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Clyde Stubblefield

Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1943, the future world-famous Funky Drummer got started by hitting everything in sight with whatever was at hand. "I used to take spoons or whatever and be hitting pots and pans all day long. The washing machine used to make this rhythm too. And there was a railroad near the house. The sound of the trains, it was all a groove to me." Chattanooga was a railroad town, and Clyde spent hours walking the tracks as a boy.

By age 15, Clyde was participating in the professional music scene. His first band was called Emmett Bonds and the Flaming Rockets (check out "The Walking Band" on Clyde's CD The Original for a brief history of Emmett Bonds and The Flaming Rockets). They played mostly private parties in "splo houses," whisky joints on the edge of town. Next came Hirshel Hawkins and the Cascades, a step up, a "hot, smokin' band," according to Stubblefield. The Cascades took Clyde out of moonshine houses to the big show - the Veterans' Hall stage before a dance floor packed with couples that flocked the joint for their one-of-a-kind soul music. Then things started happening fast. One night the Cascades played behind a traveling soul singer out of Macon. His name was Otis Redding. "We cooked," says Clyde. "And he loved us." When Redding returned to Macon, Stubblefield followed him. Once in Georgia, Clyde played a few more times with Redding, but never missed the Sunday night jams at a club owned by Clint Bradley. That's where James Brown walked in and first heard Stubblefield drumming.

At 17, Clyde found himself at the heart of the most important groove machine on planet earth: The James Brown Review. He was 22 when he joined the James Brown Orchestra in 1965, a six-year engagement that would produce such JB classics as "Cold Sweat," "Say It Loud I'm Black and I'm Proud," "I Got the Feeling," "Sex Machine" and, of course, "Funky Drummer." Actually, Clyde and fellow drummer John "Jabbo" Starks were partly responsible for the James Brown "Review" concept. As they told journalist Ken Micallef:

CLYDE: "The big live production that James became known for didn't start until after Jabo and I were there. Before that he had more of a club show, where they played a few songs, stopped and talked, and then played some more. The whole "bang bang" production that he became famous for wasn't there until we got there. Maybe we had something to do with that. We got him going."

JABO: "Clyde and I had James' show down to a science. When we were playing we had to watch him, because at any given moment he would point and that would tell us which one should play-and that could happen anywhere, even in the middle of a song!"

CLYDE: "He would switch us while a song was going on. But the groove would stay strong. That took some doing, but we got it. It's amazing to think back about that. What a show!"

Micallef captures the feel of Clyde's playing when he says Clyde plays - more with less. Using bigger drums, his grooves are deep, soulful, and more simple. (When) it's just Clyde and the groove, that's when you hear it, what Jabo calls that "Holy Ghost" feeling. It's a groove that is so locked in and swinging, rock-hard but greased to maximum effect-the feeling that nothing else exists but that groove. It's that primal feel that all people can feel in their gut (and all drummers cry over with envy).

Because Clyde was the drummer featured on James Brown "Funky Drummer" and his drums were recorded in the clear, those drummers did more than envy him. They sampled him. Hundreds of times. Clyde Stubblefield is known as "the most sampled drummer in the world," because, as Rolling Stone Magazine wrote of a recent James Brown collection, "When he (Brown) finally lets Clyde Stubblefield take the drum break, it's as pure a moment of release as you'll find in recorded music." Artists as diverse as Sinead O'Connor, Public Enemy and Fine Young Cannibals electronically "borrowed" Stubblefield's rolls and flams.

Although he was named Rolling Stone's "Drummer of the Year" in 1990 and, in 1995, a pair of his drum sticks were enshrined in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but Clyde remains a modest, happy-go-lucky kind of guy. A citizen of Madison, Wisconsin, where he has lived for over three decades, he continues to play his regular blue Monday gig when he's not on the road with leading jazz/funk groups like The Masters of Groove or John Scofield - and he seems unaffected by the fact that virtually every famous drummer who comes through town wants to meet him. "Every drummer has an idol who's the reason they got into drumming," Phil Lavinger, the man who organized the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's collection, says. "And a good number of the drummers I've met [doing this project] have asked me about Clyde, asked if I have his sticks. He's been just an incredible influence on a whole generation of drummers, on the whole world of drumming."

 

Last updated 2008.06.09