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THE JOURNEY ZONE
http://www.journey-zone.com
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THE INTERVIEWS
March, 2003 |
"Steve Smith: Confessions of an Ethnic Drummer"
Excerpts from the article by Modern Drummer Magazine
by Bill Milkowski, May 2003 issue
In Part 1 of his interview with Bill Milkowski, which appeared in the May issue of Modern Drummer, drummer and scholar Steve Smith addressed the idea of being what he calls a “US ethnic drummer.” This second installment, which details more of Smith’s playing experiences past and present, picks up where he left off, bemoaning the loss of creativity and individual personality in modern day drumming as the pop world turns with increasing frequency toward having drummers emulate the “perfect” beat of drum machines.
MD: There was a moment in time, and you have to go back to the ’50s, where pop music had all this very expressive drumming happening on records. Think of Earl Palmer’s bass drum intro on Fats Domino’s hit “I’m Walkin’.” The hook of that tune came from the bass drum, which kicked off the track. Drummers could make creative choices like that on those sessions, which revealed their unique personalities. Nowadays, as you say, drummers have been relegated to simply emulating drum machines and so their playing is devoid of any personality.
Steve: True. One of the measures of a good drummer today is that all your hits sound exactly the same and that you’re consistent and perfectly in time. I don’t see that so much as progress, really. I see it as a skill. It’s a necessary skill for today’s music business and I can do it. I play on pop records so I can draw on that skill, but it’s not a natural or fun way for me to play music. I do it as if I’m a house painter and somebody tells me, “Paint my kitchen red.” I’ll go in and apply a coat of red paint to the walls. I don’t feel like an artist at that point, I’m just following orders. And if somebody wants me to play a track on their record I’ll go in and do it, making sure that all the snare hits are the same and the time is real even. It’s a skill, but it doesn’t feel like what I aspire to do as an artist.
MD: So this is the prevailing aesthetic in the pop music of today. But what about when you were playing with Journey? Was there more room for expressiveness from the drum chair in that band?
Steve: For me, that was a time when I was investigating and exploring and partaking in that whole rock experience, and at the time I felt a combination of restriction but with some creative license. I had come from playing with Jean-Luc Ponty and big band jazz and people like that so it was a big shift for me to play one beat for the chorus and another beat for the verse and have to stick to those rather than playing a time feel that was constantly varying. That was definitely a new concept for me, but I tried to be as creative as I could within those parameters.
So I really started to get into that idea of developing that skill, yet it was before the time of click tracks and drum machines so there was still the concept of the band developing a pulse together with time being relative. It wasn’t absolute as it is now with click tracks. You developed a pulse so the band could play together with a nice feel. And when we made records we tried our best to play with real good steady time and feel, and the records hold up today and still sound good. But if you analyze them against the perfection of today’s standards you’ll hear a chorus will speed up a little and a verse may slow down a little. The music breathes, it flows. All pop music up until sometime in the mid-’80s or the early ’90s had that flow. Since then, virtually everything is done with a click. But with a group like Journey I had some freedom and also restrictions. So it was a bit of a balance. But still, it was never my everything. I didn’t feel like it expressed all of who I was or am as a musician.
MD: How would you look back at yourself as a drummer when you just got the gig with Jean-Luc Ponty and were getting your career started? What was your vocabulary like at the time and how have you grown since then?
Steve: When I auditioned for Jean-Luc Ponty I was a seventh semester student at Berklee. I was twenty-two-years old and my focus was big band jazz. I toured for a couple of summers with a trumpet player named Lin Biviano, who was a lead trumpet player for Buddy Rich and Maynard Ferguson and had his own band in the style of the Maynard Ferguson big band—the small big band he had at the time with two bones, four trumpets, three saxes, and a rhythm section. We toured the East Coast and the Midwest with that group. I played a lot of big band and I also played a lot of free jazz at the time in a Boston group called The Fringe. I had played a little bit of bebop with (clarinetist) Buddy DeFranco and also played locally in Boston in a pop-funk band with bassist Neil Stubenhaus that played at the Ramada Inn six nights a week. But at the time I met Ponty, I didn’t really play much fusion.
I had played a little bit of fusion with (guitarist) Jamie Glaser and (bassist) Jeff Berlin. And then there was a band I played with called Baird Hersey & The Year Of The Ear, which was kind of fusion. So I didn’t have much experience playing fusion but I had heard it and seen enough of it to get a handle on it. And I was able to get the gig with Ponty because I read well. He put a lot of charts in front of me, I mean, odd times and some very difficult music, and I could read everything. I think he saw that I had the potential to do well but it took me a long time to really do that well with the band.
MD: It seems like it must’ve been a very disciplined gig.
Steve: Yeah, I was more of a jazz drummer than a fusion drummer at that point, so things were sort of…a little more separated. I was a good straight-ahead jazz drummer and I could also play sort of pop-funk drums, but I didn’t do much of both together. So that Ponty gig put them both together for me. That gig was literally fusing those two styles so I very naturally developed the ability to play fusion. I have a video of me playing with Ponty from the first couple of months. I used a little Gretsch drumset. I didn’t have a double bass kit back then. He asked me to get a big double bass kit “like Billy Cobham’s” so that’s when I got my first Sonor drumset with two 24" bass drums and three rack toms and two floor toms. Then I worked on that style, consciously emulating Billy Cobham and Narada Michael Walden, who were my favorite drummers at that time. I especially loved the way that Narada Michael Walden played with Mahavishnu, especially on Visions Of The Emerald Beyond.
That Ponty gig was a big transition for me and that was the doorway into being a rock drummer, because once I got the double bass drumset I really started operating at a different dynamic—playing loud, playing hard, which then led me to eventually playing with (guitarist) Ronnie Montrose. I left Ponty at the end of ’77, and by early ’78 I moved to LA and auditioned for Ronnie Montrose and Freddie Hubbard in the same week and got both gigs, so that was a real turning point in my career. It was like, “Okay, I can play with Freddie and do the straight ahead thing or play with Ronnie Montrose doing something like a Jeff Beck kind of thing.”
MD: This was just after Blow By Blow?
Steve: Exactly. Ronnie had just put out an instrumental record called Open Fire, which was in that vein, and for the tour he wanted a fusion drummer. So that made sense for me to play with him because I wanted to play a little bit more of the rock thing. It just seemed interesting to me at the time. But geez, I would’ve loved to have played with Freddie Hubbard, but I had to make a choice and I just somehow had the feeling that I could always do that or something like that. So for me, playing with Ronnie Montrose was a more unique opportunity.
So I took that gig and that ultimately ended up leading to Journey because we were the opening act for Journey. And then I wanted to see what that was like…playing with singers. So there I was playing with singers and songwriters and rock players, but to me they seemed very good at what they did so it didn’t seem like that much of a stretch. Neal Schon played great guitar and Gregg Rolie was a great B-3 player and singer and Steve Perry was a great singer and I liked Ross Valory’s bass playing. It just all made sense to me. And my chops were slowly developing and adapting to each situation.
I’d have to say that I had the potential to do well in each situation but I needed to develop into the gigs. But it’s not like I feel today. As you say, I can go into something and have a large vocabulary to draw upon. I didn’t in those days. I was just building it. I’d get my foot in the door because I had enough musicianship to do that, but then I would exploit the situation and learn as much as I could from it. I was learning about rock drumming from hanging out with rock musicians and playing with rock musicians. I was learning about fusion drumming from hanging out and playing with Jean-Luc Ponty, (bassist) Ralphe Armstrong. Allan Holdsworth played with that band for a minute and appeared on the record Enigmatic Ocean. I was thrown into situations and I was learning by doing and developing a vocabulary, researching the drummers that did it in each setting.
When I was with Journey I was listening to everyone from Charlie Watts to investigating how Nigel Olsen played ballads with Elton John. In some ways, Nigel was an inspiration for my playing on some of those Journey ballads. He doesn’t get a lot of credit, but you know, he was somebody that I checked out and really liked how he approached the music.
MD: So you’ve always had an analytical ear?
Steve: I guess so. And I would do a certain amount intuitively, just as a response. But then there was the studied thing too that I would get into, seeing how other guys did it and then adding their ideas and licks to my thing. And then the next really big thing that happened for me was leaving Journey and playing for Steps Ahead. That was really jumping in with both feet playing with great musicians like Michael Brecker, Mike Stern, Darryl Jones, Victor Bailey, and Mike Mainieri. But again, I think I had the ability to get my foot in the door but I didn’t go in there and do this great job from the first minute. I really worked my way through it, worked my way up through practice, through listening to recordings, studying and hanging out with the players.
Last Updated 02 July, 2007 (DHG)
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