It seems likely that the drummer Hal Blaine—who died on Monday, at age ninety, of natural causes, at his home, in Palm Desert, California—has done more to quicken my heartbeat than any other American musician. By his own estimation, he played on more than six thousand songs as a member of the Wrecking Crew, a Los Angeles-based cabal of studio professionals who began as the producer Phil Spector’s house band but ended up appearing on hundreds of Top Forty hits. The odd, nervous titters in the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations,” that eager on-the-four snare at the start of the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby,” the drums on Elvis Presley’s “Return to Sender,” the theme from “Batman,” Frank Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night,” Sam Cooke’s “Another Saturday Night,” The Byrds’ “Mr. Tambourine Man,” The Monkees’ “Mary, Mary,” and Barbra Streisand’s “The Way We Were”—it’s all Blaine. Brian Wilson recently called him “the greatest drummer ever.” He is so unquestionably essential to the last half century of American popular music—to the national condition—that it almost feels as though his face should be on currency.
My favorite Blaine beat isn’t really a beat at all but an intrusion, almost a pox: those enormous, echoing whomps right in the middle of Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Boxer.” Blaine was going for what he later called a “cannonball-like” sound, something to bruise the song, which he felt was too sweet, too much like a lullaby. The producer Roy Halee had an idea—set up some of Blaine’s drums in an empty elevator shaft. “I could hear when the music got to the ‘Lie-la-lie’ part, where I hit the drums as hard as I could,” Blaine later told Robert Hilburn, Paul Simon’s biographer. Blaine’s drums sound, to me, like a million doors slamming shut in my face. Every time I hear the song, I think again about how a definitive “no” can sometimes be a gift: gather yourself and go do something different. “I am leaving, I am leaving, but the fighter still remains,” Simon sang. Lie-la-lie. Whomp.