Outside Of The Box With Howard Grimes

Hey y’all, George here…I wanted to talk to you a little bit more about my dear friend, Howard Grimes, one of the greatest Big Beat drummers to ever walk this Earth and a personal mentor. In a recent phone conversation with him, I asked how he was and what he was up to and his response was simply amazing…

“My wife is doing the laundry right now and I’m sitting here listening to the washing machine. It’s got this rhythm going, cha-chunk, cha-chunk, cha-chunk. And the ceiling fan is on above me and it’s going, womp, womp, womp, womp. I’m trying to figure out how to make these two rhythms work with each other and when I do, I’mma put ’em both on somebody’s record and it’s gonna be a hit!”

This was not the first time he’d told me something like this but I was grinning from ear to ear because Howard Grimes has always played outside of the box and is one of my favorite drummers on the planet. Just go listen to Al Green’s, Love & Happiness or Ann Peebles, I Can’t Stand The Rain and you’ll hear what I’m talking about. These are not your ordinary, run of the mill R&B grooves and this man is certainly no ordinary player. For example, you’ll notice his hi-hat sound is way up front, super fat in the mix and when I asked him what he was using, he said, “Those are 16″ Zildjian crash cymbals”. He’s had them since the 70’s. Howard was also using a 22″ rivet ride back then, very uncommon in R&B and you can hear it on William Bell’s, You Don’t Miss Your Water. It’s so good.

From the beginning of his career, he has thought of things very differently and approached the drums like no other. He began playing when he was six years old when he met a drummer/cab driver named Murray who gave the youngster a pattern Howard said was called the Mama Daddy Roll, which turned out was L-R-L-R-LL-RR-LL-RR, a single-stroke roll into a double-stroke roll. Howard once asked if I knew the Mama Daddy Roll and I had to tell him that I did not but I would go home and learn it. He’s a really funny, good-natured man.

There’s a song on Al Green Is Love titled, Oh Me, Oh My which features a killer groove from Howard that apparently was the rhythm Popeye made when he would run across the screen in those old cartoons. How many people do you know get their musical ideas from watching Popeye or listening to washing machines and ceiling fans? There’s no one like Howard Grimes, y’all.

Just listen to this tune…