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Okay, I'm going to warn you that we are going to talk about drummers on this show. I just want you to know right from the start, just in case you want to roll your eyes and go, really? Do we have to? It's kind of like an episode of Family Guy where the focus of the episode is Meg. Well, yeah, we have to. There have been countless stories about great guitarists and great singers and keyboardists. But drummers? Not so much. Unless your name is Dave Grohl. And we will get to him. Don't worry. So this was going to be a profile of my favorite drummers in alt rock. But then I got to thinking, how much do we know about what drummers play? How many histories of the electric guitar have been written? Monographs, coffee table books, books on collectible guitars. Now think about all the books written about keyboards. There's about three linear feet of bookshelf in my office that's taken up just by books on the history of synthesizers. But what about the drums that today's drummers play? Don't tell me that you go to a tool show and don't stare at what Danny Carey is playing or marvel at what Chad Smith does with those roundy things behind Flea and Anthony at a Chili Peppers gig. No, I think it's time that we not only talked about drummers, but but also about drums. Now think about this. How did the modern drum kit come into being? There's a pretty standard sort of setup. But how did that come about? Why do we play drums the way we do? And who should we thank for making drums into what they are today? Cymbals and foot pedals and snares. Where did all that come from? See? Yeah, you're curious now, aren't you? Well, stand by. The history of the modern drum kit is coming up. This is stuff that even most drummers don't know. This is the ongoing History of New Music podcast with Alan Cross. Hello again, I'm Alan Cross and full disclosure here. I play the drums. I've been a drummer for decades. In fact, I used to teach drums at a long gone place in the north end of Winnipeg called Drums Unlimited. I have an 11 piece double bass tama kit in my basement adorned with a vast array of Piesty 2002 cymbals. And although I don't play as often as I used to, it really annoys the dogs. I can never see me divesting myself of my precious, precious drums. I was really, really deep into the whole drumming scene for the longest time. I would hang around music stores, I'd attend clinics and go to gigs. Not because necessarily I like the band, but just because I wanted to see the drummer's kit. One of the coolest things that's ever happened to me was a personal tour of Neil Peart's drum sets on the Rush 40 tour conducted by Neil's longtime drum drum tech. I trembled the entire time. But until I started working on a museum project called the Science of Rock and Roll a few years ago, I never really gave much thought into all the individual components that make up a standard drum kit. I'd read and written about guitars and pickups, amplifiers, effects pedals, synthesizers, PA systems, but almost nothing about how today's drum kits came to be. Why is that? Well, I think it's time to remedy the situation. So what we're going to do over the next hour is trace the development of the modern drum kit. Something that's only really been around for about a hundred years. We're going to look at how it was created and then how it changed and grew over the last century. And along the way we're going to hear from some of my favorite alt rock drummers of all time. I won't call them the best, too subjective. But I will say that I like these guys because they're good. Really, really good. And I will try to justify my choices where I see necessary. Let's start with some drumming. Stewart Copeland is the only American member of the Police when they came along in 1977. He immediately stood out from all the other new wave drummers of the era. And the first thing you noticed about his sound was the snare drum, which was tuned very, very tight, giving it an incredibly sharp high pitched crack. Second, he had a distinctly reggae and dub feel to his playing. Something often expressed with liberal use of rim shots. Then there was a slight Middle Eastern infusion crossed with jazz. You can hear that with how he used the small high pitched cymbals called splash cymbals. He was one of the first modern rock drummers to use splashes and then listen to what he does with the hi hat. He is amazing at creating syncopated beats leading from the hi hat. His rhythms were made all the more complicated because Stewart is left handed, yet he plays a kit set up for right handers. This makes him a lot like Ringo Starr. A lot of what Ringo played with the Beatles flummoxed drummers until they realized that although he played right handed, he almost always led with his left hand for fills and flourishes. And because the Police were a three piece, this opened up a lot of space for Stewart to fill. Taking a listen to this. As a drum teacher, I used to play this for some students and say, if you can figure out what's going on here, you don't need me anymore. The Police featuring Stewart Copland on drums. Damn, he's good. Okay, let's go through our history of drums. So starting at the very beginning. Technically drums are known as membranophones and are probably humankind's oldest instrument. Doesn't take much brain power to bang out a rhythm with a stick on a rock. The first proper drums appeared about 6000 BC. They were used for rituals, religious ceremonies, marching armies into war and making music. Drums consist of a membrane, a skin which is stretched over an open ended cylinder, the shell and it struck with the hand or a stick. Now I said that some drums had an open ended shell, but some also have a skin covering the bottom of the shell. Whatever the case, in modern parlance these are called tom toms and they can be mounted on stands or on the floor. There's a special drum called the snare which first appeared sometime in the 14th century as a way to keep time for flute players. A snare has two heads, a top and a bottom. And a series of metal wires run along the bottom head. They give the snare its distinct staccato crack every time it's hit. This makes the snare very good for military use. From there, the snare became the de facto rhythm keeping machine. Today's snares are 14 inches in diameter, but can range in depth from 4 inches to more than 8 deeper if we're talking about marching bands, but we're not. Before the modern era, the various drum related percussion instruments were played by different people. For example, the bass drum was played by one person. Cymbals would be the domain of someone else. And the snare drum had its own player or players. We still see this in today's marching bands. In fact, the biggest form of popular music in the US in the 1890s was marching music. John Philip Sousa and all that sort of thing. Marching bands, an offshoot of military music, required people to keep strict time. But it was expensive to hire and maintain a marching band because of all those drummers. What if you could get just one guy to play multiple drum and percussion parts? It was time to downsize and consolidate. Now, this wasn't entirely new. By the end of the US Civil War, bandleaders began experimenting with ways for one person to play more than one drum related instrument. For example, why couldn't one person play both the bass drum and the snare drum? Well, it was possible, but unwieldy. Some innovation was required. The first significant innovation was a dedicated stand for the snare drum that appeared about 1898. The second invention was the foot pedal. It allowed a drummer to hold a beat on the bass drum with a foot, leaving two hands free for other things. The first foot pedals appeared in the 1890s. But it wasn't until 1909 that the foot operated bass drum pedal was patented by Ludwig and Ludwig out of Chicago. This was a big breakthrough and it's basically the same design that we see on drum kits today. We're going to talk about some other components in just a second, but I want to get another drummer in here. There were many things that set Jane's Addiction apart, but being a drummer, I immediately glommed onto Stephen Perkins. He got his first set of drums for his bar mitzvah. His influences were big band drummers like Buddy Rich and Gene Krupa. And this explains why Stephen likes to play with a bit of swing, giving his playing a looser feel. And I think you'll see what I mean in this track called Ted Just Admit it from Jane's Addiction's 1986 debut album, Nothing Shocking, Jane's addiction and Ted just admitted from 1986 featuring Stephen Perkins on drums. Alright, back to our history of the modern drum kit. At about the same time as Ludwig patented the foot pedal, another important development came with the waves and waves and waves of immigrants to North America, many of whom brought their traditional instruments with them. This is where things began to get interesting with cymbals. Cymbals are thin, round pieces of metal that don't produce a distinct note when they're hit, but they do have a distinctive sound. The sound is created by its diameter, the thickness and the shape of the cymbal. But the most important factor are the metals and alloys that go into making it. There are many different types of crash, splash, ride, hi hat, china type, sizzle, all with different histories. As far as I know, the oldest manufacturer of cymbals is a company called Avitis Zildjian, which can trace their roots to Constantinople in 1623. The founder of the company spent years trying to turn base metals into gold, and eventually he gave up on alchemy and got into symbol making. Zildjian remains the largest maker of cymbals on the planet. Alright to the years before World War I. Once the foot pedal and cymbals became available, all sorts of guys, and they were pretty much always guys, started putting together drums and cymbals of various sizes into kits or sets. There wasn't a standard setup. Guys just arranged things in ways that made sense to them. A guy who played a lot of percussion instruments at the same time was attractive to band leaders. Instead of paying four or five people to keep time, he only had to pay one. And so we started seeing drummers and their kids appear on ragtime records. A big breakthrough came with the original Dixieland jazz band around 1917. Their new recordings of this thing called jazz proved to be pretty popular in and around New Orleans. And an admirer named Baby Dodds headed north taking a playing style built around a bass snare cymbal setup with him. When Prohibition came into effect, the speakeasies needed entertainment. This is where a lot of jazz bands found work. Drummers developed compact kits that could be transported easily into these clubs and out when the cops showed up to raid things. Alright, time for more drumming. Chad Smith is one of the hardest hitting drummers in the world. Guy is rock solid. He's from St. Paul, Minnesota. Started playing when he was 7, and at first he was a straight ahead rock guy, following the lead of Black Sabbath and the Stones and the Beatles, the who and Led Zeppel. But then he was given instruction by a funk drummer named Larry Frantangelo. After that, everything changed. Chad says that this is when he stopped being a drummer and began being a musician. Now, the best way to give you an idea of Chad's chops is to play one of his solos. Now, come on, don't roll your eyes. A drum solo properly executed can be a thing of beauty. And this Chad Smith performance from 1997 is definitely beautiful. Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Take it from me or anybody else who plays drums, this guy is good. When we come back, more on the history of the modern drum kit. Picking up things at the end of the 1920s, when movies messed everything up for drummers.