Ten From Then: Special Edition – Drumline!

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This Saturday morning the machine has been told to forget the calendar and follow the beat. Ten tracks, close to fifty years apart at the extremes, and every one of them hands the spotlight to the person usually stuck at the back of the stage behind everyone else. Jim Bricker has built it as one continuous run, tracks rolling straight into each other, so this is an hour to leave the volume alone. There’s plenty of home turf in it, too. When Genesis played Western Springs in November 1986 they brought two drummers with them, and how the second one got the job is hiding somewhere in this hour. And one of the bands in this set played the Powerstation in Auckland last year, on a tour celebrating the very album our closing track comes from.

The records are the reason to stay, as ever. There’s a British rock band left off the album credits, a three-minute drum solo slipped into the middle of an otherwise gentle jazz trio album, and a percussion break from a Hollywood club in 1973 that took four decades to come out. There’s a duet recorded at what turned out to be the last show a famous band ever played with its leader, and ten seconds of improvised drumming that barely troubled the charts and then turned up on more than a thousand other people’s records. There’s a supergroup that played exactly one concert and then watched the tape disappear for twenty-eight years, a famous solo that isn’t quite what it sounds like, three drummers lined up across the front of a stage, and a young drummer who learned most of an album on a plane on the way to recording it. And one drummer in this hour got his biggest job because another drummer in this hour heard him on a record, but that’s what the show is for. Ten tracks, no year, and a reminder that the best seat in the band is usually the one at the back.