You Hum It, I'll Drown It. (A drummer breaks silence)

You Hum It, I’ll Drown It. (A drummer breaks silence)

First published in the Open University Music Society Journal, Autumn 2019.   

The drollery…you get used to it.  What do you call someone who hangs round with musicians?  A drummer.  How can you tell if a drummer’s at your front door?  The knocking speeds up.  What’s the definition of perfect pitch?  Throwing a drum-kit into a skip without touching the sides.  Ancient lore, too, gets in on the act: ‘If thine enemy do wrong thee, buy each of his children a drum.’  Like drum solos on rock double-albums from the Seventies, the gags roll on.

Drummers are not alone, of course, in being the target of status-banter in the music world. Viola-players know the feeling.  Despite the excellence of the likes of Slim Harpo and Larry Adler, the harmonica remains for many a last-minute buy as a child’s Christmas present (inviting wounded looks from the parents: see ancient lore, above).  The ‘perfect pitch’ quip is also applied to the banjo, an instrument that suffers further from P.G. Wodehouse’s pronouncement that a gentleman is someone who knows how to play it but refrains from so doing.  But drummers…ah, they’re beyond the pale.  Preferably far beyond, otherwise they’ll misread it as pail and want to clatter it.

I’m a drummer.  I also play guitar and ukulele (skip-alert) and I belong to a singing group. As old-time comics were wont to say, however, it’s the way you tell ‘em.  If I tack ‘drummer’ to the end of the list, some people take me for a relatively serious musician.  If I lead with ‘drummer’, I’m branded.  ‘Ahh, Ringo,’ they might say, as if  mis-remembering the Bisto ad. Sometimes it’s ‘What do your family think?’, as if I’ve just confessed a yearning to reinvent myself as Vlad the Impaler.  A similar question, ‘What do the neighbours think?’, implies my profound misanthropy.

Actually, the neighbours are unaware: for home practice I have an electric kit with headphones, which keeps the sound intimate and allows me to experiment with different settings, ranging from Country Rock through Reggae to Timpani. So all that the transient fauna in our cellar ever hear is a tapping-fest, as of someone in Starbuck’s who ordered a coffee half-an-hour ago.

What does a drummer ask a band leader?  “Do you want me to play too fast or too slow?”  Ah, these we have loved.  This is an important point, though, and not just for drummers.  Wooziness of tempo is bad news, especially if poor acoustics are on hand to aggravate it. But drummers are expected to be guardians of the pace—not least (and quite rightly) by bass players, with whom they form the engine room of a band.  Once I played with a blues band whose leader, the bass guitarist, was fastidious about tempo.  One of the band’s highlights was the Muddy Waters song ‘Baby, Please Don’t Go’ (a sentiment which wouldn’t benefit from being urged to the sound of drums), popularised in the early Sixties by Them, Van Morrison’s group.  Famously, that version ends with a dead-stop.  Woe betide any guitarist who, copying it, allows a note or chord to ring on.  And woe betide any drummer who sees the last bar as a perfect opportunity to demonstrate that, look, they’ve got the drum-line to Bolero down pat.  The leader and I were rehearsing once and he became so worried that I wouldn’t stop dead that he inadvertently did just that about three bars from the end, leaving me to disarrange the air on my own.  I say ‘inadvertently’: perhaps it was an electrified version of a knight-errant’s test.  At any rate, from his perspective I was just blithely clattering on and might not be trusted to put a sock in it with the others.  I exited the band shortly after.  

Nowadays I play the djembe, a large West African hand-drum, with a group connected to the Elgar School of Music in Worcester.  For some time the leader has been seeking a snappier title than Elgar School Folk Ensemble.  My suggestion, Eddie and the Nimrods, has yet to find favour.  We play a variety of pieces from all over the world and gig in various places: local festivals, fetes and most recently in a bandstand in the middle of a lake.  Our melody instrumentalists know what they’re doing; I strive to sound as though hanging around with them has paid off.  As you would expect with folk tunes, most of the pieces are 3 / 4 or 4 / 4 and some require less interference from me than others.  Technically, late medieval tunes such as ‘Greensleeves’ and ‘Pastime with Good Company’ require just one emphatic beat at the start of every bar (or, for 3 / 4 time, every second bar, otherwise I start sounding like an insistent bailiff).  For a while, with such tunes, I pondered nipping out for a quick drink, having rigged up a dummy’s hand to be worked by remote pedal.  Then I realised I could smuggle in some Latin American beats, provided that the fills weren’t intrusive.  I’ve yet to be caught out.  If and when I am, I plan to state as historical fact that both Elizabeth I and her dad used to hold Samba Dance-Offs at Hampton Court. 

But you can’t rely on the safe haven of crotchet values.  The Greek pieces we play are invigorating, colourful—and 7 / 8.  In one, ‘Kalamatianόs’, there’s a rest-bar between parts A and B—or almost.  The leader fills it with a vamp on his mandocello (cue Frankie Howerd raised eyebrow), nearly everyone else comes in on the sole quaver at the end and I have to join them at the start of the next bar.  It’s like ‘Baby, Please Don’t Go’ in reverse but usually I’m present and even correct.  A more recent piece, however, ‘Zwiefacher Die Alte Kath’, flits capriciously between 3 / 4,  2 / 4 and 5 / 4.  Should my path ever cross Kath’s, be she never so alt, there’ll be a free and frank Gesprӓch.

Throughout this article I’ve sensed the drummer jokes hovering in the ether, so I feel duty-bound to sign off with another: my favourite, really, since for good or ill it says something about this drummer’s character.  A boy was at a jazz workshop and became enthralled by the drumming.  At the end of the day, the organisers asked him how he’d enjoyed it: ‘Great,’ he said. ‘When I grow up, I want to be a drummer.’ ‘Son,’ came the reply, ‘you can do one or the other.  You can’t do both.’

Michael Thomas is a tutor on A815, Part 1 of the Open University MA in English.  He tends to keep his hands clasped tightly together in lectures.  www.michaelwthomas.co.uk