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MODERN DRUMMER TRENDS
FEATURE
November
2002
By Jim
DeRogatis
Why have
three, four, or more when you can do it with two?
That’s the
question being posed by a growing number of rock bands. The White Stripes,
Local H, Cash Audio, Jucifer, Swearing at Motorists, the Spinanes, Helio
Sequence, Quasi, the Soledad Brothers, and Hella are working in a wide array
of different genres ranging from garage-rock to trashy blues, rockabilly to
punk, and art-rock to heavy metal. What they all have in common is a
decision to limit the size of the band to two members, generally guitar and
drums (though Mates of State is a keyboard/drums duo, and Evil Beaver is
bass and drums).
The idea
of a two-man or woman-band certainly isn’t a new one. Blues great John Lee
Hooker often performed with just a drummer, as did rockabilly madman Hasil
Adkins and surf guitarist Link Wray. Sometimes, it’s a matter of convenience
or practicality: Fewer members mean fewer people to pay and transport. But
just as often it’s a situation where two musicians share a unique chemistry
that would only be diluted if there were three, or it’s an aesthetic
decision that more instruments would detract from the sound rather than
adding to it.
Drummers
who step into a duo face some unique challenges. One is that they usually
set up much closer to the front of the stage, parallel with their partner,
and that means they’re much more visible and a bigger part of the show.
There are also some particular musical hurdles that come from playing with
one musician instead of several. In order to a get handle on these, I spoke
with four distinctly different but equally worthy drummers in four acclaimed
duos.
SCOTT GIAMPINO, CASH AUDIO
Unlike
many two-man bands, when drummer Scott Giampino and guitarist-vocalist John
Humphrey formed Cash Audio in 1994, they were determined to avoid adding a
bassist. “No bass was just something solid that we knew didn’t want,”
Giampino says. “We’re not anti-bass player. We get a lot of people at shows
who are like, ‘So, where’s your bass player?’ It’s always bass players who
ask us that. They’re like, ‘There’s a lot of cool bass lines I could be
playing!’ And we’re like, ‘Hey, got your gear? Bring it on!’ And they never
do.”
The band’s
goal was to take the blues back to the garage, “send it through the meat
grinder, turn it up, amplify it, and get a lot of power behind it.” And it
has succeeded admirably, onstage and on albums such as 2000’s Green
Bullet (Touch and Go). Having a bass—or a third member on another
instrument—just didn’t fit the plan.
“Initially
when we formed, we were like, ‘We’ll do this as a two-piece and maybe I’ll
get a trigger pad to have more sounds and colors, and that just never
gelled,” Giampino says. “But we tried to get a really big, full sound and
represent a full band with just two guys, as opposed to sounding like a
plinky guitar and a drummer. Obviously, you’re not going to hear the bass,
but we didn’t want it to feel like anything was missing.”
To
compensate, Humphrey (a recording engineer and co-owner of Engine Room
Studios) augments his amp by running the guitar direct through the P.A. and
rolling off the mid and high frequencies. And Giampino altered his playing
style to become more frenetic and angular (before Cash Audio, he’d played in
more conventional combos such as the Rosehips and the Mystery Girls), as
well as becoming more of a showman.
“I had to
be more in the front style-wise,” he says. “Maybe not more busy, but more
accents, and more lively. I’m half the band, so I have to give people
something to latch onto, as opposed to just playing John Bonham.” Tall and
lanky, Giampino dwarfs his relatively small drum set—he uses a 20-inch bass
drum and 16-inch floor tom, both 1965 Slingerlands with a blue psychedelic
wave finish, a vintage Gretsch chrome snare, a couple of cymbals, and an
18-inch cast-iron pan. On special occasions, he’ll flip the pan over and fry
some bacon on a small hotplate beside the drums.
“You know,
we’re big guys and we’re from the Midwest,” Giampino says, laughing. “When
we toured with Man or Astroman, they were like, ‘You guys are the sound of
bacon cooking!’ So we decided to add that to the set. It’s a great smell,
and it fits our sound, and it brings people to the front of the audience.
And when they’re drunk, everybody loves bacon. It reminds people of
grandma’s house.”
According
to Giampino, the best thing about being a duo is that it’s just easier to
get things done with two people. “We went on tour with the Quadrajets, and
as soon as it ended, they broke up the band and became a two-piece, the
Immortal Lee County Killers,” he says. “John always says other people are
ripping us off, but I remind him that there’s been two-man bands for 50
years!” Giampino’s goal is to set up a festival bill of nothing but guitar
and drum duos. “I love playing with other two-pieces,” he says, “especially
live, because we just take ’em to task!”
BRIAN ST. CLAIR, LOCAL H
With four albums to its credit and
several radio hits including 1996’s “Bound for the Floor,” Local H is the
most well-known of the two-piece rock bands profiled in this article. But
it’s a new version of the Chicago duo that is currently touring in support
of Here Comes the Zoo (Palm Pictures), with Brian St. Clair replacing
Joe Daniels as guitarist-vocalist Scott Lucas’ partner.
St. Clair is an unrelentingly
hard-hitting player who plays butt-end and uses only ride cymbals because
anything lighter cracks or dents. “A lot of people have said I’m Animal from
the Muppets, and I can see where they would say that,” he says. He developed
his style in the punk-rock underground, playing in groups such as God’s
Acre, Rights of the Accused, and Triple Fast Action, which frequently toured
with Local H. In between, he worked as a drum tech for Cheap Trick.
“I knew Joe and Scott for a long time,”
St. Clair says. “When I got the call to join Local H, I listened to the
previous three records, and you could tell that Joe put a lot of thought
into what he was doing; it wasn’t just like he walked in and threw something
down. It almost sounded like his kick was playing to the vocal line. You
don’t really hear that too much—Bun E. Carlos is the only other person I can
think of who plays these weird kick patterns. I wanted to stay true to the
band and the style, but at the same time, I’m a completely different drummer
than Joe with different influences and a different background.”
The transition from a larger band to a
duo wasn’t quite so difficult for St. Clair in the recording studio, because
Local H does use bass guitar on its recordings. “I basically play off the
bass line, which is pretty typical for a rock drummer, so I think in that
aspect I may be a little bit more straightforward than Joe,” he says. But
taking to his Premier Artists Maples onstage was now a different experience.
(In concert, the only other instrument is Lucas’ guitar, though, like Cash
Audio, the sound is tweaked by being fed through other amplifiers to boost
the low end.)
“I definitely had to just take it over
the top,” St. Clair says. “From the first second I get onstage all the way
through to the end, it’s just so draining with Local H. I’m stage right,
Scott is stage left, and we’re right up front. To sit back and just kind of
play and not really get into the music, the stage would be completely
lopsided. So I had to take it up a notch from Triple Fast Action, but I also
found that we lock in much better as a duo than with four guys because you
don’t have the other elements of someone else screwing up. Once you’re
locked, you’re locked in.”
What is the biggest benefit St. Clair
has found from being in a two-piece? “There’s one less person to argue
with,” he says, laughing. “My advice is, if you’ve got a best friend or a
wife or a girlfriend who plays the other instrument, it’s like, ‘Why should
we deal with some other guy?’ A lot of times you hear about these bands
where everybody hates this one guy. Well, just get rid of them! You don’t
need it.”
MEG WHITE, THE WHITE
STRIPES
Meg White
is the youngest and least experienced of the drummers profiled here, but her
direct, stripped-down style is integral to the bluesy garage rock of the
White Stripes, the Detroit duo that she formed with her brother, Jack. The
band scored an impressive hit in the U.K. with “Fell In Love With A Girl,”
and it’s beginning to win a large audience in the U.S. for its third album,
White Blood Cells (V2), garnering appearances on MTV and “The Late
Show with David Letterman.”
“I started
playing about five years ago,” Meg says. “We actually had a drum set in the
house, and basically I just went up there one day and sat down and started
drumming on it. Jack started playing some guitar and it just kind of went
from there. He appreciated the childlike element in it, because I hadn’t
really figured out the drums yet.”
According
to Jack, Meg is modest to a fault. “She’s perfect; she’s the best part of
the band, really,” he says. “Her style is just so simplistic that I can work
around it and work with it. We have this kind of telepathy onstage where we
can just read each other’s minds. If we had anybody else onstage it would
just get ruined, I think. It feels really good to perform like that.”
Meg has
only played with a bassist on one occasion, when the White Stripes were
joined onstage for a few AC/DC covers. “That night, it was weird having to
pay attention to more than one person!” she says. But she seconds her
brother’s comments about their telepathy, and she admirably navigates the
twists and turns when he deconstructs the songs onstage. “The only way I can
get in touch with a song every time we play it is to break it up as much as
possible and destroy it and then recover it,” Jack says. “It’s like we’re
doing a cover version of a song I wrote.”
Adds Meg:
“I just know the way he plays so well at this point that I always know kind
of what he’s going to do. I can always sense where he’s going with things
just by the mood he’s in or the attitude or how the song is going. Once in a
while, he throws me for a loop, but I can usually keep him where I want
him.”
Meg has
never taken a lesson, isn’t particularly obsessed with gear (she plays
Pearl), and says her pre-show warm-up consists of “whiskey and Red Bull.”
Not surprisingly, her hero is another female primitivist: Moe Tucker of the
Velvet Underground.
“I
appreciate other kinds of drummers who play differently, but it’s not my
style or what works for this band,” she says. “I get [criticism] sometimes,
and I go through periods where it really bothers me. But then I think about
it, and I realize that this is what is really needed for this band. And I
just try to have as much fun with it as possible.”
ED LIVENGOOD, JUCIFER
When Ed Livengood
first played in rock bands, it was as a guitarist and bassist. “I always
wanted to play drums, but I couldn’t have a drum kit in my parent’s house
when I was growing up,” he says. He got his first set in 1991, and he’s been
behind it ever since, honing a super high-energy style that perfectly fits
the psychedelic-tinged art-rock of Jucifer, the Athens, Georgia duo that he
formed in 1992 with his girlfriend, guitarist-vocalist Amber Valentine.
“Early on,
I was playing bass,” Livengood says. “We tried to get a drummer for a long
time, and we just couldn’t find anybody. So I started playing drums, and we
had this bass rig sitting around, and Amber and I one day were like, ‘What
would happen if we took the Marshall and ran it into the bass cabinet?’ It
sounded really good, and by the time we finally got the dream bass player we
wanted, there was just too much bass. At that point, we’d already
established our songwriting dynamic, and we just kind of decided it would be
fun to be a duo.”
Jucifer’s
sound certainly isn’t lacking, either on the recent album I Name You
Destroyer (Velocette) or in live performance, where Valentine provides
an icy contrast to Livengood’s frantic pummeling of an oversized kit
specially made for him by Zickos. “They’re totally hand-made, and they’re
just beautiful drums,” he says. “I’ve got a 26 x 18 kick, an 18-inch rack
tom, and a 24 x 18 floor that’s basically a modified kick drum. The way they
mike the floor tom, it kind of makes up for what the bass guitar would be
doing, especially with some of the parts that I do on it. I tune it up
pretty high, and it has this kind of tympani sound. I can do this thing with
my wrist where I hit it and then do a kind of brush stroke to get different
tones, and it’s harder to do that with a smaller drum.”
Livengood
continues to drum in other side projects, but he notices some distinct
differences playing in bigger bands after being in a duo. “Having a bass
player there means that if you kind of mess up a beat, you can catch it
better,” he says. “When there’s only two people, if you miss a part or do
something wrong, it’s kind of more obvious. And now I’ m just so used to
being up front, like a couple of feet from the front row or whatever, that
it’s a charging experience. The audience is part of the show, and they can
make the energy go way up.”
But, he
adds, “The two-piece things is definitely not for everybody. For us, it was
actually an accident, and it seems like the most successful two-pieces are
the ones where it just kind of happens that way.”
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