MY ATTENTION remains focused on Tell It Like It Was, my new publication on Medium. And Tell It Like It Was remains focused on music—mostly music of the ’60s but we will get into the rock & roll and rhythm & blues before and after that decade eventually.
In the past week, Lew Shiner and John Ross published pieces on drummers: Lew with “Jack Sperling, King of the Big-Band Drummers” and John with “Give the Drummers Some!” and “Honey Lantree, R.I.P.”
John’s first article takes us from his abuse of plastic rulers as a youthful air-drummer through a look at five famous percussionists before focusing on Gina Schock, the under-appreciated drummer for the Go-Go’s.
His second piece is a tribute to the recently deceased Honey Lantree, who stood out as a fine drummer for a fine band, the Honeycombs, who had one big (fine) hit during the British Invasion of 1964, “Have I the Right.”
Here are links to these three fine reads:
• Jack Sperling, King of the Big-Band Drummers
• Give the Drummers Some!
• Honey Lantree, R.I.P.
In Lew’s piece on Jack Sperling, he makes this observation about drummers: “It takes a certain kind of person to play drums. When it comes down to it, the drummer has to impose his or her will on the band, to say, ‘My rhythm, right or wrong. Follow me or get off the bus.’ You could look at that as confidence or as arrogance, depending on the drummer and how charitable you might be feeling. For sheer aggression, you’d be hard put to match Ginger Baker, or Keith Moon, or John Bonham.”
If you haven’t read the introduction to Tell It Like It Was, now’s a groovy time: HERE
Mystically liberal Virgo enjoys long walks alone in the city at night in the rain with an umbrella and a flask of 10-year-old Laphroaig who strives to live by the maxim, “It ain’t what you know that gets you into trouble; it’s what you know that just ain’t so.
I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn, and a college dropout (twice!). Occupationally, I have been a bartender, jewelry engraver, bouncer, landscape artist, and FEMA crew chief following the Great Flood of ’72 (and that was a job that I should never, ever have left).
I am also the final author of the original O’Sullivan Woodside price guides for record collectors and the original author of the Goldmine price guides for record collectors. As such, I was often referred to as the Price Guide Guru, and—as everyone should know—it behooves one to heed the words of a guru. (Unless, of course, you’re the Beatles.)
