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In his own parlance, Pete Thomas, the anchor of Elvis Costello's Attractions for a solid decade, is a bit of a "murgler": i.e. one who creeps mischievously about in hallways. The same goes for his approach behind a drum kit. You don't hear him bashing and flailing much in the rhythm bed beneath his boss. Instead, he's a sly dog of a drummer, driving home basic feels while injecting fire, slink and truth into Costello's witty songfest. Clearly this is one of rock's great unsung groovers.
Thomas is also quick to quip or throw sobriety into disarray. He is antsy if he can't fall into a groove with his sticks on the furniture, and he's likely to snatch the questions out of an interviewer's hand or otherwise behave like a boy with a problem. "Pete Thomas on the road," he cackles with a music-tabloid snarl, "boozing, drinking, wenching and rockin'. The truth about the greatest rock 'n' roll band in the world!
"Essentially, the whole drumming thing is about getting as in shape as possible for that two hours," he reveals. "No sex, no wanking. It's the legs, mate. It's very important to stress that. Any drummer that has sex the night before he plays is being unprofessional. They tell a lot of athletes the same thing. Women weaken legs. My wife will love that.
"I like good tempo," Thomas continues confessionally. "There's nothing in life without good tempo. But I don't have natural tempo. People talk about this sort of metronomic clock that every good drummer's supposed to have, but with the Attractions it just doesn't work like that. Elvis' clock is more like a cuckoo clock. I'm the grandfather clock. Steve [Nieve] is going backwards in time."
Back in his own time, Thomas discovered early on that drums were his calling: "When I was nine, I got With the Beatles, and my grandma bought me a honky old drum and an old cymbal. That's it isn't it; what more is there? A drum, a cymbal and With the Beatles. Has the world really come on much further?"
Learning wasn't as appealing as doing. "I'm quite good with paradiddles and all of that. I was lucky. My parents twigged that it was something I wanted to do and put me in this music college when I was 11. I got all that..." he dishes out some fast rudiments on the couch. "And then I did the best I could to forget about all that stuff and get out there."
A good Englishman, Thomas' first musical loves were the Mersey Beaters — the Fab Four and Billy J. Kramer — and the Stones. He makes no bones about borrowing from his heroes. "I know that Blood & Chocolate sounds just like the Beatles. There are conscious Ringos on there, desperate." At age 15, Thomas "nicked off school" and hitchhiked to Mitch Mitchell's house: "I thought I was in fairyland. This was after Jimi Hendrix had died. He was still being a total pop star. He put me in this room full of tapestries and zebra skins. All around the floor, he had the most brilliant African drums. And then he put this Elvin Jones drumming on in quadrophonic sound and we drank vodka and oranges. That's when I thought, 'Uh-oh, I think this could be okay.'"
His Anglo sensibility was broadened early on when he landed a gig with John Stewart, which meant moving to SoCal for two-and-a-half years. An eager 19-year-old, he managed to jam with Lowell George in his garage. "I was terrified, and awful as well. No imagination. He had to show me how to play reggae. I was completely wrong."
During his Stewart stint, Thomas met up with his old pal Jake Riviera, manager and founder of Stiff Records. Riviera was putting a band together for a young English genius christened Elvis Costello. Thomas got the gig. "It's called landing on your feet. We were very new wave," he sneers. "It was brilliant. Can you imagine, all of a sudden being in this group and being new wave as well? 'Oh, I think I'll go get a jacket and a haircut.' I'm not new wave or anything. Being Pete Thomas is bad enough. It was kind of fun being new wave, though. We could go around punching people for about three years."
Is Costello a groove-conscious songsmith? Does he dictate what it should sound like, or is it a matter of the band getting together and arranging his tunes? "It's about like you'd imagine it would be. He comes in and has this song, says, 'Well, you know...' We've got this song that's almost a joke thing. We'll go into it and Elvis will turn around and say, 'Okay, shuffle... rock... reggae and 3/4....' We've learned really well."
Not given to equipment changes, Thomas is a confirmed Gretsch drum and Sabian cymbal user. He does go through a lot of snares. "You've got to see my snare where I do my rim shots. It's the only rim in the business that actually has this big dent in it. I've almost split it; it's about two-thirds of the way through. Every beat's a rim shot. I've always done that, which is very adult, isn't it? I've never been able to really hear the snare drum properly on record. Little dinks. Spank! That's how my beat goes. Spank! "Shabby Doll..." Spank! "Temptation..." Spank, spank! "Beyond Belief..." Spank, spank, spank! See me after college."
Part of the Attractions attraction is the rhythm section teamwork of the Thomas non-brothers: Bruce's often melodic basslines and Pete's anchoring wallop. "It's a love affair beyond love affairs of any other kind. It's beautiful, if anyone wants to make a fuss about it. I mean it's horrible. We don't talk. We hate each other. But not so it shows. It's groovy in a way. Once it gets going. It's exactly like a marriage. You have good and bad days, but there's always something there, this thing."
Thomas would not get on well with Nancy Reagan. While he swears by the importance of being "tip-top" on the gig, he has stories about the symbiotic relationship of intoxication and creativity: "Trust is one record you could truly say was done constantly under the influence of everything. I love it. There's something to be said for taking drugs and being at your best because when it works well — that one time out of 10 — you transcend so that the light is coming in from heaven into the top of your head and out the end of your sticks." [Don't try this at home, kids — Ed.]
Thomas' drumming on "Beyond Belief" from Imperial Bedroom is especially fervid, building up to an orgiastic frenzy of cymbal finking, shminking and spoinking. Chalk it up to demon drink — during the cutting of the album, Thomas went on a bender on a weekend off. "I was absolutely howling ripped for two days. My friend got me into the studio at about two on Monday. Elvis took one look at me and went 'hmmm...' But he's good, Elvis; he said, 'Right, what do you want, Pete?' [in a hushed voice] 'Vodka.' So he got me vodka, got me on the kit and we did 'Beyond Belief,' first take. I haven't got a clue what we did. But it's all bluffed, the whole thing. After that, they kicked me out.
"I tried to play it the next day when I was sober — no idea at all. On that one, it's this thing that Levon Helm does that's an absolute monster. It's those ands on the bell. It's like cutting across, but you can't do all of it cutting across. You can get around the beat and come back to it."
Thomas is a good deal less enthusiastic about how the production strategy of Goodbye Cruel World. "That was like going to the dentist every day. It was the sort of thing where, if you started having fun, you felt guilty. 'Oh, oh, I better get away from here. I'm in grave danger of telling a joke. Oh, no, I feel an opinion coming on, call a cab.' We all decided that our stuff always sounds better when we've been on the road for a while and worked it up a bit. So we did this tour of France — playing these Goodbye Cruel World numbers. On the right nights, it was a monster groove, very, very nice. But then when we came to make that album, they screwed it up.
"Still, it's the last actual hit record we ever had. But Elvis doesn't want that anymore. He doesn't mind about the backing or the arrangements, as long as he personally gets it out of his own mouth."
Blood & Chocolate, Costello's 1986 record with the Attractions, has a stripped-down rawness that illuminates the band in their spontaneous glory. "That whole album is live," Thomas says. "What you hear is exactly what happened." The agenda is stated from the opening cut, the deceptively and dogmatically simple "Uncomplicated" — Thomas pounding out quarter-notes. "Boink, boink, boink, three equal strokes of exactly the same timbre. That's all there is to it. It's an early clue to the new direction, the Attractions' barbecue voodoo deal. While we were doing it, we made a big thing about how simple it would be."
Out of Our Idiot, a new British compilation of Costello's songs and outtakes, reveals the degrees of change which Costello's songs can go through between demo and album, as witness the brisk Motownish version of "Blue Chair" played by Mickey Curry versus Thomas' more relaxed lope on Blood & Chocolate. And there are constant quirks and detours in the songs; for instance, on "Honey, Are You Straight or Are You Blind?" he plays the beat inside out, with the snare on one and three. You can't do that.
"I can. Some call it divine inspiration. Some call it genius. Some call it one of Nick [Lowe's] ideas," he laughs. "He's great about that, because he doesn't know anything about drums. He says, 'How about if it went ka-koom, ka-koom, ka-koom, across the beat?' That take is actually really shabby, but Nick went for it because it's got the charm. He's got this thing about the natural atmosphere of a track."
Rightfully, Thomas has no false modesty about his band's contribution to the annals of rock, if not twentieth-century culture. Thomas would like to see the music world make use of the Attractions as a valuable resource. "We haven't made the comfy crossover into the groovy world of session guys. We're still this band, still like the Velvet Underground or the Lovin' Spoonful or something. It doesn't matter how fantastic you are."
By now, Thomas has his hubris mojo working. "The Attractions have driven America crazy for the last 10 years. Mission: Impossible, forget it. The Attractions can take care of the problem. If you want a cancer removed by musical force, we can do it. We are the bad-assed heartbeat of Elvis. With the Attractions, there are no prisoners taken. The Attractions can kill at 10 feet. It's not like the Sex Pistols. We've been doing it for 10 years. It's not a drill."
He's on a roll now. "Pete, it's so great to finally talk to a drummer who's really stupid. Everybody thinks drummers are stupid, and I'm here to tell them that... they are. That's what they're supposed to be. Intelligent drummers worry me. It's like a contradiction in terms, like dancing about architecture."
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