Whats on your turntable tonight?

You’re SO right, tostadodunitos, Richard Manuel is a great drummer. Not in the technical sense, but musically. Levon Helm started the 1965 Bob Dylan world tour as the drummer in Dylan’s backing band for the tour, The Hawks. But he found the booing they encountered by the diehard Folk purists insufferable, and left the tour (and The Hawks), going down to the Gulf Coast to make a living working on an oil rig. When the tour ended in 1966, The Hawks relocated from The Chelsea Hotel in NYC to Saugerties in upstate New York, to be in close proximity to Dylan in nearby Woodstock. They found a house to rent (the infamous "Big Pink"), where they settled in and began recording what have come to be known as the Basement Tapes. When Capitol Records heard the recordings, they offered The Hawks their own contract. Hawks bassist Rick Danko gave Levon a call with the news, and Levon was on the next plane (;-).

Levon listened to the recordings, and Richard, who had played drums on many of the songs, became, as Levon states in his autobiography, his favorite drummer. That Richard is the drummer on some of the songs on The Band's 2nd, s/t ("brown") album, most people don't realize he's on about half the songs on that album, as well as a couple on their 1st, Music From Big Pink. The drumming of musicians whose primary instrument is other than drums is interesting, in that they are not playing the stock, "traditional" parts that primary-drummers have learned, but rather in a manner they find dictated by the song itself. Other non-drummers who play interesting, and sometimes great, drum parts include Stevie Wonder, Dave Edmunds, Andrew Gold, Paul McCartney, Emitt Rhodes (actually, Emitt was the drummer in The Palace Guard before he moved to guitar and piano in The Merry-Go-Round, and then his solo career) and, more recently, Marshall Crenshaw. Marshall’s drumming on his #447 album is really, really good!