The history of the tea towel in rock occupies
a sadly neglected nook in the overall pantheon of the fables of the deconstruction
of pop history. Greil Marcus barely touches upon it, Johnny Rogan dismisses it
in a paragraph, and only Donovan’s perpetual claim that he invented it on every
BBC 4 documentary about the sixties that he can claw his way into briefly keeps
the subject hovering athwart the listening public’s consciousness.
Like most people, I first became aware of the
phenomenon when watching footage of the legendary rooftop concert performed by The
Beatles during the sessions for what eventually became Let It Be. Most people
can’t get past the horrific plastic mac Ringo is sporting (possibly one of
Maureen’s) but once can tear your eyes away it is clear that he has
customised his drum kit by carefully placing a tea towel over firstly the floor
tom and then the snare. Before the invention of those little gummy blue pads
that you can now attach to your drum heads and in the absence of the gaffa tape
first introduced to Liverpool by merchant seamen in the thirties (and then
eagerly swapped like gum, chocolates and silk stockings with GIs during the war
by impressionable young percussionists throughout the home counties) this was
the only way to damp down an overly timbalesque snare. With the experience of unsuccessfully
trying to record the drum part for Tomorrow
Never Knows while the kit was set up in the revolving door at the EMI
offices in Manchester Square (John Lennon apparently wanted it to sound like “…a
thousand Tibetan monks all paradiddling on temple drums at once”) still fresh in his mind Ringo would have
been careful not to draw any attention to issues with recording the kit, and it
is also enchanting to think of him absent-mindedly reading a humorous summary
of the laws of cricket, or looking at Giles Martin’s and classmates’ handprints,
or perhaps reflecting on some mawkish poetry about a mother’s love whilst
shuffling his way through Get Back.
Ringo was not alone in his pursuit of sonic experimentation. Across town Dave Mattacks, newly
installed as drummer of incipient folk rockers Fairport Convention was
struggling to reproduce the loose sound of Levon Helm’s kit as heard on The
Band’s Music from Big Pink. “We ended
up draping a tea towel across the snare to mute it – give it that subdued basement
feel” he told Patrick Humphries some years later in a conversation recounted in
the Fairport biography Meet by the Fridge.
Sometimes the old ways are the best. Only last week I myself was involved in
recording an acoustic session wherein le
batterie, even lovingly attended to with brushes by our sensitive and attentive percussionist, was
overwhelming the delicate nuance of the banjo accompaniment. With a knowing
sideways glance and a nod to the long and noble tradition of thinking outside
the box our drummer rushed to the kitchen, returning with a lovingly wefted little
Fairtrade cotton number which he draped over the snare in order to dampen down
the intrusive rattle.
It turns out than in these days of electronic
gizmos and digitally-manipulated sound technology, where decades of improvisation
and recording expertise and moving the mics and damping the room and tweaking the EQs have been reduced to bits and VDUs, you can now just
buy a plug-in.
