One my drumming highlights this year was discovering a new drummer (to me anyway), Jimmy Chamberlain. I knew who he was but never really heard him play. He was one of the big success stories here in the UK during the month of July when he undertook a seven date clinic tour.  Jimmy was the drummer for not one but two very popular bands The Smashing Pumpkins and then Zwan and now has his own solo project “Jimmy Chamberlain complex” I met up with Jimmy at Brentwood Drumfest for what turned out to be a very honest and frank chat.

Mike.D: Tell me a little bit about your upbringing, musically, and what you were listening to.
J.C: I grew up in a completely musical environment I was the youngest of 6 children. My father was a clarinet player, so at a very young age I was exposed to big band swing from Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman and Louis Armstrong. The first concert I ever saw, my parents took me to see The Oscar Peterson Trio with Ella Fitzgerald on vocals.  I was already playing the drums at that time, I think I was about 12, and I just remember watching those people and not really understanding what they were doing but knowing it was a really special. While my parents listened to Jazz my brother Paul who was also a drummer would be listening to Led Zeppelin and my sister Laura would be exposing me to Steve Gadd with Steely Dans “Asia” Chick Corea and Return to forever which is still my favourite recordings to this day. I was hearing all styles of music.

In around 74/75 I started really getting into Jeff Beck and really fell in love with the way Richard Bailey played on the Blow by Blow record.  I think if I could point to any milestone where I really found a style and tried to make it my own, I think it’s that record. That was a real turning point, being able to simulate the 10/8 phrases of Scatterbrain, that is when I started getting into the machinations of sub-dividing music

I’ve always been a super-big fan of music and I go through these phases, I’ll spend two months just listening to Thelonious Monk, Thelonious Monk helps me write, just because what he does is so simplistic, yet so involved.  He says so much with so little and as a drummer and an instrumentalist, it’s important for me to be able to realise that because I’m not the greatest guitar player, I’m not a great piano player either.  For me to be able to simulate that type of simplicity in a writing environment is really kind of cool and I think Thelonious probably did that the best.

Jimmy Chamberlin

You have your own very unique sound.  Is this something you have worked on and are aware off?
Yeah, as a drummer you have to practice to be able to simulate what you’re hearing in your head.  I don’t actually think about it anymore.  Obviously I think I can get better and I just recently bought some new books to go through. I want to hock up with Gregg Bissonette and get some lessons.  For me it’s an on-going journey.  I don’t think playing over complicated drumming is as important to me as it would be if I was 8 years old.  I would probably be going out and doing nothing but playing that stuff and then once I got to that point I would be able to simulate what I have in my head.  For me, the individuality is what is important and not who’s got what.  I’ve got to a point physically and mechanically, I don’t hear super-complicated stuff in my head and what I do hear I can play.  I don’t like to think about what I’m doing, I know what I want, I know if it’s a little off.
 
I play some songs 7 nights in a row and I don’t think I play them the same.  Some of the fills I play the same because I think they sound good but sometimes I think lets do this a little different, lets wear something a little different or lets open this up a little and lets leave a little more to the imagination. 

Tell us a little bit about the Jimmy Chamberlain Complex. 
I had a call from Sanctuary records, they got wind of this crazy rumour that I was going to do a solo record and before I knew it I had a record deal without any idea of what the hell I was going to do.  I had a lot of cheerleaders for the Complex before I even really realised. I remember them saying I don’t care what you do, its going to be great.  We had a deadline; we had to be done by July 2nd so I was operating under a promise that I had to have the record done by July 2nd.  We started rehearsing May 15th, yeah me and Billy Mohler in a rehearsal studio, just a little room, we recorded everything everyday and we went home, he went his way, I went mine and I would just listen and say that’s good, that’s a good riff, and we would come in the next day.  Slowly but surely we built the songs.  The instrumental tracks that I didn’t think needed lyrics, we didn’t write lyrics for.  The ones that were kind of pop songs that had something about them we did lyrics.  An example would be  Love is Real, there’s not a lot instrumentally going on aside from the 3/4 chorus, but there was something about it and I wanted a British voice on the song, I was thinking Crowded House or Squeeze, something like that and I told somebody about that I was looking for Mark Lonnigan to sing on the lullaby song because I thought it would be super creepy and Mark called me up, he said Mark Lonnigan’s on tour in Europe but Rob Dickinson’s in town why don’t you give him a call?   It was just one of those things that fell in place and he was perfect for the tune, I called him up we went out, had a beer, the next day gave him the tune, we recorded in 2 days, so we wrote the album in about 25 days and recorded it in 10. 

I think the thing that people find so compelling about the record, and not just to toot my own horn, but I think this is a line that runs through all music that’s done this way, is it’s just a block in time, it’s a honest representation of that block in time, which is something you don’t hear on records now.  Nowadays you hear this whole running dialogue, but when you take a piece of your pie and put it in the music it just becomes this powerful thing and even though the songs like Street Crowd or So Far From Neural Waves, there’s this common thread that flows through it and it all sounds like the same record because it was all written from the same sense of path.

What was the reason behind the title?
It’s just the title I had the whole time. I would wake up in the morning, we’d start rehearsal at noon I was living with my brother-in-law down in skid row, I was really cool, and I thought it was great.  For me to come from a semi-luxurious lifestyle and go live amongst the homeless people and make a record seemed to make perfect sense to me.  My wife wasn’t thrilled that I was endangering my life on a daily basis or having to pay people to watch my car, but for me coming from that and coming back full circle, (I grew up in a real rough area of South Chicago), you’ve really got to dig deep to find anybody that will tell you something honest and who better than a homeless person, what have they got to loose?  So I immersed myself in all this garbage, I had the title, it was a kind of dualistic thing, Life Begins Again was obviously the song I had written but life begins again kind of musically and as another musical cycle for me and that’s kind of what it is.  The next record may be called It Goes On and On and On or something.  It was just something I had the whole time.  People really want complicated answers to stuff but I really didn’t think about it that much.  If it sounded good and made sense it went on the record, if it sounded clumpy and I wasn’t into it, then it didn’t. 

A year ago you moved from Chicago, where you grew up, to LA. A lot of musicians move to LA at the beginning of their career to make a name for themselves but you were established, so why that move?
It was probably the most transitional period of my life that I’ve ever really experienced.  My father died in 1996 and that was kind of the beginning of the end for me.  My father was a super important part of my life, whether we got along or not, because we really didn’t get on.  After he died was when the drugs and escapism started for me.  I just really didn’t see the importance of being in Smashing Pumpkin after my father died.  A lot of people don’t know that but that had a lot to do with it.  My own demons didn’t help that was the beginning of the self-destructive.

At the beginning of the Complex record my mother was in a home, she had suffered from Alzheimer’s for about 10 years, and had just had it.  I knew my mother so well, when I saw the look on her face I knew she was ready to check out.  So when I was writing the album, and even before I was writing the record, all this stuff happened to me.  I’m a believer in that you’ll only get as many kids as you can raise and you’ll only get as much as you can handle.  That’s a beautiful thing of the cosmos, if you get a bunch of crap late in your life, it’s only because you can handle it and I’ve come to believe this.  So my mother died.  I was trying to put this record together. I was selling my house in Chicago where I’d lived for 40 years and moving to California to be in this new band.  It was a big, big roll of the dice, it was huge.  I didn’t even know if this band was going to stay, I didn’t even know if I had a band, it was just this whole thing of vision and will power and not taking no for an answer no matter who’s saying it, just saying this has got to happen and I’m going to make it happen.  Now I’ve got these incredible opportunities, surrounded by incredible musicians, incredible camaraderie from everybody around me.  I found that LA, although it’s not my favourite place to live but as far as the musical support group, it’s great. 

Your daughter would have been one when you made that move.
Yeah, she needs to know that everything is going to be all right and I thought that was a good way to tell her.  Don’t listen to people who are paranoid, lets make this fun, lets make this another adventure and see what we can make of it.  I’m glad I did it because it’s been a tremendous success.  If you put good things out there, good things will happen to you.  I’ve been in LA for a year, the records doing fine, I’m not making any money out of it, but I’m doing OK, I have money now The Pumpkins  are getting back together which is like a dream come true for me.  Two years ago I would have said no, there’s no way I’m getting on stage and pretending to have a good time, I know what that feels like, I don’t have any interest in doing that.  Right now the reason I know its going to be cool is that I’m happy about it, so if I can be genuinely happy about it, people will pick up on it.

You’ve just done a series of clinics for Yamaha, how do you find doing this type of work?
At first I found them a little bit of a bummer because I don’t consider myself a clinician, I’m just somebody who plays music and I’m glad people are interested in seeing me but I’m not into the competitive aspect of clinics.  But I think it’s been another thing that I needed to do to get over that type of fear.  Everybody, no matter what they’re doing, no matter how much confidence they seem to carry with them, they always have that “am I good enough” and for me it was an eye opener to see if I could really pull this off on my own and I have things to say that I think people should know.  For that, the talking more than the playing.  If people want to hear me play they can go and listen to a song, that’s no big deal, but for me to say “this is important, if you don’t learn anything else today, learn to trust yourself, learn to be honest with yourself, learn to not be ashamed of what you’re doing at any point because there’s nothing to be ashamed of”.  For kids to hear that from somebody like me., who’s really had their bag yanked out from under them, the experiences I have had, the trials and tribulations I’ve gone through, for me to come out and be positive and say hey life will give you only what you can handle, you better be careful how strong you make yourself because there’s going to be a whole bag of crap  piled on your back.  I think that’s cool and I think there’s a reason why I’m here doing it. 

Final question, what’s in the plans for the band and yourself?
We have done a host of dates and did thee V Festivals here in England.  We are playing shows in London, Dublin, and Amsterdam, pop, which is going to be huge for the Complex.  I’m really in the moment right now.  I’m not really looking ahead to the Pumpkin reunion right now, I’ve got a meeting with Billy when I go home to talk a little about it but I’m really immersed in the Complex right now and I’m really, really trying to make this thing work.  For me whether it works financially or not, I just want it to work so I can do it for the rest of my life.  Its like Jeff Beck, to be able to put those records out is just so important.  For me to have a hand in that type of music is just really cool.

Interview by Mike Dolbear