Blondie, "I'm on E"
Because let’s be clear: I’m a shitty drummer. And in fairness to me, it’s not a timing or a coordination problem. I’m a regular goddam Neil Peart-Keith Moon-Clem Burke banging out beats on my steering wheel on the ride in to work, or ripping off machine-gun fills with pointer fingers on the edge of my desk later in the day, as I read down through a draft of our umpteenth Memorandum in Support of Defendant’s Motion to Dismiss Plaintiffs’ Bullshit Legal Claims. Problem is all that skill and precision makes a mad dash for the hills the minute I actually pick up sticks. All the physical limitations of my age round into view, and I feel like I’m whipping my wrists and arms through an atmosphere of mayonnaise.
I got back into the habit of practicing during the COVID lockdown. My five-piece kit, dating from my fifteenth? sixteenth? birthday, had been down in the basement collecting dust. Looking for projects—rewarding ways to spend my time—I spent a few weeks renovating it. Shining it up, replacing the hardware and heads, the works. Once I had everything ship-shape or close enough, I sat down and starting playing. Like, a lot. And over time I did get something of a feel back, at least for everything but the bass drum.
My bass drum play was a mess. And for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why. I went online looking for answers. It could be the heads were too tight, which would explain why the mallet stuttered and fluttered on contact, instead of delivering a clean stroke. Or maybe the resting angle was too close to the head. Or was there too much tension in the pedal spring? Too little? Should I replace the pedal altogether? Go back to the old one? Every few weeks I would start futzing around with all these settings again, making adjustments minor and major, testing them sorta-scientifically, until I got myself to a place marginally different from where I was before with the bass drum, but that felt like an improvement. I would play with that status quo for a couple weeks, be again dissatisfied at my lack of progress, and down to the ground again I would go, to mess around some more with the pedal.
I wish I could say I’ve since broken out of this cycle—that I’ve finally pinned down the problem, borrowing that joke IT support professionals tell one another about an incompetent user, to a location between the drum stool and the kick pedal. But even now I’ll be playing, stumbling along, and I’ll start thinking there’s a tweak I haven’t tried that will magically make me a nineteen-year-old with a functioning right leg. Because that’s really the thing: my iliotibial band has been a shit show for five years now and counting, a result, I’m told, of all the running I do and the very little stretching I do afterward. Never more than 20 or 30 minutes into a practice session before the old IT1 band acts up, causing soreness in my hip and my knee to go wonky, so that I lose all precision and timing in my bass drum strokes.
For all that, I still think that I peaked during the COVID lockdown. By which I mean to say that despite the estranged relationship between my brain and my right leg, the best drummer I’ve ever been I was during the lockdown, when there was zero possibility I could play alongside any other musicians and start my late-career meteoric rise to rock stardom. Not that there was any hope of this. It’s always been just me on the drum stool, with headphones on, playing along to songs on cassette, then after a 15-year hiatus, on an iPod or iPhone. And that’s been good enough for me.
I was briefly in a band in law school, with my friends Bruce on guitar, Jun on bass, and David on vocals. We didn’t have a mic for David, so he just shouted over the rest of us. We were together for all of one rehearsal. I hauled my drums2 over to Bruce’s dormitory, where we set up. We had four songs we’d agreed to practice on our own before this first rehearsal: “One Chord Wonders” (Apple Music, Spotify) by the Adverts (ha ha), Blink 182’s “All the Small Things” (Apple Music, Spotify), “Nine Bullets” by Drive-By Truckers (Apple Music, Spotify), and the Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend” (Apple Music, Spotify). We started with the Ramones song because we figured Ramones songs are the easiest of all songs to play, and “Boyfriend” is their slowest of those easy songs. Five minutes in we had a knock on the door from Campus Security. One of Bruce’s neighbors had called in a noise complaint. They said they “couldn’t concentrate on studying.” This was at 1 PM on a Saturday, with the law library literally 50 yards away.
And that was the end of the band. I hope the stifling forever of our artistic ambitions was ultimately for the greater good, and the unnamed complainant grew up to be a brilliant and selfless criminal attorney rescuing innocent defendants from death row. But I highly doubt it.
There were stretches in 2020 and 2021 when I would play the drums every day, in the evening, for at least a half hour. Kate would adjourn to the top floor of the house to take her nightly call with her father in Utah, and I would go to the bottom floor and rock out. I started with R.E.M.: songs like “These Days” (Apple Music, Spotify) and “I Remember California” (Apple Music, Spotify), the drum tracks of which I knew by heart going back decades. From there I moved on to more challenging stuff like Jane’s Addiction and Black Sabbath. Sabbath and Jane’s are fun to play because there’s a bit of funk to them, and for the most part they’re mid-tempo and accordingly do not ask very much of my dysfunctional right leg.
Contrast the motorik beat that features broadly in Krautrock, and most prominently in Neu! tracks. Motorik is a 4/4 beat with snare strokes on the 2 and 4 and the bass drum playing all the 8th-notes in between. It’s super-simple and requires little coordination or study—I was playing motorik beats in 1988, a matter of days after I unlocked the basic rock beat with my drum teacher. The problem is that Krautrock motorik requires precision and endurance. Klaus Dinger sustains this beat for ten minutes on Neu!’s “Hallogallo” (Apple Music, Spotify) and for another eleven on “Für Immer” (Apple Music, Spotify). As part of a plan to build up stamina and strength in my leg, I decided I would play “Hallogallo” once per night, until I could get all the way through the ten minutes without coming apart.
I chased this dream for three weeks and never lasted longer than four minutes. My right leg just sucks, and it’s infuriating. In November 2022 I went to see Michael Rother play a show in London. As Neu!’s other principal, Rother scheduled several gigs to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the duo’s self-titled first record, of which “Hallogallo” is the opening track—Neu!’s mission statement. Dinger is sixteen years deceased and probably wouldn’t have played with Rother if he were alive. In his place at the kit in London sat veteran Krautrock drummer Hans Lampe, of among other acts A.R. & Machines and La Düsseldorf. 74 years old at the time, and he could play the motorik beat. He must do a hell of a lot of yoga.
When I was in high school, all the other drummers in marching band used to rave about Neil Peart from Rush. I understood why: in terms of talent and technical ability, he was the best there was at the time, and possibly ever. I just didn’t like Rush’s music. It seemed like a lot of wank and self-celebration. To this day, if they’re mentioned in my presence I have to swallow down the impulse to squawk out WHAT YOU SAY ABOUT SOCIETY in a full-volume Geddy Lee falsetto—and in fact I’m in the practice of spamming a good friend’s Facebook feed with this phrase in all-caps on a quarterly basis. I mean, get out of here with Rush already.
In those days I looked hard to find the kind of drummer I could admire and model myself after, when, for the most part, I was listening to synth pop. O.M.D.’s Roland CR78 drum machine wouldn’t fly. But maybe U2’s Larry Mullen was a candidate. I dug his beats, most especially the military marches in “Sunday Bloody Sunday” (Apple Music, Spotify) and “Seconds” (Apple Music, Spotify). And Bill Berry—there was a reason why I knew then and know now every drum stroke from every R.E.M. song. Mike Joyce, too: I could play the Smiths’ live album Rank all the way through, from start to finish. Thing was, if I could play along and reasonably keep up, then did these guys really have the chops? If I’d thrown their names into the mix at band practice, I wouldn’t have survived. One day at school I went out on a limb and proffered Stewart Copeland. No one plays a hi-hat like Stewart Copeland does, amirite? This elicited some nods, some shrugs, and no abuse. Okay, then. We’ll go with Stewart.
I discovered Blondie after college. Like, REAL, punk rock Blondie. In SPIN and Rolling Stone I kept reading descriptions of them as a first-gen punk rock band, central and seminal on the Downtown scene, but none of that made any real sense to me based on what I had heard growing up, which was the disco tracks: “Heart of Glass” (Apple Music, Spotify) and “The Tide Is High” (Apple Music, Spotify) playing over the car radio, or in my sister’s bedroom. Then I moved to Manhattan after graduation, and after some time passed and I had finally settled into a late ’70s New York state of mind—I’d found CBGB OMFUG down in the Bowery, and I’d even celeb-spotted Deborah Harry in a restaurant in Little Italy3 while on a date (both of us, it seemed)—I went ahead and bought the two-CD hits compilation, The Platinum Collection.
What jumped out at me on the first listen, in addition to the fact that so many of these songs were melodic, frenetic, and fun, were the drums. From the jump, on “X Offender” (Apple Music, Spotify), and notably, too, on “Kung Fu Girls” (Apple Music, Spotify) and “Dreaming” (Apple Music, Spotify)—but really, on every track—the drums were spectacular. Not featured, necessarily, but not suppressed, either, like on so many other records in the DIY post-punk tradition, carrying forward through the ’80s. It was as if the drummer, being self-evidently overqualified to play in this band, had been granted license to play whatever he liked, and if at any point he went over the top, the sound engineer’s sole recourse was to drop his levels just a smidge in the mix. Good God: I needed to figure out who this guy was.
Blondie’s drummer is a fellow named Clem Burke, and with all due respect to Klaus Dinger and Can’s Jaki Liebezeit (see “Spaced Cowboy”), I think it’s reasonable in this moment to declare him my all-time favorite Sovereign of the Skins. Watch him here, spiffy in his jacket and tie, standing and sitting, twirling his sticks as he hammers snare drum and floor tom, spraying red Christmas confetti into the air, a full decade before Blue Man Group did that same trick with paint. Note that the Top of the Pops crew uncharacteristically slotted the drummer at the front of the stage, to Deborah’s left. This is the second time I’ve posted this video here. Probably won’t be the last.
It’s not a coincidence that whenever I’m downstairs on the drums, whether I’m on a good run and feeling my oats or grimly pushing through and regretting the toll time has taken on my abilities, I almost always end the session with Blondie in my cans. I set aside all the funk cues with the dropped snare strokes, cue up The Platinum Collection, and I just go for it. I give up playing with precision, as much as I can ever get there anyway, in favor of playing with reckless abandon. Clem Burke somehow manages both at the same time, and for this reason I have no business trying to play along with him. Actually, strike that: I can hold my own on mid-tempo tracks like “Denis” (Apple Music, Spotify), “Picture This” (Apple Music, Spotify) “(I’m Always Touched by Your) Presence, Dear” (Apple Music, Spotify).
But when the hard and fast songs come on—“Kung Fu Girls,” “Contact in Red Square” (Apple Music, Spotify), “I’m on E” (Apple Music, Spotify)—that’s where it can get a bit ugly … and fun. Over the past four years I’ve been able to play faster and faster, bass drum aside, largely by playing (or trying to play) songs like these. “I’m on E” is usually the song where I finally crap out, chuck sticks into the air and limp up the steps, sweaty and exhausted with a cold can of La Croix in my hand, pulled from the basement fridge. It’s the climactic moment in the session, the last and fastest in a series of punchy numbers from Deborah, Chris Stein, Clem et al., at least in part because making a run at “Detroit 442” (Apple Music, Spotify) would be a hopeless exercise leading to significant soft-tissue damage and possibly the involvement of EMTs.
Drumming with Fast Blondie is a useful way to burn calories, expend nervous energy, and engage in cathartic behaviors like Dionysus in the woods. I needed all three of these benefits last Monday, when I was about fed up to the gills with work, still seven looooong days from finally taking a vacation, and feeling like I just wanted to beat the daylights out of something. And my drums were that something. Per usual, I saved my last reserves of energy for “I’m on E,” and although I don’t think I blacked out, I don’t perfectly remember how I went from downstairs battering the drums to punching the air and pogo-twirling in the kitchen with “I’m on E” set to repeat. All I can say is it felt really good.
For the longest time I thought “I’m on E” was about ecstasy—even if the timing was a bit off. The Shamen were chanting E’s are good! E’s are good! in 1992 (Apple Music, Spotify), a year or so after the Happy Mondays’s Shaun Ryder declared that God made it easy—God laid his E’s all on me (Apple Music, Spotify). But Ecstasy wasn’t a thing in the late 1970s, not even in Downtown Manhattan. Turns out Debbie’s “I’m on E” was a song about being stuck at home without a car, with nothing to do but watch television, and non-streaming broadcast TV at that. :28 and :58 I’m walking to the ’frigerator, and so on. Now I do have a car, but that fact notwithstanding, I was feeling very much on E last Monday night: running on empty, as another song goes. I was tapped out, fried, and generally done with a great many things and even some people, so that in addition to the usual burst of endorphins I’d harvested from a round of Blondie drumming, I’m on E was a sentiment that rang especially true for me in the moment.
Funny thing was, by the time I realized all this, Debby and Her Gang had already refilled my tank. This is probably something I should keep in mind for later, as the next six, twelve, eighteen, or fifty-six months are likely to be long and exhausting. Note to self: if you run out of gas, never mind AAA—dial up some Blondie.
Two different IT acronyms in the same paragraph—what were the odds?
I had brought them from Ohio to Boston earlier in the year. Kate and I had stopped at Niagara Falls along the way, and I had had to convince the Canadian immigration authorities that I was not crossing over the border to play gigs without appropriate work authorization.
And to think that I saw her on Mulberry Street!