We Are The Real 99 Percent

By Andy Doerschuk
Originally published in the February 2012 issue of DRUM! Magazine

“Our job is to chronicle the careers of successful musicians, not to make unknown musicians successful.” So said my very first publisher, Jim Crockett, a true visionary who, through his pioneering development of Guitar Player magazine, created the editorial format mimicked by every ensuing publication and Web site that ever catered to musicians, including this one.

That was 25 years ago, and even though some might find his comment a bit coldhearted, I understood what Jim meant. As much as certain readers claim to prefer reading about unknown local drummers, most actually base magazine purchases on the famous names they recognize on the cover. We’re in the business of selling magazines, just as Jim was a quarter century earlier, so we try to cover artists our readers are interested in.

But I’ve seen the flipside of that picture. I remember back in 1976, at the age of 21, while living in Berkeley, California, writing a scathing letter to Miles Hurwitz, who was on the editorial staff of BAM magazine at the time. I met Miles through a mutual friend and sent him a copy of Electronic Wizard, the debut album by my band, Vic Trigger Band.

If I correctly remember the letter, I was absolutely outraged that he didn’t publish a review of our album in BAM. I recall accusing the magazine (whose name was actually an acronym for “Bay Area Music”) of failing to live up to its promise of covering local bands. I was pretty huffy.

Naturally, all these years later, I now know Miles was just doing his job. He wanted every story to count – every paragraph and word to be punchy. He couldn’t do favors unless they were calculated risks.

Nonetheless, such editorial rationalization ignores an important issue. The big stars we put on the cover represent the smallest fraction of drummers playing on any given night. The rest of us, to borrow the phrase, are the 99 percent.

We have day jobs to cover the bills. Drumming is just a little gravy. When you see us dragging our drums into a club on a Thursday evening you can count on the fact that we’ve already logged a solid eight hours at the office. We get home at 2:30 in the morning and still wake up on time for work the next day.

The real, everyday experience of drumming for 99 percenters takes place in grungy bars and churches, casinos and cruise ships, wine festivals and weddings. (I once played with Gurf Morlix at the opening of an L.A. Lamps R Us store in the ’80s. Whatever.) We don’t have roadies or endorsements. We drive ourselves to gigs, and pay our way.

Some folks think we’re crazy, but we know why we go to so much trouble to play drums. At the end of the night, when your bandleader folds a hundred dollars into your hand, you’re still amazed you get paid any amount of money for doing something you love so much.

Drummer Vs. Machine: The Value Of A Beat

By Andy Doerschuk
Originally published in the November 2011 issue of DRUM! Magazine

A recent news item caught my eye and raised my blood pressure. Apparently, rapper Rick Rich is suing Lil Wayne’s production team, The Drummer Boyz, for using a beat on Wayne’s single “How To Love,” which Rich claims to have purchased years before.

Intrigued, I logged onto YouTube, searched for the video, and listened to the track. My first impression was that it was a nice, hummable tune with a simple, repetitive chord progression and AutoTuned melody sung (rather than rapped) in Wayne’s pinched, adolescent voice. However, I found nothing remarkable about the beat. Take a look at the notated example below for proof.

Barring the fact that the backbeat is relegated to handclaps instead of a snare drum, the kick resonates like a cardboard box, and the eighth-note triplet fills echo like watery clicks, this beat has been performed thousands of times in countless variations by generations of drummers.

Now, I don’t doubt that Rick Rich has a compelling argument. If he really did “buy the beat,” then the producers should pay damages for using it without permission. The thing that irks me is that drummers have recorded beats for decades without being able to own the copyright to their creative output. Why can a beat be traded like a commodity and inspire lawsuits when it’s programmed on a drum machine, but be considered little more than disposable window-dressing when played by an actual drummer?

Admittedly, there are rare exceptions – very rare – such as Clyde Stubblefield’s ongoing fight to be paid for his innumerably sampled drum break on James Brown’s 1970 single “Funky Drummer.” But his efforts to chase down royalties have hardly been fruitful, and it still isn’t clear whether Stubblefield legally owns the copyright to the “Funky Drummer” drum break, or Brown, who was the songwriter.

Don’t get me wrong – I didn’t write this column to demean the effort The Drummer Boyz put into programming the beat that lies at the center of the controversy. In order for that loop to sound as it does, the producers made creative choices about the rhythms, fills, and sounds used, which make it an artistic work in my book.

But that’s what every drummer does when recording tracks for public consumption. Did Mitch Mitchell receive royalty checks for the signature drum fills he played during the breaks of Hendrix’s classic “Little Wing?” Can you hear a metal drummer pump a double bass shuffle without thinking of Alex Van Halen on “Hot For Teacher?”

In both cases, drummers composed parts that stood the test of time. Their musical ideas became hooks that lodged in our memories as firmly as any melody or chord progression ever could. As far as I’m concerned, they have as much right to demand royalty payments for their creative work as Rick Rich feels he has.

But, of course, I would say that; I’m a drummer.

Love Those Happy Mistakes

By Andy Doerschuk
Originally published in the January 2012 issue of DRUM! Magazine

I won’t forget the moment I stopped thinking and started doing. It was 1975, and I was practicing in the percussion lab at Chicago Musical College, then a part of Roosevelt University, right in the heart of The Loop. My dormitory connected to the school via a couple of strategic walkthroughs, and I often padded over in my socks late at night, even in the middle of snowstorms, while most other folks weren’t around.

The drum room was part sanctuary, part playground. I locked myself in among sets of marimbas, xylophones, chimes, gongs, timpani, and drums of all types. I would always practice mallets first, then move on to the school’s remarkably sonorous (and now vintage) Ludwig drum kit to play for another hour or so. It was mostly unstructured – just soloing, working on timekeeping, trying new grooves, whatever came to mind.

One night I was wailing with eyes closed, enjoying the rhythms and the pulse and the sounds of the moment, when it suddenly dawned on me that I’d stopped thinking about what my hands and feet were doing. I was just playing.

It was liberating. I wasn’t counting. I wasn’t plotting my next fill. I was just drumming freely, using muscle memory, with limbs moving together, yet independently. I snapped out of that gauzy zone long enough to realize that I’d just improvised some pretty cool and unexpected stuff. I swore to play drums like that from then on.

Of course, it didn’t work out that way. With minor exceptions, most bands I’ve played with since then weren’t interested in freeform drumming. They’ve wanted me to execute well-established parts that best complemented the arrangement, and I never complained. I was happy to be playing drums professionally.

But an interesting thing happened from time to time. I’d be onstage playing my memorized parts when I suddenly voiced a fill differently, or inadvertently changed my bass drum pattern, or hit an unexpected splash, or any number of other possible unintended detours.

At first such slips shook my sense of equilibrium. I thought I had to play precisely that part at exactly that moment to properly interpret that particular song. But I was wrong, and have since re-embraced the lesson learned late that night in Roosevelt’s downtown Chicago practice room.

Self-imposed rules don’t mean much within the bigger context of music making. So don’t freak out the next time you accidentally veer from the playbook. Call it a happy mistake. Make it work. You could become a better drummer for it.

Remembering The Best Gift Ever

By Andy Doerschuk
Originally published in the February/March 2003 issue of DRUM! Magazine

Even though it will be early 2012 by the time you read this column, I wrote it in the first week of December, 2002. And because of the season, I want to tell you a holiday story about the best Christmas gift I ever gave to someone.

It was in 2001, and I was trying to come up with a gift idea for a kid in his early teens who is very close to me. I wanted it to be special because the boy had been through a pretty tough few years. His family moved a lot, not around the block, but long distances, which forced him to make new friends, only to quickly lose them. He shuffled from one school to another, always as the new kid in class. If you’ve ever been the new kid in class, you know what I’m talking about.

Before his life turned upside-down, I knew him as a gregarious youngster who liked to be the center of attention, laughing, smiling, playing wildly with his friends. It only took a few hard years for him to become sullen and quiet. He spoke in clipped sentences, and then only when someone asked a question. He had trouble looking you in the eye. It was heartbreaking. He needed friends so badly. He needed something to believe in. This gift had to be special.

So I gave him an entry-level set of drums – nothing fancy, but they weren’t toys, either. I wish I could say that the drums completely turned his life around, but even if they haven’t, they seemed to nudge him in a better direction. He now practices religiously, and his drumming has come a long way in a very short time. He studies with a local teacher and began to attend a drum circle. He joined the school band, and earned an A. His life isn’t perfect, but he seems so much more engaged with it and the rest of the world.

He’s probably going to read this, too. I hope you like the pedal you got this year. Keep drumming.

Welcome To My Nightmare: A True Story

By Andy Doerschuk
Originally published in the March 2007 issue of DRUM! Magazine

After a rather hectic Friday at the DRUM! office, I looked forward with mixed emotions to a gig that evening with my band in San Francisco. I was burned out and could easily envision dozing off in front of the TV for the night. But I knew that I would get a second wind as soon as I got a pair of sticks in my hands, so I tried to make the most of the hour or so I had at home before I needed to drive into the city. I got a bite to eat. Watched the news. Relaxed. Checked the clock a couple times. And finally loaded my drums and left.

A bit more than an hour later, I was rounding the corner of Jefferson, about to pull into the alley next to Lou’s Pier 47, a club housed in the heart of the Fisherman’s Wharf district of San Francisco where I’ve played literally hundreds of gigs over the past 15 years. There was a long stretch of time during the early days of DRUM! Magazine when I played there six to eight times a month with various bands just to pay the rent. In many ways, it’s the closest thing to my home away from home.

As I negotiated the car through the regular crush of tourists, I thought it was strange that I didn’t hear any music wafting from the upstairs bar. Lou’s features live music all day. It was around 7:55. The band before us should have been in the middle of their last song. Something was wrong with this picture. Very wrong.

Swinging my bass drum case over a shoulder, I headed up the back staircase and walked into a scene that would strike horror into the heart of any drummer. The club was already fairly full of customers and the rest of my band was set up on stage … waiting. A sinking feeling spread through the pit of my stomach as the bandleader rushed over to me to ask if I had gotten his email.

And my answer was — well, yes and no. I saw the email arrive in my inbox and read the headline. It appeared to be one of Kevin’s normal pre-show reminders, so I never bothered to open it up. After all, I hadn’t forgotten that we had a gig on Friday. So I never actually gave myself the chance to read that the club had changed the starting time for the last set during the winter months. We were supposed to start at 8:00, not 9:00. And it was 8:00.

This was one of those situations when it really pays not to panic. I enlisted a few regular fans in the audience to help me carry the rest of my kit up the stairs, and while Kevin and Don played the opening number on just guitar and bass, I assembled my set as quickly as possible, literally throwing drum cases off the side of the stage without much regard for where they landed. Miraculously, I began playing during the second verse of the second song, as beads of sweat slowly dripped down my nose.

Anybody who has ever read this column in the past must know that there is a moral to this story. It’s simple but important. Don’t ever take anything for granted. Not a single gig or a single relationship. I thought I knew exactly why Kevin sent his email. I was wrong. I thought I’d played at Lou’s so many times that nothing could surprise me about the place. I was doubly wrong.

There are days when I think I’ve been editing drumming magazines for so long that I can’t possibly make any mistakes. God knows, I’d better double-check my work right away.