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DRUMS
A Rock Novel with a
Novel Beat
The inner workings-and unworkings-of an up-and-coming rock
band are set to a novel literary beat in Brad Henderson's rock-and-roll
novel, Drums. This is not the first rock novel ever written;
not by a rim shot. But it is the first to be narrated from the
point of view of the person who puts the roll in rock-and-roll-the
drummer. Though from the audience's point of view the drummer
is often buried behind his pile of drums and cymbals and eclipsed
by the "front" members of the band, the drummer is
often the only one in the whole concert hall who can not only
see every member of the audience, but every member of the band
as well. Thus he is in a unique position to observe the inner
workings of a band's often arcane relationships.
Danny Vikker, our guide on this comic romp, has just given
up his academic career in engineering at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo
(in real life, one of the country's finest technical schools),
and joined the group Bandit for a summer of touring. They travel
to Lake Tahoe in hope of landing a gig at the prestigious Lake
Club, while Danny is hoping for a gig of the romantic sort with
the band's lead-singer, the smoky-voiced and enigmatic Abbey.
Abbey, it turns out, still has an engagement or two of her own
with Bandit's former drummer, a flashy and conceited character
who quit the group to hit the "big time" in Los Angeles.
Drums has everything a rock novel ought to have-sex,
drugs, and rock 'n' roll, to name just three, plus fast-paced
action with plenty of laughs and a fair share of tears. But it
also has everything that any good novel ought to have-characters
whose lives mean something to them, and therefore to us; a plot
that is propelled by the passions of those characters and by
the driving rhythm of the music they make; and, most importantly,
insight into human nature and the hopes and desires that make
all of us-drummer, singer, and groupie alike-real human beings.
"The novel," Henderson observes, "is the closest
thing we've got to turning the human mind inside-out." For
all those reasons, the manuscript version of Drums, written
while Henderson himself was a student and a drummer, won a prestigious
Phi Kappa Phi Award in Creative Writing from the University of
Southern California.
About the Author: Brad Henderson is himself a drummer,
and lists as his influences Ringo Star, Charlie Watts, and Matt
Sorem, among others. But unlike Danny Vikker, he actually graduated
from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo (1983), and went on to study writing
at USC, where his mentor was novelist John Rechy and where he
earned his Master of Professional Writing degree in 1989. In
writing Drums he drew inspiration from all these sources,
but on a day-to-day basis it was the song "Beat of a Heart"
by Patty Smyth that warmed his coffee. "Every morning while
I was writing my way through the first draft," he says,
"I played that song-good and loud, so that the drums throbbed
and Patty's voice ripped at my soul."
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