There’s so much I could say about one of my favourite tracks off one of my favourite albums of all time (Laughing, from Murmur, R.E.M.’s 1983 debut record), but as with Roxy Music’s More Than This a few weeks back, I’m just going to talk about the drum track.
There’s a line that Peter Buck’s spun off in a few interviews down the years, when talking about the bad advice R.E.M.’s members were given by well-meaning but clueless folks who thought they were being helpful. According to Buck, they’d tell the band they should get some disco drums on their records (and girls in bikinis in their videos, and so on). To which Buck would add as commentary something like, ‘Disco drums? On Murmur? Really?’ (A variation on this now well-worn Buckian riff is at the end of this interview here: http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/rem-find-a-return-to-their-religion/story-e6freomx-1226015997695)
I always wonder what Bill Berry makes of this, if indeed he’s aware of it. For, like so many other drummers in the rock underground in the early 1980s, Berry spent half his time playing disco drums.
OK, for Buck’s benefit, and maybe some readers’, the standard rock drum part divides the bar into eight semi-quavers (8th notes), which are typically played on the hi-hats or ride cymbal. The bass drum is played on the one and the three (the on beats), the snare drum on the two and the four (the backbeats). Sometimes the bass drum is played on both one and one and a half, giving a distinctive ‘boom-boom tssch, boom-boom tssch result’ (which nowadays I can’t help but think of as the ‘Neil Young beat’).
If you switch to playing the kick on every crotchet, so you’re playing four bass drums to the bar (‘four to the floor’ as it’s often known), now you’re playing disco. You’re playing Billie Jean, Boogie Wonderland and Stayin’ Alive. That’s the rhythmic basis of all disco music. It might sound even more like disco if you play 16th notes on the hi-hats (alternating left and right hands) – now you’re playing Chic’s I Want Your Love and Odyssey’s Native New Yorker.
Bill Berry plays disco figures on three out of five of the songs on the Chronic Town EP (Wolves Lower, 1,000,000 and Stumble), on five of the songs on Murmur (Radio Free Europe, Laughing, Moral Kiosk, 9-9 and West of the Fields), on four of Reckoning‘s songs (Harborcoat, Pretty Persuasion (before the final verse), Letter Never Sent and Little America), and on two on Fables of the Reconstruction (Life and How to Live It and Can’t Get There From Here, although he gets surprisingly close, too, on on the ruminative, banjo-fied Wendell Gee). After 1985, disco figures almost entirely disappear from Berry’s drumming repertoire and R.E.M. became notably less light on their feet.
Berry used his disco licks cleverly. His favourite trick was to play disco during the verse and then get propulsively ‘rock’ for choruses. I don’t know whether he picked this up from bands like Wire and Gang of Four or whether it just came naturally to him, but it’s the defining rhythmic quirk of R.E.M.’s early work, much of which ranks as their best (my pick of the later records would be Automatic for the People and New Adventures in Hi-fi, but really my heart belongs to Murmur and Fables.
Laughing deploys all of these tricks. The intro figure vaguely recalls Stewart Copeland (as do some of the reggaeish fills at the start of each verse) before settling into classic disco, with cymbal hits along with the snare drum on the two, giving displaced emphasis to the chord changes. A notable feature is how much space the three players give each other. Mike Mills – often doubling his bass part on single-note piano – defines the song’s chord structure while Buck plays double tracked arpeggios and Mills sustains his root note. It’s all very spare. Buck only starts stumming once Berry switches to a straight rock feel in the pre-choruses. Mills stays relatively sparse (once again) for the first pre-chorus, but second time around brings in a great walking pattern, to lead into the ascending line of the choruses (which again is doubled on piano, a recurring trick on Murmur).
After the middle eight, there’s a half-chorus, where Berry plays his ace: he sticks with four-to-the-floor disco, giving the chorus a whole different kind of movement than it had before. But his final move – and it’s a triumphant one – is to switch to the ride cymbal (from the hats) for the last line of the final chorus, lifting the song to its peak. It’s a masterclass in how to arrange a drum part and shows how well considered the rhythm tracks were on early R.E.M. records, compensating for Buck’s – at this stage – slightly limited guitar work.
As Buck became a more resourceful and more accomplished player, the rhythm section had to work less hard and their standout moments became fewer and further in between, although I remain very fond of Berry’s muscular drumming on These Days and The One I Love, Mills’s bass playing on Losing My Religion, the rhythm-section arrangement on Drive and the all-time career highlight How the West Was Won and Where It Got Us, from New Adventures. If you’re only familiar with R.E.M.’s later records and have always focused mainly on the contributions of Michael Stipe’s vocals and Peter Buck’s guitar, give their early records a listen and join me in doffing your cap to R.E.M.’s covert Mr Disco, Bill Berry.
*I’m being somewhat glib. Peter Buck is, above everything else, a music fan. I’m sure he recognised a disco figure when he heard one. It’s just strange that, in the light of Berry’s heavy reliance on such techniques, Buck considered the suggestion that R.E.M. incorporate disco drums to be bad advice.
Can I trouble you to listen to my new EP, Last Swallow?
songs from so deep 
Well spotted. Spotting disco patterns in old R.E.M. songs would not have occurred to me – it’s always a delight to see how this kind of thing is often hiding in plain sight. another example being Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick in the Wall, Pt 2’. Once the disco pulse is pointed out to you, it’s as if it’s always been there: before that, it’s just not part of the picture.
I suspect that it’s easier to miss this kind of element in a song if it’s an older song which you’re looking back on from its future. This is ironic, considering how much more we’re versed in deconstruction and critical dissection these days. But perhaps it was easier to spot the change at the time, seeing the music evolve and take in elements of the culture which surrounded it… some of them unwelcome. For us, looking back, this shock was just a blip in the song’s continuum – and often, before we’d caught sight of it ourselves, the blip and the shock had leveled out and closed over as if it had never been.
Hey Dan. Thanks for stopping by and for your kind comment!
I think there’s something in what you say, for sure, but in this case the story’s very simple: it came from listening to Murmur on the train last week after two or three months where I’d listened to/played along with a lot of disco while practicing the drums, but just ‘classic’ disco, as it were, rather than any rock bands who appropriated disco rhythm.
Realising that the verse part of Radio Free Europe was a disco pattern, I went looking for them in other songs too. These are records I’ve known since the mid-nineties but I supposed that one of the best things about music is how when you learn about something, start hearing it in other things and then your appreciation of records you thought you knew well can get deeper.
Pingback: Underrated Drum Tracks I Have Loved | songs from so deep
Pingback: The Songs from So Deep pantheon | songs from so deep
GREAT piece! Couldn’t agree more about the surprising disco feel, as well as the oft-overlooked Stewart Copeland influence. (Although Bill got away from the Copeland feel on later albums, he did retain Copeland’s influence on the way he would play the bell of the ride in semi-randomized ways.)
Pingback: Classic Openers & Closers | songs from so deep