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Man
of 1,000 Faces
In just these past few months, Stanton Moore has: gigged and recorded with his main band, the masters of cosmic New Orleans funk, Galactic; laid down drum tracks for metal leviathans Corrosion Of Conformity on In The Arms Of God, their first album in four years, and joined them on the road with Motörhead; conspired with tenstring guitar wizard Charlie Hunter, percussionist Mike Dillon, and sax innovator Skerik to invent grooves never before played under the auspices of their avant/improv project Garage à Trois; buzz-rolled and parade-thumped through century-old traditional jazz classics with the Preservation Hall Band; whisked brushes across snare and cymbal for a whispery trio gig at a fancy restaurant; shared the secrets of the second-line groove on a pair of instructional videos; written a book; and even stayed still long enough to be interviewed by DRUM! What’s more impressive is that none of these personas is a disguise; each offers a glimpse of the real Stanton Moore from another angle. More than mastering the New Orleans clavé, or walking the line between straight and swung eighths, or blowing a fresh breeze through the cobwebs of metal drumming, in the end, the most important lesson exemplified by Stanton Moore is: you can play any music you love. Make no mistake, Stanton Moore loves metal. Sure, he’s become kind of a roving ambassador for the music of New Orleans, with its unique mixtures of Afro-Cuban, marching band, and other flavors. But he put in his share of time listening to bands with big drums and screeching guitars too – and like most drummers, he nurtured a serious jones in particular for John Bonham. “Actually,” he remembers, “before I was into New Orleans music at all I was stringing lights around the ceiling of my room, turning them on, and playing to all these Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Jimi Hendrix records. I still remember the first record I ever actually owned. I got it when I was nine or ten, something like that, from this family friend who also had the first drum set I ever saw in person. This dude had [Black Sabbath’s] Sabotage, which he gave to me. I went home, put it on the turntable, and I was like, ‘What the hell is this?’ It starts off heavy, and I’m like, ‘All right, yeah, this is cool.’ Then it just stops and goes into this triplet acoustic thing, and I’m like, ‘Is the record broken? Is that why he gave it to me?’” In discovering British proto-metal before getting hip to the music being played a few miles away along Bourbon Street, Moore was not that different from a lot of kids coming up in the city today. “There’s still not that much awareness of the culture that surrounds New Orleans,” he says. “Knowing that, I went back to my high school a while ago and did a clinic with Galactic. We started off by playing a bit of our stuff. Then we said, ‘Okay, we’re going to play a tune like the Dirty Dozen Brass Band. How many of you guys know about them?’ Out of 80 or 100 kids, maybe ten or 15 raised their hands. And when we played a Meters tune after that, the same ten or 15 kids said they know who the Meters are. These kids were born and raised in New Orleans! But I didn’t know who they were either when I was their age.”
Instead, as he started playing in bands, Moore gravitated toward punk rock. Whenever Black Flag or The Circle Jerks came to town, he’d be in line to catch them at the VFW Hall, Jed’s, or Jimmy’s. He played some of his first gigs in punk bands, including one that called itself Oxen Thrust; they’d often cross paths with similar groups, such as Graveyard Rodeo, whose guitar player, future Corrosion Of Conformity member Pepper Keenan, became a friend of Moore’s. A lot of what he picked up from that scene – the rhythmic and emotional intensity – left an imprint that lingers in Moore’s sound today. But inevitably that wasn’t enough to keep the young drummer interested. “Playing in punk bands was totally fun, and playing the songs verbatim was cool,” he remembers. “But I also dug being able to improvise, so when guys started turning me onto The Meters and James Brown, I started digging it because of the grooves, but also because of the improvising. I was checking out jazz because I thought it would make me a better drummer all-around, which of course it has. But with funk you can play grooves and improvise, so I dove into that whole-heartedly.” The leap from funk, with its backbeat focus, into heavy rock wasn’t that great. More surprising, though, was the realization that Moore’s early metal heroes – Bonham, Mitch Mitchell, and to a lesser extent Ian Paice of Deep Purple – had a lot in common with the New Orleans feel for R&B. “Those guys grew up on Earl Palmer, man. They grew up on Fats Domino and Little Richard records. There was no such thing in those days as rock drumming, so they were coming from swing and jump blues. They were playing shuffles and swinging eighthnotes. See, Earl Palmer started out doubling his ride cymbal pattern on the snare, which took the drummer to a place that’s totally between straight and swung.” As
Moore dug into the music of his hometown, he discovered unexpected
synchronicities with what he’d been hearing from British drummers,
particularly Bonham. “I realized, like, his snare drum fill
at the beginning of ‘Whole Lotta Love’ is not straight
sixteenth-notes. He’s swinging them – not all the way,
but in between, like Earl Palmer. And he copped his whole intro
to ‘Rock And Roll’ [from Led Zeppelin IV] from Little
Richard’s ‘Keep AKnockin’,” which I’m
pretty sure he thought was Earl Palmer but it was actually Richard’s
touring drummer Charles Connor. Growing up in the ’80s, I’d
been listening mainly to guys trying to play everything precisely,
with perfect time to a click track, and I just wasn’t digging
Around age 16 Moore began buying records by Professor Longhair and other Mardi Gras legends. He also found a teacher, Johnny Vidacovich, who was able to help him blend elements of rock, funk, and other rhythms. Though his career eventually steered him away from metal, he didn’t hesitate when Pepper Keenan called to announce that Corrosion Of Conformity was looking for a drummer. With two weeks open on his calendar, he invited Keenan to come down to New Orleans and lay down a few tracks at Galactic Studio. First, though, Moore rushed down to Tower Records to pick up some study materials – all the Zeppelin albums, some Deep Purple, and everything Ozzy had tracked with Black Sabbath. When he wasn’t cruising around with Machine Head blasting out of his speakers, Moore was poring through the new Corrosion demos, transcribing and playing along. That way, when Keenan showed up, Moore had all the material in his head and his hands, so that the whole band was able to join them four days later and begin laying tracks. Just six days after that, the sessions were finished and the music was on its way to Raleigh, North Carolina, where producer John Custer whipped it into an extraordinary album – extraordinary in particular for the way it defies the conventions of modern metal drumming. “From our first day in the studio, Pep was like, ‘Man, I want the drums to thump and swing,’” Moore recalls. “‘I want it to be unorthodox, like a jazz drummer on steroids playing with a bunch of heavy metal dudes. I’m so sick of these safe records; I want this one to sound dangerous.’ I could totally relate to what he was talking about, because so much of what I’m hearing in metal now lacks that thick groove. There’s definitely a lot of talent there, with cats switching time signatures every three bars. That’s interesting, but 20 years from now is anybody going to be singing this song? Music still has to be about songs. It has to be about melody. It has to be about groove. That’s why The Beatles and Led Zeppelin are still around. That’s what people remember.” They remember, or at least register, drum sound too, as Keenan fully understood. “He was like, ‘I’m so sick of these metal records where the drums sound like mosquitoes. Screw that, dude. I want your drums to sound huge.’”
That was Moore’s cue to turn In The Arms Of God into a feast of booming, Bonham-flashback resonance. He began by deciding to record on his Gretsch round-badge kit, but after trying different ways of muffling the drums he realized that the thump that Keenan wanted wasn’t happening. Then he remembered the ’60s-vintage round-badge set that Travis McNabb of Better Than Ezra had once loaned him; it had sounded a little too big for Galactic, but for Corrosion they felt right. Moore stayed with his own 22" kick, though he had Frank D’Arcangelo from Ray Fransen’s Drum Center in Kenner, Louisiana, soup it up with a new combination of heads. In the end the kit consisted of Moore’s kick, McNabb’s 13", 16", and 18" toms, some Bosphorus cymbals that he had been using for jazz dates, and a second bass drum – a 26" marching model that Moore had noticed hanging on the wall one day at Benny’s, a blues club in New Orleans. “It was literally decoration,” he remembers. “I had just played Lundi Gras, the night before Mardi Gras, and I was supposed to show up for the parade the next morning with a bass drum. At the time I was playing a vintage Slingerland kit and I was a little apprehensive about bringing the bass drum because I didn’t want to get it all messed up. So Benny’s had this big old bass drum with calfskin heads on the wall. I was like, ‘Hey, man, can I borrow that?’ They said, ‘Yeah, sure.’ Then they shut down before I could give it back. The owner was a friend of mine, and he said, ‘Just keep it.’ So over the years I’ve incorporated it into my kit as a remote.” The
next step was to play … or, as Keenan insisted, swing. They
began with what would become the first cut, “Stone Breaker.”
Though Moore knew the tune from the demo, his approach was more
or less to wing it. Throughout this track the drums are jamming:
the feel fresh and spontaneous, the sound as massive as anything
Bonham ever laid down. The medium tempo allows plenty of room to Problems began when Keenan called and asked Moore to join the band as they shot their “Stone Breaker” video. His instructions were specific: The drum part, down to every improvised detail, had to be played back precisely. “Luckily he told me about it a month or so ahead of time, so I friggin’ transcribed myself,” Moore laughs. “I transcribed it in planes and airports all across America. It came down to five pages. Then I went to Kinko’s and blew it up 400 percent, so each page was about four feet wide. Then I’d just shed it until I relearned it all, so I could show up at the shoot knowing it.” The video was shot in one day, from 9:00 in the morning until 11:00 that night, in front of a blue screen in Metairie, Louisiana. (For this session Moore played a ’70s Gretsch kit in Bonham sizes – 13" or 14", 16", 18", and 22", plus a 26" remote kick that Gretsch made for the occasion with matching red glass glitter finish, plus his Bosphorus signature cymbals.) As the crew shot one section of the song at a time, Moore hung the corresponding music from a light stand off camera, just to make sure he nailed every detail. “It was pretty different,” he admits. “But I went to music school, so whenever I need to dip into that bag, it’s cool.” The Corrosion story leaps ahead one more time, to New York in March, where the band played its first opening slot with Motörhead. Jason Paterson, from Cry Of Love, was signed on to play most of the tour, but because there was a lot of press happening around the album release Keenan wanted Moore for the new songs on this particular gig. Luckily he didn’t have to replicate his recorded parts for this show; even so, this show had its own set of challenges. “I’d played a couple of metal and punk rock shows,” Moore says, “but never for a really large audience. And this was a sold-out house. So I get up on Jason’s drums in front of all these people. We’ve had no sound check. I’ve never played live with the Corrosion guys. And it’s a house person running the monitor. Luckily she did a great job – but talk about trial by fire …” The Corrosion story isn’t over yet; plans are being laid for Moore to tour with the band in Europe, Japan, Australia, and on their own headlining U.S. shows. But even when he was deep into In The Arms Of God he was juggling a number of other projects, any one of which would demand undivided attention from most drummers. That would be true especially for Outre Mer, the second Garage à Trois project, an even more ambitious effort than Mysteryfunk (1999) and Emphasizer (2003), the previous collaborations by Moore, Charlie Hunter, Skerik, and Mike Dillon. Their goal this time? Nothing more than the creation of a new sound, based on rhythms and modes that had never been heard before. “Charlie and I agreed that on the first record it was like, ‘Okay, this is a shuffle. This is a funk thing. This is an Afro-Cuban thing. This is something that’s been around for 100 years.’ Well, there are hundreds of guys who can do that a thousand times better than us, so we wanted to get away from that paradigm and invent some grooves that haven’t existed. For me, it was like, ‘Okay, how about I shake a tambourine in my right hand and then play a baion bass drum pattern, which is Afro-Cuban. And maybe I can put a Brazilian samba thing in my left hand. Then we’d pick these different modes – not just the blues scale – to write in, put that against the groove, and come up with something you can’t really put your finger on.” Even redefining metal drumming and giving birth to unprecedented types of music isn’t enough to keep Moore busy. We’ve already mentioned his DVDs, both titled Take It To The Street, one of them focusing on traditional New Orleans jazz and the second applying its lessons to more contemporary music. We also noted the recording he’s been doing with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, whose specialty is vintage jazz in the Louis Armstrong vein. And the trio work with pianist David Torkanowsky, on which Moore embraces the Paul Motian approach of building rhythm through feathery, free interactions with the other players rather than articulating a clear pulse. There’s all that … and the three-week Galactic trek … and the book, which will follow the DVDs … But
that’s enough to make the main point underlying all of this
activity. “I’ll play anything that people call me to
play,” Moore says. “I don’t think twice about
how anybody perceives it. If you love a certain type of music, don’t
be afraid to dive into it. And I love it all.” |
Ever
wish you were a master of disguise?
