Here’s a cool little moment from the first Tower of Power album, East Bay Grease, where drummer David Garibaldi exchanges 2‑bar solos with guitarist Willy Fulton at the end of track 3, “The Price.”
If you want even more David Garibaldi, he released a collection of sheet music about four years ago: drum transcriptions he made himself to show off his playing with Tower of Power. I quite like it when drummers take a look at their own playing — it’s invariably the best breakdown you’ll get of their work. I have the book myself, and it’s a great look at some very busy, dense funk drumming. Garibaldi has some nutty drum parts.
East Bay Grease is a really interesting album that sounds nothing like any other TOP record, both in songwriting and production. You can tell it came out at the tail end of the James Brown era, when funk sounded more like R&B and soul than the very dry, Steely Dan-style sound that eventually took over the ’70s. While there are a lot of fun moments on East Bay Grease, many of the tunes tend to devolve into drawn-out jams. You can tell it was the first shot at a record. The big exception is the closer, “Sparkling in the Sand” — a pensive, forlorn tune driven by Skip Mesquite’s flute.
Anyhoo, there are some neat moves on this little solo section from “The Price”: a lot of ghost notes, hi-hat barks, and nimble tom work. The most exciting fill is perhaps in the 6th line — I included the stickings so you’d know how to play it. The secret is a left-hand paradiddle-diddle starting on beat 4:
Also involving paradiddle-diddles are the 32nd notes that we see at the start of the second page:
Take note of the China cymbal; with the album being released in 1970, this is a pretty early use of a China cymbal in popular music. One of the earliest I can think of outside of jazz, in fact. The China cymbal seems to have had a dip in popularity in the middle of the 20th century — maybe a discussion for another time.
