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Sandy Nelson, one of the few musicians in pop history to score Top 10 hits as a featured drummer, something she did early in her career that included more than 30 albums, died in a Las Vegas nursing home on February 14. He was 83 years old.
His son, Joshua Nelson Straume, said the cause was complications from a stroke that Mr. Nelson suffered in 2017.
Mr. Nelson was a drummer in Los Angeles in 1959. “Young Beat” The dominating drum part is an impulsive instrumental inspired by something he heard at a strip club he visited with other musicians.
“Looking at these pretty girls with G-strings, guess what I was doing?” He told The Las Vegas Weekly in 2015. “I was looking at the drummer in the orchestra pit.”
“He was doing a kind of ‘Caravan’ beat,” he added, referring to a jazz standard. “’Bum ta da dum’ – little toms, big toms. That’s what gave me the idea for ‘Teen Beat’.”
Mr. Nelson played in the backing band of Art Laboe, a popular Los Angeles disc jockey who also owns a small record label, Original Records, and Mr. Nelson took the song to him in the hopes he’d hit it. Instead, Mr. Laboe tested it on his radio show.
“The little punk stole the actual acetate from the lathe,” Mr. Nelson recalls, “and wouldn’t print it unless a few calls came in.”
He said that Mr. Laboe had received three calls from impressed audiences and that was enough: Mr. Laboe printed it on paper. It reached #4 on Billboard’s Hot 100 in October 1959, a rare success for a drum-centered instrumental.
Mr. Nelson scored again in 1961. “Let It Drum” It reached number 7.
Two years later, while riding his motorcycle on Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles, he collided with a school bus and was seriously injured. Part of his right leg was amputated. But he went back to drumming, learning to play bass with his left leg.
“In the long run,” he told The Las Vegas Review-Journal in 2017, “I developed a slightly better technique.”
During the 1960s and 70s, he recorded a series of instrumental albums, with titles such as “Boss Beat” (1965) and “Boogaloo Beat” (1968), often filled with covers of the hit songs of the day showcasing his drumming. . He wasn’t very proud of this job.
“I think I made the worst version of the Rolling Stones’ ‘Satisfaction’ ever,” Mr. Nelson told LA Weekly in 1985, “oddly enough it was a big seller in the Philippines. I guess they like squeaky saxophones or something.”
But among those covers were some hints of his interest in the discoveries that heralded electronic ambient music. For example, “Boss Beat”, in addition to “Louie, Louie” and other hit songs, “Drums in the Sea Cave” Mr. Nelson accompanied the sound of the ocean waves.
He was still experimenting at a late age. His friend and fellow musician, Jack Evan Johnson, said he was particularly proud of Mr. Nelson. “Veebles” A bizarre five-track concept album with an extraterrestrial sound and theme, released in cassette format in 2016.
“It’s about a human race from another planet,” he said. told The Las Vegas Sun In 1996, when the long-running project was just starting to take shape. “They’re going to take over the world and make us do nothing but dance and sing and play silly jokes.”
Sander Lloyd Nelson was born on December 1, 1938, in Santa Monica, California, to Lloyd and Lydia Nelson. His father was a machinist at Universal Studios.
She told LA Weekly: “My parents were having roaring parties with their Glenn Miller records, and they sounded like drugs to me – I had To hear these recordings. ”
Drums especially caught his interest and he started playing it in high school.
“The piano was very complex and I felt like I had to take lessons and learn to read music,” he said. “With the drums, I could play instantly.”
He said he once played in a band with a young guitarist named. Phil Spector, later a famous and then a notorious producer; Mr. Spector brought in Mr. Nelson to play drums on the 1958 hit “To Know Him Is to Love Him” for Mr. Spector’s band, the Teddy Bears.
He also played “Street Oop,” A 1960 novelty for Hollywood Argyles about a comic book caveman, though not on drums. Aspect Gary S PaxtonRecording the song with a group of studio musicians, who told The Chicago Sun-Times the story in 1997, Mr. Nelson was a last-minute addition.
“We already had a drummer,” said Mr Paxton, “so Nelson played the trash cans and screamed in the background.”
Over the years other musicians have cited Mr. Nelson’s early recordings as a major influence; one of them was Steven Tyler, who started out as a drummer before gaining fame as a vocalist for Aerosmith. In a 1997 interview with The San Diego Union-Tribune, Mr. Tyler recalled trying to imitate one of Mr. Nelson’s riffs as a child.
“I played this until it wore out my little rubber drum pad,” he said. “I wore out the first two Sandy Nelson albums.”
Mr. Nelson admitted that he did not handle his early success well.
“I spent most of my money on women and whiskey and wasted the rest,” he told The Review-Journal.
In addition to his son, he is survived by a daughter, Lisa Nelson.
Mr. Nelson settled in Boulder City, Nev. in 1987 and became a colorful local fixture, operating a pirate radio station from his home for nearly seven years before it was shut down by the FCC, said Mr. Johnson. And then there was the cave.
Mr. Nelson had a lifelong fondness for underground spaces and began digging his own cave in his backyard in Boulder City with a coffee can and pickaxe. The project took him 12 years.
“I went on a ‘cave tour’ once,” said Mr Johnson by e-mail, “and it was pretty dangerous, even dug into the hard desert soil at a very steep angle with no support structure and just at a very steep angle. A path until the room opened at the bottom. Enough room to go down for.”
“There was an electric keyboard in there,” he added.
Mr. Nelson told the Las Vegas Sun that he enjoyed relaxing in the cave in his backyard.
“A place to cool off,” he said.
“I’m going in without a leg,” he added. “There’s more room.”
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