Forbidden Beat

Perspectives on Punk Drumming

S. W. Lauden, Lori Barbero, Matt Diehl, Mindy Abovitz, Mike Watt, Rat Scabies

• Publisher: Rare Bird Books
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781644282779
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Theory & Appreciation

Whether they're self-taught bashers or technical wizards, drummers are the thrashing, crashing heart of our favorite punk bands. In Forbidden Beat, some of today's most respected writers and musicians explore the history of punk percussion with personal essays, interviews and lists featuring their favorite players and biggest influences. From 60s garage rock and proto-punk to 70s New York and London, 80s hardcore and D-beat to 90s pop punk and beyond, Forbidden Beat is an uptempo ode to six decades of punk rock drumming. Featuring Ira Elliot, Curt Weiss, John Robb, Hudley Flipside, Bon Von Wheelie, Joey Shithead, Matt Diehl, D.H. Peligro, Mike Watt, Lynn Perko-Truell, Pete Finestone, Laura Bethita Neptuna, Jan Radder, Jim Ruland, Eric Beetner, Jon Wurster, Lori Barbero, Joey Cape, Marko DeSantis, Mindy Abovitz, Steven McDonald, Kye Smith, Ian Winwood, Phanie Diaz, Benny Horowitz, Shari Page, Urian Hackney, and Rat Scabies.

The Nightmare Continues:
Deconstructing the D-Beat

By Matt Diehl

Play to this.

It’s a bit quick, Tezz.

Yeah? So what?

—Tezz Roberts, But After the Gig…

If punk rock has an equivalent to the Bo Diddley beat, it can only be the D-beat. It’s arguably the most influential rhythmic figure to come out of all of punk—even more international in its reach, perhaps, than its American cousin, US hardcore’s “forbidden beat.”

“[D-beat] is not only a recognized musical style, but a very specific drum rhythm—much in the same way, say, as samba to Latin music or one drop is to reggae,” notes veteran punk drummer Spike T. Smith (who’s played with the Damned, Morrissey, New York Dolls, Killing Joke, and D-beat legends Sacrilege, among others) in his short, sharp YouTube documentary on the subject, The Birth of the D-Beat…Punk Meets Hardcore. “It existed a long time before any punk band was putting it to good use, that’s for sure,” Smith adds, noting similar rhythms could be found in everything from the Velvet Underground to various genres of Latin music.

The forbidden beat and the D-beat were certainly the most fashionable rhythmic choices when it came to eighties punk’s attempts to set land speed records. The former was primarily the province of acts like Minor Threat—a caffeinated, amateurish 4/4 thump with a distinct oompah vibe. The D-beat, meanwhile, began via the trademark tattoo popularized by the most iconic band of UK punk’s second wave, Discharge.

Also typically rendered in 4/4, Discharge’s D-beat added Burundi-influenced toms and syncopated rhythmic nuances arriving at unexpected times in the musical measures—creating its signature galloping pocket in the process. While sounding equally as extreme and intense as the forbidden beat, these choices made the D-beat a more open and musical framework for Discharge to sandwich its jackhammer unison riffage into, all without disturbing its relentless forward assault. There was air for the bombs to pass through before they exploded unexpectedly.

“That’s what’s distinctive, innit—the hand is following the foot, while the quarter note played by the right hand smooths it out,” Spike Smith muses in The Birth of the D-Beat. D-beat’s Wikipedia page posits that there are three versions of the D-beat, all variations on a basic formula. The Discharge-style D-beat came from the band’s visionary cofounder and second drummer Tezz Roberts on the title track of its first official release, the groundbreaking Realities of War EP. (It should be noted, I interviewed Tezz in a kind of meta fashion for this essay: essentially, I would ask him questions via Facebook messenger, and he would respond in an iconoclastically post-Internet manner by sending links to YouTube videos—some relating to the question, others not. Truth be told, it was still a fascinating, illuminating exchange!)

In Tezz’s playing on Discharge’s earliest D-beat classics—and that of his successors in Discharge, first Dave “Bambi” Ellesmere (also of D-beat band the Varukers) and then Garry Maloney, both brilliant musicians—the ride cymbals, crashes, and floor toms alternate abruptly for variety, all while striving for maximum impact by staying tautly within the parameters of Tezz’s effectively brutalist, minimalist template. The other trick to D-beat was that it sounded deceptively simple to play, inspiring endless imitators. In actual practice, however, it proved incredibly challenging to pull off—due to both the sheer physical exertion required to maintain it, as well as the necessity to reduce its more complex counts to muscle memory.

“You can count the quarter notes as eighth notes in two-measure phrasing—which is easier when you’re talking about playing really fast tempos,” explains veteran punk drummer Adam Zuckert, who’s served as sticksman for Discharge-influenced bands Final Conflict and F-Minus. “It’s ‘one and two and three and four’ versus one-two-three-four. The D-beat’s syncopated kick on the up ‘and’ notes creates a different feel than everything being on the down beats in the ‘forbidden beat.’ Add in variations of the kick patterns and two measure phrasings, and you can see there’s actually a lot of creativity and differentiation to be had.”

Vastly influential, the D-beat would go on to transcend its rhythmic origins, inspiring various related splinterings of Discharge’s punk aesthetic. While crust and anarcho-punk to street punk were predictable outgrowths of the D-beat sound, at the same time, it drew adopters even from outside punk’s stylistically stratified boundaries. As such, while Discharge would initially be pigeonholed as thrash amidst the various stylist punk subdivisions, D-beat would eventually be considered a genre unto itself—taking its name, even, from its rhythmic foundation. Numerous D-beat bands, in fact, affix “Dis” as the prefix in their moniker (Disfear, Disclose, Dishammer, et al.) to pledge allegiance to their forefathers.

And well after. Indeed, one doesn’t necessarily need to be a punk enthusiast to have experienced the D-beat; it’s genetically present in nearly all contemporary popular music that aspires to take music to its loudest, fastest, most aggressive extreme. In a sort of chicken-and-egg give and take, the D-beat has proven an indisputable part of contemporary heavy metal’s DNA for the past four decades—extending its crusty tentacles into the varietals of thrash, crossover, doom, death, powerviolence, sludge, and even Scandinavian melodic power metal. Heavy titans ranging from Metallica, Anthrax, and Sepultura to Napalm Death, Machine Head, and At the Gates have covered Discharge songs. D-beat’s influence, meanwhile, proves omnipresent in bands spanning various extremes of heaviness, from Neurosis and Corrosion of Conformity to Bathory, Helmet, and Slayer. Celtic Frost cofounder Tom G. Warrior, in fact, considers Discharge’s influence to have inspired a “revolution” in heavy metal’s sonic aesthetics.

“When I heard the first two Discharge records, I was blown away,” Warrior told Decibel’s J. Bennet. “I was just starting to play an instrument and I had no idea you could go so far. And to me, they were unlike other punk bands—they sounded more like metal.”

And there was a reason for that. D-beat’s viral capacity for cross-species transmission makes sense considering metal served as a crucial element of its definitive formation. Discharge proved the perfect crucible to bring together all its molecular elements in what was clearly a zeitgeist moment in the rhythmic spectrum.

Punk, however, would provide D-beat’s gateway drug into notoriety. The first recorded examples of the D-beat came from England punk originators the Buzzcocks via the band’s stone-classic songs “You Tear Me Up” and “Everybody’s Happy Nowadays.” In fact, in The Birth of the D-Beat, Buzzcocks drummer John Maher recalls lurching into the rhythm on “You Tear Me Up” as his first order of business in his debut rehearsal with the band in 1976. As such, that defining moment proved a happy-accident meeting of amateurism, deconstruction, and innovation for the then-seventeen-year-old novice with a crap Sonor Swinger drum kit.

“I remember the very first time I played it, I went ’round to Howard’s basement flat,” Maher says. “It was literally being thrown into the deep end: ‘We’ve got this song, it goes like this…one-two-three-four!’” As for the related thump in “Everybody’s Happy Nowadays,” Maher remembers it came about by turning a mistake into a style choice. “The hi-hat needed to be a steady thing—and I couldn’t do it!” he says. “Two years later, I would’ve been able to. But it worked out for the best!”

“You Tear Me Up” first appeared on 1978’s Time’s Up bootleg, capturing the band’s first demo session, recorded in October 1976 at Revolution Studios in suburban Manchester; “Everybody’s Happy Nowadays,” meanwhile, appeared as the A-side of a non-album single release in 1979. Maher’s interpretation of this beat proved the essence of punk—the rhythm embodied a different kind of rhythmic tension, utterly and thrillingly distinct from the prog and hard rock stylings of the day. Seemingly tossed off, simultaneously swinging and metronomic in its violently shifting dynamics, Maher’s nascent D-beat was the human musical approximation of an industrial accident—a machine that has gone off its gears and could fall apart at any time. And in the best punk tradition, it sounded effortless and democratic—its childlike pulse intelligently designed to sound so that seemingly anyone could play it.

The D-beat as we think of it today evolved out of what’s become known as “UK82”—the punk movement and sound that evolved a half decade after punk entered England’s collective consciousness. In that five-year span, punk evolved sonically and aesthetically, as things do, but it’s especially important in a genre iconoclastically devoted to never being stuck long in any conventional musical space. The Clash and Sex Pistols distinguished themselves from the symphonic ambitions, cosmic obsessions, and virtuoso guitar solos of Pink Floyd and Queen by combining the stripped-down instrumentation and brisk tempos of fifties rock, sixties garage, and the first Ramones albums—marrying that alarming cacophony to a bird’s eye view of society descending into urban-dystopian Thatcherism.

Bands were starting to take that approach to greater extremes, however, even in the first wave. Tempos started inching up faster and faster, even among the genre’s originators. Take It’s Alive by the Ramones, a double-LP set capturing one of the band’s most significant gigs impacting the original UK punk scene, for example. The live recording vividly captures the OG New York punks’ blazing set at London’s famed Rainbow Theatre on New Year’s Eve 1977. Attended by prominent local punk cognoscenti, the Ramones (powered by original drummer Tommy Ramone) played that night with even greater energy, momentum, and wildness than on their first three albums. The visceral excitement of their barrage, in fact, drove audience members to tear their seats off the floor and hurl them at the stage!

An early US tour of the Damned in 1979 also proved similarly inspiring. Future “forbidden beat” hardcore progenitors like Ian MacKaye and Henry Rollins were left dazed by the intense performances of the first English punk group to have a commercial release. At the Damned’s Washington, DC, stop, MacKaye noted that the band, propelled by drummer Rat Scabies, seemed to triple the tempos established on the band’s already propulsive studio recordings; meanwhile, the show’s dazzling opening act, Bad Brains (with bravura drummer Earl Hudson behind the kit) were also taking punk BPMs to uncharted levels.

As well, the UK Subs were already shaking up the genre’s formal language in ways that would prove central to later generations of punk and metal—but especially Discharge. Truly the bridge band between punk’s first and second waves, the Subs and their rotating drum stool of sticksmen actually possessed the very musical virtuosity disdained by punk orthodoxy; this tendency would poke its head out in intense flashes of spiky brilliance on songs like “Emotional Blackmail.” On “Emotional Blackmail,” the Subs play in an almost unnatural lockstep. Most startling is the stop/start on-a-dime syncopation of the percussion: staccato bursts of quickly grabbed crash cymbals the primary dynamic accent for emphasis, merging jarringly with the guitar’s disarmingly metronomic riff-based groove. “It was like the guitar there was doing what the timpani does in orchestral performances,” noted Ian Astbury, early punk adopter and vocalist for post-punk/hard rock tribalists the Cult (and perhaps the Hendrix of the tambourine, it must be noted). Simultaneously, appealingly “primitive” and “exotic” sounding (and easy to play) floor tom-heavy tribal rhythms were also making themselves heard in bands starting from Adam and the Ants all through the post-punk of Killing Joke and Astbury’s earlier band, Southern Death Cult (themselves highly influenced by Crass in this regard). All of those strands would be brought together in Tezz’s D-beat.

Punk was not unlike other extreme music styles in that, once the extreme aspect was introduced, it would become the dominant raison d’être of the music itself. Harder, faster, louder, more angry, more dissonant—at some point in an extreme genre’s life, this becomes the only way forward. This has proven true for diverse musical styles spanning heavy metal, drum and bass, and free jazz, and it was certainly true for pu...

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Introduction
• Straight Eighths from the Garage
• Maximize the Minimal & Let it Swing
• You’re Only as Good as Your Drummer
• Top Five Favorite Punk Drummers
• Drums>Violins
• Joey Shithead on Chuck Biscuits
• The Nightmare Continues: Deconstructing the D-Beat
• 1984: Rock Against Reagan(Dreadnaught Chapter Excerpt)
• Mike Watt on George Hurley
• You’re Pretty Good for a Girl
• How I Got the Beat
• Top Five Favorite Punk Drummers
• Jan Radder on Grant Hart
• Bill Stevenson: A Consistency of Pressure
• DC Will Do That to You
• Top Five Punk(ish) Songs to Make You a Better Drummer
• Lori Barbero on Babes in Toyland
• The Angry Builder
• Top Five Pop Punk Drummers
• Tré Cool of Green Day
• Dare Ya to Do What You Want
• Steven McDonald of Redd Kross
• My Self-Education in Punk Drumming
• On a Mountain, On a Mountain
• Phanie Diaz of Fea
• A Trip to Tommy’s House
• Top Five Drumming Influences That You Didn’t Know Were Punk as Fuck
• Reggae, Hardcore, & Death
• Rat Scabies of the Damned