The Buddy Rich Tapes

"Sit down and play some f**king music!!!"
--Buddy Rich, Drummer Extraordaire

Somewhere around my junior year of college I recall hearing about these tapes of Buddy Rich, widely regarded as the greatest drummer ever to walk the face of the Earth, going ape-shit on his band. At the time, there was no internet, so if one were to hear them, it would be vis-a-vis a pirated cassette. There was a small but vibrant clique of musicians where I went to school, and though the college itself wasn't known as a strong music school, there were some very competent musicians. I heard about the Buddy tapes through this clique of musicians, but I never heard the actual recordings (there are four in all) until a year or two ago. Needless to say, they're outrageously funny...if you go for the kind of humor that they unintentially reflect. There's Buddy giving his bass player a hard time ("And what's with the bending?"), his trumpet players ("Everyone can hear you clamming up the joint!"), and saxophones ("...and saxophones?!? You gotta be kidding me!"), but his tour de force is when he gets into it with one of his trombone players, who had the audacity to grow a beard ("This is the Buddy Rich Band! I want young people, with faces. No more f..king beards! This isn't the House of David Baseball Team!"). Imagine Bobby Knight leading a big band and you're not terribly off course. That said, I must say that I have two CDs of Buddy Rich's, one being the Gene Krupa/Buddy Rich drum battle , and the other being "Big Swing Face". Both absolutely WAIL, particularly the latter.

Many of the victims of Buddy Rich's diatribes come off rather philosophical about their time in Buddy's band. For the most part, they seem to be proud of their stint in the outfit, saying that for every bad story there was about Buddy, there were ten good ones. Buddy was a frequent guest on Johnny Carson, who loved Buddy's playing and appearances. He played in Tommy Dorsey's band in 1939; Frank Sinatra joined a year or two thereafter. Legend has it that the two tough guys traded punches on more than one occasion. Such were the ways hardscrabble, old-school guys worked out their differences. They were friends thereafter, and Frank gave a touching eulogy when Buddy passed in 1987.

"You're all...not my kind of people. At all."
--Buddy Rich