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 documentary film is just underway, based on my first book, Backbeat: Earl Palmer’s Story. 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.

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. Among other good moves, they chose the cover, above, that I’d always wanted: a supremely suave, coolly relaxed Palmer at his kit in a Los Angeles recording studio, about to take a drag on his Sherman cigarette. A fedora sits on what looks to be a floor tom-tom case. The message the photo conveys: “Do not mess with this man.” ¹

I met Earl Palmer in 1991, on assignment to profile him for Musician magazine. After five minutes of listening to him talk, I told myself, “I've got to do a book with this guy." Backbeat, for which I interviewed Earl from 1991 to 1998, mostly at his Los Angeles home, celebrates one man’s challenges, triumphs and failures, in the words of the subject himself: the greatest raconteur I have ever known. As I wrote in Backbeat’s introduction, “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.²

When Earl migrated to L.A. in 1957 from his native New Orleans, he was 33 years old. He had already played a major, if not the major, role in creating the rhythmic underpinnings of rock and roll, an accomplishment which Earl and I discovered while we were working on Backbeat! I’ll go into the details of Earl’s innovation in a later post. For now I’ll merely note that 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 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.”

That generous L.A. session pay was only one of the reasons Earl headed for the coast. In 1954, he 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.”

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 for nightly jam sessions]. 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 career, Earl was proud of his mastery of multiple genres. “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 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.”

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.”

Earl worked 12 sessions, from June through August 1973, at Lowell George’s house in the Malibu Hills. He had vivid memories of the circumstances, but none of the session itself. George, of course, was the band Little Feat’s gifted guitarist/singer/songwriter, whom Bonnie Raitt hired to produce her third album, Takin’ My Time. Raitt eventually fired George, or, as she preferred to put it in an interview with me, “We came to a parting of the ways.” Earl played on every track but one. “Lowell George,” he recalled, “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.”

From the start (and, as I’ve mentioned, to the irritation of rock’s more myopic fans and celebrity hounds) 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 are given space to offer their enlightened critiques of the books they’ve purchased, have offered many on the subject of Backbeat. “There’s nothing about drum technique,” complains one. “Could have been great,” writes another, “except for too much detail on his life as a youngster in New Orleans.” And another: “Would have like[d] more about the music he played and the recording sessions….[C]ould have Ben a great read.” 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. Chapter Five, “The Power and the Groove,” is about Earl’s big-money days in Los Angeles. I spent years on those first four wretchedly boring chapters, which rock fans advised their fellow music lovers, as did one I haven’t yet quoted, to “Start at chapter 5, first 4 chapters are terrible, very boring and the verbiage is terrible.”

I’m going to leave you with Earl’s accounts of two very different gigs, which, taken together, indicate the depth of his musical gift, and his deep, ironic sense of humor. Not much got past Earl.

“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 n—— 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. Re that fedora: 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. To give you a sense of Earl’s creative phrasemaking, here’s a nice audio chunk of the man recalling how he and other youthful, bebop-loving members of the Dave Bartholomew Orchestra, essentially an R&B band, used to sneak bebop phrases, chord progressions, and, as Earl puts it, “spasmodic syncopations” into a staid Bartholomew arrangement, drawing the boss’s ire.