Disco, Hair Metal, Creeping Ambition
Published: Fri, 08/19/22
Reading about music is a way to hang out with folks who like thinking about music, and since those are my people, I'm going to keep hanging out with them. A few weeks ago at Townie Books, a small but righteous independent shop in Colorado, I picked up and quickly became consumed with Kalefa Sanneh's Major Labels: A History Of Popular Music In Seven Genres. Sanneh's compelling and vivid writing had me enthusiastically plowing through chapters involving punk, hiphop, disco and hair metal, all genres I've manage to live through without ever quite understanding. Should you choose to go down that rabbit hole yourself, I recommend fortifying yourself before or after with Steven Hyden's Twighlight of the Gods: A Journey To The End Of Classic Rock and Paul Edwards' The Concise Guide To Hip-Hop Music.
Sometimes books hang around a long time before getting pressed into action. I've had a copy of John Riley's The Art of Bop Drumming on the shelf for several years; I doubtless reckoned at the time of purchase that gaining insight into how some of the world's most sophisticatedly grooving music works would somehow help me program drum software for thirty-second burger ads and reality-TV cues. But over the past couple weeks a series of large boxes has arrived, depositing on my doorstep the various disassembled components of a '60s Ludwig drum kit my sister no longer wanted lying around her studio. When she first offered it to me, I just thought it would be cool to have a drum kit on hand, for rehearsals and such. You know, for drummers to make use of. But then, creeping ambition set in: what if I could record drummers playing these drums, too? Then the drums actually got here, and once I finally had them more or less reassembled, I had to see if they worked, right? So...out came the bebop book, followed by searches through Youtube to learn how exactly one keeps one's balance while operating both the bass drum and hi-hat pedals at the same time.
Suffice to say, that sh*t is not easy. Not any of it. But deeply entertaining and addictive? Heck yes. Also, I realized within about the first ten minutes that keeping eighth notes going on the hihat or the ride cymbal is pretty much the equivalent of keeping a steady bass going with your thumb on a solo blues guitar arrangement. And all those syncopations in between? They screwed me up right away. To paraphrase Todd Snyder, I'm for all that sort of thing. I'm for it – anything that will help me understand how hard it is for a newcomer to play things I have gradually come to take completely for granted. In that respect, this drum kit is a humility machine, and as profound a one as I might possibly ask for. Plus, full disclosure: banging on a drum kit is as fun as it looks. And I am also for anything that combines music and fun, if that isn't already redundant.
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Speaking of drums, and recording them, and oh, also, popular music of the past fifty years, I recently caught a really enjoyable interview with legendary producer and engineer Glyn Johns on one of my favorite podcasts, Leo Sidran's The Third Story. Here's a link, if you want to give it listen:
Glyn Johns on The Third Story Podcast
More soon,
David