carol k on hal blaine...

 Carol K praises Hal in Modern Drummer, March 1994

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Hal Blaine was another one of Carol's favorites. "I met Hal in 1959." says Carol, "a year after I met Earl. Hal had a different feel, but he had a sparkle too. He could lay it down and was a little more inventive with certain licks. He also had a different sound-very hard with very hard backbeats. You always knew where the beat was. His drums were tuned tighter and higher. And he did different types of fills-8th and 16th notes and quarter-note triplets with a lot of quarter-note fills.

"Hal was the first to use a bank of drums." Carol recalls. "I walked into Goldstar Studios once, and saw him with a ton of drums. I kidded him, saying, 'Why don't you play a tune on those things?' So he did. He showed me, all right. After Hal, everyone got banks of drums."

Carol talks about doing Beach Boy dates with Hal Blaine. "We played together on 'Help Me Rhonda,' 'Good Vibrations,' 'California Girls,' 'Sloop John B,' 'God Only Knows,' 'Wouldn't It Be Nice?,' and several others. And for most of those recordings, we had to gear ourselves for marathon sessions, because Brian Wilson worked in a similar manner as Phil Spector- doing things over and over. There would be twenty or thirty takes of each song--which got boring. Hal would do crossword puzzles-but his ear was always cocked to the speaker to listen to the play-back."

Carol also remembers Hal Blaine's inventiveness: "One day, a tune didn't click. Hal finally got a set of spoons and played them. That worked, and the song was a big hit!"