Where the Groove Is: Interview with Steve Williams

introduction

I first heard Steve Williams play drums at Nublu on Avenue C in Manhattan's East Village. Tall even when he's sitting, long limbs commanding every element of the drum set, the reach and motion of a great octopus. Williams keeps the beat and makes it music.

I had met him earlier, in 2005, when he was listening to others play at the legendary club Black Betty in Williamsburg Brooklyn. The club is gone now. The financial speculation boom and bust that wrecked the nation took Black Betty as one of its many victims. But back in 2005 it was the underground place to be. Steve and I met through our mutual friend, bassist Paul Frazier, and quickly found our own groove as conversation ranged from music to women to politics to surviving in New York City and always back to music again.

Steve Williams is a classically trained and jam session trained drummer who has played with artists of all styles, from the concert stage to the Broadway stage, during his more than twenty years in the business. Our conversation at the funky textile-spirits fusion bar The Dressing Room in 2008 was a chance to catch up and talk about music and life.

interview

CLAY: Tell me how you got turned onto music.

WILLIAMS: My father was a singer in church, singing gospel quartets for thirty years with his other buddies, and as a kid I just gradually started playing drums with him.

CLAY: Were drums your first instrument?

WILLIAMS: No, my first instrument was trombone. I think I was probably seven or eight years old, and I got tired of carrying a trombone. The trombone was bigger than me. So I started taking drum lessons at school and all you had to carry was a pair of drumsticks, that was it. Little did I realize that way down the line you have to take the whole drum set with you, so I don't know, maybe it was my bad karma. I think about those days often: Just a trombone. You take it apart, stick it in your case, and walk.

CLAY: What were those first lessons like?

WILLIAMS: I had some drum lessons with my cousin. I was probably eight at the time, and he was fifteen or sixteen. He would just play. Then the lessons I had in elementary school were basic rudiments, and I really didn't start learning how to read music and play a drum until I went to the Peabody Conservatory as a kid in high school. That was classical music, so I started learning technique and how to read, how to play marimbas and timpani. Peabody Conservatory has something called preparatory school, which is basically for kids that are in junior high and high school. You take lessons under one of the conservatory professors a couple of times a week, and at the end of the semester you do a recital, like all the regular conservatory students, so you feel important as a kid.

There was a Bach minuet that I learned to play on marimba. It was probably eight bars long. But that piece kicked my ass for like two months. And then once I learned it, it was like, Yes! But there was this kid in my group, an eight year old genius. He would stand up to the marimba, and all you could see was his head. But he could play anything. We used to hate him.

When it comes to classical music, everything is just by the book. So you learn out of certain method books, which are like bibles. One book was called Stick Control. Most teachers will use this book to help you get dexterity in your hands. The book is just full of exercises. The technical aspect of playing snare drums on classical pieces: that's where it all starts for me. Other people will start at the drum set. They just start playing drums. They find a teacher and the teacher will say, "Okay I'm going to show you how to play a beat, how to play Rock and Roll, how to play Blues."

CLAY: What came next for you?

WILLIAMS: In high school I majored in music. I played in the jazz band and the marching band. And after high school I went to Berklee College of Music in Boston. But I should also say that a lot of my training came from three local drumming heroes in Baltimore. One is Larento Featherstone. He played gospel music, and that's what I started playing: gospel music. He was the first drummer who turned me onto Buddy Rich, Billy Joe Jones, and Art Blakey. He told me, "Okay, you really need to listen to these guys. They are some of the greatest jazz drummers." And it started there. Then I went to Peabody Conservatory. The two other guys in Baltimore were Larry Bright, a great drummer, and Dennis Chambers, who everybody knows. These guys were really influential on my concept of how to play drums.

CLAY: How did you meet them?

WILLIAMS: I was always listening to them at clubs, and then they would invite me over to their house and say, "Check out this record" or "Check out this way to play this beat" or "Here's a way to practice your single-stroke rows." Dennis Chambers was the first person who led me to Frank Zappa. He knew every Frank Zappa record there was, and he knew all the beats by heart. His whole approach was very musical. When people think of Dennis, they think of someone who has amazing chops, which is true. But a lot of people fail to realize that he takes those things and makes them very musical.

CLAY: What is it that turns it into music?

WILLIAMS: For one thing, there's a person's knowledge of music. Dennis can put on a Tony Williams record or Buddy Rich or Max Roach and play everything and hum melodies to you. And he can turn around and do it with music at the opposite end of the spectrum. With that vast knowledge of music, it becomes easy and natural to use all those different influences. All this stuff starts to seep into your playing.

CLAY: Is it just a matter of being able to say, "Here I'll do this thing Blakey does, and here I'll do what Roach does"? Is it like a patchwork quilt?

WILLIAMS: It should be something more than that. When you're working with producers, they will be that specific: "Here I want you to play this beat, and there I want you to play that beat." Now you can argue whether that's music or not. That goes down to the listener. Or then you'll have somebody you work with who says, "I want you to play the song. Play what you feel in the verse, play what you feel in the chorus, make the song build." I think experience is probably the biggest factor in being musical. Experience comes from playing with horrible musicians and playing with some of the best. It comes from situations where you sounded great and situations where you made a lot of mistakes, and you try to figure out, "Why did I sound bad there and how do I sound better?"

CLAY: Tell me about learning from bad players.

WILLIAMS: I've always tried to learn from everyone that I work with. I think you can learn a lot from people who are not so good. You learn what not to do. Sometimes they really haven't put in the work gaining facility with their instrument—someone who's not being honest with themselves and admitting, "Hey, I haven't done the work." You recognize certain things that you yourself should work on. For a drummer it's an issue of keeping steady time as well as musicality.

CLAY: Tell me about the balance between the job of keeping time and feeling the music.

WILLIAMS: The first issue is playing steady time, but all music isn't just straight up and down—one, two, three, four. Music kind of flows. Every idiom has a certain flow to it. Figuring out what that flow is takes a certain amount of trial and error. Rock and roll, for instance, is a music that technically, as it's written down on paper, shouldn't work. But it does work because it has a certain feel to it. Capturing that feel comes with experience, with understanding where that pocket is. The drummer's responsibility is keeping the groove at a nice even pace, from the beginning to the end.

And that's always a sticking point because people will have a different concept of where the groove should be. You can be playing with a group of people, and every one of them will be feeling the tempo differently. That makes it harder for the drummer to find the right tempo and keep it there. And if the tempo doesn't stay there, the drummer is the scapegoat, everybody looks at you. They don't realize it's all a group effect.

CLAY: Why do you suppose it is that different people can feel a tempo so differently?

WILLIAMS: I think everybody has a different rhythm of life. Everyone walks down the street with a different rhythm.

CLAY: What's your strategy for handling those differences?

WILLIAMS: Typically you should key into the musical director. When they count off a song, you follow them. Still you may have other band members who are not good at keeping a steady tempo, which makes your job a lot harder. Or sometimes you have a musical director who's not really sure where the tempo should be. And then sometimes everybody is very solid, and that's when it's perfect. But it's not always that way when you're freelancing, working with different types of artists and different types of music. A rock-and-roll person feels the beat totally differently from the way a funk person or a rhythm-and-blues person feels the beat.

CLAY: You said before that rock and roll on paper looks like it shouldn't work but it does. Tell me more about that.

WILLIAMS: On paper it doesn't line up. Everybody does music on computers today, and on a computer you have the option of quantizing everything. You can put every note on the beat. The song will sound so perfect, but it will sound very stiff. In rock and roll you have some notes on the beat and some notes off the beat. It creates a certain kind of push and pull. Sometimes the beat will speed up slightly or slow down. There is a certain sway in the music.

CLAY: What's special about the groove in funk as opposed to rock and roll?

WILLIAMS: In rock and roll you play behind the beat. The bass player and the drummer can be playing slightly behind the beat while the guitar player can be playing right on top of it. In funk music everybody is playing right on top of the beat, so that it feels like it's pushing forward and it's very tight.

CLAY: Does that speak to rock and roll's ancestry in the blues?

WILLIAMS: The blues and rock and roll are extremely similar in feel, with the drums and bass playing slightly behind the beat. When it comes to funk—and let's say you're playing high hat, snare drums, and bass drum—everything can be either right on the beat or slightly ahead of the beat. In rock and roll, your high hat and your kick drum can be right on the beat, but your snare drum can be behind the beat. Those are some of the differences.

CLAY: What's next? Where your music and your career are headed?

WILLIAMS: I would just like to continue to play great music with great musicians who are all on the same page about what's important, about why are we here. I want to be playing with musicians who are writing good music, who know how to write a song with a verse and a chorus and a bridge and a chorus and a verse and a free part.

As far as what's later down the line, I'm not sure. I've been working on establishing myself as a writer. Recently I did a piece with bass player Paul Frazier, for a PBS show called Now. And then we did another piece for an independent film. So composing for TV, film, and video is a direction I'm going in. Until that is fully established, I would just like to continue playing with really good musical artists, people whose focus is playing great music and not how good they look on stage.

CLAY: Tell me about your process of composing music.

WILLIAMS: Filmmakers will present you with a treatment of the sections of the film from the beginning to the end. It's a trial and error process. You try to come up with a piece of music that aligns with what the film maker described to you. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. When it doesn't work, you just go back and re-edit.

Creating music for artists, the artist may have lyrics and suggest a place to start creatively. Sometimes they have a melody, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they have melody and a few chord changes.

CLAY: When did you first start writing music?

WILLIAMS: In college when I started learning more theory, chord changes, arranging, how to build a song—that encouraged an interest in writing. After college, as a musician you focus on trying to get the next gig. All your focus is on playing and making sure your playing is rock solid. Later on you have the time and hopefully the money to focus on writing tunes.

CLAY: I know you spent some time in Provincetown Massachusetts.

WILLIAMS: Those were summers from college. It was a summer job. I got a gig with a local blues artist named Ellie Boswell who sounded like Billy Holiday. I was playing drums. My first or second gig with her was in Provincetown. Ellie had been playing the whole Provincetown circuit for years. She would do these Blues tunes and torch songs, kind of a lounge singer. Playing with her I learned how to play blues shuffle.

CLAY: What was it like playing music there?

WILLIAMS: It was like a top forty gig, but a top forty blues gig. You'd play five or six nights a week. You'd play from nine at night till midnight or one o'clock in the morning. I had a place to stay, right off the main street and across the street from the ocean. Across the street you had restaurants and stores, but behind that was the beach.

One place we played there was called the Townhouse Restaurant and Bar, on Main Street. It was a typical Cape Cod restaurant that served some of the best clam chowder you could ever taste in your life. In the back, they had a bar where they had bands playing.

CLAY: What was the Provincetown scene like?

WILLIAMS: It was like Mardi Gras every night. I think it was right before the whole AIDS thing had started to blow up. Every night from Tuesday to Sunday, tons of people going in and out of the bars, drag queens walking up and down the street. I remember at the end of summer 1985, you started to hear about drag performers and other well-known people dying of AIDS.

CLAY: Was that all very new to you?

WILLIAMS: It was culture shock. I had never been in a concentrated gay environment like that. I was nineteen years old, thinking, "Men are looking at me like I look at a woman, this is not right!" I was ready to fight. My first gig with Ellie Boswell, I'm already skitzing because men were holding hands with men and women holding hands with women. This famous drag queen comes into the place, Sylvia Sydney. He' six foot ten. He's at the microphone telling jokes. Then he turns to Ellie and says, "You're little drummer there is cute. Send him to my room after the show. Tell him I'll only charge him two dollars." Everybody was laughing—like a dream sequence in a movie, that's what it felt like for thirty seconds. So this woman who was a friend of Ellie's said to me, "Let me tell you something: Why do you feel threatened by guys? You should actually be flattered!"

After a while I calmed down and realized I was comfortable with my own sexuality, and if they like guys, more power to them. I got to be friends with the drag queens. We'd have a drink and they'd hit on me and I'd say, "Hey that ain't gonna happen." But I wouldn't get angry anymore. It was a learning experience. Then I learned from the gay guys that the guys who are more homophobic are the ones who would be more likely to step across the line and have an experience with a guy.

CLAY: How long have you lived in New York City.

WILLIAMS: I've lived here twenty-three years. From Baltimore I went to Boston, where I studied at Berklee College of Music. After graduating, I stayed in Boston for a year or so and then moved to New York.

CLAY: What brought you to New York?

WILLIAMS: For a musician New York always has the lure of the big time. And the energy here. You have the whole jazz scene which is thriving. Many clubs, little and big, where you can hear some of the greatest jazz musicians in the world. You can see great rock-and-roll artists playing in a local club, and you can see unknown artists and indie bands playing, which is great too.

CLAY: What do you still admire about the Boston scene?

WILLIAMS: There wasn't much of a scene. In Berklee School of Music, it's music 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You're in school or your playing music with friends or your practicing. The scene was in the school. When it came to the scene outside of school—I don't know. There were a few rock-and-roll clubs. Whatever scene there was it was top forty cover bands. I think the scene there now has dwindled to almost nothing. Clubs have closed because real estate has gone through the roof.

CLAY: New York has experienced soaring real estate prices too. What have you seen happening here?

WILLIAMS: Live music venues have dwindled, and most of those places now are geared toward national acts. Ten or fifteen years ago you had a lot of smaller clubs that were available to local artists. With today's real estate prices it's hard for somebody to want to open a small club because to pay the rent they would have to charge outrageous prices.

CLAY: Where do lesser known musicians go now to play?

WILLIAMS: Everywhere but New York. Everywhere I visit now there seems to be more of a music scene going on than in New York. I think Cleveland, Dallas, Austin Texas, Seattle Washington, Spokane Washington, Philadelphia, Atlanta. Those cities seem to have scenes that are thriving more than New York.

CLAY: Tell me more about what New York was like when you first arrived here.

WILLIAMS: Coming to New York in 1986, 1987, you had everything going on here. On the Lower East Side you had the the whole art scene, indie music. It was wild, but it was vibrant. You had a lot of these little store fronts that became art galleries, that became clubs. The Knitting Factory on Houston Street is basically a storefront. There used to be a notorious rock-and-roll club club on Avenue A called The Pyramid. It was kind of like CBGBs but smaller. It was a drag queen place and at the same time a great rock-and-roll club. So you had these places that created a certain kind of raw creative energy.

CLAY: Some people say NYC was dirty and dangerous back then.

WILLIAMS: Back then New York was dirtier, a lot grittier. But in gritty places you have a lot of things that are being created. What came out of the Bronx? Hip hop. Even in the 1970s what came along was the Talking Heads. Grittiness creates a certain type of creative energy. People were creating freely, and there were avenues for them to create. In the 1970s and 80s you had clubs where musicians could play experimental music. They had an opportunity and a place and people to listen to them. Today you don't have that. Music, literature, and art are a lot safer and more formulated today.

CLAY: The cliche is that where there's struggle there's innovation. But I heard you say something that blows away the cliche. You said there were avenues and opportunities at that time that there aren't now in this cleaner richer city.

WILLIAMS: Yes, you had small indie record labels who were releasing music by artists who weren't household names. And some of these small labels grew up into bigger labels. That was one avenue. There was the whole gallery scene on the Lower East Side—small independent galleries. It was easier for an artist to get a storefront and paint the walls white and put their pieces up and have art openings and showings every week. Out of that whole scene the graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat came up. You had different kinds of music to choose from, more kinds of art to choose from. There was an avenue for people to create and to make some sort of living. But when the whole revitalization started, it drove artists elsewhere. The city as a whole has cleaned up and become basically like Disneyland, one big shopping mall.

CLAY: Looking beyond New York City, how has the music industry changed during the years you've been playing?

WILLIAMS: Over the last twenty years, music has become much more of a business. In the 1970s or 80s, record companies would give an artist the opportunity to become a household name over the course of three or four records. A company would grow with an artist. An A & R department would help an artist find the best in themselves. They would start an artist on small tours and push their records in these small markets, and five or six years later you have a star on your hands. Today you have basically four major record labels who have most of the major artists in the market: Sony and Universal, which are the biggest, and then BMG and Warner Brothers. So what a record company does today is that if they sign somebody and the first single doesn't immediately become a hit, the company starts losing interest in you. And if the second single isn't a hit you're done. The days of a record company helping you build a career are almost gone. But there is hope because of the whole major industry being in such a flux of chasing quick money. Smaller independent labels have come up and taken some of the artists who need some preparation and guidance. Some of these artists turn out to be big selling artists over the course of five or six years. The artist makes a career, and the company builds a track record of making new artists.