Earl Palmer's Story: the Movie

Coming soon: a cinematic salute to one of the essential founders of rock and roll—who always considered himself a jazz musician first

Strike the publicity drumroll: a full-length documentary is underway, based on my first, and favorite, book: Backbeat: Earl Palmer’s Story. At this point, it’s a subdued drumroll: the film, produced by Grand Songbook Media, won’t be out for a few years. It is one in a trilogy about how mid-20th-century Black musicians, through talent, courage, and guile, overcame multiple obstacles to create lasting work. The trilogy’s first film, The Musicians’ Green Book: An Enduring Legacy, released in 2023 and streamable on Amazon Prime, is the real story, not Hollywood’s sentimentalized 2018 version, of the indispensable resource that helped black entertainers navigate Jim Crow America.

DO NOT MESS with this man. Or his fedora. Early-mid-1960s. “Earl and I produced our own drum parts,” said Earl’s fellow A-lister and good friend Hal Blaine (see my Substack of Sept. 11 on Blaine). “Producers and arrangers wanted to pick our brains.”

Backbeat was originally published in 1999 by Smithsonian Books. Da Capo Press brought out the paperback edition in 2000. Da Capo’s is the superior version—the company let me correct the many typos, and the shoddily assembled index, that were Smithsonian’s work. The Da Capo version’s cover, moreover, is the one I had vainly lobbied Smithsonian for. Their choice was a poor one, failing entirely to capture Earl’s charisma. On the Da Capo jacket, a supremely suave, coolly relaxed, mildly threatening-looking Palmer (the chief emotions that Earl induced in his younger contemporaries were fear and awe) is sitting at his drumkit, about to take a drag on his Sherman cigarette. A fedora sits on what looks to be a floor tom-tom case.¹ Two microphones have been placed directly over Earl’s kit. There would have been at least one other mic, on Earl’s bass drum, and probably more. Los Angeles of the early-to-mid-1960s, when this photograph would have been snapped, was a vastly different recording environment from that in which Earl, still a young man, had already played a major, if not the major, role in creating the rhythmic underpinnings of rock and roll, namely, New Orleans. The Crescent City had only one recording studio in the 1950s, J&M, on Rampart and Dumaine. It was the size of a large bedroom. If a singer/pianist, backed by a quintet or sextet, were being recorded, a mere three mics were used: one for the bass and piano, one for the vocalist, and one for the band. It’s a testament not merely to the musicians’ brilliance but to the resourcefulness, acute ear, and intimate knowledge of his room, of J&M’s owner/engineer, Cosimo Matassa (whose major source of income was his family’s grocery store) that the records that came out of J&M, by Fats Domino, Little Richard, Lloyd Price, James Booker, and others—sound as wonderful as they do.

RICHARD, EARL, AND THE PARADIGM SHIFT: “Slippin’ and Slidin’,” cut for Specialty Records at J&M Studios, New Orleans, February 7, 1956.

Here’s Earl on the historic session from which the classic rock & roll beat—the straight eight, or eight eighth-notes per measure—emerged: “Most everything I had done before Little Richard was a shuffle or slow triplets. Fats Domino’s early things were shuffles. Smiley Lewis’s things were shuffles. But Richard moved from a shuffle to that straight eighth-note feeling”—eight eighth-notes per measure, that is. “I don’t know who played that way first, Richard or Chuck Berry. Even if Chuck Berry played straight eights on guitar, his band still played a shuffle behind him. But with Richard pounding on the piano with all ten fingers, you couldn’t very well go against that.” On the version of Richard’s song “Slippin’ and Slidin’” that the J&M studio band cut on February 7th, 1956, Earl, for the first time, matches Little Richard’s straight eights note-for-note. This is the emergence, long smoldering and lacking only the right spark, of what became the classic rock & roll beat, the same as what you get on the Beach Boys’ “Surfin’ Safari,” the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night,” Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl,” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run.” Note how Earl hits his bass drum more forcefully, upping the excitement level, as tenor saxophonist Lee Allen starts his solo at 0:50. Critics have long recognized Earl’s signal contribution. “If any single musician can be credited with defining rock & roll as a rhythmic idiom distinct from the jump, R&B, and all else that followed it, that musician is surely Earl Palmer,” wrote Robert Palmer (no relation), The New York Times’s first full-time rock writer, in 1990.

But New Orleans of the 1950s, for all of its musical richness, was a backwater town. The Crescent City had one recording studio, Los Angeles dozens, equipped with state-of-the-art gear and staffed by the industry’s best, and best-paid, engineers, producers, and session players. By the mid-1960s, Earl was making great money: easily low six-figures, not the pittance he’d earned back home. But it was hard to leave the Big Easy. Life in New Orleans flowed smoothly and easily (if you kept to your part of town). After his departure, Earl was universally admired by the many top-notch New Orleans players—Earl’s best musician friend, the saxophonist Red Tyler, for instance, or the brilliant pianist Ellis Marsalis—who could not find it in themselves to forsake New Orleans’s leisurely, soulful stride for the dog-eat-dog competitiveness of the L.A. studio world. “If there was a way to sell and bottle ignorance, you could get rich here,” Ellis Marsalis told me in 1997. “There really are no swift thinkers, no fast lanes, and people who have some get-up-and-go about them, they get up and leave. Earl did.”

As Earl found when he reached L.A., there was plenty of work, and not merely session gigs, for a musician of surpassing skill. When he made his recording debut as a leader, Capitol Records’ in-house newsletter paid Earl noisy, hype-strewn tribute.

“Nation’s No. 1 Rock and Roll Drummer Bows on Capitol,” ran the headline in The Capitol Record of March 3, 1958. “New Orleans’s contribution to the world of rock and roll is the fabulous drummer, Earl Palmer, who has made his home in Hollywood the past year, with his family. Capitol introduces Palmer, who has recorded hits with Fats Domino, Little Richard, and Ricky Nelson, on “Drum Village, Parts I and II.” Both sides are instrumental and feature the fabulous percussionist for the first time as a bandleader…. When Palmer isn’t busy recording, he likes to collaborate on creating tunes and raising Pomeranians with his New York-born missus.”

The New York-born missus was just one of the reasons why Earl left New Orleans. His primary motivation was to make that big L.A. money playing with those big-name L.A. artists and producers: Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, The Righteous Brothers, The Beach Boys, Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass, Phil Spector, and Quincy Jones.

But in 1954, Earl fell in love with Susan Weidenpesch, a New Yorker who’d come to New Orleans to study art at Newcomb College. Interracial romance wasn’t merely frowned on in 1950s New Orleans. A 1950 law explicitly outlawed “marriage or habitual cohabitation” between “a person of the Caucasian or white race and a person of the colored or Negro race.” Earl and Susan carried on a relationship that only their close friends knew about. “No one tried to talk me out of it,” Earl says. “All they ever said was, ‘Be careful.’ There were times I got scared, but I never considered breaking it off. I just thought, ‘We going to have to leave.’”

He had tried and failed for years, Earl insisted, to get his wife, Catherine, with whom he had four children, to move to Los Angeles. ”I’d wanted Catherine to go to California long before I knew of any Susan,” he says. “Susan was just one more reason to leave, and leaving New Orleans was the best thing I ever did.” 

Susan joined Earl in California shortly and found a job. In those early days, Los Angeles’s tougher whites gave the couple a hard time. “It dawned on me,” says Earl, “that Susan was going through an awful lot of abuse. Here she was, working and scuffling, and whatever we made I was sending to another woman’s children. If Susan had said, ‘I’m tired of this shit, I’m going back to New York,’ I can’t say I’d have had any right to say she shouldn’t. She dug in there and worked, man. Took a lot of insults. Heard a lot of things I didn’t. Knowing my temper, she kept a lot to herself, ‘n——--loving bitch’ and shit like that. Susan was very, very strong, had a sense of humor, and she was wild. Susan was feisty. She was cussable.”

Within a few years, Susan and Earl had two toddler daughters. Susan died of cancer, tragically early at 42. Earl eventually remarried and had one more daughter. In addition to the three who were born there, several of Earl’s children eventually joined him in Los Angeles. Earl tried, in his way, to be a good paterfamilias, but beyond his earning power, I would hardly characterize him as such. After putting in long hours in the studios, he was as liable to haunt L.A.’s after-hours joints as he was to go home. Home was in Baldwin Hills, a haven for affluent L.A. Blacks known as “the black Beverly Hills.”

“Earl took over,” says the Los Angeles session bassist Carol Kaye of Earl’s arrival in L.A. “I thought he was the greatest drummer I’d ever heard.” For Jim Keltner, a top drummer from the generation following Earl’s, “Earl’s playing had a mysterious sophistication that that was so different from the rock drumming I’d heard at the time.” One of the sources of Earl’s percussive magic was his childhood as a child tap-dancing star on the black vaudeville circuit, or T.O.B.A (the Theatre Owners’ Booking Association’s artists had a different name for it: “Tough on Black Asses.”) “Tap-dancing,” Earl was fond of saying, “is nothing but drumming with your feet.”

Another source of Palmer’s depth and sophistication was his early mastery of jazz drumming. When Earl came back from World War II—and it wasn’t until then, at age 21, that he began drumming—a small but vibrant bebop community was already blossoming in New Orleans, its members entirely en courant with the innovations of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. When internationally known beboppers such as alto saxophonist Sonny Stitt came to town, they made a point of sitting in with New Orleans players. As Earl recalls, “Charlie Parker’s manager, Teddy Reig, heard me one time and introduced me to Bird, who was staying at a little hotel down from the Dew Drop [the club where New Orleans beboppers gathered nightly]. I don’t remember if he was playing or passing through.”

“He said, ‘Sure would like to get high.’ Asked would I know where he could score.

“I don’t make it a habit,” Earl said, “but I’ll do it for you. People find out you ain’t from here they’ll give you anything.”

“Well, I appreciate it.”

“So I went and scored, wasn’t no big deal, and gave it to him. And that’s the last I saw of Bird. He never paid me back for the dope. I’m sure he did a lot of that.”

To the end of his life, Earl was proud to regard himself as above all a jazz (and big-band) player. “By ‘61,” he says, “I was getting calls for dates with no rock and roll in them at all. Neal Hefti hired me for Sinatra and Swingin’ Brass, which was strictly top-call players, and I come to understand that I was a finished musician. That’s when it don’t matter what they throw in front of you, you ain’t worried. People always ask, ‘How long did you rehearse that? You never saw it before!” I worked a job with [saxophonist and bandleader] Benny Carter where I couldn’t make rehearsals, so I sent a guy in my place. Just so they had a drummer. Then I came in and cut the part straight through, sight unseen. Benny said it was the most impressive exhibit of sight-reading he’d seen in his life.” “Earl,” says Paul Humphrey, a later studio drumming star, “was the first Black drummer to break into the higher-class work, the Sinatra dates and the films and TV. There were other guys out here, they did their R&B dates, but they weren’t able to excel to a level that Earl had achieved. Some guys are gifted but they don’t know how to take advantage of the gift they have. Earl was smarter.”

What constitutes a finished musician? In Earl Palmer’s words, “That’s when it don’t matter what they throw in front of you, you ain’t worried. ” A Neal Hefti arrangement of the Cole Porter classic: grist for Earl’s mill.

Rock was Earl’s highly profitable day gig. Beyond the pride he took in his role as an essential rock innovator, the music meant little to him. A running theme in Backbeat, which I sought to turn into a joke (and which, as far as I know, nobody has gotten) was Earl’s near-total recall of the jazz sessions he played on and near-zero recall of his sessions with some of rock’s greatest heroes. On October 17, 1968, he was paid $326.87 (he made a habit of carefully noting every gig’s important data: artist, producer, arranger, engineer, contractor, and moneys received) to play on two legendary songs, “The Old Laughing Lady” and “I’ve Loved Her So Long” on Neil Young’s eponymous first solo album. Of the session itself, he says, “I’m telling you, man, I don’t remember it.” He worked 12 sessions, from June through August 1973, at Lowell George’s house in the Malibu Hills. George, of course, was Little Feat’s exceptional guitarist/singer/songwriter, whom Bonnie Raitt hired, and fired, to produce Raitt’s third album, Takin’ My Time. Earl played on every track but one (which Jim Keltner handled). Earl had vivid memories of the circumstances but none of the session itself. “Lowell George,” he says, “was a fat short guy who had this big old rustic beautiful house above a nudist colony. Them broads didn’t hide or nothing. I guess they were used to being watched! Telling you, it’s a shame I don’t remember any of those sessions.”

If he recalled a rock date, his opinion of the principals was generally caustically expressed. On ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,” one of the superstar producer Phil Spector’s biggest successes and a #1 1965 song for The Righteous Brothers, “[Spector] took two days to get eight measures the way he wanted them. Right before the pause where Bill Medley comes in for the second verse [at 0:53], Phil wanted the tempo to stay constant but sound like it’s slowing down. Each beat had to be about a thirty-second note behind where it would normally land. He couldn’t explain it very well. He should have had somebody write it out. Put the first note right on the beat, the next note a thirty-second note behind the beat, and so on. But Spector wasn’t an arranger of notes; I don’t know if he could write no notes at all. He had his finger on what other producers would die for: he knew what the kids wanted to hear. But you ain’t getting me to accept him as no musician. Who are people going to listen to a hundred years from now? Phil Spector or Duke Ellington? Ellington is on a goddamn stamp, what’s Phil Spector on? The world knows Duke Ellington, the world don’t know Phil Spector. The rock world knows Phil Spector.”

“I enjoyed doing Sam Cooke,” Earl told me, “and tried to do it as well as I could.” He played on the great majority of Cooke’s biggest hits, from the first, “You Send Me,” to the last, “Shake” (one of the rare songs on which the drums—Earl’s pounding fills— are the lead instrument). “But I don’t put Sam Cooke on the same scale as Sarah Vaughan, nowhere near.” The Explosive Side of Sarah Vaughan, which Earl recorded in 1962, “might be my favorite of all the albums I’ve made. I’d have to call out fifteen singers—Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat Cole, Billy Eckstine—and then I’d get to Sam Cooke.”

“The call of the playback” is a phrase that Jim Keltner coined years later, but Keltner’s term, and this snapshot of Earl, perfectly illustrate how, after a take was cut, the players listened intently for missed notes or inspired licks, for the elements that make the difference between a keeper and just another outtake.

From the start (and, as it turned out, to the irritation of rock’s more myopic fans and chroniclers) I intended Backbeat to explore territory far beyond the recording studio. “Earl Palmer’s life is a many-chambered vessel,” I wrote in the introduction. “When Earl and I first spoke [in 1991], doors opened unexpectedly onto vital and underexamined corners of our nation’s recent past: New Orleans’s protean musical culture from the 1930s through the 1950s (after jazz’s first wave, that is), the daily lives of black New Orleanians during the same years, the world of Negro vaudeville in its twilight, the experiences of Black soldiers in World War II [America’s World War II Armed Forces were almost entirely segregated, with Blacks performing secondary, frequently menial jobs; when you learn the ugly stories, the term “the Greatest Generation” turns hollow, a TV anchor man’s bogus coinage], and the working and personal lives of the musicians who steered rock and roll from the margins to the mainstream.” As Gene Seymour wrote in Newsday, “In pushing the spotlight onto Palmer’s life and work, Scherman performs a valuable service to the cultural legacy of this nation,” adding that the book was “[an] account of what it was like for a resourceful black artist to come of age in the mid-20th century.” “There is such vibrancy, adventure, mystery, and lucidity in this book,” wrote Greil Marcus. “The country and its history will look different to anyone who reads it.”

Amazon book-buyers, who often offer their enlightened critiques of the books they’ve purchased, have provided many on the subject of Backbeat. “There’s nothing about drum technique,” complains one. “Could have been great except for too much detail on his life as a youngster in New Orleans,” writes another disappointed customer. And another: “Would have like[d] more about the music he played and the recording sessions….[C]ould have Ben a great read.” Finally, we get, “Start at chapter 5, first 4 chapters are terrible, very boring and the verbiage is terrible.” ² I’ll point out modestly that Chapters One through Four are hardly inconsequential. Chapter One, “The Tremé Jumped,” is the story of Earl’s eventful childhood in North America’s oldest African-American community. Chapter Two, “The Darktown Scandals: Across the USA” is about Earl’s years as the child tap-dancing star of the Darktown Scandals, the black vaudeville trip led by the great blues singer Ida Cox, a second mother to Earl. “No Kind of Hero,” Chapter Three, details Earl’s life as an ordnance sergeant during World War II. He saw no combat. “The only problem we had was with our own troops, your white Southern troops. Whenever race wasn’t on your mind over there, it got put on your mind. Get caught after dark, you were fair game for a Saturday night beating, whale away on your ass just for sport.” Chapter Four, “Runnin’ Wild in this Big Old Town,” focuses on Earl’s years with the best band in New Orleans, Dave Bartholomew’s R&B-cum-swing aggregate, and on the world-changing recording sessions at J&M. I spent years on those first four wretchedly inconsequential chapters. Oh, well. As Ricky Nelson (whom Earl backed on more than one occasion) put it, “You can’t please everybody/So you’ve got to please yourself.”

I’m going to leave you with Earl’s accounts of two very different gigs, which, taken together, indicate the breadth of the territory he covered, the depth of his musical gift, and his deep, ironic sense of humor:

“August 1970 (Six dates)—Zachariah, MGM. That’s the hardest session I ever did. They made a movie called Zachariah, a real hokey satire on cowboy days. Elvin Jones [one of jazz’s greatest-ever drummers] played a gunslinger. In his big scene, instead of saying ‘Draw,’ he says, ‘Gimme them drumsticks,’ and plays a big solo.

“Jimmy Haskell was the composer. Jimmy’s a guy that did a little bit garbage of anything. ‘Oh yeah, we can do that.’ Probably at a lesser price, too. That kind of guy works the shit out of you, because he’s aiming to please. He’ll go past breaks, rush you, come in with the score half-written and write the rest right there. One of the last times I worked for him, Jimmy was sitting there eating peanuts out of his pocket writing the score.

“Anyway, somehow or other the sound got messed up. The drum solo had to be played all over again. Jimmy told the producers, ‘Oh yeah, we can do that.’

“I said, ‘Wait a minute. I’m not going to do this. I’m not going to fucking do this, man.’

“Haskell said, ‘Why?’

“Do you know who this is? I can’t match Elvin, nobody can. The man is a genius.’ Finally I said, ‘All right. Give me two hours.’ I took my lunch and a Movieola machine and some music paper, went across the alley into a little room, and transcribed Elvin’s solo. Took me two-and-a-half-hours to write out a five-minute solo. Then I played it. I not only got paid overtime, I got a bonus when they realized how hard that was and how near it came to being perfect.” So if you’ve seen Zachariah, and there can’t be many of you who have, when you watch Elvin Jones play his duel-winning drum solo, you’re actually listening to Earl Palmer.

“January 18, 1973—Inauguration, $1,500. [Producer/arranger/jack-of-all-trades] Don Costa, Sinatra’s man, was music director of the thing. Sinatra was emcee. Now, Don wanted one drummer, me, to be available to all the acts. As it turned out, everybody brought their own band, so I wound up only playing with Roger Miller. All I had to do was walk around tasting hors d’oeuvres. Since I was with Sinatra’s man, they gave me a Secret Service button that let me go in any room I wanted. All the guests are wondering, Who is he? They didn’t have many black Republicans, so they all figure this is someone they should know and don’t. It dawns on me: they’re worried. They don’t know who this n——— Republican is that’s big enough to be in this particular room. Who is this n——? That’s exactly what they thinking: Who is this n——-? For him to be in here, must be someone we supposed to know! I’m reading their minds. Must be an important nigger Republican AND WE DON’T KNOW HIM! Jesus, let’s don’t fuck up. Somebody find out who he is!

“Nobody knew, except Mrs. Pat Boone. She saw me and came running over.

“‘Earl, what are you doing here?’

“‘Well hi, Shirley. How’s Pat?’

“‘Wait, I’ll get him!’ And she went and gets Pat and we’re shaking hands and hugging because I did a lot of work with him at Dot Records, and little Debbie’s hugging me and Shirley’s hugging me and Shirley goes and gets her daddy, the old country singer Red Foley. And the guests must have all breathed a great sigh of relief. Now we can find out who this n——- is. Everybody came swarming around Pat, who gave them the story.

Oh! He’s an entertainment n——-! One of those kind, by God!

“So now they all come up to me. ‘Oh, Mr. Palmer, are you having a nice time?’ Mrs. Nixon, for one, a very nice lady.

“‘Yes, Mrs. President, I am, thank you very much.’ I was feeling pretty good—I’d just smoked some weed with Pete Fountain’s band and Al Hirt.

“I met them all, I’m telling you, everybody but Nixon. John Dean was the only one who asked me anything about what I did.

“‘Who are you going to be playing with?’

“‘Well, I don’t know yet. That’s why Mr. Costa had me come along.’

“‘You mean you’d be able to play with any of them?’

“Sure, that’s what we do, play with anybody we have to.’

“‘Must be quite an experience.’ His wife walked up and he introduced us. Agnew was very busy; I must say the man was busy, the president not being there. Must have been writing his speech.

“Like them or not, look at who these people were! I’m not a celebrity-conscious motherfucker but you don’t have to be told when you in the presence of power. I got introduced to Agnew by Erlichman or Haldeman, whichever. The bald, stern-faced one. Erlichman. Mean-looking. Little jowls beginning.

“I told Agnew, ‘Congratulations!’ and said, ‘You remind me of someone I’ve had occasion to have a couple of drinks with.’ He almost guessed who it was: Ed McMahon.

“I was shocked when Sinatra exploded. They got their signals crossed and he introduced somebody, I can’t remember who, but Joey Heatherton came on. Wrong act. Sinatra hit the roof. I was in his dressing room with Costa and he storms in. ‘These cocksuckers don’t know what the fuck they’re doing!’ I hadn’t realized until then what a rough guy this was. ‘Wait til my man gets in there, he’ll straighten this shit out.’ I’m wondering, ‘What does he mean, his man? Nixon’s in.’ You know who he was talking about? Agnew. He didn’t like Nixon worth a shit. That was his man, old Spiro.

“Isn’t it funny how nobody ever came up and asked me who I was? They all figured they supposed to know. The only other musicians who had this button were Costa and his brother Leo, who Costa brought along as contractor so Leo could make all that money contracting all them bands in one night. Contracting, man—that’s a good- paying gig.”

1. One of Earl’s chief complaints about the rise of the late-’60s counterculture (apart from the increasing lack of work for session players now that bands were playing their own instruments) was that he had a closetful of beautiful, now-unwearable hats. “I didn’t react much to hippies. I’d been getting high long before these kids were born. But Afros! I was pissed with that, and you know why? All of a sudden I had fifteen, sixteen beautiful hats in my closet I couldn’t wear. The hat made a ring around your head; the top of your hair stood straight up, the sides stuck out. Take off your hat and your hair’s a fright! I was pissed! I didn’t wear an Afro but so long, but by that time hats were out. Afros killed them.”

2. “The verbiage”—Earl’s, that is, of which the book largely consists—is what I called, in the introduction, Earl’s “pure vernacular poetry. It isn’t an exaggeration to speak of Earl’s verbal artistry, the unstoppable creativity with which he spins phrases (and the pleasure he derives from his knack). Wayne Newton was a ‘long-legged short-torso kid,’ Strom Thurmond ‘that old live-too-long motherfucker’….. An arsonist ‘soused the place with gasoline,’ which evokes the action a lot better than the proper word. “If you can use rationale with somebody, fine,” he told me. ‘But sometimes you turn the other cheek, he’ll break that one too.’ And in a bleak mood Earl allowed that “the American and the African got together and made a new race: the nigger.” As vital or intriguing as I hoped its subject matter was, I wrote, “this book stands or falls on whether I have caught the cadences of Earl’s speech. Listen to a nice audio chunk of Earl, circa 1995, or when he was in his early 60s, telling me how he and other youthful, bebop-loving members of the Dave Bartholomew Orchestra, essentially an R&B band with a touch of big-band swing, used to sneak bebop phrases, chord progressions, or, as Earl puts it, “spasmodic syncopations” (recall what I’ve written about Earl’s knack for creative phrasemaking) into a staid Bartholomew arrangement—and draw the boss’s ire.

NOTE: In the late 1990s, a growing number of music fans, music writers, and musicians complained that there was no category in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for the music’s great session musicians and side(persons)—Carol Kaye, for instance, mentioned above. In 2000, the Hall’s board voted to create just such a category and label it “Sideman.” Earl Palmer was among the first inductees.