As James Brown would always say to his audience at a show, “Give the drummer some,” and this documentary attempts to do just that, though its range of appreciation is fairly narrow. For one thing, none of JB’s drummers, who practically invented modern funk, are even mentioned in the film. In fact, the only Black drummers cited are jazz innovators like Art Blakey and Max Roach, which means no Clyde Stubblefield, no Benny Benjamin, no Bernard Purdie (and his seminal “Purdie shuffle”), no Questlove. Props to the producers for highlighting currently active female drummers like Jess Bowen and Cindy Blackman, but even in those cases the focus is on rock, and rock of a certain type. This focus makes sense when you check out the provenance of the film, which is the UK. Though lots of famous drummers are interviewed and each offers insight into the profession and musical interpretation in general, the core through-line is the history of rock drumming from Ringo to Watts to Baker to Moon to Bonham. Except for a few detours by way of people like the Clash’s Topper Headon, who ably describes punk’s reduction of everything to rhythm, it’s mostly the 1960s British male rock drummer who is considered the template for an entire industry.

A lot of lip service is given to gear, which isn’t to imply that the producers have something to sell, but rather that in the movie’s chosen context drummers are more associated with their instruments and their technical skills than with their inventiveness and, dare I say, soul. Even more lip service is lent to concepts like groove and swing, but it’s Bonham who epitomizes the film’s purview since, as more than one drum-head here comments, he was the master of “power and speed.” At one point, when the history lesson veers into new wave and post-punk, Stewart Copeland, probably the most articulate practitioner on display, avers that pop and rock drumming “became more African,” though the movie doesn’t really take that cue to the next logical level (or, for that matter, the previous logical level). Instead, it goes into the realm of drum machines, a technology that the film suggests set drumming as a vocation back ten years; that is, until Dave Grohl recaptured the mojo with his monk-like mindset about always being in the hard rock zone with Nirvana, which looked particularly dynamic on MTV. 

The most derided cliche in classic rock is the 10-minute drum solo, which the people who put together Count Me In probably think of as the ultimate test of skill and showmanship. To those of us who dig songs over everything else, long rock drum solos are a distraction that only make sense when you’re in a large venue and high on drugs, an insight the movie overlooks in favor of other cliches, like driving your parents and neighbors crazy after you get your first kit for Christmas and later achieving success through “conviction and hard work,” which in the end make it a typically didactic American documentary.

Now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Shinjuku Cinema Qualite (03-3352-5645), Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608).

Count Me In home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2020 Split Prism Media Ltd.