Tales From The Sticks - Part One

I promised to write more about sticks. Those not interested in drumming should look away now...

Without sticks, you are generally in some difficulty. Yes, you can play with your hands. And even though John Bonham was known to do it, it doesn't really look so cool...

Drummers love sticks. Some of them spend a lifetime looking for the right ones.

To me, Vic Firth American Classic 7As are perfection. But the more you play, the more sticks you have to buy. Like everything else, they don't last forever...

I called in to a shop in London just to buy a couple of pairs, and inevitably got talking about drums. This is, of course, the main reason for visiting drum stores, to look at drums and to discuss them in fine detail.

I asked what the drummer who used to run the shop was doing now. "Spending more time with his wife," I was told bluntly. "Something he should have done 10 years ago."

The ensuing conversation focused on the links between drumming, divorce and self-destruction. The chap now running the store, previously a full-time professional drummer, had been through his divorce some time back. Gigging every night, even though it was to pay the bills, hadn't gone down well at home. "She knew I was a drummer when we married, but... "

I said I knew it was rare to find a partner who understood about drumming, gigging, being in a band.

He said: "If it's any consolation, just about every full-time musician playing in the West End is divorced."

The conversation turned to drink and drugs (the time-honoured ways of the musician to deal with stresses of all sorts), and in particular to Phil Seamen (the man from whom Ginger Baker got a lot of his Ginger Bakeriness). We had both seen him play.

Seamen dealt with the strains by using cigarettes, alcohol and heroin. He died at 46, having made a name for himself as a drumming genius... but a walking disaster area.

I took my two pairs of sticks, thanked the man in the shop. And we wished each other well in keeping on going...

The Literary Drummer

Question: What do you call someone who spends all their time hanging around with musicans? Answer: A drummer.

Not particularly funny jokes like this reinforce the idea that drummers are not proper musos. Trying to think of the most musical drummer in rock, I reckoned it had to be BJ Wilson.

You might know him for playing on Joe Cocker's With A Little Help From My Friends, or you might know him from the various stories about Jimmy Page asking him to join Led Zeppelin prior to his thinking about a bloke called John Bonham.

But you should know him for his epic work with the classic line-up of Procol Harum. Wilson's style has been described as "literary", so closely did the drama of his percussion follow the drama of Keith Reid's lyrics and Gary Brooker's music.

If you need any persuasion, listen to the drum fills on the song A Salty Dog — a piece for which Brooker said there was no drum part, but Wilson proved emphatically there was. This was totally original drumming, played completely for the song, using space and silence just as much as sound. And always surprises.

Scores of other tracks, such as the similarly cinematic Whaling Stories, illustrated Wilson's musicality. But check out his time-stopping barrage in the climaxes of Repent Walpurgis, from the very first Procol album, if you want to hear him in fullest flow.

Wilson died awfully and tragically young. And no one has ever quite matched him — as a rock drummer and musician.