The other week*, I was thinking about what happens to amputated limbs -- are they simply discarded with the rest of a hospital's bio-hazardous waste? If one already owns a burial plot, can the limb be pre-buried before to wait for the rest of the person's body? Can you have your limb stuffed or pickled in formaldehyde and put on display in your living room? That would give your goddamn kids something to look at that's not the goddamn television or their goddamn cell phones, wouldn't it?
Anyway, I started thinking about how there are no notable one-armed/legged guitarists -- several are missing chunks of fingers, like Django Reinhardt, Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead and Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath [technically Hound Dog Taylor lost a finger too, but he still had more than ten fingers even after he cut one off at a house party].
On the other .... hand .... there are two high-profile drummers missing limbs -- Def Leopard's Rick Allen lost his left arm in an accident and Sandy Nelson lost his right foot and part of the leg in a motorcycle crash.
I've occasionally wondered why Nelson [no relation to Ricky] hasn't been rediscovered and championed the way other surf-music godfathers like Dick Dale and the Ventures have -- while never the flashiest of show drummers, he's always had an unflaggingly appealing flow and groove with a subtly unorthodox style. Is it possible to make music so simple and yet be only appreciated as a musician's musician? Here's a playlist of his three Top 40 hits as a solo artist:
For my money, I think "Let There Be Drums" is better than "Teen Beat" or "Drums Are My Beat" but none of them are as groovacious as the "Casbah" single of a few years later:
As Daniel Trujillo's recent set of lessons/interviews indicate, Sandy Nelson is also an eccentrically compelling raconteur -- one who provides fascinating historical connective tissue between Jan & Dean, Phil Spector, Gene Vincent and the Beach Boys -- who undoubtedly has scores of amusing anecdotes from a session musician's POV about the Southern California music scene of the late '50s into the '70s. I could listen to this old coot drum and talk about music for hours:
* I'm still sidelined with hand damage from a sidewalk fall and numbness all over the upper-right side of my body from a pinched nerve. No applause, please.
0 What Say Youse?:
Post a Comment