Roger Linn interview transcript, Part 1

An in-depth conversation with the drum machine legend

If you’re going to write a book about drum machines, then one of the most important people you could possibly interview is Roger Linn. His drum machines changed the landscape of popular music during the Eighties, Nineties, and beyond. They also reinvented the field of music technology, anticipating and making possible many of the composing and recording techniques we now take for granted.

Linn Electronics enjoyed a short, sometimes stormy, but impossibly influential run from the end of the Seventies to the mid-Eighties. The iconic LM-1 drum machine changed the game by using real drum sounds. Prince swore by it. Mainstream pop music embraced it. New wave built many of its foundations on it. The follow-up, the LinnDrum, became even more widely adopted: this is the sound you grew up with if you’re a child of the Eighties (or perhaps even the child of one of those children). And while the Linn 9000 eventually bankrupted Linn’s company, it correctly predicted the day when musicians would demand an all-in-one, do-everything box. When Linn later took this idea to Akai, the MPC series demonstrated his foresight.

Roger was incredibly gracious and generous with his time, and consented to multiple interviews for Dancing to the Drum Machine, my new book from Bloomsbury. This is a fairly complete transcript of our first interview, which took place in September 2020. 

We spoke via Zoom, and Roger was relaxed and reflective on the back deck of his California home. No single conversation could cover all of his contributions to music, but this one does hit many of the high points of his illustrious career. This is the first half of that initial interview, which traces Linn’s career path (roughly) through the introduction of the LinnDrum.

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There’s an interview with Tom Oberheim, who I know is a friend of yours, that I read not long ago. He said something that struck me: we tend to think of music technology as something that is driven by the needs of musicians. But he said in the 1960s and 1970s, when you guys were starting out, that technology was actually more driven by the interests of the people making this stuff, than by the musicians. 

Well, I think how I interpret that is that there were a bunch of small, creative companies at that time—in the Seventies, anyways, ‘cause Tom’s a little bit older than I am. I came in in ‘79 with my company, but there was a community of people, and they were all part of small companies. We were all floundering, but the technology was so new, that you could flounder and still be relatively successful. It hadn’t become a commodity business yet. 

Shortly after that, the Japanese companies came in, but I would say they wouldn’t come in just to steal ideas. They came in with their own ideas, and some very good ones. Eventually, some people came in because they saw a financial opportunity. The good news is that it brought down the prices for a lot of younger musicians, and the bad news is it took away a lot of the income from some of the founding companies. That’s just something that normally happens as the industry matures. 

The nice thing about music products is that the music is so individual, that there still is space for small makers like me, or Tom, or those like that.

I’ve read that your first real music tech gig came with the all-girl rock band Fanny.

Well, it wasn’t so much a gig. I was in high school at the time, and I had a friend who happened to know the road manager for Fanny. He told the road manager about this modification I had made to a stompbox—a guitar pedal. It made it sound much better, and he was very excited about it. He was a young, budding guitar player, my friend was. He told the road manager, the road manager told the guitar player in the group Fanny, and she said, “I’d like to see this.” It was just largely due to the serendipity that the chemistry was just rolling up in LA, particularly in Hollywood. 

At one point after school, I went up and showed it to her, and she was very excited, so it was just kind of a lucky coincidence. It was nice for me. It certainly was  a great acknowledgement, and all I had done, was I took an existing pedal and added some circuitry to it that I had gotten from another pedal to make it sound better. It kinda like the same thing as putting one pedal before another in your change of pedal effects, and I just stuck them into one box that made them sound better because it was the right combination of things. It was an early thing, an early idea, but I knew what I wanted to hear and what would sound good. I think that that gave perhaps a sound that was more current than what some of the makers were doing. 

I also heard that this stomp box didn't quite work out as planned.

Well, the story was that Fanny was playing some place. And I had put the circuits together, but I didn’t know anything about the reliability that’s required. So the story is they were playing a concert once, and she stepped on one of the buttons of the pedal. All these pedals, they have buttons, and you step on it, it changes the sound. Well, all of a sudden, apparently the radio station came through or something. (He grimaces)

And this would have been—

This would’ve been early seventies. I was born in ‘55, and so by the time I was probably sixteen or seventeen. So yeah, probably ‘71, ‘72.

To go back to the Tom Oberheim quote, though—unlike some of the people who were part of this music tech movement in the Sixties and Seventies, you actually were a musician.

Well, I was a musician, but one of many. As a guitar player, I wasn’t that great, and I did some music production. I did some engineering, and also I had some work—because I had bought an early computer, and I had been learning about programming and about hardware, and so I knew a little bit of this—so I had a gig writing software here and there. 

So you kinda combine it all together, and it’s like one leg in technology, one leg in music. I think it’s a particular advantage when you have a foot in each of two worlds. It allows you to combine those things into the optimum solution whereas companies have one guy in technology, one guy in music. They don’t know how to talk to each other, and they end up with something that doesn’t meet the needs of either one. 

Do you remember the first drum machine that you came across?

Well, I remember I had some Roland drum machine. I worked with this musician, Leon Russell, who was popular at the time, and he had a drum machine that he would use. He would record the tracks that were never included in the mix. That would allow him to keep the time steady enough so that he could wipe off the drummer and replace the drummer if he needed to, whereas if you cut the track with all human musicians and no drum machine, if the drummer happens to speed up or slow down, then if you wanted to wipe your drums and put another drummer on, the drummer has to speed up or slow down the same way. You don’t want that. You want a steady, very reliable drummer. 

Leon used to cut tracks with the drum machine, and one of them—I don’t remember what the model number—it was intended to sit up on top of a piano or keyboard. It was long and wide, and it had a little touch bar to start and stop it, a metal round bar that was maybe about four or five inches wide, but I don’t know what the model name was. It had a pretty good sound. [Editor’s note: Most likely, this was the Roland TR-77, a preset model that debuted shortly before the company’s first programmable machines.]

So what was it about this drum machine that made you decide—I assume—that you could improve it?

Well, I’ve always been driven by ideas, and this is something I wanted to do. Once I got my first computer, which I got when I was probably nineteen or twenty and was a very early time for personal computers. I wanted to apply it to music. So there were all kinds of programs I was writing, and one of them I wanted to make was a drum machine. The phrase, of course, is, “Necessity is the mother of invention,” and I just wanted to have one. Selling them was a byproduct. All of a sudden, I’d get these calls from famous musicians who I would have killed just to get an audition with. I was a guitar player. I’d say, “Well, you know I don’t do this. I’m just a guitar player. I’m a songwriter.” They’d say, “Yeah, yeah, that’s fine. What about this drum machine thing?” 

Eventually I got the message: that I had a better chance of success in combining my music and technology skills, and that was better than becoming a guitar player. There were some great players, much better than I was. It took me a while to remove that ego identification, but I finally did.    

So before the LM-1 even debuted, you had established a pretty good word-of-mouth network among fellow musicians.

The word spread like wildfire, and Leon Russell, who I worked with, was very interested. I came up, showed it to him once. I had this one prototype. Then Herbie Hancock became customer number two. Stevie Wonder was maybe number four. Daryl Dragon [the “Captain” of the husband-wife pop duo The Captain & Tennille] was, I think, number five. I don’t remember who they were, but out of those first drum machines, I only made five hundred. And the owners were the who’s who of the music business. I don’t remember who else, but it’s just that it was something they wanted. They didn’t want a guitar player like me. They wanted to have this cool drum machine.” 

The Linn LM-1 Drum Computer. Image from Rogerlinndesign.com

I would go and show it to people, and they’d press a button, and they’d hear a recording of a snare drum, something before this time, that could only happen if they rolled tape. It just seemed like magic. It’s like that quote from Arthur C. Clarke: “Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic.” If you could get in there early on and do something that still seems like magic, it was great because people would whip out their checkbooks. But, you know, if you did that ten years later, people would go, “Sampling.” I mean, I’ve done that, yeah.

One of the guys who was exploring this field at the same time as you was Roger Nichols, who built the Wendel drum programming system for Steely Dan. Did you guys cross paths in those days?

Well you know, Roger was a friend of mine, and we were actually developing concurrently. What’s even funnier is we had the same exact computer, and there was this little computer store in Studio City, a suburb of Los Angeles, called Computer Power and Light. C-O-M-P-A-L was their acronym, and so they had a model called the COMPAL 80, based on the Intel 88 Processor. This is one of the early, personal computers, and Roger and I had both bought our computers from the same store. We were both getting into software, and I knew him, but not well—we’d see each other occasionally. We both really dug the fact we were both into the same thing, and he had a slightly different purpose.

Wendel, his drum machine, was mostly a connection to the computer. It was a sound generator, and they would play the sounds back. But he had better quality. He used a twelve-bit audio converter, whereas I was using the eight-bit. He was also using a higher sampling rate, but he wasn’t thinking at the time so much about making a product to sell and to make copies of, but rather was just thinking of something to use on the Steely Dan records. Of course, Rogers Nichols had impeccable standards and sound quality. 

Anyway, he made a programming system, so he could make a repeating beat. The musician would just record bells or cymbals on top of that, but when they did that record “Hey Nineteen,” it sounded really very good. It was a little bit regular compared to the drummers Steely Dan had used, but it worked great for the sound, I found. 

Can you walk me through the process of building the LM-1?

My first prototype was just a sound generator board from a Roland drum machine, that I thought had a good sound, wired up to my computer. I wrote a program where you program the beats on the screen, and with its steps it was able to create great beats. It would just play Roland drum-generated sounds. Then I recognized it had to sound better, and I wasn’t quite sure how. 

I’ve heard that your friend Steve Porcaro, the keyboardist from Toto, made a suggestion about using digital samples for the sounds.

Steve definitely did suggest that, because I think—well, there were a few things happening at the time. There was the digital tape recorder from 3M, a collaboration with the BBC. There was another one from Sony, so the concept of storing sound on tapes as numbers had been established. The only problem was that you can’t have a bunch of tape rolling inside the drum machine. In the event, of course, it has a high expense memory. I don’t know exactly what the order of events were. 

I know Steve at one point had talked about it, because he talked to some people at Roland who had the idea of having some samples at the start of a sound, then synthesis after that, because often at the start of a sound, you hear the realism in sound. But then again, it’s hard to say because as I recall, I think the first two sample products were my drum machine and the Fairlight, their synthesizer. I’m not exactly sure on the order of events, but I know Steve was a dear friend and always had great ideas and always was very much in touch with both music and technology, so we connected real well. 

But at any rate, I think the thing that made sampling and sample playback possible and affordable rather than at the expense of $35,000 Fairlight sampling playback machine—or later on, the Emulator for $5,000—was the idea that you didn’t need to sample that much. If you don’t sample the whole drumbeat, but instead sample once instance of a bass drum, one of a snare drum, one of a hi-hat, and a few other drums, you can actually get away with sampling. I think that was a big innovation for drum machines. 

Many people think they know whose drums are sampled on the LM-1. I’ve had people tell me, confidently, that they’re Steve Gadd’s drums, or Jeff Porcaro’s, or any of a number of well-known session pros. But the guy who created most of the sounds is the session drummer Art Wood.

Well, it’s mostly because Art is lifelong, dear friend of mine. We had been in bands together in high school, and also we were housemates for a while, so it was just convenience, really. The other thing too is from the engineering standpoint, there isn’t a whole lot of difference between Jefferey Porcaro hitting a snare drum once and Art Wood hitting a snare drum once. In fact, I could hit a snare drum once. The purpose of the drummer was mostly just to tune the drum to make it sound good. For example, striking a rim shot, you gotta do it right, but it didn’t take extraordinary skill to strike a drum once. Some of the sessions were kinda funny. Art would come in, strike it once, and I’d say, “Thank you very much. We’ll call you.” 

Where did you guys record these drum sounds?

In my closet. In my closet in my hallway in my home in Hollywood.

Really?

Yeah, the only requirement is they had to be in a different room than where I had my mixer and my speakers, so I could hear it without hearing the snare drum or the drum without being played. It doesn’t take a lot. You know, in the ambience of the sound, you can trim that off anyway because you didn’t have much sample time to deal with, so you wanted to throw in a flat sound. You could always add ambience later, but it cost us twice as much to put that ambience in wrong, so why do you wanna [do that]? 

Still, it must have been challenging to work around memory limitations.

It’s going to be very expensive. The first drum machine [the LM-1] that had no cymbals was $5,000. Now in all fairness, a lot of that is due to the fact that I didn’t want to think about production engineering or how to do quantity advice for parts and to set up for manufacturing and all that stuff. I was just making these things at my house with a few out-of-work musician friends. 

That’s part of it, but the other thing, too, is that I thought, “Well, it’s going to cost about $5,000 to sell this thing with no cymbals.” Nobody uses a ride cymbal in rock music. They use a hi-hat, and people only use a crash occasionally, and you could overdub that. I thought, “What’s the point?” 

And even a hi-hat--an open hi-hat—was taking too long, so what I did on the original drum machine is I just conserved memory. I had Art just use mallets to do a cymbal roll on the hi-hat, so we had this continuous “shhhhh,” and I just looped that and had a little envelope generator cutting a little piece of it out. You had a little hi-hat decay slider, and all that was doing was the decay on the envelope generator making a hi-hat sound.

One of the great innovations of the LM-1 is the quantization feature, which corrects your timing. I’ve heard that this was actually a happy accident.

Not only was sample memory expensive, but memory memory was expensive--it’s what they call ram memory—into which I had to store the actual drum beat data. I had to compress, I had to hold I think it was 64 drum beats—49 drum beats, that’s what it was—in memory, and that’s the user’s drum beats. So I had to squeeze their information in as little space as possible. So I thought the vast majority of drum beats are just sixteenth notes or eighth notes, and if you want to have a little bit of a swing feel, you can just delay every other sixteenth note. So I thought, “Why not just store the vast majority of drum beats in sixteenth notes, and that way, it takes up a whole lot less space than for example storing every single piece, every sixth of a quarter note or something like that.” 

I did that, and originally the drum machine had a step time programming system. When I first showed the early prototype to Stevie Wonder, I saw how hard it was for him to work in step time, and I thought, “Well, this is stupid.” Real musicians should be able to play their music in real time, and the machine should be able to accept their music in real time, which is what they already know. They don’t have to do a translation later in their mind that way. So I wanted to do real time play, and what happened was since I only was only storing sixteenth notes in the memory, and you would play the buttons in time to a metronome, a looping metronome with a two part beat—so what happened was it had to store in a sixteenth note, and it would store it in the sixteenth note that’s closest to you actually played it.  What happened was when it would loop back around, it would correct your timing errors, and it was a fortuitous coincidence. 

You designed the LM-1 as a songwriter’s tool. But fairly quickly, it started showing up on records—and some major hits. Was that a surprise?

Well, yes. Surprise is kind of the magic word for all this. You know I used to make something people thought was cool and say, “Can I have one?” and all of a sudden, I’d put together a little company to make it. I made it, and I didn’t know what people wanted to do with it. 

I thought maybe they’d use it for demos, then they ended up using it on recordings, which was a double-edged sword. It was very nice to hear it, but they would use it in such robotic ways that I was a little bit sometimes disappointed—because they didn’t use the swing feature very well. It wasn’t really until hip hop came along did it really start to get into beats that started to sound a little more human, more lively, more realistic. 

But you know, the first big hit of the LM 1—my first drum machine--was an English band, the Human League. They had this song called “Don’t You Want Me.” That was just as robotic as possible, and I thought, “God, guys. Can’t you just use a little bit of a shuffle feature? Or some dynamics?” But instead it was just tt-tt-tt-tt-tt-tt. It’s kind of a waste, but as I’ve often said in other interviews, “You can make the brush, and the painter decides what to paint with it.” At the time, it was the style to make things as robotic as possible, and the singer is what gives it the humanity.  

Actually, the one that probably had the most impact was an Elton John song called “Nobody Wins.” That was programmed by Jefferey Porcaro. It was great because Jeff is one of the greatest drummers of my era, and before that time, a lot of the time, it was not the drummer who programmed the drum machine. There were all these bands where there was always the one sorta sexy singer and the one nerd who did everything else, and it was often that it was the nerd who did everything else that would program the instrument in loop and would program a few fills. The result sounded something like, [he mimics a robotic drum fill]. You know, a good drummer responds to the music. The drum machine couldn’t respond to the music if its—well, it doesn’t have a life, but if its life depended on it. 

But that was the style of the day, all these robotic sequences and all this sorta stuff. Although there was still a lot of live playing in the 80s, there wasn’t a whole lot of reaction coming from the drummer. The drummer just did his sorta Steady Eddie, and that was it.

Obviously, other people in the industry quickly paid attention to the success of the LM-1.

I debuted the LM-1 in 79, then it shipped the early units in early 80. It was certainly the first sampling drum machine, but my understanding is it—if I’m correct—that it shared the introduction to sampling with the Fairlight. Other sampling devices came later.  Then I know Tom [Oberheim] had his DMX drum machine, and Dave Smith had his drum machine [the Sequential Circuits Drumtrax]. Those both came from within maybe a year or two after my drum machine. 

In fact, when I first released my drum machine, Tom Oberheim, or somebody from Oberheim, called me up and said, “Would you like to talk to us about maybe collaborating?” So I went over there and visited them, but I was a cocky, young may 24-year-old, and I thought, “Pfft, I can do better than this.” I decided to do it myself, and I think in retrospect, Tom is just such a gentleman that it was his way of being able to say he offered first. Then when they made their own thing, it wasn’t like they were just stepping on me because they were making largely copycat products, as was Dave. 

They were making yet another programmed drum machine, but the LM-1 had two innovations: one, it sampled sounds. It was not the first programmable drum machine —I believe before that, Roland had had a drum machine, I think it was called the CR-78, it had this sorta dumb, I’m sorry, way of implementing real-time programming. What they did is they had such solid resolution—it was 12 increments per quarter note and real time programming—so even if you played it right, it would come back wrong. It was sorta reversed timing. But before that, there was a company called PAIA, a gentleman named John Simonton. It’s the name of a small town in Hawaii; it’s where he got it from. He had made this home kit drum machine [the PAIA Programmable Drum Set] that you could program into patterns with little touch buttons. It was a kit you could build very cheaply, and I think that was the first actual programmable drum machine. 

But I think what a lot of people would say, what I added to the mix, was the first intuitive system of programming by the introduction of time correction, or what is now called quantize and shuffle, and swing and loop recording, which is very common now as well. You put all those things together, and people would immediately understand, and it was easy to make beats, if you actually had musical talent. 

Now, if you didn’t have musical talent, the step time was better, and I incorporated step time into the software of my drum machine. But I think more people liked it for the real-time recording. The 808, that was Roland’s attempt. And at that time I had met Mr. Kakehashi, the founder of Roland, and it was important for him to not just wipe out young, pre-emptive companies, but to do something in their own Roland way and to allow those companies to succeed and to exist in the marketplace. He was a great guy, and I ended up working with him later for a couple of years in the Nineties. 

But Roland had this idea about step programming, because they thought there were a lot of musicians who don’t have the programming and real-time playing skill, and it’s easier for them to turn notes on and off from different switches. Now, someone that has musical skill, I would say it’s unnecessary, but for someone who can’t play in real time, it’s a good way to be able to play beats. They put some dynamics in it. They allowed you to have each note be soft or loud, and that helped a lot. So, that model [the 808] has sustained to this day, and not only that, but a synthesis, of course, wasn’t replaced by sampling. It was for a while, but then it came back big time, because people enjoyed it. So it turns out that while there were good ideas in my version of it, Roland had very innovative and very strong ideas early on, and both ideas have survived. Kudos to Roland for that.

At some point not long afterward, you developed a follow-up to the LM-1, the LinnDrum. What prompted that product?

Actually, it mostly came from a friend of mine named Bob Easton. Shortly after I released my first drum machine, through some friends I knew, I met a guy named Bob Easton, who was a very bright engineer and had his own company at the time called 360 Systems. He later made an early sampling keyboard, and at the time, he had made a guitar to control voltage converters. He was an excellent engineer designer but also entrepreneurial. 

Anyway, we met, and he said, “You know, I’ve got a factory down at my little office down in the Valley, and we’re running it about half capacity if you would like to manufacture your drum machines for you. That would allow you to put you at the next level.” So he did that for me, and he also was a great mentor for production engineering. So I knew how to make a prototype, but I didn’t know how to make things reliable in the field. He taught me a lot about that, but he was also good at scaring me. He kept saying things like, “You better make a cheaper one quickly!” or “Other people will come in and wipe you out!” 

It was good. He built a fire under my butt, and I worked on making a cheaper one. He helped me in the engineering of that as well. 

Whose sounds are on the LinnDrum? Are they still Art Wood’s drums?

It was still mostly Art, but then by that time, some other people had helped me with some sounds, so a few other sounds got in there. Really, it was mostly Art. But I realized that it would be nice to get some other drums there too, so I created a policy that if you wanted to get your own sound in an LM-1, or later in the LinnDrum, just send me in a tape, and out of the goodness of my heart, I’ll create chips of it for free—on the condition that I add the sounds in my library to sell to other people. 

How many people took you up on that offer?

There were a few. I remember in the early days once, Ian Anderson of the English band Jethro Tull came in, and he wanted all these sounds of traditional English drums. Then I think Steve Winwood came and visited once. He was in town in L.A., and I don’t remember if he provided sounds, if he just wanted one of the drum machines. Also, Daryl Dragon, one of the early LM-1 owners of the Captain & Tennille, he was really a very talented musician that really loved technology, and he had a very well appointed studio called Rumbo Recorders. He had all the latest gear, and he would do his productions there. So did some other [sounds] as well. He provided for me, what he considered the perfect snare drum, and I offered that as a chip, a replacement chip in the LinnDrum. 

Do you remember who did what sounds on the LinnDrum?

It’s hard to remember actually, but I think all the major sounds, the major bass drum and snare drum and hi-hat, were all made by Art. So it was really Art on all those records. Even like I say--and Art is a very talented drummer by the way, and I really love being in bands with him because he was so good—but it is also true that one strike is not what makes Art a great drummer. But I’m not denigrating his skill in striking it once. It’s just that it doesn't take a Steve Gadd or Jeff Porcaro to do that one strike. Art also always had very good-sounding drums too, and he was great, so helpful. 

The other thing too is--it’s kinda funny. I remember once going to--I knew Bruce Springsteen’s drummer, and he had invited me to come to one of their shows in L.A. Max Weinberg, very nice guy by the way, he told me a story that he had a LinnDrum, and Max at this point, I think, was maybe getting a little bit of trouble with his hands with arthritis, early signs like this. He wasn’t able to hit the drums as hard, so Bruce Springsteen, of course, he would do anything before he changed drummers or any musicians. He’s the world’s kindest gentleman, right? 

Many people have said the same thing, but what they did is they found out that in these big arenas, you hit a drum, it’s like hitting cardboard. Max couldn’t hit it harder. I think what it was was in these stadiums, you mic a snare drum, and you’d just get a bunch of cardboard sound. So they found a solution. On the LinnDrum, there were five trigger inputs in the back of the unit, so they disconnected a little contact mic that was taped onto the snare drum onto one of the trigger inputs, and whenever he hit the LinnDrum, it would make the snare drum’s big, fat, snare drum sound. 

They loved this, but the funny thing was that these trigger inputs were not dynamic. Anything coming would give one snare drum at the same volume, so it was kinda funny. And by the way, I should mention the circuit for the trigger input was designed by Bob Easton, an engineer who gave me so much help. It was a wonderful circuit that he had used to detect a guitar pick in his early guitar synthesizers, and it was the genus circuit that rejected all background noise, comparing the transient to the background noise. It could only measure how much something changed from what was there before and how quickly. Brilliant circuit, but at any rate, the circuit worked very reliably. 

So there I am, listening to the concert—Bruce Springsteen—and the entire night through, all I heard was Art’s snare drum recording. [He imitates a big snare drum sound.] But it worked! You know, it was a very fine sound.

Bruce Springsteen never used a drum machine because he had Max Weinberg, but Max Weinberg got his drum sound from the drum machine. (Laughs)

One of the subplots of this book is the effort by various musicians’ unions to fight the use of drum machines, just as they fought synthesizers.

Oh yeah. The Musicians' Union was discussing the idea of blocking drum machines on recordings for a while. They never did it. They saw that this was the future. You know, you had synthesizer players just coming in and pressing one key and replacing five string players that would play the one note. 

Drummers were disturbed by it. Jeff Porcaro, I have to say—although he was someone I previously saw as a god of drumming, and somebody who knows drummers, obviously—we always had a little bit of tension because I was the guy making the thing that replaced drummers in some people’s minds, and it rubbed him the wrong way sometimes. I have to admit, I was just a cocky, 24, 25 year old at the time, and I didn’t help things. I wasn’t particularly sensitive at the time, and so it’s my fault for this. 

For example, I placed an ad in Billboard Magazine, and it showed a picture of the LM-1 drum machine, and it said, “The hit record,” and it showed “Nobody Wins,” the Elton John song. Then it said the drummer on the hit record, and it showed a picture of the LM1. Jeff got pissed and wanted me to retract it. Actually, I did an article after that, and I said, “I’m so sorry about that. It was tongue-in-cheek. Obviously, the LM-1 was not the drummer on the record. Jeff Porcaro was the drummer on the record.” [Editor’s note: Jeff Porcaro programmed the drum machine on “Nobody Wins,” the first hit that used the LM-1.]

I think that sometimes, drummers would be afraid of it and see it as being replaced, and in some cases they did. It was a sort of a regular beat-type drummer who was more apt to be replaced. Someone like Jeff Porcaro could never be replaced, or Jack DeJohnette or Max Roach. These guys had become my drum heroes of the day.

But I think there were many drummers, also, who’ve gotten more work because they have bought a drum machine, showed up at the gig, and the artist would say, “What can you do?” “Well, I can give you metal drums, I can give you electronic syndrums. I can give you a LinnDrum. What do you want? I can give you percussion.” 

They recognized the drummer still has to create the drum part, and after a while, the records that were just picking a drum beat and pressing play, like Bruce Hornsby did in a lot of his records, people after a while said, “Well, you know what? If you’re gonna use a drum machine, at least program the damn thing, you know?” You had a drummer put the parts in. And by the way, I love what Bruce Hornsby did. It was a great example, but at the same time I wish he had programmed a few fills or something, you know?

Check back for Part 2 of this Roger Linn interview next week! And while you’re at it, check out A Ghost in the Mall by Young Mister Grace—a concept album about growing up Eighties that features lots of vintage beatbox sounds (including, of course, the LM-1 and LinnDrum)!