Whats on your turntable tonight?

I left out one detail of Levon's remarkable playing in "Chest Fever". By not crashing on the downbeat (the 1) that introduces the next bar of the song, Levon has actually changed the construction of the song---from a bar-to-bar construct to a larger, longer viewpoint, that of the whole bridge. Very few drummers think in those terms, that of the construction of the song, and how their playing affects, determines even, that.

When a drummer emphasizes the "1" (by crashing on a cymbal as Keith Moon always does, or, as does John Bonham in so many LZ songs, by "burying" the bass drum beater into the bd head, preventing the head from ringing by not letting the beater bounce off the head), he does two things: First is bring the song to a screeching halt---stopping and starting again every four beats, back-and-forth. That creates a secondary effect, that of breaking up the song into little pieces---a bunch of 4-beat bars--- rather than the natural flow of the songwriter's chord progression, the whole song section (whether verse, chorus, or bridge/middle 8) as one. It is that kind of "small" playing that I find so common, so tedious, so pedestrian. Okay, I'm an elitist!

You’re SO right, tostadodunitos, Richard Manuel is a great drummer. Not in the technical sense, but musically. Levon Helm started the 1965 Bob Dylan world tour as the drummer in Dylan’s backing band for the tour, The Hawks. But he found the booing they encountered by the diehard Folk purists insufferable, and left the tour (and The Hawks), going down to the Gulf Coast to make a living working on an oil rig. When the tour ended in 1966, The Hawks relocated from The Chelsea Hotel in NYC to Saugerties in upstate New York, to be in close proximity to Dylan in nearby Woodstock. They found a house to rent (the infamous "Big Pink"), where they settled in and began recording what have come to be known as the Basement Tapes. When Capitol Records heard the recordings, they offered The Hawks their own contract. Hawks bassist Rick Danko gave Levon a call with the news, and Levon was on the next plane (;-).

Levon listened to the recordings, and Richard, who had played drums on many of the songs, became, as Levon states in his autobiography, his favorite drummer. That Richard is the drummer on some of the songs on The Band's 2nd, s/t ("brown") album, most people don't realize he's on about half the songs on that album, as well as a couple on their 1st, Music From Big Pink. The drumming of musicians whose primary instrument is other than drums is interesting, in that they are not playing the stock, "traditional" parts that primary-drummers have learned, but rather in a manner they find dictated by the song itself. Other non-drummers who play interesting, and sometimes great, drum parts include Stevie Wonder, Dave Edmunds, Andrew Gold, Paul McCartney, Emitt Rhodes (actually, Emitt was the drummer in The Palace Guard before he moved to guitar and piano in The Merry-Go-Round, and then his solo career) and, more recently, Marshall Crenshaw. Marshall’s drumming on his #447 album is really, really good!