Whats on your turntable tonight?

tostadosunidos---It was in ’69 I saw and heard Dewey live. Buffalo Springfield in parenthesis was to identify Dewey as the drummer in that group, not to say I saw them in ’69. The group in ’69 was named The New Buffalo, and Dewey was the only remaining original member. Neil Young was working on his first album, Stephen Stills on the first C,S,& Nash, and Richie Furay was starting Poco (along with late-Buffalo Springfield bassist Jim Messina).

In The New Buffalo playing bass and singing harmony was Randy Fuller, Bobby’s brother. My teen combo got the gig opening for them at a local San Jose High School, with the proviso Dewey---who traveled with only a snare drum, bass drum pedal, and stick bag---could use my drumset. Oh, okay ;-).

For an excellent example of playing in the less-is-more style, give a listen to Levon Helm in "Chest Fever" on Music From Big Pink. Hear how in the bridge he switches from playing the snare drum backbeat on 2 and 4 (in the verses) to playing all four beats on the snare drum? At least, that’s what you THINK he’s doing; listen again, and you’ll notice that by playing the 1, 2, and 3 on snare, he has lead you to assume he will also play the 4 (as Charlie Watts does all throughout "Satisfaction). He instead rests (doesn’t play) the fourth beat on snare drum, playing his bass drum on that beat instead. It sounds SO cool! Most drummers would play the 4 on snare drum, then crash a cymbal on the downbeat (the 1 of the next bar), which results in the release of tension, ala Keith Moon. Levon, by instead leaving out the 4 on snare and not crashing on the 1, CREATES tension. Brilliant! Music From Big Pink is full of that kind of playing---very, very rare in Rock ’n’ Roll. That’s why everyone from Ringo, to Jim Keltner, to Richie Hayward (Little feat), to songwriters like Nick Lowe and John Hiatt, consider Levon amongst the handful of best drummers in R & R’s history.

I left out one detail of Levon's remarkable playing in "Chest Fever". By not crashing on the downbeat (the 1) that introduces the next bar of the song, Levon has actually changed the construction of the song---from a bar-to-bar construct to a larger, longer viewpoint, that of the whole bridge. Very few drummers think in those terms, that of the construction of the song, and how their playing affects, determines even, that.

When a drummer emphasizes the "1" (by crashing on a cymbal as Keith Moon always does, or, as does John Bonham in so many LZ songs, by "burying" the bass drum beater into the bd head, preventing the head from ringing by not letting the beater bounce off the head), he does two things: First is bring the song to a screeching halt---stopping and starting again every four beats, back-and-forth. That creates a secondary effect, that of breaking up the song into little pieces---a bunch of 4-beat bars--- rather than the natural flow of the songwriter's chord progression, the whole song section (whether verse, chorus, or bridge/middle 8) as one. It is that kind of "small" playing that I find so common, so tedious, so pedestrian. Okay, I'm an elitist!

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!