Someone I know was mentioning that he’d miss the July 7 Live Earth “Concerts for a Climate in Crisis” because we’d be playing then, ourselves (although at a significantly lower-profile event). It’s safe to say that this guy is dismissive of—even derisive toward—the notion of “climate in crisis.” Although he was keenly tuned into the Live 8 concerts, I doubt he could tell you what cause they supported. Lacking an act that interests him as Pink Floyd’s reunion did, he was utterly disinterested in Live Earth.
The short film, at http://liveearth.msn.com/le/video, certainly stays true to the Spinal Tap spirit, down to Marty DeBergi’s participation. I’ll be on the edge of my drum throne to see if their bad luck streak with percussionists still holds.
That kind of rotten luck seems almost inevitable when it comes to drummers, (although losing one to spontaneous human combustion seems exceptional). Our band’s gone through them like a hair band runs through Aqua Net. We’re currently on our fifth drummer in the past couple of years. Which helps explain why this weekend will be our first gig since last December.
Acquiring and keeping a decent drummer is such a frustrating enterprise, it’s enough to make me understand what led to the development of the drum machine. What they lack in personality, they more than make up in reliability. There’s no question that you’ll find your drum machine where you left it last, and that it will be ready to work when the rest of the band shows up. And the chicks don’t ever want to go home with the drum machine.
Given this apparent shortage, it seems especially unfair and wasteful when a band has what seems to be an excess of drummers and doesn’t make full use of them.
Take the Grateful Dead, for years, one of the best-known of the double-drummer bands. Lately I was listening to Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty for the first time in years, and was struck by just how little they used drums: “New Speedway Boogie” (handclaps only?), “High Time” and “Brokedown Palace” (no drums at all). “Uncle John’s Band,” “Friend of the Devil,” “Candy Man,” featured brushes or very light drum work.
Granted, these are the only two studio albums of theirs that I own, so maybe they aren’t typical. And maybe they retained two drummers for their live work, which was the Dead’s bread and butter. Still, it seems odd for a band with such deep apparent folk influence and jazz aspirations to incorporate the twin drummers.
The money for that second drummer might’ve been better spent on some backup singers. Even considering the 1970 SoCal atmosphere from which the albums sprang, the harmony vocals are often shaky, sometimes downright shrieky.
Or they could have—and should have—invested some of that second drummer’s salary toward insurance for their keyboard players. What Spinal Tap is to drummers, the Dead were to keys players. For 30 years, the band replaced this perennial musical fifth wheel position roughly every decade. First was “Pigpen” (d. 1973, liver failure), then Keith Godchaux (d. 1980, car wreck), and Brent Mydland (d. 1990, drug misadventure).
The one that bothers me the most is Vince Welnick, who died in 2006, in a particularly horrific suicide. Not only the utterly preventable way he died, but Welnick’s work on my favorite Tubes albums makes his death the most tragic to me.
As a piano player myself, and on behalf of anyone they might tap for a reunion tour, I urge the Grateful Dead to forget about filling that position. Get someone in to blast some saxophone or slap around a tambourine. Just give the keyboards a break.
Oh, and the next person who uses the phrase, “long, strange trip,” or any derivative of same, in connection with the Grateful Dead should have to play keys for them.
