Zombie Media: 2014

Tuesday, September 30, 2014

NAMM Oral History - Bob Henrit

If I can draw an analogy: the fat end of the trumpet was America, [and] the thin end of the trumpet was England, or let's say the U.K., and so we got to listen to stuff that Americans didn't get to listen to simply because if you're on the west coast, you didn't know what was going on on the east coast. Even if you're in, even, even if you were an A&R person, you didn't, you didn't go to the west coast. That wasn't what you did, and this was in 19-- in the sixties. You didn't do that. So we heard everything, and we didn't, we didn't know whether we were supposed to like it because obviously a lot of guys on the west coast had heard stuff they didn't like, and but we just would- we wanted music, and it didn't matter what it was, so I mean it wasn't until I went to America that, um, I learnt about, uh, about some of the songs that I thought were rock and roll and turned out to be country and western. Conway Twitty. Um, we all played "It's-" uh, "It's Only Make Believe" - all of us - but we never knew that he, he was a country singer. We thought he was a rock and roll singer. And, and so it didn't matter, and we didn't know, we didn't know anything- I'm not sure if I should say this, but I know it was called "race music" in its day. We didn't know about that. We just, we listened to Wilson Pickett and thought, "This is brilliant!" or we listened to Little Richard and thought, "This is fantastic; let's play that," and, and so that's what we did.

And I know technically about what we did. I mean, one of the, one of the stories is- we all recall "Peggy Sue," and I think "Peggy Sue" got me going and made me think, "I'd like to be able to play like that," and so I listened to the record, as did all my contemporaries, and we all- we weren't schooled musicians, so we all listened to it and played it in a way that Jerry Allison, who was the drummer in the Crickets, didn't. Now, I'll demonstrate. We played singles strokes [taps hands on knee out of frame].

OK, so, Jerry Allison came up with a rhythm that we all thought wa- went in single strokes, very untechnically [taps hands on knee and sings along]. "If you knew Peggy Sue..." Well, it wasn't until 1962 that we did some gigs with the Crickets, and I saw how Jerry Allison played it, and he played it in paradiddles. Now, when we began, we, we wouldn't have known what a paradiddle was. It, it just wasn't part of what we did, so and it goes [taps hands on knee], so it's got some lilt. It goes up and down. It's got upbeats and downbeats, and, and so it's altogether more musical, but we didn't realize, so we went ahead [taps hands on knees in single stroke, untechnical fashion], and, and it was rock and roll. It was, well, it was our rock and roll, and it wasn't till years after the event that I realized how, how you played it, and- so every now and again if somebody asks me to play it, I'll play it, and I always do my best. It's not easy to play it in paradiddles, by the way, and, uh, I'll play it in paradiddles and then, it- just to see how it works. So there's, there are a myriad of those things- can it be a myriad? That's not the right word, is it? But there are lots - lots, that's the word, a much better word - there are lots of those things that, uh, uh, that we, we were dealing with, and of course, once we got to America, we, we soaked it all up. You know, we would do stupid things [in the] late sixties like walking in areas because, uh, especially in New York, could, could be in Chicago, too, where we shouldn't simply because, "Well, yeah, but they'll know we're musicians. They're- we're gonna be OK." How crazy is that? So, uh, once we got to America, we could not, we could not stop sort of drinking it all in, and we went to see jazz. We, we went to see Os- Oscar Peterson. That's what we did, you know, and, uh, and it was great, great fun.