Heroes: Bill Bruford

With the unique distinction of having played with three of the 'big five' of prog, Bill Bruford is the godfather of prog-rock drumming. Over 30 years he has influenced hundreds of drummers, not least guest ed Mike Portnoy. The pair came face to face in Manhattan to discuss Yes, King Crimson and odd time...

Of all the musicians from the formative days of prog-rock, the one who deserves the ranking of true legend and the title of ‘prog-rock founding father’, would have to be Bill Bruford. After playing a crucial role in liberating popular music from the 4/4 backbeat with Yes in the early ‘70s, Bruford lent his abundant polyrhythmic talents to King Crimson, the art-metal pioneers whose angular dissonance paved the way for later bands such as Tool and Nirvana. As if that wasn’t enough, Bruford also shared drumming duties with Phil Collins in post-Gabriel Genesis and later founded Earthworks, his highly innovative jazz outfit.

That’s some history alright, but as he bounds into a Manhattan recording studio for a meeting with guest ed Mike Portnoy, Bruford could easily be mistaken for someone 15 years younger – his enthusiasm for drums has not dwindled with time.

Mike Portnoy: I must start by pointing out something I’m sure others have pointed out: prog-rock fans generally regard the genre as having been started by the ‘big five’: Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Yes, Genesis, and ELP...

Bill Bruford: Interesting, yeah. I’d cut two out of there right away. I’d take out Genesis, who I thought were late in on the thing... but you haven’t gotten to your question yet. (laughing)

MP: Well, you have the unique distinction of having played for three of the ‘big five’...

BB: What’s wrong with the other two guys – why didn’t they call?!

MP: Throw in the fact that you were also part of the prog-rock supergroup UK, and fans must absolutely regard you now as the godfather of progressive rock drumming?

BB: Ha, ha. I think that might be an honourable thing to be called.

MP: Let’s dig into these bands a little. Every prog-rock band since the ‘70s, including Dream Theater, has had the groundwork you and the ‘big five’ laid out before us, but when you started out with Yes in the late ‘60s, what musicians and bands inspired you to create that style?

BB: Good question. And why it occurred is quite interesting too. You have to bear in mind that we were from very different social backgrounds, unlike Black Sabbath, with four guys from the same street. We were from wildly different parts of the UK. I had trouble understanding what Jon Anderson (Yes lead singer) was saying. His accent was so strong that I struggled to understand him. And my syntax and vocabulary would be so weird to him, he’d be struggling to find out what I was saying. Then there was this Rick Wakeman guy who’d been to the Royal Academy and Steve Howe who seemed to know about Wes Montgomery and various jazz musicians. So what got us going was the Beach Boys, vocal harmony. Everybody wanted three-part vocal harmony, much of the time. All three guys singing, that was a given. Quite rarely did Jon sing on his own.

Also Vanilla Fudge because they’d done ‘You Keep Me Hanging On’. They took a pop song and extended it. So we were just a cover band and it seemed hip to us that you could take tunes of the day and extend them and put in bits of Sibelius and jazz and stuff.

MP: You did it with Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘America’, The Beatles’ ‘Every Little Thing’. That was the impressive thing I noticed early on was that you guys took pop music and moulded it into a more progressive direction. How did that new direction come about?

BB: You’d have to hand it to Jon Anderson I would think. He’d say ‘Well let’s do something with this. I’ve heard this thing on television...’ and he’d sing. ‘Bum bum bum bum’, and we’d say, ‘Jon, that’s the theme to Bonanza, you can’t use it, there are copyrights!’. ‘Never mind’ he’d say, and off you’d go. Next thing you know, you put that on the front of something and you’ve got a middle section that sounds a bit like Sibelius, where it all goes dreamy and drippy and then back with some fast moving up-tempo stuff, and we thought that was pretty good. I don’t know why we thought that and Jon would be the driving force. Then of course, I’m coming from Joe Morello thinking, ‘Why don’t we do the whole thing in 7/8’.

MP: It’s funny you mention Joe Morello, because when I first got into odd time signatures I was listening to you with King Crimson and Yes and Genesis, but Dave Brubeck was the first music I heard that was jazz-oriented but also incorporated odd time signatures – was he an influence to you?

BB: He was a big influence. I really grew up on that Brubeck Quartet. The sound of his set was so sweet and his technical ability was just from heaven. I thought that was great and I found it easier to play in 5/4 than in 4/4. I couldn’t think what to do in 4/4 that everybody else hadn’t already done.

MP: How much were your early influences based in jazz and how much in rock?

BB: It was all jazz because I grew up going ting-ting-ta-ting on a cymbal and quite quiet on the snare. I didn’t do a straight eighth beat until I was 18 years old. From 13 until 18 I grew up with jazz records. We listened to The Beatles and we liked the Stones and it came and it went and they were ok, but the jazz pile was much bigger compared to the other records. I thought it was ok but not as good as Monk or Freddie Hubbard.

MP: Were the other guys in Yes like that?

BB: No, they hated it. They didn’t know anything about jazz. Peter Banks may have done a Wes Montgomery octave thing, and he knew what a minor ninth chord would sound like, but Rick Wakeman had not a note of jazz. He was completely classical, as was Tony Kaye. Chris Squire and Jon, certainly not. So I was this token guy. They’d say ‘Shut up with your jazz’. I'd say ‘I want to play this in seven, and what’s more, I reserve the right to play this differently tomorrow night’. You can imagine how that went down. I think I was an irritating guy to work with, but maybe in the good sense. It made people look at rhythms. We could have a bar of four and a bar of seven and a bar of four and of seven alternating. That would be a hit. I could also be irritating from another point of view in that I was always wanting to change the stuff on a nightly basis.

MP: But change was what made prog-rock bands like Yes break that ground...

BB: We were keen to do anything as long as it didn’t sound like The Nice or Led Zeppelin. You just had to sound different.

MP: I always found the songwriting credits on early Yes albums intriguing because although many songs were credited to Jon Anderson, the musical interplay between you and the other musicians was often the key element of the composition. What was the writing process for classics like ‘Heart Of The Sunrise’ and ‘Close To The Edge’?

BB: Jon was the man with sort of the velvet glove. He’d slam his velvet glove down on the table. He’d come with something so bad that it had to be replaced. He was unfamiliar with guitar shapes and harmony and he’d bang away on a guitar until, out of sheer desperation, somebody would say, ‘Jon this is terrible, but maybe if you did this, we could do that’. And I’d say, ‘Well this is ok, but the rhythm stinks; let's slow it up or make it faster or something.

MP: Well that’s why I found the credits hard to believe because so much of it was instrumentally based.

BB: Yeah, but we didn’t know what songwriting royalties were. I was 18. I don’t even remember signing a recording contract. Nobody ever looked for a contract, everybody always had one. In retrospect everything just got ‘Anderson’, ‘Anderson’, ‘Anderson/Squire’, ‘Squire/Anderson’.

MP: I’ve read that some of those albums were recorded in bits...

BB: Absolutely. Isn’t that weird? You put the mics back up on the drums. You have a lot of technology to help now, but in our day all we had was tape editing, which was big. The tape was edited every 10 seconds. If you watch the master tape go around there’s an edit every two seconds...

MP: And you were writing that way as well, it wasn’t only just tracking...

BB: Absolutely. We were writing something and editing it onto the previous section. You’d write eight bars, play it and say, ‘Not bad, maybe we can improve on that’. So that would be Option A and Option B and Option F would get taped around the studio walls, then after a day someone would decide Option A was best so we’d stick that back in.

Rhythm: Can you give an example of a song that was put together that way?

BB: Oh anything more than two minutes long! By the third album it started to creep in and by the time we got to ‘Heart Of The Sunrise’, that’s option city.

MP: It’s funny because I can relate to that method but it’s completely unorthodox. We write like that in the age of Pro Tools and it’s very easy, but I can’t imagine doing it back then...

BB: Especially since none of those guys could remember what they played on Option F. Now I can remember – you ask me what I played a half-hour ago and I’ll tell you. But in those days nobody could remember anything. Squire was very good and very methodical and he had very strong bass lines. He took forever-and-a-day to do them and pretty much every note was up for discussion.

Somebody said that Simon & Garfunkel spent three months making Bridge Over Troubled Water. I’m good for three or four days in the studio, but three months?! Of course, I knew the minute I heard that, Close To The Edge had to take at least three months and one day.

MP: They were two people and you were five.

BB: And after Close To The Edge I couldn’t do that again. I knew the next one would be a quintuple album and I didn’t have the stamina. I get bored real quick.

MP: After you left Yes in the early ‘70s, you immediately joined King Crimson. As they had already been around for a few years, what were your thoughts on their first few albums before you joined?

BB: Oh total bliss! Court Of The Crimson King fried me. They were doing a lot of club dates around town. I saw them several times. It was just shocking: they could put a room into silence. In those days, for a band to play in ensemble, all together at fff, but then ppp, was unheard of. Nobody knew that rock guys could play like that. It was a big shock.

MP: Do you recall seeing them and saying ‘Oh God I wish I could be playing that kind of music’?

BB: Yeah, pretty much immediately. So of course the longer these issues with Squire and Anderson are going on I’m thinking ‘Jeez, I could just pop next door and play with these other guys, they sound great! I don’t have to do this for a living’. And I wouldn’t have left Yes unless I had a gig with King Crimson. I intimated this to Robert Fripp and he said ‘Well, you know I don’t think you’re ready yet’. And I’d go back nine months later and say ‘What do you think?’. And he’d say he didn’t think I was ready yet! And eventually apparently I was ready. I was very young. I don’t know what 19-year­olds think now, but I was very young. I also thought I knew everything, like 19-year-olds do, which is a pain in the ass of course.

MP: You made three albums with King Crimson in the ‘70s before the band split, only to reform with you in the ‘80s and again in the ‘90s. You’ve been a part of three different incarnations of the band. What were the differences for you between these three distinct phases?

BB: How long have we got? I guess in the ‘70s I was coming in on the tail-end of something where the template was set by The Court Of The Crimson King, so everything else after that was kind of a burn-out fall-out thing. Until we got to Red, which was really a different record. That looked forward to a kind of metal music. We didn't verbalise that, but it was raunchier, tougher.

MP: Larks’ Tongue In Aspic had a bit of that as well.

BB: It did, yeah. Kurt Cobain picked up on Red a lot later on and that sent sales through the roof. It was a hellish record to make. They were all difficult records to make. It was no picnic. Kind of blood on the floor. That was the first band.

The second band, in the ‘80s, was another ball game. There was a number of things going on – it was a very exciting time. People were talking about Peter Gabriel and Laurie Anderson and Steve Reich and minimalism, and what they called village music, not world music, and the way people from other cultures operate with drums, and why does a western drummer always cut things up with a fill? There were synthesizers and electronic drums. Great things. So, being King Crimson we thought that it was our job to use these new tools and make something up with it. That got us into trouble because we went out touring the world with completely new music, and as far as we were concerned that whole ‘Schizoid Man’ thing was finished. Now there’s a problem here, because the ticket-paying guy wants to hear the old songs. If you completely change your set and do not play anything from a previous album, the customer may have a right to say this is a trades description thing – ‘You told me you were Dream Theater and now you ain’t’. There was a lot of trouble with that. But the band with Belew (guitarist Adrian) and Levin (bassist Tony) and some light electronic drumming and Robert doing his no chordal stuff and everybody just had a single-note line – getting away from chords was a big change in our sound. We loved it.

MP: So what about the ‘90s version with the ‘double trio’?

BB: Yeah, I never bought into that. I didn’t think it worked and Robert would probably agree. He’d say whether it works or not is not his responsibility. His responsibility is to throw balls into the air. If people catch them, great. If they don’t, they’ll fall to the ground.

So we had two drummers, two guitarists, and two bass players. And the drummers were the guys who had it figured. We were great. I thought the bass players didn’t really co-operate. I turned up for rehearsal and I say to this guy Pat Mastoletto, who I’d never seen before, ‘Hi, what do you play?’ and he says ‘Drums’. And I say, ‘I play drums. Anybody in the room who doesn’t play drums?’. But it was great, and for a while we danced around each other and didn’t really get it until the penny dropped at one point: he was Ringo and I was Elvin. It was play-acting. We needed a guy to tie the audience to the beat and to tie Robert too. He likes a beat. I hate that stuff about beats. I don’t want to hear a beat, I want to hear a pulse and some time.

Brilliant thinking from Robert: ‘We’ll have a guy who’s like the drum machine, and this terrorist guy can do what he wants, on the side, so I don’t have to listen to him’. So it worked great. Pat and I woodshedded like crazy. He had a minimal technique but a great solid beat. A steady LA studio guy, terrific pocket as big as you can think.

MP: You toured with Genesis on their first post-Gabriel tour when Phil Collins first stepped up to the mike. What are some of your memories of that experience?

BB: Well, I probably behaved really badly. It was the first time I was on a studio session type gig and I had never done that before. And here was I suddenly getting this enormous sum of money, £500 a week. And I was not required to give my opinion. That was a new one on me. Now I know there’s plenty of time to be quiet. They put up with me. They were really sweet. I think they saw me as this loose canon, reserving the right to play it differently. We got through it.

Phil had told me, I’m auditioning singers and they’re all crap. I can sing better than this’. And I think I said, ‘Why don’t you sing and I’ll play drums for nine months or a year until you’re comfortable, then you get someone else and I’ll go off and do what I do’. It worked pretty well. It was steady enough, Phil knew my playing and he knew the thing wouldn’t fall apart. It nearly fell apart. There were a couple of times where they said, ‘Let’s try to keep this something approximating the way it’s been recorded, Bill’. But I was learning. The session world was new to me and it was a sharp learning curve. I’m grateful because they should’ve thrown me out after a couple of months!

MP: I can relate, because I’ve done some things outside of Dream Theater. When I started doing those I wanted to have control, but since then I’ve learned when to just be the drummer. I was just doing a G3 tour and with that I’m just a D in a world of Gs. It actually gets me back to being a drummer because in Dream Theater I’m the producer, the director, the songwriter. Sometimes drumming gets lost...

BB: Sure, I’m in that place now. Any time you’re tour manager, band leader, recording engineer, composer like I am, it's like, ‘Now, about these drums. Somebody ought to play the damn things’.

box

Mike Portnoy’s recommended listening [for examples of Bill Bruford’s drumming]

‘Heart Of The Sunrise’ – Fragile (Yes)

‘Close To The Edge’ – Close To The Edge (Yes)

‘Starless’ – Red (King Crimson)

‘Indiscipline’ – Discipline (King Crimson)

‘Presto Vivace’ – UK (UK)