Dec 162009
The challenge is self-explanatory. The only thing I ask is that you stay away from listing every odd percussion device that Harry Partch may have invented. Let’s keep this to rock ‘n roll and other forms of popular music.
I’ll start with Jon King’s use of the folding chair.
I think we might be last-man-standing-ed out. But I’ve got one: The first time I saw Aimee Mann live, Buddy Judge drummed on a plastic box when he wasn’t playing guitar.
Tom Waits – loop of a squeaky rocking chair in Murder in the Red Barn.
When I saw Demme’s Neil Young film, I noticed them mic’ing a sweeping broom during “Harvest Moon.”
TB
On the Beefheart song Buggy Boogie Woogie they use the broom percussion too, because “that Buggy Boogie Woogie sweeps me off my feet.”
The song Nothing But Time on Jackson Browne’s Running on Empty album was recorded on the tour bus, and drummer Russ Kunkel is listed as playing “snare, hi-hat, and cardboard box with foot pedal.”
If my admittedly poor memory serves me, then the story I heard at Sun Studios offers a good example. Johnny Cash stuck a dollar bill in his guitar and strummed it to simulate the snare drum sound. Reason being that the Grand Ole Opry didn’t allow drums on stage (or on it’s radio show, perhaps?) Cash falls into popular music, right?
Oh yeah. And the song was I Walk the Line. Johnny was towing the line while he was walking the line.
I was gonna say Ringo playing the “packing box” on Words Of Love, but that was also used on Holly’s Everyday, so it’s more of a creative homage.
How bout Keith Moon’s explosives at the end of My Generation on the Smothers Brothers show?
Brian Wilson’s Coke cans on the intro to “Caroline, No.”
TB
Splashing water in Roy Wood’s, “Wake Up.”
Actually on Buddy Holly’s Everyday Jerry Allison percussed by slapping his hands on his thighs.
Speaking of Brian Wilson, there’s also the chewing percussion on Vegetables.
Sly Dunbar clinking bottles together on Bob Marley’s “Jammin.”
When E. Pluribus Gergely and I played in a band together he constantly bemoaned the fact that all drummers didn’t play solely cardboard beer cases and oldtime suitcases. He couldn’t stand the fact that drums too often sounded like drums.
As for the competition, the typewriter percussion in Eno’s “China My China” is an all-time fave in this division.
Csh registers in Pink Floyd’s “Money.”
i have a tape recording where E. Pluribus Gergely forced the band’s drummer to play an empty beer bottle instead of a hi hat