Back in the hazy days of, I think it was ’74, during a recording session – you know how it goes, an eager assistant engineer wanders out to set up the mics for the drums. Now, this was the 70s Classic Rock scene, and drum sounds were, let’s say, evolving. But this guy, before even hearing a single beat from my kit, announces he wants to dampen the toms. And get this – they hadn’t even brought up the drums on the console yet! Mind you, I was rocking black dot heads, bottom heads completely off – a pretty open sound already!
Look, in those days, being easy to work with often meant more gigs, so even though I was a bit taken aback, I just told him to go ahead and do his thing. I figured I’d step out, stash my gear, and quickly light up a joint – hey, it was the 70s after all.
I return to find this assistant had gone completely overboard. He’d smothered more than half of each drum head, snare included, with massive chunks of yellow foam, all held down with copious amounts of duct tape! Luckily, that little doobie helped me see the funny side. I stood there by my drums, waiting for the engineer to give me the nod to put on the headphones. When he signaled me to hit the kit, I leaned into the snare mic and deadpanned, “I can’t.” He asked, with a real attitude, “Why not?” And I replied, in my best 70s drawl, “Dude, I can’t find my drum heads, man. They’re, like, buried in yellow foam.”
The engineer himself strides out, clearly ready to lay down the law – you know, that engineer ego thing. He gets behind the drums, takes a good look at the yellow foam monstrosity, then looks at me… and we both just burst out laughing. He then informed the assistant, who, it turned out, was a guitar player (which suddenly made everything crystal clear!), that he’d seriously messed up. We grabbed a roll of toilet paper and some masking tape – thankfully, I always kept masking tape in my case – and I sorted out my own drums properly.
The next time I found myself recording at that studio a couple of months later, the overzealous assistant had, shall we say, transitioned to other career opportunities. It was just another day in the studio during the wild and wonderful era of 70s classic rock.
