CS Daily Archive > The Big Picture > 04/28/04

Give the Drummer Some

By TOM MATTHEWS

Drummers create the foundation of a song, yet they get no respect from their teammates and fans don't even know their names. Thank God the film industry doesn't have a job like that…

Q: What do you call someone who hangs around with musicians? A: The drummer.

Did you hear about the actress who was so stupid she slept with the screenwriter to help her career?

As a teenager, at the same time that I became obsessed with filmmaking, I took up the drums. Aside from a single fill-in performance at the local Elks lodge, this was an entirely solitary endeavor, just me and my kit, bashing away in the basement to KISS records, essentially being a reclusive, forlorn teen. Just really, really loudly.

When it came time to choose precisely which craft I would waste years of my life pursuing I chose screenwriting, but I have come to realize that my interest in these two fields were not unrelated. Perception-wise, screenwriters are to the film industry what drummers are to rock and roll. This despite the obvious difference that screenwriters do no less than write the "music" from which all else flows, while drummers, with very few exceptions, do not.

Think about it. Drumming -- like screenwriting -- is an exacting, methodical job, the drummer literally forced into the background, sitting on his ass -- like a writer -- while his more colorful, more dynamic, more "artistic" bandmates bask in the attention of the crowd.

Taken apart from the whole, what the drummer creates is not "music," is not entertainment in and of itself. Like a screenplay, no one would sit down to listen to a drum track for pleasure. Both only meet the purpose for which they are intended when they are taken up by others to build a larger whole.

The vocalist and the guitar slinger down front, they're who the people pay to see. Meanwhile, what the drummer does looks to be so artless and simpleminded that people often make the mistake of thinking anyone could do it.

For these reasons and more, no one gives a rat's ass about the drummer. You could count on one hand the number of drummers who have appeared alone on the cover of Rolling Stone. Ringo Starr. Phil Collins. Keith Moon, for dying. Dave Grohl, but only after moving down front on guitar. That's really about it. (I know, I keep track.) In band photos I can always spot the drummer by his sad inability to pose, because it has been beaten into him that he is valueless, at least for hype and marketing purposes. He just stands there, trying his damnedest to play the part of rock star, knowing that the casual fan probably doesn't even know his name.

Which is all tragic, since anyone who truly understands rock and roll knows that the drums -- just like the screenplay -- are the foundation on which everything is built. Ask Keith Richards, who generously allows that Charlie Watts is the unheralded soul behind the Rolling Stones. Ask Led Zeppelin, who ruled themselves obsolete the moment John Bonham died and took his bone-rattling beat with him. Ask the Who, who became a pale embarrassment when they failed to follow Zeppelin's lead upon the death of the irreplaceable Mr. Moon.

Rock and roll is rhythm, is punch, is color and flash laid securely upon a sturdy, mathematically precise base. Rock's true legends, who at the end of the day are still going to get all the groupies, nevertheless understand the vital role that the drummer plays in the complex, indefinable stew that makes music matter.

The Stones? Zeppelin? The Who? Dinosaurs! Today, drummers are expendable, interchangeable -- literally machines in more and more cases. Counting Crows and Pearl Jam, to cite a couple examples, threw their original drummers overboard the minute they tasted some success. The reason in all cases: the drummer just wasn't good enough, just wasn't able to meet a level of excellence which -- I'll lay you odds -- wasn't imposed upon anyone else in the band.

More likely, with success at hand and suddenly huge money at stake, skittishness required that the organization be shaken up in some way and, well, you can't fire the dewy-eyed bass player or the spotlight- hogging singer -- they're getting all the fan mail and magazine covers. So sack the drummer! He's not really a part of the team, and what this artistic endeavor really needs is fresh blood. Besides, anyone can do that. Insert "screenwriter," and you're talking about the same indignity.

(It would take a bigger man than I to not point out that Counting Crows and Pearl Jam have taken dramatic dips both commercially and critically since they started playing musical chairs with their backbeat. Somehow the spirit went out of their music the minute they decided that one of the guys who helped get them to the top, who did the hard, inglorious work and believed in the integrity of the project when all they had was the music, wasn't worthy of staying around once the Big Time was at hand.)

So how did drummers fare in the Beatles, now and forevermore the gold standard of rock and roll? Surely they understood.

In 1962, in one of the shabbier sackings in rock history, John, Paul and George cowered behind manager Brian Epstein as Pete Best (below), the band's original tub- thumper, was shown the door -- allegedly because he was drawing more girls than his colleagues (in the long, sorry history of screenwriters being fired for undue reasons, can we agree that this has never been one of them?). Pete's mother, a Liverpool club owner, had provided the Beatles their first regular venue and had ably managed the band right up until Epstein came along to usher them to unimaginable stardom. Pete Best stayed behind and became a baker.

When the Beatles entered the studio to record their first album, Best's replacement -- the inimitable Ringo -- was handed a tambourine by producer George Martin and told to sit in the corner while a session drummer played on tracks like "Love Me Do" and "P.S. I Love You." Throughout the band's existence, there was a modest but persistent rumor that most Beatle recordings were clandestinely shipped to New York before pressing, in order that the legendary Bernard "Pretty" Purdie could redo Ringo's parts. (In The Big Beat, Max Weinberg's 1984 collection of interviews with rock's great drummers, Purdie insists this is true; Ringo, in the same book, avoids the question.) As in screenwriting, credits only tell so much -- only the insiders know who actually did the work.

Finally, while recording the so-called "White Album" in 1968, Ringo could no longer stand being marginalized by bandmates who were, let's not kid ourselves, far bigger pieces of the puzzle than he could ever hope to be. Becoming the trick answer to a Beatles trivia question, it was Ringo Starr -- not Lennon or McCartney -- who first quit the band, a full two years before the celebrated songwriting duo officially pulled the plug. Perhaps the breaking point? Paul decided he could just play the drums himself.

Ringo sat around the house for a week waiting for his mates to beg for his return, to concede that they were diminished without him, and then he skulked back to the studio to carry on.

His drums were covered in flowers and notes of appreciation from John, Paul and George. They were the Beatles, for Christ's sake. He was only the drummer, but they understood that the foundation that brought them the world was the foundation that was going to drive them until they chose to be no more.

In the entire recorded history of Hollywood, no screenwriter has ever been given flowers for returning to a project.

Read Tom Matthews' feature article "Second-Act Troubles: Sustaining Your Screenwriting Career" (about the unforeseen challenges which can derail a career, and offering helpful warnings for aspiring screenwriters before that first sale) in the May/June issue of Creative Screenwriting magazine (on newsstands now.

Tom Matthews wrote the 1997 Warner Brothers film Mad City starring Dustin Hoffman and John Travolta, and has written scripts for most of the major studios. His satirical novel Like We Care will be published this September by Bancroft Press.

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