Interesting article and quotes from this drummer who played on
the early Little Richard sides... Sounds like a book worth checking
out.
--junior
--- Forwarded Message Follows ---
Art Schuna
Quote from the new Earl Palmer book appeared in today's NY Times.
Quoted without permission below:
April 25, 1999
Ding-Ding-Ding-Ding! That's the Way Rock Began
Earl Palmer was one of rock-and-roll's first great musicians, a drummer who
laid rock's rhythmic foundations.
In "Backbeat," a new oral biography by Tony Scherman, Mr. Palmer narrates
his eventful life, which wound through some of the most vital, and still
underexamined, corners of America's recent past. In this excerpt, he
recalls meeting Little Richard in a New Orleans recording studio in 1955,
an encounter that helped forge the sound of rock.
The first time I felt like a page was being turned was Little Richard. I
hadn't heard anything like this before. He went into that
ding-ding-ding-ding at the piano, and I thought, "This is wild." Richard
wasn't a star when he met us, but I thought he was. He walked into JM like
he was coming offstage: that thick, thick powder makeup and the eye liner
and the lipstick and the hair everywhere in big, big waves. Walked in there
like something you'd never seen. And meeting him all them times since, I
still get the same feeling. I don't remember exactly what I said; something
like, "What the hell is this? Not who, what. "Gus," I said to Red Tyler,
"what the hell is this?"
But Richard was so infectious and so unhiding with his flamboyancy, he
sucked us right in. We got laughing with him instead of at him. I never
thought Richard was crazy, never thought he didn't know exactly what he was
doing. I just thought, "What the hell is this?"
Richard liked to record right after a show, when he was wired. Came in the
studio with a briefcase full of cash and set it up on the piano. I remember
Lee Allen dipping his fingers in it and pulling bills out and laughing.
Richard looked at Lee and say, "Lee, will you get out of that bag!"
What I remember about those sessions is how physical they were. You got to
realize how Richard played. I'll tell you, the only reason I started
playing what they come to call a rock-and-roll beat came from trying to
match Richard's right hand. Ding-ding-ding- ding! Most everything I had
done before was a shuffle or slow triplets. Fats Domino's early things were
shuffles. Smiley Lewis's things were shuffles. But Little Richard moved
from a shuffle to that straight eighth-note feeling. I don't know who
played that way first, Richard or Chuck Berry. Even if Chuck Berry played
straight eights on guitar, his band still played a shuffle behind him. But
with Richard pounding the piano with all 10 fingers, you couldn't so very
well go against that. I did at first. On "Tutti Frutti," you can hear me
playing a shuffle.
Listening to it now, its easy to hear I should have been playing that rock
beat.
Richard's music was exciting as hell. I'm not talking about the quality of
it. It wasn't quality music. It wasn't no chords; it was just blues.
"Slippin' and Slidin' " sounded like "Good Golly Miss Molly" and they both
sounded like "Lucille." It was exciting because he was exciting. Richard is
one of the few people I've ever recorded with who was just as exciting to
watch in the studio as he was in performance. On edge all the time, and
full of energy. And I never remember him angry with anyone. He was a
sweet-tempered guy. Still is. Whenever I'm around that way, I stop at the
Continental Hotel where he lives, go up and see him, sit down and talk a
while. Always come away with a pocketful of little Bible booklets. )
Copyright 1999 by the Smithsonian Institution, Smithsonian Institution Press.
