How The Great Earl Palmer Drove Me Around the Bend
Surviving the greatest raconteur I've ever known, and the biggest pain in the ass
Revised from Chapter One, “Earl Palmer and the Heartbeat of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” The Rock History Reader 2nd edition, ed. Theo Cateforis (2013, Routledge)
Nation’s No 1 Rock and Roll Drummer Bows on Capitol—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, Roy Brown, Ernie Freeman and Ricky Nelson, on “Drum Village,” Parts I and II (#3899). Both sides are instrumental and feature the fabulous percussionist for the first time as a band leader. When Palmer isn’t recording, he likes to collaborate on creating tunes and raising Pomeranians with his New York-born missus. —The Capitol Record, March 3, 1958.
Here’s Earl Palmer, ca. 1961 in a Los Angeles studio, responding intently to “the call of the playback,” a term coined by drummer Jim Keltner to convey how session players inevitably gather to absorb the take they’ve just cut, listening for missed notes or inspired licks, for the elements that make the difference between a keeper and just another outtake.
The New Orleans-raised drummer Earl Palmer didn’t merely transform the rhythm and blues shuffle into the propulsive thrust of rock and roll; Earl made his great innovation while maintaining his own, immediately recognizable, sound: a steamroller with bounce, equal parts muscularity and finesse. Listen to the Righteous Brothers’ #1 1965 hit “You’ve Lost that Loving Feeling." Earl’s improvised tom-tom fills virtually commandeer the song at its climax. On “Shake,” Sam Cooke’s final, posthumous Top Ten hit, Earl’s drums were the lead instrument, an almost unheard-of touch, especially when the singer was the greatest in the day’s rock & roll.
Earl had moved to Los Angeles in 1957, tired of recording for peanuts in New Orleans. As he had in the Crescent City, he blew the L.A. competition away, all but Hal Blaine, his rival and good friend. “Earl took over,” says the electric bassist Carol Kaye, the only woman among L.A.’s studio elite. “I thought he was the greatest drummer I’d ever heard.” He and Earl “produced our own drum parts,” Blaine told me when we spoke. “Producers and arrangers wanted to pick our brains.” (See my Substack of Sept. 11, 2024 on Blaine).
Jim Keltner, a fine member of the drumming generation after Earl’s, told me about the first time he heard the great man play. “Someone was warming up in the studio next door,” Keltner recalls. “Whoever it was, this sound came through the wall that was...overwhelming. It just surrounded you—from the other side of a soundproof wall! I asked another drummer who it was.”
"You don't know who that is? That’s Earl Palmer, man.”
“The power, groove and taste,” says Keltner. “’God,’ I thought, ‘that feels so good!’ Earl had a mysterious sophistication that was so different from the rock drumming I’d heard at the time.”
If Earl was, as I’ve said, the greatest raconteur I’ve ever known, he was also hands-down the biggest pain in the ass. Backbeat’s backstory is a two-actor farce with one character, me, helplessly subject to the whims of an impulsive, short-fused, infuriating seventy-year-old whom far better authors than I could never have dreamt up.
I have to say, however, that despite his tendency to explode, Earl could be a great pal. “Tony, man," he would say cheerfully, "how come you never like to go to a bar?”
“I’m not much of a drinker.”
“Ain’t talking about drinking. Talking about going in and sit at the bar, strike up a conversation. Relaxing. You need to relax, Tony. You overwound.”
He had a warm heart. Earl genuinely cared about me, wanted me to do well and be happy.
“How’s your career going?” he would ask.
Such episodes of fellow-feeling, I learned, were strictly on Earl’s terms. I took trip after trip to Los Angeles to conduct the endless series of interviews I had been crazy enough to undertake. After one such flight, Earl met me at his door, wearing only boxer shorts and a sheepish look. He’d scored a hot date for the weekend. Of course he was torn, knowing I’d come all that way to do some good hard work. But I knew where the more binding commitment lay.
“Earl, I came three thousand miles!”
He stared at the ground and kicked some dirt.
“This my last hurrah.”
“Gimme a break!” I thought; Earl was nowhere near his last hurrah. But there was nothing for it but to climb into my rental car and head back to LAX.
The one time I twisted Earl’s arm into traveling east, I was standing idly in my study one evening when I heard a howl of rage, and here came Earl, bounding naked out of the bathroom, brandishing a towel. He stopped about six inches from me. I was sure he was going to take a swing.
“You fagot! This towel is dirty!”
Forget more than a half-decade of what I had come to presume was fellow-feeling, if not intimacy. Earl was convinced that I would never have left a dirty towel out for a white guest. It was merely, of course, my sloppy housekeeping.
In the morning, I shook Earl awake.
“Get your stuff together! I’m taking you to the airport.” He didn’t protest, just looked at me with big, sad, penitent eyes.
In the car he sat huddled in his raincoat, staring out at the overcast sky.
“It’s like you once said, Tony. It’s never too late to change.”
“Except for some people,” I thought grimly. At the airport I said, "Catch a plane." I didn’t care if the book ever got done.
It didn’t take long for us to reconcile. Backbeat: Earl Palmer’s Story was published in 1999 to near-unamimous praise. What biographers see, that critics never do.
The master of the sticks.