I Drum, Therefore I Am

Being and Becoming a Drummer

Gareth Dylan Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317119227
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Despite their central role in many forms of music-making, drummers have been largely neglected in the scholarly literature on music and education. But kit drummers are increasingly difficult to ignore. While exponents of the drum kit are frequently mocked in popular culture, they are also widely acknowledged to be central to the musical success and aesthetic appeal of any musical ensemble in which they are found. Drummers are also making their presence felt in music education, with increasing opportunities to learn their craft in formal contexts. Drawing on data collected from in-depth interviews and questionnaires, Gareth Dylan Smith explores the identities, practices and learning of teenage and adult kit drummers in and around London. As a London-based drummer and teacher of drummers, Smith uses his own identity as participant-researcher to inform and interpret other drummers' accounts of their experiences. Drummers learn in multi-modal ways, usually with a keen awareness of exemplars of their art and craft. The world of kit drumming is highly masculine, which presents opportunities and challenges to drummers of both sexes. Smith proposes a new model of the 'Snowball Self', which incorporates the constructs of identity realization, learning realization, meta-identities and contextual identities. Kit drummers' identities, practices and learning are found to be intertwined, as drummers exist in a web of interdependence. Drummers drum; therefore they are, they do, and they learn - in a rich tapestry of means and contexts.

Chapter 1
‘I Drum, Therefore I Am’?

For Descartes, thinking, or the capacity to think, is the defining feature of (his) human existence. He writes:

Observing that this truth: I think, therefore I am, was so certain and so evident that all the most extravagant suppositions of the sceptics were not capable of shaking it, I judged that I could accept it without scruple as the first principle of the philosophy I was seeking. ([1637] 1968, pp. 53–4)

People claiming ‘I drum, therefore I am’ may expect to face more scepticism even than greeted this ground-breaking assertion of Descartes’; we all think, but drumming is done by fewer people and is often regarded as a mere hobby. A few years ago I was having a deep and meaningful conversation with an old friend and fellow musician, whom I had known for more than 20 years. We were discussing the directions of our lives and plans for our respective futures, and he said to me, ‘You are drums.’ I did not think very hard about this remark at the time, other than to take more than a little pride in the fact that Chris had noticed this about me – after all, if I was confident about being anything, then that thing was a drummer. The depth of feeling that I have about a being a drummer, how much this identity shapes and defines me, is a character trait that has been observed of other musicians; Shank, following a study of musicians in Austin, Texas, found that ‘within the rock ’n’ roll scene, musical taste and musical ability are not the surface traits of an individual but must be directly related to some elemental truth about the person performing. They must shape, and in turn be moulded by, the most basic longing within that person’ (Shank 1994, p. 137).

A chance encounter with an advertisement for a t-shirt on the Internet one evening 18 months after my conversation with Chris led me to discover the slogan ‘I drum, therefore I am.’ I immediately purchased two t-shirts bearing that legend, confident that it was probably true enough for me that I could wear it. Wearing the t-shirt makes me feel good (and it comes in handy at conferences too), but it set me to thinking about whether or to what extent Chris and the t-shirt could be right. Does anyone take drumming that seriously? The gravity of such a sentiment is clear from what Descartes goes on to say – that ‘if I had only ceased to think … I would have had no reason to believe that I existed; I thereby concluded that I was a substance, of which the whole essence or nature consists in thinking’ ([1637] 1968, p. 54).

From a sincere but fleeting remark by a friend, via a clever t-shirt, to seventeenth-century French philosophy about the very essence of human existence was quite a journey. If one paraphrases Descartes thus – ‘if I had only ceased to drum … I would have had no reason to believe that I existed; I thereby concluded that I was a substance, of which the whole essence or nature consists in drumming’ – one wonders whether there is anyone for whom so strong a statement might be true. Life, after all, is complicated, and we have many allegiances to keep, obligations to meet and tasks to perform – could drumming mean this much to any person? Descartes may be turning in his grave at the thought of a silly Englishman, hundreds of years his junior, arguing that, rather than thinking being the very essence of what makes a person truly exist, that essence in fact lies in drumming. I defer to Descartes and accept that he may well have a valid point in the case of many people. Descartes, however, undertook no sociological or ethnomusicological research with kit drummers (for I have been accused of doing both with this book) – he was doubtless a busy man! So it now falls to me to see whether or how and to what extent my borrowed and adulterated proposition may be true: ‘I drum, therefore I am’?

Research Focus

I began this study with the notion of wishing to investigate drummers’ identities, what drummers do and how drummers learn to do what they do. Two groups of drummers were investigated for the study – teenage drummers and adults. The teenage drummers were required to be aged between 13 and 19 years and admit either to taking regular lessons or to playing the drums frequently – or both. The adults had to be over 30 years of age and must have been playing drums as a significant part of their life for at least 10 years. These caveats were added to the age groups because I was interested in people for whom being a drummer was likely to be a significant part of their lives and identities.

After settling on what (or, rather, whom) I wished to investigate and what it was I wanted to find out about them, I needed to frame this for the purposes of research; to this end I contrived the research question ‘How are drummers “drummers” and how do they learn to play?’ The emphasis throughout the study remained on drummers’ own individual perspectives and experiences (including my own). Where similarities and differences emerge between accounts and opinions, I discuss these with reference to other writings in order to paint some sort of a picture of drummers collectively. In order to maintain a tight focus for the research, seven sub-questions were devised. These sub-questions expand on themes from the title, and incorporate recurrent, interesting and relevant themes suggested by the review of literature carried out early on in the study. They are:

1. How big a part in the life of a drummer is the identity of ‘drummer’?

2. In what situations, in what ways and to what extent do drummers feel included or excluded as drummers?

3. How do drummers think that others perceive them?

4. How does a drummer see his or her place in the historical and cultural musical landscape?

5. How do drummers learn their art and craft?

6. How, if at all, do drummers engage with the Internet?

7. What roles might issues of gender or ethnicity play in contributing to the identities of drummers?

These questions guided the gathering and analysis of empirical data.

Initially, I had wanted also to explore the issue of class as it affects drummers’ identities. However, after reading Bourdieu (1984), among others, I decided that this would be too complicated an issue to be included in this book; Bourdieu’s complex work challenges and problematizes commonplace notions of class to such an extent that to do his work justice might require a book unto itself. It would, nonetheless, be a fascinating lens through which to explore drummers in the future.

Drummers’ Kits and Kit Drummers

Historical Context

The drum kit (or ‘drum set’ more commonly in US English parlance) is a relatively new musical instrument, dating from around the beginning of the twentieth century. More accurately, it is a collection of un-pitched musical instruments generally viewed and played as component parts of one instrument – the kit. Its history is documented by Dean (2011), Budofsky (2006), Moore (1965), Peters (1975), and Soebbing (1965). Matt Brennan at the University of Edinburgh has also just begun a study into the social history of the drum kit (Brennan 2012), for the instrument developed along with the musical role of the drummer, a role discussed throughout this book, especially in Chapter 5. Brennan’s work should help to fill a conspicuous and substantial gap in the literature on the drum kit. A standard contemporary drum kit has come to comprise a bass drum (played with a foot-pedal), a hi-hat (also operated by pedal), snare drum, one or more tom-toms (usually referred to as simply ‘toms’), and a selection of cymbals. There are almost as many variations on tuning preferences, configurations, dimensions and sizes of drum kits as there are exponents of the instrument. Probably the most important technological developments to enable the playing of the whole drum kit by one musician were the development in around 1910 of the modern bass drum pedal and during the 1920s of the hi-hat as an instrument that could be played with both the feet and hands.

The history of drumming is, of course, far older than the story of the drum kit. Drums are widely held to be the oldest of musical instruments made by humans; they are found around the world, and are not indigenous to any region or race. Soebbing traces the history of drums back to the Stone Age, citing discoveries from Germany dating to c. 3000 BC and differently shaped drums coming much later from Africa to Spain in AD 711. Precursors to the contemporary snare drum include the Tabor, dating from the late Middle Ages, to which in Scotland around this time cat-gut snares (strings laid across the skin) were added. Other writers trace snare drums back to Turkish Janizar bands of the thirteenth century, or even as early as 600 BC in Arabia. The ‘Swiss drum’ can be traced back to at least the seventeenth century; this instrument stands about two feet tall, produces a low tone, and is perhaps the most obvious ancestor of the toms used in today’s drum kits.

Kit drummers and their instruments were first to be heard playing jazz from around the turn of the twentieth century; this music then morphed from the late 1940s into the wide range of contemporary styles that surround and evolve around us in Western cultures today – styles such as rock ’n’ roll, hard rock, country, funk, soul, gospel, heavy metal, and so on. Drummers’ roles in the musics that they play today emerged from cultural developments in the United States of America during the late nineteenth century, especially in the city of New Orleans, Louisiana. New Orleans is where the various musics of West African slaves and their descendants, along with musics imported from all over Europe to the New World, initially combined to create the rhythm-orientated music that became the forerunner so much of today’s contemporary music. Drummers who play jazz have often played, and continue to play, a range of other styles of music. There is a reciprocity and cross-pollination among drummers and their playing (explored throughout this book), so it can be misleading to locate a drummer only in one narrow stylistic category. The spread of kit drumming from jazz to other styles in the USA in the middle part of the twentieth century is described evocatively in Tony Scherman’s (1999) biography of pioneering drummer Earl Palmer and in Paul Justman’s (2002) film Standing in the Shadows of Motown.

What We Already Know about Drummers

Most people, if they know the names of any members of a given band, will probably be able to name the singer. It is rare, I would suggest, for a person, unless a particular fan, to know the names of the other musicians in a band – including the drummer – especially if the names of musicians are glossed over in the marketing, such as in the Dave Matthews Band, Bill Haley and the Comets, or Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble. The same is true when music is sold under one person’s name but even a casual listen (or a glance at the liner notes) reveals the presence of so many more musicians: David Bowie, Miles Davis, John Mayer or Stephen Wheel. Drummers also tend to feature infrequently in music videos, so, unless they go to see a band perform live, I would argue that the majority of people rarely notice drummers or seek to find out about them. For this reason, there may be a paucity of understanding in society at large as to what drummers are and do.

Ingrid Monson in her 1996 ethnographic study of jazz musicians observes that ‘the drummer is generally the member of the band most underrated by the audience and least discussed in the jazz historical and analytical literature’. Indeed, when drummers do feature prominently in mainstream popular culture they are often ridiculed in some way, as highlighted in the BBC documentary I’m in a Rock ’n’ Roll Band: The Drummer (BBC Two Television, 2010). A scene in the popular film ‘rock-umentary’ This Is Spinal Tap (1984) focuses on the tragic/comedic demise of each of Tap’s many successive drummers. One drummer died ‘in a bizarre gardening accident’, another ‘choked on vomit (someone else’s vomit)’, and two others were victims of spontaneous combustion! In Paul Cattaneo’s 2008 film The Rocker about a drummer and his band, the bassist says that ‘Fish’, the drummer, is ‘sloppy and he’s stupid and he’s full of life’. While these films mythologize and dramatically perpetuate various stereotypes of (mostly rock) drummers, they are possibly surpassed in their influence on the popular consciousness regarding drummers by a bootleg recording of UK rock band The Troggs. The recording is undated, unofficial and uncatalogued, but can be traced through hearsay to some time in the late 1960s or early1970s; familiarity with this recording, known as The Troggs’ Tape, is a rite of passage of sorts among popular musicians. On the recording, the band are trying to record a song and have apparently been working on it for some considerable time that day. The guitarist plays for four bars, and another member of the band shouts an excited ‘Yes!’ When the drummer then fails to start playing, that member screams a desperate ‘NOOOO!’ Here is a partial transcript of some of the conversation between Ronnie, the drummer, and another, anonymous, member of the band:

Other member:	Just listen for a sec.
Ronnie:	You can say that all fuckin’ night, but I cannot feel it any other way than I‘ve been playin’ it.
Other member:	You have played it tonight.
Ronnie:	You’d better fuckin’ forget it then cause I ain’t gonna be able to do it … and I’ll tell you that now.
[Some time passes, while they try to play the song]
Other member:	It’s easy – you’ve done it tonight.
[More time passes]
Other member:	It’s exactly the same rhythm as you were playing before – it’s da da da da da, cha.
Other members:	Da da da da da, cha; da da da da da, cha.
Ronnie:	Just shut yer fuckin’ mouths for five minutes and give me a fuckin’ chance to do it!
Other member:	Fuckin’ drummer, I shit him.
[A few seconds pass]
Other member:	[counts the drummer in] A one, a two, a one, two, three, four – you’re doin’ it fuckin’ wrong!

Clearly frustrations are running high in this recording session. I am not aware of a recording similarly lampooning another instrumentalist or member of a band; perhaps this recording has influenced popular impressions of drummers – certainly I face fellow musicians quoting sections from this dialogue in many a music-making scenario.

Arguably the most powerful image of the drummer in minds of the general public is ‘Animal’ from Jim Henson’s The Muppet Show. Although this television series no longer airs in the UK, the films are still widely distributed and very popular – a new film was released and well received in 2011 (The Muppets 2011) – and the Muppets are popular characters on www.YouTube.com. Animal is possibly the world’s best known and best loved kit drummer. He plays drums for The Electric Mayhem, the house band in The Muppet Show. A mad, barely articulate creature with ravaged pink/purple hair, he assaults the drums as hard and as loudly as possible; whilst pounding his kit, he shouts ‘aaaaaagghhh!!!’ a lot. (During my tenure in most of the bands with whom I have played, one musician or another has told me that I remind him or her of Animal – surely a compliment?!) It is probably no more than a coincidence that the man who played drums for the puppet Animal off-stage is a namesake of Ronnie, the troubled drummer in The Troggs – Ronnie Verrell was a highly respected British jazz musician who played in Ted Heath’s orchestra for over 10 years, drummed on many recording sessions, and led his own band for several years.

Compounding the popular public ridicule of drummers, there are websites dedicated to drummer jokes; the easiest of these to find is www.drumjokes.com. I recall upon regular visits to my local music shop in the late 1990s, spotting by the sales register a book entitled 101 Drummer Jokes. Although I never purchased a copy, I would browse it each time that I visited in order to be able to ward off an interlocutor with the punch-line to any joke with which he or she might attempt to woo me...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Foreword
• Preface
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 ‘I Drum, Therefore I Am’?
• 2 The Snowball Self
• 3 Learning to Play Drums
• 4 The Snowball Self in Motion
• 5 A Part, and Yet Apart
• 6 Ethnicity and Cultural Heritage
• 7 Gender and Drumming
• 8 Conclusions
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index