts beat is, you know, an integral part of the song. Yeah. Wouldn't be the same without it, right? Sure. Yeah, absolutely. But Charlie's also saying, you know, I am nothing compared to actual drummers, you know, like his words, Max Roach, Joe Morello, you know, Tony Williams, all jazz drummers who Watts repeatedly heaps praise on. And so he's really doing himself a disservice. But like, if that were actually true, then you wouldn't have similarly virtuosic drummers in a pop sphere in later decades, like Jeff Piccaro or Jim Keltner saying, actually, no, not anybody can do what Charlie Watts does, right? You know, Jeff Piccaro on record is saying, you know, if he sat down and played with the Stones, he'd be trying to play like Charlie Watts, right? So how do you square that? You know, I think part of that is because Watts doesn't see himself fitting into the rockstar paradigm, right? You know, his background is in jazz and he's sort of evaluating his own work within a band based on jazz criteria. You know, okay, maybe if you judge Watts and his recordings, you know, by the criteria, which he seems to judge himself, which is, you know, the kind of jazz model. So he's not a Max Roach. He's not playing that sort of music. So actually, those criteria are sort of inappropriate on which to evaluate it. Exactly. Which doesn't make sense. It doesn't fit. His contribution to rock drumming culture is undeniably monumental, right? Yeah. And the same thing with Ringo, right? They set templates which generations of drummers then go on to imitate. And you can say the same with, you know, these other founding figures in rock drumming culture. I guess, you know, two others that have to be mentioned are Keith Moon and John Bonham, of course. Moon, what's interesting about all those figures is actually, you know, although we see them as being at the beginning of the history, all of them were listening to Gene Krupa. Yeah. You know, there's a wonderful moment when Ginger Baker is recalling his career, another one of these, you know, a handful of canonical rock drummers from the 1960s. When he talks about him and Moon deciding that they want to get a drum kit with a double bass drum setup. And you would think, ah, that's maybe them pushing into playing ever larger venues with their bands, you know, needing to fill up the stage and sort of having this innovation in terms of, you know, rock spectacle and arena rock. But actually, according to Baker, this idea comes from them watching Duke Ellington in London in the 1960s. Yeah. For sure, man. Yeah. Ginger Baker said that both he and Keith Moon were at a Duke Ellington concert with Sam Woodyard playing a double drum kit. And this would have been like 65 or 66. And immediately, both of them are like, we got to go out and get an extra bass drum. Yeah. Right. It's interesting because like you see Louis Belson playing the double bass kit and all these, all this stuff. And it's, you wouldn't think of that influence translating over to like Keith Moon and Ginger Baker like you're saying. But it's all from jazz. It's awesome. Yeah. 100%. And the same goes for that showmanship elements. Yeah. You know, the flashy virtuosity of Gene Krupa kind of had to be there before Keith Moon or John Bonham are doing their thing. And, you know, both of them in interviews, you know, credit Krupa as like a really key influence when they were growing up. Yeah. Of course, like who else would they be looking to, right? Definitely. You know, Buddy Rich is another key figure in terms of showmanship and virtuosity. But, you know, there weren't rock drummers doing that. So of course, they're all looking back to jazz players. But at the same time, that the work of being a drummer behind the kit is well at the same time having debts to the past. It is changing, right? Yeah. So they're, I think, you know, by the late 1960s and especially when you start moving into hard rock, you know, the role of a rock drummer really starts to take shape in a way which is quite different from what's come before. Part of that comes with, you know, for instance, power and aggression. But then there are also other aspects to it like virtuosity, which do harken back. You know, where there is a link to be made between between the jazz world and rock. But not every drummer is, you know, needs to embody virtuosity in order to be a great rock drummer. Some do, particularly in, you know, as we start moving towards progressive rock and you have your Bill Brufruits and your Karl Palmer's and the rest. And while others are, you know, valued for their sort of primal or animalistic showmanship, you know, Keith Moon comes to mind. He's sort of one off. On the one hand, you could call his work virtuosic, but on the other hand, you know, well, it's interesting. He never claimed to want to be a sort of master technician. He always talked about how he would look towards guitar players actually. And he'd want to play guitar riffs on the drum kit. And that's what he saw himself doing. Yeah. So you don't hear that so much when you're looking at interviews with, say, jazz drummers from the 1950s. It's a different way of thinking about what it means to be playing that instrument. Yeah. And I think it's interesting too how you say, like looking at this, how you have Charlie Watts and Ringo. And they're kind of the early post-jazz rock guys who are paving their way. Their drum sets looked very much like jazz drum sets. Small four piece, a ride, a crash, high hats. But then you get into the next phase. Let's say Keith Moon with the double bass. And I always think of like, like Rufus Jones who was with Count Basie. He was double bass. You get these guys. So they're still pulling that. Oh, I didn't like, I can do that. I can get a double bass kit. But then the guys after that, the mega drummers, the big drum sets are then building off of the Keith Moon set and stuff. So it seems like, like you said, things are getting more aggressive and bigger. So you get into the 70s more, you know, giant drum sets. Yeah, absolutely. There's definitely an exhibitionist element to the drummers of the 1970s. And that's also because the size of venues that these drummers are playing increases dramatically over that time. So, you know, it was very rare for jazz gigs to, you know, take place in venues the size of arenas, let alone stadiums. But that becomes the norm for the biggest rock bands of the 1970s. And so suddenly, you know, you're having to reach people that are, you know, 10, maybe 20,000 seats back, right? Yeah, really? How do you connect with those people? Spectacle and size of, you know, things like the drum kit, you know, there's, it doesn't work for guitarists, right? You can't suddenly like, you know, say, okay, you have your double neck guitars, but you can't, you know, quadruple the size of a guitar and, you know, the fretboard on it, for instance. Unless you're in cheap trick. If you're in cheap trick, you can have like a 15 neck guitar. This is true, but it becomes impractical. Let's face it. You're right, though. And a funny, a cool note on that is how everyone else is getting bigger, but Charlie and Ringo remained the same with their drum sets. Like, you could be in the biggest arena in the world, and you've got Charlie there playing his Gretch kit with, you know, U-FIP symbols, and he's playing a small drum set. So I think that goes to show those guys how they're just like, we're going to do what we're going to do. But you're absolutely right, because there's obviously, you got the guys who are playing. You just, they're surrounded. And I do think 50, 60% of that is, it's just a spectacle, you know? Yeah, for sure. And it's also, you know, a form of competition and one-upsmanship as well, doing something which hasn't been done before, trying to outdo, you know, the show or spectacle of other competing bands and concerts, I suppose. Yeah. But that's, you know, we're talking about rock music quite a lot. And, you know, there are other styles of music where you think about the, that maybe have interesting insights into what being a professional drummer was like in those days. And Clyde Stubblefield and the drummers of James Brown, Jabbo Starks, come to mind as a different sort of model. You know, especially when we start going back to that discussion that we were having about where the drummer, you know, has their place creatively in terms of songwriting, in terms of authorship. One thing that was really interesting when I was researching James Brown and his drummers was that I hadn't realized that, you know, by the mid 1960s, he typically employed between three and five drummers at any one time. And according to interviews with some of those drummers, the reason why is that Brown was interested in looking for unique beats and unique performance styles. So he could tell on the one hand that there was something kind of close to the originality that we might attribute in the 1960s to a really unique melody or lyric. That that was also a feature of drum beats as well. And this comes back to like, you know, well, why can't you copyright, you know, for instance, the drum bake from Funky Drummer, which Clyde Stubblefield, you know, you could make an easy argument that that's like a composition in its own right. Yeah, definitely. And yet the credit of, you know, of any James Brown hit goes 100% to James Brown, you know, very occasionally to one of his horn players, but never to the drummer quite crucially. No. It's interesting, you know, you have these different models of, you know, drummers either, you know, receiving a certain kind of credit, you know, either for being, you know, an unprecedentedly like powerful drummer or virtuosic drummer or exhibitionist drummer, but rarely do drummers get that recognition for contributions to the song, to composition, to creating the artistic aesthetic of those bands, at least in that time. You know, things have changed a lot and we now sort of see the work of those drummers in a completely different light, you know, in the 21st century. Yeah. They now get, I think, you know, the tables have turned and they're getting the recognition, which was kind of denied to them for so long. But certainly, you know, in the 1970s, it's interesting, you think on the one hand, like to have been Keith Moon or to have been John Bonham, you must have been on top of the world, right? You were acknowledged as these incredible musicians playing in these incredible pioneering bands. But, you know, when you read interviews with those drummers, you know, one of the reasons why they had huge amounts of trouble with, you know, substance abuse was due to low self-esteem, self-destructive tendencies, you know, being kind of relegated to this sort of, you know, low status figure in these extremely famous bands, right? Well, and you just read my mind, like, this seems like the era of, and those two guys, Keith Moon and John Bonham, which both had, they died way too young, you are a rock star. I mean, I don't know if there's, I feel like they are like the blueprint of what people think of when they think of a rock star with a capital R. It's like, these guys are, and it's not good, but like taking horse tranquilizers or whatever and passing out on your drums. It's like, so they went big, and maybe that's because they are then on posters and kids' rooms, and they are seen more as these giant rock stars. But, like, so it's interesting what you're saying about low self-esteem of, I'm not Jimmy Page, I'm not the guy writing this. I'm not Robert Plant, which is just such a shame. That's, and that's not me theorizing it, you know, that's them on record in interview, you know, and in memoirs and biographies that have been written about them, you know, that really comes through. And it's, yeah, it's incredibly tragic, you know, but they are sort of forced to live up to these particular stereotypes which were being, you know, formed around them. And part of that is, in a way, like not taking the work that they did seriously, right? As opposed to the work that their bandmates did. Yeah, yeah. So to think too that they were both 32 years old when they died is unbelievable to think about being so young. I mean, you're 32 years old, you're still, I mean, you are barely an adult at that point really. It's just like to have lived and made such a giant contribution to the world of drumming and just disappeared so quickly is such a shame. Yeah. I mean, and clearly their deaths were the result of complicated circumstances. Yes. You can't attribute it to one single factor, but it's also, it's undeniable that, you know, that self-destructive substance abuse was in both cases fueled at least in part and by feelings of inadequacy that were stemming from a belief that their bandmates were seen as the real artists. Well, they were just the drummers in that band and had to fulfill a certain role within that. Yeah. So it was sort of impossible to live up to. Yeah. Now, to get it kind of back to the working drummers, you know, theme that we have going on here, is there any comment or any, is there any information about how they would have been paid less? They would have been seeing, you know, like Robert Plant is probably making more money than John Bonham, even though, you know, you see the song remains the same and he's racing cars and doing, you know, he has a nice big house and stuff. And that may be, he may be an extreme example because he's John Bonham, but were they still, like drummers in general at that point, I'm sure they were still probably paid less and didn't get writing credits, as you're saying. But financially, probably not covered as much as, you know, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, right? Yeah. Well, I think that the key thing is that they're separate revenue streams, you know, publishing rights versus ban profits. There wasn't a sort of set model for any of these bands, you know, the band's management in any of these cases would set up legal agreements between the different members of the band. Look at the different revenue streams, say from live performance on the one hand, record sales on the other, merchandise or songwriting, and then divvy those profits up accordingly. Yeah. And it's difficult to make generalizations about like, you know, how drummers fared, you know, across the board because those agreements were, there wasn't a standard set of agreements, I guess, in terms of how to share profits. So, you know, famously in some bands from the 1980s on words like U2 and REM, ban profits were divided equally. But what I'm trying to make an argument about, I guess, in terms of songwriting is that that sort of agreement had to be made deliberately to counter a built in inequality. Yeah. Yeah. And it's defined in how songwriting credit and copyright traditionally worked. Yeah. I don't know if any drummers who are in bands that are listening to this will have encountered a similar situation to myself. But I know when I was playing in a band and we were first registering our songs with, you know, the British equivalent of ASCAP and BMI and, you know, dividing up, you know, which songwriting credits went where. And we asked for advice on this and the advice that we were given by a professional working for one of these royalty collection agencies was, you know, whoever writes the melody in the top line lyric is the songwriter, right? Yeah. And many lawsuits famously, you know, deal with the drummer being basically getting the short end of the stick on these types of agreements. So if you move on into, for instance, the 1980s, there's a very famous and well-documented case between Mike Joyce, the drummer for the Smiths, and Morrissey and Maher, where he sues them for profits that the band was making. And at the time, the profit split between the four members of the Smiths were 40% for Morrissey, 40% for Johnny Maher, 10% for Roark on bass, and 10% for Joyce on drums. You know, that's not a profit split that we can say like all bands operated like that, but it wouldn't have been unusual, right? Joyce then hands to come back at the end of the 1980s, and this is completely different from songwriting splits, right? He wasn't claiming a lawsuit against songwriting credits. He was talking about profit splits of the band. So he takes Morrissey and Maher to court, and Morrissey famously shows up in court testifying that in terms of the Smiths' output, Joyce and Roark on drums and bass were just session musicians. The famous quote was that they were as replaceable as the parts of a lawnmower. Oh my God. Yeah. Come on. That's not nice. Despite that testimony, the judge ruled in favor of Joyce, right? Yeah, recognizing that that was like an inaccurate account by Morrissey. Morrissey, who he also described as being, and I think this is a quote, truculent and unreliable. So I think that that case is illustrative of how it worked for a lot of drummers playing in bands in the 1970s and 1980s. There were basically mechanisms in the system of remunerating musicians for their work that went against the favor of drummers in a lot of cases. Gosh, wow. Well, I think, and we'll move forward here because we have still, you know, 50 years to go or 40 years to go. But I think it's worth noting too that, and I've talked about it a lot. We've talked about it a lot in different episodes, but about how Ringo, and let's say Charlie, but really Ringo made drumming extremely popular with young kids. And then that made Ludwig blow up, and I think the same can be said about John Bonham. The guys were then, as far as gear goes, were becoming superstars in the world of drummers as, you know, like Premier, you think of Keith Moon. So yeah, they drove the growth of the drum kit manufacturing industry. Yes, and the Made in Japan market basically started because they said, oh my God, we need to create these off-brand Ludwigs and expand on that. So global expansion with drummers thanks to Ringo and everyone else, Charlie, Keith, everyone. Yeah, 100%. There's definitely accounts from Ludwig, but also interesting like, you know, manufacturing companies that Ringo never went close to, like Gretch, saying that basically after 1964 and that appearance on the Ed Sullivan show, they had to double production or triple production, or keep their factories open 24 hours a night to meet demand. And with all of that demand and companies not being able to expand quickly enough, it did open this gap in the market for new companies coming from Japan in particular, like Pearl, like Tama, like Yamaha by the end of the 1960s to start creating drums to meet that growing demand. And interestingly, like creating their own innovations in the process, right? When we think about those classic Yamaha recording custom kits with this beautiful black lacquer finish, right? Yeah. That absolutely stems from Yamaha having their previous history and making upright pianos, right? Yeah. Wow, that's interesting. Yeah. And so they have all these interesting innovative manufacturing techniques that were maybe being used for other instruments that then started getting applied to drums. And in the case of hardware, even though, say, John Bonham, for instance, never played Tama drums, his impact, both literal and metaphorical on drumming as performance and the heaviness of rock drumming that developed from the beginning of the 1970s onwards leads manufacturers like Tama to invent double bracing for their stands. Yeah. When you look at the stands that John Bonham was playing at the end of the 1960s, it's amazing that they withstood a single hit. They're puny little things. Yes. But the shape of the drum kit, the shape and design of the drum kit is driven by the popularity of these rock drummers coming out of the 1960s leads to new manufacturers coming up who are then trying to create a USP for themselves through design innovation. And that really dramatically affects the development and the design of the drum kit as an instrument. But it's interesting thinking like one sphere of work playing the drums, having this really tangible impact and relationship on another sphere of industry was like manufacturing and selling drums as instruments. They're all related. Yeah. Which, I mean, again, I was born in 1990 and it, John Bonham heavily influenced me as a kid. You know what I mean? Yeah, sure. He died 10 years earlier than that, which isn't that far. But like, his impact is still huge today. So yeah, on gear and everything. But okay. Absolutely. So last time we ran out of time and we had to do a part two. So to avoid a part three, let's move forward here. So we're in the 70s. Let's finish up the 70s, get into the 80s and then push on through. So where do we go from there? Well, I think that one really important thing that happens to the drummer from the 1970s onwards, we can say, is how their work changes in the recording studio. And that really is an effect of the invention of multi-tracking, which of course is a 1950s invention. But, you know, really only starts to take shape with, from eight track recordings onwards, you know, in the latter half of the 1960s. And suddenly, you know, whereas you only previously had a mono channel than a stereo channel than four tracks, the drum kit as an instrument is always going to be pushed to the bottom of the mix, essentially, in those songs with eight channels and then 24 and then suddenly 48. You have suddenly a channel for each component of that drum kit, which allows engineers and producers to really start pushing the sound of that drum kit up and up. And do interesting things besides like not just affecting the drum kit, but overall basically trying to like increase the impact of, you know, the kick, the snare, toms and cymbals. And so I think like in terms of the development of the drum kit and working behind the kit, you know, a key characteristic of the 1970s and 1980s is this interesting tension between engineers and producers on the one hand and drummers on the other. Like who has the authority over the performance of the drums and the sound of the drum kit. Because, you know, a classic example of that may be being like the debut album of Joy Division in 1979, Unknown Pleasures, where the poor drummer, Stephen Morris, he, you know, just having an incredibly hard time with the producer, Martin Hannit, you know, who's getting him to record, you know, each individual element of the of the kit like so, you know, do a take. Where he's playing only the hi hat or only the rack tom, right? Yeah. Which allows the producer to really manipulate those things and create an incredible record on the one hand. But that's like hell on earth for a drummer, right? Which still happens today. I mean, that happens a lot where you do a cymbals pass and a, you know, just drum. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So that didn't exist right in the 60s. No, no. But it becomes increasingly common, maybe from the tail end of the 70s and onwards into the 80s. And so on the one hand, that's an interesting impact aesthetically. But it also, you know, has a real impact in terms of like what the work of the drummer is, right? Yeah. So, you know, throughout the 1980s, you know, the drummer has again, this huge importance in the studio that they're the first instrument to be tracked often. They're the most complicated instrument to be tracked. Yeah. At the same time, the drummer has very little autonomy quite often and is being like told what to do or directed or marginalized in other ways by their bandmates and by the producers because you can't, you know, move forward without getting that really solid drum take. Yeah. And so they're often very restricted. The same thing goes for a click track, you know, very typical, you know, click track sort of become increasingly popular through the, you know, second half of the 70s and then kind of ubiquitous by the 1980s, especially once you have like MIDI which is invented at the early 1980s. And suddenly you need to like start mapping takes of drums onto, you know, sequencers and synthesizers that are programmed to do arpeggios or whatever it happens to be. So before then there was, they would not play to a click track, which for everyone who's listening, if you don't know a click track is a metronome which can be referred to as playing like on the grid. And the importance of that would be to then overdub later or to mix with MIDI instruments which are perfectly in time because they're a machine. If you record something without a metronome, it can have a really good feel and kind of sway, but you can't exactly overdub a drum part again and fix things over a guitar track that's been recorded without a metronome unless you're perfect, which is rare. So anyway, so before you said 1960s, the 1960s, it wasn't really, they didn't record to a metronome? I mean, you certainly, you had metronomes. They're early 19th century invention. And you had people recording to something close to a click track, but it was usually relegated to the world of film music where people had to sync up soundtracks to a moving picture. But it wasn't something that was used in pop groups until, you know, it became more common in the 1970s and also with the advent of drum machines which really only start getting used in records by the tail end of the 1960s. So it's kind of a... Probably the Linn drum machine or something like that. The Linn drum machine comes in 1979 actually. So I'm actually thinking of earlier drum machines being like the Rhythm Ace or the Maestro Rhythm King, which you can hear on tracks like Slime the Family Stone use some of these drum machines in the early 1970s. Again, not very common, although you do find these transistor drum machines being used in the demo process and then kind of being laid down as a bed track in the 1970s which then a drummer might start to play over top of. So that starts to happen through the 70s but then becomes increasingly common through the 1980s. And of course, who gets lumped with the headphones that have the click track really banging in their ears but the drummer? Often the other musicians don't get that click track in their ears, right? They get the drums. So there's a real form of kind of subordination depending on how you feel about click tracks, I suppose. You know, a burden that the drummer has to bear which really, really affects their autonomy as a worker and as a musician through the night, well, let's say the end of the 1970s and then very much so in the 1980s and 1990s where it almost becomes impossible to do a professional studio recording without that click track. Yeah, really. Cool, that's interesting. And I mean, I'd say that working at a studio I rarely ever unless it's jazz do a session where I record a drummer without a click track and if they don't want it, I mean, I'm a drummer. I know that it's not as fun. I know that it's hard, especially if you haven't practiced. Man, you've never seen, and I've been there early on but you don't see someone get as embarrassed as if they're playing and they cannot play to the click. It is a very embarrassing situation if you haven't ever practiced it and there's a room full of people and they're like, you're speeding up on the fill. So that's a tough situation. That's a big thing to throw on a drummer. Yeah, I'll tell you though, I read this really interesting round table between like the very top session drummers of the 1980s so Jeff Baccaro, Vinnie Colliute, Rick Morata and some others and this is when click tracks were really becoming more commonplace and they were complaining about these things and they were saying, we have these clicks in our ears, think about these drummers and their sense of time, right? We've got these clicks in our ears and we want to play a song where the tempo breathes a little bit, where say there's a chorus, you maybe do want to lift that up by a few BPM or not, but we're getting lumped to these click tracks and then guitarists are yelling at us saying that we're not sort of moving with the song or not serving the song when actually we're being restricted here. Jeff Baccaro saying this, right? Yeah, the king there. I mean, and nowadays you can tempo map and make it a little faster but it's still, it's just like a, and they'll say like and then you get the classic thing of the drummer saying like, man, the click is off. The click's not off dude. It's perfect. I'll tell you one other thing that made an impact on drummers here and this is very related to click tracks and in a way this, we have one of our own to blame for this. The digital audio workstation obviously is another key change. Yeah. You know, basically in the 1980s you're still recording mostly to analog desks but by the 1990s Pro Tools becomes the industry standard. Sure. Not many people know that the invention of Pro Tools can actually be pinned down to a drummer and his bandmate actually. Really? Peter Gotcher and Evan Brooks were the designers of, or the inventors of Pro Tools and they were students in California who played in a band together. Peter Gotcher was a drummer and he was interested in these new drum sample drum samplers. Essentially there was one called drumulator in the early 1980s where it came with this pre-equipped set of drum sounds and he wanted to expand that. So he and his bandmate Evan Brooks, who was an engineer decided to hack into this drumulator and make new sound chips where they could upload their own samples and then also attach an audio editor to that so that they could edit the audio of these different drum tracks and kind of expand the creativity, the creative possibilities for the drummer while using these new technologies. And the company that they created is called Digidrum. By the end of the 1980s, they had switched the name of that company to DigiDesign and they were trying to figure out how to edit audio using some sort of visual display and the result was Pro Tools. Man, that's awesome. DigiDesign, they owned Pro Tools forever until Avid Bottom which wasn't that long ago. Man, that's really interesting. Basically, some of the biggest developments in terms of the recording studio from the 1980s to the present day come from attempts to shape what the drummer is doing or shape the sounds of the drum kit and then other instruments sort of follow suit when these new technologies come into play. Wow, you could say that and I do say it. Okay, cool. Click track, we got that going. We're in the studio. Session drumming is different. Electronic drums are samplers and synthesizers and all this stuff is happening. Yeah, and I guess the other thing to say about this is that we've been talking about the studio quite a bit but this also has ripple effects into the live arena. So as soon as these new sounds start being created in the recording studio, drummers are suddenly expected to replicate them live. And so when you have things like that famous Phil Collins gated reverb that is created in the very early 1980s with Hugh Patton who was the engineer working on those records, suddenly when it comes to performing those in arena tours the drummer is suddenly playing to a click track in a live concert setting and their drums are going through effects racks that are trying to recreate that gated reverb sound. So the work that happens in the studio has an impact on the rest of a working drummer's life, whether it's in the studio or outside of the studio. Yeah, absolutely. And just so everyone is on the same page the gated reverb sound is basically so you have the reverb sound which would be like a tail of putting it in a room like a bah, then you gait it and cut it off and that's very much that sound of in the air tonight or any of those big bah, like huge tom sounds. So gated reverb. Or most of the big pop hits of the 1980s. Exactly. In the air tonight is sort of the classic example but you hear that drum sound, you know being in a way like the easiest way to be able to place a pop recording as saying oh yeah that's definitely recorded in the 1980s is that drum sound. Yeah, and I think it's worth noting that like that's the era of like power toms and super deep huge snare drums so everything was much bigger the opposite of 40 years earlier where it's kind of the bebop high tuning jazz sound now we are big and deep and so a far cry from the jazz days but cool. So we're in the 80s which is just an iconic era of drums in general. I have a, or I had I should say at late 80s early 90s set that I think I talked about in the last one where it was just the hardware it was a Ludwig rocker set the hardware was not good. I don't know, I think this was an era where things were still getting developed a little bit like you said where John Bonham's playing these tiny stands but I know when I play that set you play for five minutes and the tom is like facing the ground and has completely lost its tension. So things are still getting figured out basically. Yeah and I guess the other key difference for drummers as they move on into say the 1980s and the 1990s is the creation of organizations and societies that are dedicated to kind of co-hearing drumming as a culture and drumming as a form of work as well so we think of a convention like PASIC the Percussive Art Society International Convention as maybe existing for who knows how long well this is a mid 1970s creation like the Percussive Art Society is formed in the 1960s the convention only gets going in the second half of the 1970s and then drum publications are another key sign of drumming being taken seriously as its own specialized form of work magazines like Modern Drummer its first issue is in 1977 so these types of magazines conferences, meetups that really sort of glue together drumming as a profession drumming as a culture drumming as a community these are in the long view in terms of the history of the instrument relatively recent developments but their impact is huge as well on the culture. Yeah that's a great point I guess before that you're kind of just playing off by yourself but then you can like I said earlier about you can build off of other people and that just goes to show our community and obviously there's guitar magazines and stuff but drums have a special connection there so things change in the 90s though a little bit right I mean it's not it's the end of that glam rock era for the working drummer so your drum set seems like it's maybe getting a little bit smaller right? Yeah sure and you could say actually like maybe the 90s is the beginning of of where retro fetishism starts to come into play so nowadays it's not unusual for us to see drum manufacturers recreating the classic drum kits of yesteryear where vintage and artisan are the kind of key marketing points that current manufacturers are sort of looking back to the gold and age of drumming you know maybe that the first hint of that starts to become apparent in the 1990s when drummers start scaling back that you know giant kit moving back to the four piece kit back to basics which of course is like harkening back to you know the sort of post-war era from beboppers up to the classic you know just our black oyster pearl Ludwig Kitt Yeah, no that's really interesting the gear wise to think about that because before that guys are playing the massive set of pearls and the set of Thomas where there's 15 you know bass drums hanging behind them that they play they hit once in a concert or something like that and music is obviously becoming a little more I think there in the 90s it gets to be a little more let's say natural you know what I mean it's less of the reverb that reverb effect goes out of style absolutely yeah cool so now we go up to the what you call the globalization of the drum kit production that is basically an argument I was trying to make and I'm not the first to make it either I'm absolutely indebted to you know previous books that have come out on the drum kit by folk like Jeff Nichols, Rob Cook you know many others but saying that they were whereas previously American manufacturers like Ludwig, Slingerland, Gretch, Rogers really led the way suddenly by the end of the 1960s you have manufacturers from outside of the US that begin to have an international impact now drum kits were being made in countries outside of the US so long before that sonar is one of the oldest drum companies in the world if you take that back to before they were called sonar but the same sort of family company was founded by a guy named Johans Link in 1871 so like ages ago but sonar begins to have a more international impact in the second half in the 1960s as sort of resuscitates itself in the post-war era being a German manufacturer for obvious reasons that company has to kind of it collapses, reforms and rethinks itself in the post-war era but then also those East Asian companies that I was mentioning so Pearl, Tamaha Pearl, Tamma and Yamaha get into the drum making business at the end of the 1960s so when I talk about the globalization of drum kit manufacture it's really about companies coming from outside of the United States but beginning to have an influence on the Anglo-American popular music scene and drummers being starting to use those kits so whether it's Billy Cobham using Tamma or Steve Gad using Yamaha these become really an influential manufacturers from the 1970s onwards basically whereas now that they've seen equals in every conceivable way to those older American manufacturers Cool, well we're getting close to the end of the chapter here so and I just again I want to tell people that we were talking about chapter 5 of Matt's almost 400 page amazing book all about the drum kit so if you are like me and like Matt and are a giant drum nerd then you are going to love this book because it goes into so much more detail than we are going into and I think we're going into a lot of detail so yeah I would highly recommend people and I'm going to put a promo code in the description so you can get I believe it's 30% off the book yeah that's right if people go to the website oup.com slash academic because the publisher of the book is Oxford University Press so the website is oup.com slash academic and then if you type in my name Matt Brennan or the title of the book Kick It! A Social History of the Drum Kit and order a copy then you can enter a promo code which is all caps A-A-F-L-Y-G-6 then that will automatically take 30% off the regular price when ordering from that website it's also available via Amazon or any online bookstore that you would want to order it from but the cheapest way to get it is through the oup website and using that discount code yeah and I mean I think the it's like $29 you can obviously get a hard copy version but the paperback I think is only like $29 US so throw 30% on there and I have heard, I have a copy that I love and I've heard from multiple listeners of the show that they've ordered it and are loving it so yeah I really appreciate all you guys and girls out there listening for ordering it and supporting people like Matt who's doing this and just find Matt online and reach out to him and tell him you like his book and all that good stuff so well, Matt I think we did it my friend I think we've just wrapped up part two of our two part look at the history of working drummers yeah thanks so much for having me on the show Bart I really appreciate it and I love what you're doing here with the podcast great thank you it's always a pleasure and enjoy all right you two men take care all right bye bye