The Face Behind That Rockin’ Rhythm

If, on a winter’s night, the car radio tuned to classic rock, you’ve ever wondered who played the piccolo trumpet solo on “Penny Lane” or what regular life was like for the cellist on “Yesterday’ or whether the recorder player on “Ruby Tuesday” also opened “Stairway to Heaven,” then the publication of Tony Scherman’s “Backbeat: Earl Palmer’s Story” may put a bop in your lop bam boom.

Even if Palmer’s name doesn’t ring a bell, his backbeat will. That’s Palmer you remember driving the drums in Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” and Ritchie Valens’ “La Bamba.” That’s Earl behind all the echo of the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin” and Ike and Tina’s “River Deep Mountain High.”

“If any single musician can be credited with defining rock ‘n’ roll as a rhythmic idiom distinct from the jump, R&B; and all else that preceded it,” Scherman quotes the critic and music historian Robert Palmer (no relation), “that musician is surely Earl Palmer.”

Palmer’s story is relatively simple. Born in New Orleans, into a city and a family of mixed race and culture, Palmer received his primary education as a tap dancer in vaudeville, graduated to drums and jazz, and from there into the early rock ‘n’ roll of Fats Domino and Little Richard.

On the wings of those angels, he moved to Los Angeles and became one of the top studio drummers, running from recording to recording with (according to the ample discography) the Righteous Brothers, Frank Sinatra, the Byrds, the Beach Boys, Bonnie Raitt, Bugs Bunny--everybody.

*

For the most part, Scherman presents Palmer’s story in a first-person narrative, edited from hundreds of hours of interviews conducted over a period of seven years. Palmer’s voice, his idioms, his malapropisms are, well, fun. But it is Palmer’s back story, as much as his backbeat, that makes the best reading.

From his very conception, by a father he never knew and a mother who was a well-known lesbian singer, Palmer did everything a little differently. He left a comfortable life with steady gigs, a wife and four children to run off to the uncertain rewards of studio life in California with a white woman. And when those rewards became certain, Palmer turned down a chance to play with Count Basie to continue harvesting his cash crop.

And finally, when studio musicians were replaced by bands that played their own music, and later by synthesizers, Palmer refused to turn bitter. “If I didn’t have happiness forever, I had it then, and what more could I want?”

Scherman introduces each section with pages explaining (often in labored prose) what Palmer is about to say with great clarity and color in his own words, or inserting a piece of social history that ought to be common knowledge to Palmer’s audience.

“In New Orleans in the early and mid-’50s, an ambitious and self-assertive young black man was a threat to the social order. . . . Bolstering the old anti-miscegenation code, a 1950 statute explicitly outlawed ‘marriage or habitual cohabitation’ between ‘a person of the Caucasian or white race and a person of the colored or Negro race.”

The music, not the history, is the thing. (Note: Thirty tracks of Earl Palmer’s drum work, including jazz sessions, can be heard on the recently released CD “Backbeat: The World’s Greatest Drummer.”) The Earl Palmer story, after all, means very little to a reader who doesn’t have a visceral memory not just of “Tutti Frutti,” but of a winter’s or a summer’s night, long past, cruising along to the backbeat.