The best drum sound Bruce Springsteen ever heard: “Hit me like a thunderbolt”
Any Bruce Springsteen is much more than the sum of its parts half the time.
Although many of his own solo records have been beautiful for what they were, there’s no chance that an album like Nebraska was going to have the same kind of musical punch that the E Street Band did whenever they tore through classics like ‘Born to Run’ or ‘Thunder Road’. It was about making the musical equivalent of a hurricane come out of every amplifier, and that always came from building the drums first.
After all, any great drummer should be the heartbeat of the band in many respects. If someone can’t keep the right tempo or is out of step with the rest of the group, everything was going to fall apart, but as long as Max Weinberg was behind the kit, there was never any need to worry about how the drums were going to fit. He had studied all the technicians before, but he was only one in a long line of drummers before ‘The Boss’ came along.
John Bonham and Keith Moon had already shown the world what could happen when a band had heavy hitters behind the kit, and even when listening to Ringo Starr, a lot of his best moments were examples of him playing exactly what was right for the song. Nothing got in the way of him understanding what his fellow Beatles wanted, but sometimes artists aren’t really looking for the tasteful drumming that fits perfectly in the background.
No, the best drummers are the ones who can hit people in the face from the moment they start, and Springsteen knew that better than anyone. Despite Bob Dylan being one of the greatest songwriters he had ever heard, the reason why ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ hit as hard as it did was because of that opening snare drum kicking down the door to your mind, but if Dylan did that with his words, Elvis Presley did it with pure swagger whenever he started working on his material.
Any other performer would have been intimidated when they saw Presley shaking his ass, but the real power behind him came from his backing band. Scotty Moore always knew the perfect guitar lick that could complement whatever he was singing, but when Springsteen heard ‘Hound Dog’, the drumming on the track stood out to him just as much as Presley’s voice when he sang Big Mama Thornton’s signature tune.
Presley had the voice for it, but the sound of the drums was what Springsteen was chasing ever since, saying, “I was then in pursuit of something, and there’d been a vision laid out before me. You were dealing with the pure thrust, the pure energy of the music itself. I was so very young, but it still hit me like a thunderbolt. It sounds great to this day. We still base our snare drum sound, one of the ultimate snare drum sounds, on ‘Hound Dog’.”
And when listening to ‘Born to Run’, it’s easy to see what he was going for. Springsteen was never going to match the moves that Presley had back in the day, but since the album was intended to be a love letter to every brand of rock and roll that he loved back in the day, the title track was like hearing Presley’s rhythm section with Roy Orbison’s dramatics and the massive wall of instruments that you would hear out of any Phil Spector production.
None of it was done by accident, but what Springsteen heard from Presley meant more than one snare drum. Yes, it may have only been a single snare hit that got him hooked, but when you look beyond the actual note, ‘Hound Dog’ was the sound of an entire generation going against the grain and paving out a new sound for themselves.
