The Wreckage

Hit So Hard by Patty Schemel, and why drummers in 90 rock bands had it so rough

Reading Festival 1994. Courtney saw me side-stage and said in the mic, “John Strohm, bring me a cigarette.” So I lit a cigarette and walked it out to her mid-set.

I’m not sure why I love reading addiction memoirs. I’ve read a ton of them, mostly by famous musicians. Why do so many musicians struggle with addiction? Is it in the wiring of the creative mind, or are we fueled by trauma? I haven’t found the answer in the pages of these memoirs, but I have learned a fair amount about addiction. There are definitely repeating patterns from story to story.

My only addiction, since around age 16, is coffee. I’m a full-on junkie when it comes to morning caffeine…but never after 1:00 PM because I like to sleep well at night. I might have an Arnold Palmer with lunch but oh fuck it…I’m no addict. I’ve just enjoyed my morning coffee for…over 40 years.

Maybe I love the memoirs because I’ve been part of communities where it’s socially acceptable to do hard drugs in the open. Not me, but you know…other people. I know I’m not an addict because I had every opportunity to become an addict, even encouragement to become an addict. On one brief 90s Lemonheads run of dates a guy who wasn’t in the crew very long tried multiple times to peer pressure me into doing heroin. Like, “It’d be so great to hang out with you…like, REALLY hang out with you…you owe it to yourself to experience it.”

That guy was from Seattle, just like Patty Schemel. Just like the great Mark Lanigan of The Screaming Trees (RIP) who wrote the most brutal addiction memoir I’ve ever read, Sing Backwards and Weep. Just like Layne Staley of Alice In Chains, who was so isolated in his addiction at the end of his short life that his dead body went undiscovered, rotting in his apartment for two weeks. Those were some of Schemel’s music scene buddies. I met Schemel and Courtney and a ton of people this book. Most of them did lots of drugs.

If you love these sorts of books - addiction stories, rock stories - you’ll love Hit So Hard. Schemel was born into a recovery community and started getting wasted at 12. She lived an absolutely incredible life as a member of an iconic band that was huge in its day…and by her own admission she was completely out of her mind nearly the entire time. It’s ultimately an uplifting read. She’s a likable character, and she lands well in the end. She gets sober, plays music for fun, starts a professional dog-walking business, then happily marries her girlfriend and becomes a mother of a daughter. Her insights on addiction in the last chapter are incredibly clear-eyed, but that is not what I’m here to write about. I’m here to write about how record producers used to fire drummers in bands. Like, all the time. It was a thing.

Schemel’s addiction finally goes completely off the rails when she is fired from recording drums on Hole’s third album, Celebrity Skin. Producer Michael Beinhorn, a member of Bill Laswell’s band Material in New York in the late 70s who produced Red Hot Chili Peppers, Soundgarden, and Marilyn Manson. Beinhorn made what Schemel considers perfunctory and insincere efforts to initially include her in the recording, but he quickly dismissed her and brought in a session guy - literally the guy who plays drums for Journey. She took it VERY hard.

She wasn’t asked to leave the band; the band expected her to come back and do the tour. The studio replacement led to a downward spiral that ended with Schemel losing everything and living on the street. It’s grim. Maybe it was bound to happen regardless, but it certainly seems like there’s a causal connection between her firing and rock bottom.

I can easily prove Patty Schemel was a “good enough” drummer to play on Celebrity Skin. I can prove it because she was deemed good enough to play on the breakout album Live Through This, produced by my old Boston pals Paul Kolderie and Sean Slade. I can prove it because the evidence is there on the album - her feel is perfect. Check out Doll Parts:

Listen to the way it builds at the end - her drumming is great for this track. Her firing on Celebrity Skin seems especially cruel because the session drummer played the exact parts she wrote. Drum parts don’t always garner writing credit or publishing interests but at times they should. There’s some dispute over who came up with the opening drum fill in Smells Like Teen Spirit, but it is clearly part of the song, not just the arrangement. Schemel was replaced, I assume, because the sound of alternative rock changed in the few years between Live Through This and Celebrity Skin. Alternative radio became a hit format, driving many multi-million sellers in the height of the CD era. The feel is very different, and if you listen you can understand why Beinhorn made the call:

It sounds like a different band. It is a different band, with the amazing Mellisa Auf der Maur on bass, it’s a very powerful rhythm section. While Live Through This is noisy and rough around the edges, Celebrity Skin is almost slick. They hired a producer to get a result, and he did what he felt he had to do to get the result. Would the album have sold fewer than its 4 million copies with Schemel on drums, though? I assume the answer is yes, but I’m not sure.

I’ve seen the fallout when a band member is replaced in the studio. Producers can be brutal. I’ve discretely replaced a drummer’s performance before, at the insistence of the producer. Would my music career have gone any differently had I not given in to that pressure? Yes, if I’d handled that differently, I would be John Fogerty today. We had to act like it was life or death because we were all indulging the same fantasy that anyone would give a shit 30 years later. But in the case of Hole in its 90s prime, just as I write this essay, they were correct.

I encounter a lot of producers in my work these days, and some of the best insist on picking the players. It’s easier if it’s a solo artist and there are no hurt feelings. I’ve been in the studio when some of the best session players of all time, like Jay Bellerose and Kenny Aronoff, did their thing. It’s an amazing thing to witness a genius drummer at work. A track doesn’t work without a great feel. In rock music, or folk, Americana, country, punk, and metal, the feel starts with a great drum performance. You want to build on a great foundation. A substandard drum performance becomes more glaring the more you layer on top. And great drummers work fast, get it in one or two takes. An inexperienced studio drummer might take all day. Take it from me, an inexperienced studio drummer who has played on records.

These days this sort of heartbreak is more easily avoided. Recording technology has evolved to the point where you actually can polish a turd. You can easily move things around, quantize, use samples, use a grid. If Hole recorded Celebrity Skin today, Beinhorn could have had Schemel play the parts and then made them sound exactly like the dude from Journey. She probably would have been pissed, but she’d have played on the album and she wouldn’t have had to face the humiliation and disappointment of being replaced.

I don’t mean to pass judgment on anyone. The producer made a call, and the band went along with it. It’s harsh, but if it objectively meant making a better record, then it was probably the right decision. Nevertheless, I consider bands to be sacred - especially when it’s all kids who came up playing together in the basement or garage. It’s incredibly harsh for someone from the professional music business to assess a band that is pure and real, and decide somebody has to go. It makes me emotional just thinking about it in the abstract.

One time late in the Blake Babies’ run, we cut some demos with a big time producer from a major label, a Michael Beinhorn type. He told Freda very nonchalantly that he would replace her on the tracks if he produced our album. When we got back in our shitty, barely functioning van after the session we all said “fuck that guy.” We broke up anyway. But still, over 30 years on, fuck that guy. I’m so grateful we didn’t fall for his bullshit and make an album we’d all be embarrassed about - especially if it had been successful. Our cool little band, the opposite of an industry plant, lived and died under the radar.

I’ve drifted from my original topic, but I’ll leave you with this story. When Blake Babies recorded our first album in a real studio with a real producer, Freda had to miss a couple sessions for health reasons. “No problem,” I said. “I can play her parts and nobody will know the difference.” After all, I taught Freda to play the drums. Of course I could do it as well as she could!

Then I got fired by the producer. Gary Smith called me in to the control room at Fort Apache and said let’s just wait for Freda to come back. I literally couldn’t do it, I couldn’t get Freda’s feel, or play as consistently, evenly, and in-tempo as she could. It shocked me because I hadn’t considered that Freda was a better drummer than me. I had a drummer’s ego (any musician knows what I’m talking about). I played drums in The Lemonheads and countless hardcore bands - I was a good player! As it turns out, however, not as good as Freda. I now recognize that Freda is a fantastic drummer, generally better than I ever was despite my technical skills, and perfect for our band. I was too close to it to see it, but when I really had a chance to focus, it was obvious.

There’s an argument to be made that Patty Schemel was the best technical musician in Hole. The parts she wrote, the parts she played, are perfect for their time and place. The heartbreak she experienced from being fired is the final piece of evidence that Beinhorn did her dirty. He did what he felt he had to do, but it was his choice. It’s a tricky question: is history on his side?