Born to Drum by Tony Barrell

Author:Tony Barrell
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2015-01-27T08:00:00+00:00

6

THE WORST JOB IN THE WORLD

Listen to “Helter Skelter” on the Beatles’ White Album, and at the end you’ll hear Ringo Starr scream that playing the song has given him “blisters on me fingers!” The drummer was complaining about the wear and tear on his hands after he had bashed away at the hard-rocking track at Abbey Road studios for so long, after it had basically turned into a jam session. Fast-forward forty-four years to March 2012, and fifty-six-year-old Butch Vig is behind the kit as Garbage rehearse before relaunching themselves into the world following a seven-year hiatus. Vig endures about fourteen days of nagging muscular pain before posting this message online: “After 2 weeks of rehearsal, my hands have finally stopped aching!”

What’s that loud noise? It’s the sound of drummers roaring with laughter at these trivial complaints. Big deal! Blisters and aches are nothing compared with the accidents, agonies, traumas, and misadventures that so many drummers have suffered over the years, and continue to suffer.

Just because you’re sitting down on a cozy drum stool while the rest of the band are on their feet most of the time, don’t think for a moment that this is going to be an easy ride. The drums are usually the most kinetic instrument in the band: in order to play your parts, you have to move a whole lot more than the other musicians do. The singer and guitarist might be running all over the place, contorting their bodies and throwing all kinds of shapes as they sing and play, but those are theatrics: they don’t need to do that to perform their musical parts. You, on the other hand, have to navigate the distances between your sticks and your drums and cymbals every time you need to hit something. Your shoulders, arms, and hands are going backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, for long periods of time. Meanwhile, your legs and feet are pounding at the bass-drum pedal and the hi-hat pedal and whatever other pedals you have. If your name is Terry Bozzio, you have an almighty amount of pedaling to do.

With thousands of drum and cymbal strikes to accomplish during a gig or a recording session, are you going to make all of them, or are you going to miss a few? There are many ways to miss, and many consequences of missing. “A couple times,” Steven Drozd told me, “I’ve hit my left hand with my right hand, really hard.”

“I’ve caught my knuckles on the edges of my cymbals now and then,” said Richard Jupp of Elbow. “You get a nice little spray of blood.”

“It’s horrible when you misjudge something and you smack yourself really hard in the face with a drumstick,” said Cherisse Osei. “Or you go to choke a cymbal and it catches your nail. Ouch! I’ve had loads of cuts. A few times, I’ve been playing and suddenly I’ve seen blood on my snare drum—‘Oh! I’m bleeding!’ And I look at my hands and they’re covered in blood.

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