Give The Drummer Some

As you know, I love everything in the world, with the exception of three things. One of those things that I love is drum solos (of the 1970s).

The response to my last blog about my favourite drum solos of the 1960s was entirely non-existent. So here, in chronological order, are my top 5 drum solos of the 1970s!

1. Good Lovin' - Grateful Dead (Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart) February 1970

Grateful Dead appeared in my top 10 drum solos of the 1960s, and it's safe to assume they'd also feature on my '80s and '90s lists if I could be bothered to write them. This version of Good Lovin', recorded at the Warehouse in New Orleans, includes a typically wild drum solo (duet?) from Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann. The Dead had just been busted for drugs and had to post bail, so this gig was held as a bust-fund benefit, which saw the band joined on stage by Fleetwood Mac's Peter Green. And what do we get in 2014? Kings of Leon joined on stage by Chris Martin. That's what. 

2. Friday Night, August 14th - Funkadelic (Tiki Fulwood) July 1970

Speaking of drugs, Funkadelic's Friday Night, August 14th is an unbelievably cool slice of '70s funk that closes with a superbly (psuperbly?) psychadelic drum solo from Tiki Fulwood, from their awesomely titled 1970 album Free Your Mind... and Your Ass Will Follow. According to bandleader George Clinton, the album was an attempt to "see if we can cut a whole album while we're all tripping on acid." It turns out that they definitely could.

3. One Word - Mahavishnu Orchestra (Billy Cobham) March 1973

One of the world's greatest living drummers, Billy Cobham rose to prominence as drummer for Miles Davis and went on to redefine jazz drumming in John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra. A particularly fine example of Cobham's fusion drumming comes at the end of One Word, from the classic album Birds of Fire. He still performs at the age of 70, just like your grandparents don't.

4. This All Too Mobile Home - Steely Dan (Jeff Porcaro and Jim Hodder) May 1974

No one combined jazz and rock quite like Steely Dan, and the rarely heard This All Too Mobile Home proved the perfect closing number for this London show. Each member of the band exit the stage one by one until just the two drummers remained, leaving Jeff Porcaro and Jim Hodder to end the show on an electrically energetic closing jam. "Sweet dreams my brothers, goodnight."

5. Fire - Ohio Players (James "Diamond" Williams) November 1974

Fire by the Ohio Players is one of my favourite funk songs, which I first heard on a That '70s Show CD but is also apparently the theme song to Gordon Ramsay's reality show Hell's Kitchen. That obviously spoils it a bit, but not enough to ruin Diamond's groovy percussion break, which intertwines with Sugarfoot's funky guitar and Merv, Pee Wee and Satch's cool horns. Oh yeah, they all had amazing names, huge afros and white capes. The '70s were unbelievably good.

Drum Solos Are Boring!

As you know, I love everything in the world, with the exception of three things. One of those things that I love is drum solos (of the 1960s).

So here, in chronological order, are my top 10 drum solos of the 1960s:

1. Toad - Cream (Ginger Baker) December 1966 

When the notoriously unpleasant Ginger Baker wasn't threatening his bandmate Jack Bruce with a knife or battling heroin addiction, he was thundering his way through solos with a pioneering use of two bass drums. Toad is one of the earliest recorded rock drum solos, a piece of musical history from the original supergroup.

2. Cold Sweat - James Brown (Clyde Stubblefield) July 1967

The 1960s saw the origins not only of hard rock, but also of funk. No single individual has greater claim to popularising funk music than James Brown, who in amongst his various noises shouts "Give the drummer some!" in the middle of the extremely funky Cold Sweat, to which drummer Clyde Stubblefield responds with a particularly groovy mini-solo.

3. My Generation - The Who (Keith Moon) September 1967

Keith Moon hated drum solos, once reportedly stopping mid-gig to yell "Drum solos are boring!" So this isn't actually a drum solo, but it's my blog so shut up. The Who were known for destroying their instruments on stage, and Keith Moon, another early adopter of the double kick drum, would load his kit with cherry bombs to make it blow up. For their performance on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, Moon used considerably more explosives than usual, resulting in an unforgettable climax to My Generation that caused a momentary break in transmission, singed Pete Townshend's hair and left Moon with shrapnel in his arm. So-called rock bands of today take note, this is how it's done.

4. Catfish Blues - The Jimi Hendrix Experience (Mitch Mitchell) October 1967

Recorded at the BBC, this unbelievably cool Jimi Hendrix cover of Robert Petway's Catfish Blues features a very nice drum solo by Mitch Mitchell. Admittedly I just wanted to include Mitch Mitchell, because his name is Mitch Mitchell. 

5. Alligator - Grateful Dead (Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart) January 1968

Is it still a solo if there are two drummers? That's one for the philosophers. All I know is how hard it is to pick a Grateful Dead drum solo from one of the travelling hippy troupe's 2,300 odd gigs. And I mean odd. But this Alligator drum break in Seattle is a prime example of Bill Kreutzmann's rhythms and Mickey Hart's percussion forming the centrepiece of a typically psychadelic jam. Not bad considering they were all higher than Snoop Dogg watching 2001: A Space Odyssey.

6. Channel One Suite - The Buddy Rich Big Band (Buddy Rich) July 1968

This has all been child's play up until now. No one played the drums with the sheer level of effortless talent as Buddy Rich, who brought popularity and personality to drumming while taking centre stage with impossibly tight jazz solos. One of the finest of these comes at the end of Mercy, Mercy's Channel One Suite, in which he double-handedly tears the roof off Caesars Palace. And he had a black belt in Karate. 

7. Sex Machine - Sly and the Family Stone (Greg Errico) May 1969

Sly and The Family Stone's album Stand! is a perfect slice of '60s psychadelia, featuring the awesomely narcotic Sex Machine, which Greg Errico closes with a simple but dynamic drum solo. He'd later play with the likes of Santana and Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, in a combination of rock and soul that demonstrates the way psychedelic music breaks musical boundaries and blurs them together, until they're very, very hazy.

8. Do What You Like - Blind Faith (Ginger Baker) August 1969

Ginger Baker's importance in rock drumming cannot be understated, so here he is again. Blind Faith's Do What You Like was written by Baker himself in the unusual 5/4 time signature, showing that not only could he drum, he could also compose. Like the angry Buddy Rich, only much angrier. 

9. Soul Sacrifice - Santana (Mike Shrieve) August 1969

Woodstock 1969 is the stuff of musical legend, with a lineup that included the Grateful Dead, Sly Stone and of course Santana. Glastonbury-goers would have hated it, all those rock bands. The latin-rock giants became one of the festival's highlights, thanks to a blistering Soul Sacrifice drum solo by then 20-year-old drummer Mike Shrieve. If you were there, I hate you. 

 

10. Moby Dick - Led Zeppelin (John Bonham) October 1969

Who better to bring us out of the '60s and into the '70s than Led Zeppelin, with their quintessential instrumental Moby Dick. It's hard rock at its purest, from the bluesy Jimmy Page riff to the junky cowbell beat, sandwiching John Bonham's classic drum solo which takes us rattling into the 1970s.

Thanks for reading and peace out etc.

Load up the 4x4, it's Festival Time

There are only three things in the world that I hate, and one of them is Glastonbury.

I've never been, because if I had £210 I'd spend it on something useful, like shampoo or some Garfield books. But this year, the festival that Iron Maiden's Bruce Dickinson accurately described as "the most bourgeois thing on the planet" reached hellish new heights, when festivalgoers objected to Metallica headlining their rock festival.

In fact, it turns out that the last thing Glastonbury attendees want at their rock festival is a rock band. According to one poll, 80% of festivalgoers wanted to sell their ticket after Metallica were announced. First and foremost, this shows the stupidity of spending £210 on a ticket for a concert where you don't know who's playing. If you did that, you're an idiot. It's like spending £210 on a holiday to a mystery location, then complaining when it's North Korea or Stevenage.

So when it's announced that their rock festival will be headlined by one of the world's biggest rock bands, they're pissed off. Because they didn't want rock music at their rock concert. They wanted to eat overpriced organic burgers and watch Kasabian and Jake Bugg and Kelis. I'm with them on that last one, I hope she did Milkshake. Repeatedly.

Sorry for having a go at the middle classes, but don't worry, The Guardian is fighting the corner of that wholly unfortunate and victimised group. It's just frustrating as a fan of rock music, because there are people all over the world who'd kill for a chance to see Metallica. And I mean that literally, some of those fans are insane. So it's frustrating when these festivalgoers respond with such snobbery. Because that's what it is, a bunch of dullards sulking about their organic 6 Music holiday being wrecked by a rock band.

I know some of the criticism towards Metallica was based on frontman James Hetfield’s supporting bear-hunting, and while that's a thoroughly laudable objection, we still can't start filtering acts based on their personal views. That would be ridiculous. You'd have to investigate each member of each band individually, to check none of them have opinions we dislike. We don't programme festivals based on the acts' personal lives. Lily Allen is Keith Allen's daughter, and they let her play. 

The more widespread objection was simply that Metallica's metal sound was unsuitable for the festival's "hippy" vibe. The festival that's sponsored by mobile phone giant EE. Who are owned by telecoms multinational Orange. Where all the acts are signed to labels owned by Universal and Warner and Sony. Dolly Parton owns a theme park. Lily Allen lives in a £3m house in the Cotswolds. Kasabian are idiots. Hippies? They're all corporate cock-sucking dicks, you pricks. Just admit that you don't want a rock band at your rock festival.

Now it's all over, and of course everyone loved Metallica because who wouldn't? And the awful festivalgoers are all back at their awful jobs, because my suggestion to lock Glastonbury with everyone inside wasn't taken seriously, leaving them free to post inane Facebook statuses about how relieved they are to finally have a shower, though not nearly as relieved as us. But I will never let them forget how unbearable they were for complaining about having to see a rock band at their rock festival.

I'll leave you with Adam Buxton's fantastic Festival Song, but first some more from the great Bruce Dickinson: “In the days when Glasto was an alternative festival it was quite interesting, but anywhere Gwyneth Paltrow goes and you can live in an air-conditioned yurt is not for me.”

Baby Please

There are only three things in the world that I hate, and here are three more of them.

3. Before I lived in London I had no idea public transport could instantaneously transform. I don't mean like Optimus Prime, I mean the way you can board a train on the underground only for it to completely change service while you're on it. The driver will make an announcement like: "When you boarded this train it was a Hammersmith and City line service to Barking, but now it's a Circle line service to Tower Hill. Sorry!" The other day I was told that my train to Hammersmith was going to stop at Moorgate and then go backwards. No other mode of transport could get away with that, and it's completely baffling from a metaphysical standpoint that something can change entirely what it is whilst in operation. "When you boarded this train it was a Piccadilly line service to Cockfosters, but now it's a shoe."

2. 

Yes, that is a magazine called Gurgle. With a title like that it's either a baby magazine or pornography, and I'm not sure which is worse. Actually of course I do, the baby magazine is far worse. "Top chef shares his baby recipes" boasts the cover, unclear whether it means recipes for cooking babies or recipes for baby food. Surely it can't be the latter, that would be insane. Why do we need a "top chef" telling us how to cook for babies?! They'll eat literally anything. Mush up their favourite toy and they'll wolf it down like a stoner eating pizza, the idiots.

Maybe this is just about me hating babies, but these magazines seem to be spawning faster than the stupid brats themselves. There are publications called Baby London and Baby Surrey, as if there's any difference between the two! I suppose this all serves me right for going to Waitrose. 

1. Dawn O'Porter. When presenter Dawn Porter married actor Chris O'Dowd, she changed her name to Dawn O'Porter. That's just worth remembering.



Here's Jurassic 5.

Public Eye

There are only three things in the world that I hate, and one of them is the public.

More specifically, I hate the things that people think it's acceptable to do in public. You can't walk down the street without someone playing the piano, or trying to talk to you, or telling you to stop screaming. Here are three things it shouldn't be acceptable to do in public:

3. Eating sushi. I like nothing more than buying an espresso so I can pretend to be a giant drinking a regular cup of coffee. Ask anyone. But when you sit in public with your tiny food and your tiny chopsticks and your tiny fish-shaped soy sauce, you look unbelievably stupid. I know you think you look cool, the smug expression plastered all over your wasabi-stained face makes that painfully obvious. But believe me, the reason we're all staring is not out of admiration. People hate you. They're waiting for you to finish your ridiculous meal and sheepishly sneak into a garage for a pasty.

2. Watching films. Stop watching films on your phone. If Ang Lee had wanted Life of Pi to be watched on an HTC he'd have spent much less time on the tiger. 

But try telling that to the man I saw on the train who thought that was an acceptable thing to watch on his phone, happily insulting the work of every single person involved in the making of Life of Pi. Actually, that seems fair.

Stupider even than him is the man I saw reading the Metro on his iPad. People only read the Metro because it's free and it's there. If you've got an iPad connected to the internet, you can do almost anything. You can look at brilliant pictures of cats, or watch Fail compilations on YouTube, or enjoy some pornography. And what was he doing? 

Reading the Metro. Maybe there was an unmissable article about a man who eats slugs or something.

1. Being pregnant. I mean seriously, it's 2014. And yet, people still think it's acceptable to go out in public whilst being pregnant. Have some self-respect. You'd have thought the shame of getting pregnant in this day and age would be enough to drive anyone into the sewers with the rest of the brainless pond-life, but some of them actually seem proud of themselves. I've seen them, wearing their "Baby on Board" badges. So I'm supposed to give up my seat on the train for you, because you were too stupid to use protection like they teach you in school. You're so self-obsessed that you think the world needs someone else with your stupid genetics, even though it can barely hold the strain of the exploding population and your exploding ego. Not only do the rest of us have to suffer the long-term consequences of there being a tiny version of you running around a dying planet, you also expect us to stand up for you because you're so brilliantly impressive for failing to take precautions. But if anyone reading this is pregnant, congratulations etc.

Here's The JB Conspiracy.

Shoot To Thrill

There are only three things in the world that I hate, and one of them is crap that only works in thrillers.

It's generally accepted that the laws that govern the fictional worlds of film and TV are quite different from the pesky logic that we real folk have to contend with on a daily basis. But there are recurring techniques in thrillers that surely don't work in real life, which our on-screen heroes are programmed to do by lazy writers. Here are 3 examples:

3. Spying from cars: Our protagonist Mr Lovely is tailing Mr Nasty, waiting for him outside his house. So where does Mr Lovely hide? In the bushes? Up a tree? In a bin? No, in a car, parked right outside Mr Nasty's house. Last time I checked, windscreens are see-through, otherwise people would crash more. But not in thrillers, where being in a car seems to turn you invisible. It doesn't work in real life and you'd get a parking ticket.

2. CPR: Mr Lovely's girlfriend, Miss Pretty, has been killed. She got run over, set on fire, shot in the face, run over again and then died of cancer. But wait, Mr Lovely knows CPR, and shouts things like "don't give up on me now!" while pummelling her suspiciously exposed chest and shoving his tongue down her throat. And Miss Pretty comes back to life, spluttering water even though she hasn't swallowed any. In our boring world, the chances of CPR completely working is around 2%, according to some website I just found. It's likely that those who are revived will die within a month, which puts a real dampener on the end of most thrillers. Imagine that, everyone who's ever been revived on screen has actually just died a few weeks after the credits rolled.

1. Using guns on your buddies: While it's true that most gunshot wounds aren't actually fatal, I'd still be cautious about shooting someone I cared about. But characters such as Sherlock and James Bond are happy to lodge a bullet in their friends, their expert marksmanship guaranteeing the survival of their loved ones. There are surely too many variables in play to warrant such a casual attitude to gunplay. And the reason I say using guns rather than just shooting is down to Lost. On the craziest island outside of all those party islands, characters are constantly thwacking each other over the head with rifles to knock them out "for their own good." Once passed out, Charlie can be carried to safety by Locke or whoever, and we get a few gloriously peaceful moments of Charlie being unconscious. This seems like another massive risk, given the high probability of them never coming round or being concussed. I don't really know what that means, but it sounds bad. They could become seriously brain damaged, but in the case of Charlie I'm not sure anyone would notice.

That You Criticise

As you know, I love everything in the world, with the exception of three things. One of those things that I love is HBO's True Detective.

What I don't love is the stuff that's being written about it. Not since NBC's Hannibal have critics fallen over themselves in such a hyperbolic frenzy. Here are three things people need to stop saying about True Detective.

3. 

The oft-repeated un-opinion that True Detective is "like a movie" is, to use a technical term, donkey bollocks. The crime-drama is protracted and slow to an extent that no movie would ever get away with. If a film was paced like True Detective, you'd turn it off. When people compare it to cinema, all they mean is it looks nice and has film stars in it. As a piece of criticism it's superficial, hacky and lazy. You can't just say a TV show is like a film because it's good, TV has been better than film for ages now. With the amount of money and talent that's moved to TV over the last few years, TV has overtaken film to the point that we should really start saying that a good film is "like a TV show." Twin Peaks and Breaking Bad aren't like films. Films are crap. With it's drawn-out, unravelling mystery, True Detective is nothing like a film, it's very much like a TV show.

2. 

No, the real star of True Detective could not be Louisiana. Because it's a place. The real stars of True Detective are, get this, its stars. The clue is in the name. I see what The Guardian man is trying to say, but calling the show's setting its "star" seems to undermine the work of the director and cinematographer and everyone involved in putting it on screen. Louisiana contributes relatively little towards True Detective's success, because, and I can't stress this enough, it's a place. This is the sort of pretentious thing people say to sound clever, which is actually completely meaningless. It's the sort of thing I might say. 

1. 

I've written about these ridiculous claims made by critics, that make you question their motives. Clearly these nonsensical headlines are just hit-generators. Maybe True Detective will be the best show of the year. But it's fucking February. No opinion you currently hold on the subject has any worth at all. The level of disingenuous non-discussion by professional critics seems to be reaching staggering new heights, with reviewers mindlessly saying anything to get traffic or a retweet from Lena Dunham. You have the best job in the world, all I ask is that you think about what you say. 

Thanks for reading, here's Who Are You by the brilliant Skindred.