Drummer Practice Quotes

Man, why don’t you practice?” Tony would ask, as if there was nothing strange about a teenage drummer lecturing the greatest jazz trumpeter of his generation, a man old enough to be his father.

Charlie Watts’s drums on “Street Fighting Man” are from this little 1930s practice drummer’s kit, in a little suitcase that you popped up, one tiny cymbal, a half-size tambourine that served as a snare, and that’s really what it was made on, made on rubbish, made in hotel rooms with our little toys.

A shrill, glass-endangering scream of outrage from the direction of the stage yanked me around just in time to see the guitarist swing his gleaming back Stratocaster at the drummer's head. He struck with the kind of accuracy that comes only with years of practice and/or extremely vivid wishful thinking.

Please listen to the hi-hat on the recorded version of Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks.” Listen through once. Allow yourself to be trans- ported back to the time or place when you first fell deeply into that trance of sound, so wide and powerful it gave a new depth to your life, a depth you had not known to search for. Or maybe this is the first time you are hearing the song. In that case, I imagine you prefer different music altogether. Maybe you discount rock and roll as ego-driven, disconnected from that channeled light of Bach or Satie or Django or Monk. No matter. Allow the resistance to rise here as well, then wait for the moment the song breaks through, rings that same truth, that same transportive bell of beauty, that hyp notic atmosphere music offers. How beautiful to find lessons in our resistance. This may be a foundation of spiritual practice, to dive into the center of no and investigate. All those pronouncements and walls dis- solve like so much dust under the microscope of mind. The trance of song—loud, immense, gorgeous—does the same.

The band all thought I was mad, and they sort of indulged me. But I heard a sound that I could get out of there. And Jimmy was onto it immediately. “Street Fighting Man,” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and half of “Gimme Shelter” were all made just like that, on a cassette machine. I used to layer guitar on guitar. Sometimes there are eight guitars on those tracks. You just mash ’em up. Charlie Watts’s drums on “Street Fighting Man” are from this little 1930s practice drummer’s kit, in a little suitcase that you popped up, one tiny cymbal, a half-size tambourine that served as a snare, and that’s really what it was made on, made on rubbish, made in hotel rooms with our little toys.

Washington valued well-played music in army life and assigned a band to each brigade. At one point he chided a fife and drum corps for playing badly and insisted that they practice more regularly; a year later, after the drummers took this admonition to an extreme, Washington restricted their practice to one hour in the morning, a second in the afternoon. He was also irked by the improvisations of some drummers and, amid the misery of Valley Forge, took the trouble to issue this broadside to wayward drummers: “The use of drums are as signals to the army and, if every drummer is allowed to beat at his pleasure, the intention is entirely destroy[e]d, as it will be impossible to distinguish whether they are beating for their own pleasure or for a signal to the troops.”44

The judge drummed with his fingers on his desk but the band of toes still wouldn’t let him in yet. Though he didn’t want to be in that special orchestra where a practical joker was known to put water and a powdered fruity dessert mix in large stringed instruments of which the stunt was known as cello Jello.

Even in the 1950s and very early sixties, when people still worried about conformity and the silent generation, there were different drummers to whose beat millions would one day march. The bohemians of that era (called “beatniks” or “beats”) were only a handful, but they practiced free love, took drugs, repudiated the straight world, and generally showed which way the wind was blowing. They were highly publicized, so when the bohemian impulse strengthened, dropouts knew what was expected of them.

But performing with just a microphone stand instead of a row of cymbals between me and the audience—that’s the thing to overcome. If you’re not predisposed toward bat-wing headgear and flying in the air, what do you do when there’s no singing? There are other practical concerns. I’ve already made it very clear that I’m not going to be able to do what Peter did. I will not be sporting Andy’s camisole or a badger pelt. But what will I wear? The workman’s overalls that did the job when I was just the drummer? Or is that too, well, workmanlike? I can wear a flat cap and Edwardian coat for “Robbery, Assault and Battery,” but that’s as theatrical as I’m prepared to go.