Stick To The Beat

Don Lewis, shown in 2013 National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) show, playing the Live Electronic Orchestra (LEO). Lewis faced protests over his instrument in the 1980s, which could effectively recreate the sound of a full band.

Forty-Seven Heartbeats Beating Like a Drum

When Don Lewis showed up for work at the Hyatt Convention Center in Oakland, California, in 1984, he was surprised to find picketers outside. Lewis was an engineer and musician who made a name for himself playing a self-constructed instrument called the Live Electronic Orchestra. Often shortened to LEO, the instrument united a Hammond organ with a variety of synths to create a futuristic sound and lively show. As he approached the convention center, Lewis assumed the workers were protesting the Hyatt. But then he saw their signs: “Non-Union Musician. Don Lewis, Unfair to Musicians Union, Local 6.” It was the American Federation of Musicians (AFM). They weren’t picketing the Hyatt. They were picketing him.

The AFM was a large union best known for orchestrating huge strikes in the 1940s that halted all recording. Lewis had had problems with the union for some time. It had previously admonished him for performing as a solo artist at the Claremont Hotel, a room that was supposed to adhere to a six-musician minimum. Lewis, a onetime member of the union, jumped ship for the National Association of Orchestra Leaders (NAOL), an organization more supportive of his endeavors.

Though the AFM has gone to great lengths to make sure working musicians get paid a fair wage, they have also been sluggish to adapt to new styles and technologies. Musician minimums, for example, were a relic of the idea that recordings damage those who perform live. The AFM viewed Lewis as a threat because his mastery of synths and drum machines made other bandmates unnecessary.

With the help of the NAOL, Lewis filed an unfair labor practice charge against the AFM, alleging that they were illegally trying to coerce him to rejoin their union. An administrative law judge dismissed the complaint in 1985. With his options exhausted, Lewis put LEO in storage and supported his family by other means. In 1992, the Ninth Circuit overturned the earlier decision, but it was too late to revive his live act.

Lewis’s story is an illustration of many things, one of which is how technological advancement can evoke apocalyptic fear. At every turn, from the invention of radio to the rise of digital sound to the proliferation of pitch correction, people have equated technological progress with musical destruction. But like our relationship with the past, our relationship with technology also changes.

Drum machines prove a good example of this. Though they initially faced backlash, they went on to be one of history’s most popular pieces of musical technology. Let’s get a sense of how this change happened.

Why You Shouldn’t Fear the Drum Machine

In 1984, the CBS Evening News produced a segment on synthesizers and drum machines. Here’s how anchor Bob Schieffer introduced the story: “The next time you hear a drum beating or a violin playing, it may not be a real instrument at all. You might be listening to computer generated sounds from a synthesizer.”

Schieffer then passes the report to Sam Ford. The camera pans over an orchestra as Ford narrates: “Much of the music was coming from a machine called a synthesizer and that has many musicians worried … Many professional musicians are so concerned these musical robots are taking jobs, unions are negotiating labor contracts prohibiting synthesizers from displacing traditional instruments.”

The camera then cuts to Victor Fuentealba, the president of the AFM. Fuentealba’s tone is apocalyptic: “They keep refining these devices to the point you can’t tell the difference between the electronic device playing the instrumental part and the instrumental part being played by the live musician.”

Fuentealba is expressing the same sentiment that James C. Petrillo expressed during the AFM strike that we discussed in Chapter 2. New musical technologies will destroy the lives of working musicians. In Petrillo’s case, that technology was radio, records, and jukeboxes. In Fuentealba’s case, it was synthesizers and drum machines. To a degree, both men were correct. These technologies did put musicians out of work. But that doesn’t account for the fact that these technologies also transformed music.

The music industry of the 1980s was much bigger than that of the 1940s. Part of the reason for that was because artists embraced technologies that made it easier and cheaper to make music. You can get a sense of this by talking to some of the people who pioneered drum machine technology.

Roger Linn, the aforementioned creator of the LinnDrum, told me that part of his motivation was to help with the songwriting process: “When writing songs or simply jamming, it’s helpful to have a drumbeat playing … [Producer] Giorgio Moroder once told me that before my drum machine, he would record a drummer playing a simple beat continuously for about 20 minutes, then play it back to write to.” Clearly, Moroder put this technology to good use. Along with producing a handful of hits for Donna Summer, he cowrote and produced Blondie’s “Call Me,” Irene Cara’s “Flashdance . . . What a Feeling,” and Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away.”

And what about Don Lewis? He told me that he started his career playing the organ at a bar in Denver. Because there wasn’t enough space for a percussionist, Lewis used the organ’s built-in drum machine as accompaniment. An engineer, Lewis rewired the machine to play beats beyond the presets.

Later, while working as a salesman for the Hammond organ company, Lewis continued to utilize drum machines to improve his sales pitch. It was through this job that he met Ikutaro Kakehashi, the head of Ace Tone, a company that made drum machines for organs. Kakehashi was impressed by the modifications that Lewis made to his machines, and the two became fast friends. In 1972, Kakehashi formed Roland and hired Lewis to help work on the first programmable drum machines.

So, while artists worried that drum machines were destroying jobs, Lewis’s interest in drum machines grew out of necessity to do his job. He continued to use them because he loved the sounds they made. To quote producer Quincy Jones in a documentary about Lewis’s life, “[We] kind of rode technology all the way. These things changed music. To me, it was never an attempt to displace a musician or replace a musician. It was just another instrument and color in the orchestration.”

Many of Jones’s productions with Michael Jackson in this era, including “Bad” and “The Way You Make Me Feel,” utilize a traditional drummer and a drum machine. U2’s “With or Without You” does the same thing. It starts with a dreamy, programmed beat before drummer Larry Mullen, Jr. arrives during the song’s climax.

These examples illustrate not only how programmed beats can be complementary to traditional percussion, but how technology can grow rather than shrink the music industry. That doesn’t mean that every programmed beat makes for good music. Kim Wilde’s cover of The Supremes’ “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” isn’t as powerful as the original because the drum machine sucks the life out of it. But bad songs aren’t enough to deny the fact that drum machines and synthesizers helped the music industry grow to new heights.

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Thanks again to Chris for sharing an excerpt from Uncharted Territory. (I plowed through the whole thing in like a day!) If you want to learn more about chart-topping songs and the culture that created them, pre-order the full book on Bookshop or Amazon.

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