Our family band, Caution! Blind Driver is all about the drums. My dad was a drummer. My sister was a drummer. I’m a drummer. My daughter, Jenny, can play. My son, Jeff, is our drummer and the driver of the band. You might say we’ve got drums in the DNA.
To me, and all of us, drums set the framework for the music. You can build a really pretty house with fancy stuff hanging all over it, but if the frame isn’t solid, and isn’t designed to fit the house and carry the weight, the structure is going to fall apart.
A drummer doesn’t have to be slick. It’s fun to see a great soloist, or a flashy guy spinning sticks – once in a while. But for a full show with a wide variety of music, what I want is crisp playing that matches the tone and mood of each song, with a steady meter, start to finish. The downbeat has to be on the down, and the snare has gotta pop on that off beat. The drums should roll effortlessly through the piece of music, no dragging or wandering. Fills and accents are great, but must add, not compete. Because unless the basic framework is there, it’s just not gonna hold up. I’ve run into too many drummers who think the world is waiting for their next solo, but they are so into hearing themselves they make the band sound worse, not better.
We sometimes let visiting musicians sit in with us for a song or two at club gigs. Most of the time it’s great fun, but it’s always a risk. A while back a young drummer asked to play, and I asked him what kind of music he wanted to do. “I don’t know, man, I just play,” he said. I offered a few very well-known tunes to try to make it easy for him, but he hadn’t heard of any of them. That should have been a warning. So we just picked a fairly standard rock tune. We counted and started, and the drummer took off, thrashing and crashing, off in his own little world. I had to stop after about 12 bars. “Hey, you have to play with the band!” I told him. We started again, and it was a total train wreck. He had no idea what the band was doing and didn’t care. We ended up cutting a four minute song in half just to get him the hell off the stage. He thought he did just great, and his drinking buddy was grinning ear to ear. “He’s fast, ain’t he!” I pity his band mates, or anybody who actually pays to hear him play.
Next time you join us at a Caution! Blind Driver gig, watch Jeff for a while. I have played with hundreds of drummers, and I’m a drummer, and there’s nobody I would rather gig with than him. Not because he’s blind (some people claim blindness is an advantage – trust me, it’s not!) but because he is a rock solid little drumming machine who gets it right first time, every time. We count on him completely to get us going, hold it together, lead us through, add the spice, fill the holes, bring it home, song after song, night after night.
Jeff sometimes wears a t-shirt that says it all. “Drums are the bacon of music.” True, dat.
Tom