DVD Review – Behind the Player: Stephen Perkins
Posted on February 20th, 2010 by JABB
Hola! Yeah, I know it has been a while but now I’m back!
To make up for slacking I’m doing a trio of videos to make up for lost time. The three videos come from a new series of instructional videos I discovered on Netflix. A Los Angeles based company called IMV has flooded Netflix with its line of “Behind the Player” (BTP) DVDs. They have videos for guitarists, bassists, and drummers and they feature mostly artists of the rock/metal/alt variety. They also donate a portion of their earnings to a charity called Little Kids Rock. I suspect it’s all a part of an evil plot concocted to boost membership in the KISS Army, but that’s just my theory.
On to the review!
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I’ve been excited to see this one for a while. I was waiting for the promised Blu-Ray version to come out so I could see if the instructional experience is that much better in HD. Alas, my patience expired when I saw it available on Netflix. I saw the 
This review might be a little nontraditional but you’ll have to forgive me because this DVD is quite nontraditional. It’s one of those most rare of animals, the drum and bass instructional video. 
If there’s any drummer who can claim they’ve come from the rock and roll jungle it’s Matt Sorum. With seven years under his belt, he’s the longest sitting Guns N’ Roses drummer ever. Matt Sorum was ejected from the band by Axl Rose after he defended Slash’s decision to leave. So along with Slash and former Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan they formed Velvet Revolver… which is now on hiatus because their lead singer left the band. Lead singer issues aside, Matt Sorum is a road tested rock drummer and well qualified to speak on the topic of rock drumming. 
Coordination & Groove is a video that is pretty much honest about its content. It’s a video about coordination and groove, in that order IMO. Alan Schechner (the host) is another one of those working drummers. The kind that we’ll probably end up like if we pursue the working drummer career path. Not famous, but then again… who needs fame if you have a job making music with the instrument of your choice? 
Slim Jim Phantom is awesome… more awesomely awesome then you will ever be, and this video proves it! Woe unto you he who knowith not how awesome he is for he is just that awesome. Is what I would proclaim smugly if I weren’t above such things. Which I’m apparently not but seriously that is how smug this video comes across to me. Almost to the point of making the thing too comical to watch. I’m gonna keep this review short because the less I say the less likely I’ll say something I’ll regret. 
I’m gonna be totally honest and say I had never heard of Randy Van Patten before I rented this DVD and I have a feeling you might not know who he is either. He’s a working drummer with a lots of years under his belt and has drummed for lots of people in his time. In other words he’s the kind of drummer we aspire to be like but didn’t realize it when we started. When people say they want to be a studio or a session drummer they often have guys like Steve Gadd in mind, but not everyone can achieve Steve’s level of standing in the music industry. Most studio and session drummers are more like Randy. One of many working drummers who’ve landed some big gigs but never achieved the notoriety of the drum gods. Not glamorous but if they went missing it would put the music industry into cardiac arrest. You can get the specifics on everything Randy at www.vanzdrumming.com. 
Russ Miller, studio drummer, inventor of drumming gadgets, and former drummer-talk interviewee has entered the world of instructional DVDs with his offering Arrival: Behind the Glass. Arrival is the name of the album that he recently released and Arrival: Behind the Glass is a tour of what it was like recording with tons and tons of famous and well respected drummers. Oh, right. I didn’t mention the all star cast, did I? This is definitely an album for drummers incase you hadn’t guessed. Every other track on the album is a rhythmic conversation (a.k.a drum duet) with some incredible drummer. Among those included in the project were: Steve Smith, Jeff Hamilton, Zoro, Akira Jimbo, and Johnny Rabb. 
I should note that for this review that I have neither Advanced Funk Studies nor the Contemporary Drum-Set Techniques books themselves but given the information in this DVD I will soon. Rick Latham wrote those two books over twenty-five years ago and they’ve become favorites of the drumming community over that time. At some point along the way Rick decided to supplement the books with a video for each book respectively. Fast forward to today, for the 25th anniversary of Advanced Funk Studies Rick rereleased both of the DVDs together in a single disk with a bunch of extras and it made its way to my house via Netflix… and that’s the story so far.
Benny Greb’s new DVD is somewhere between Big Time and the Thomas Lang DVDs. To me this makes sense because I tend to think of Benny Greb’s drumming style as a blend of those two drummers. Thomas Langesq chops with a Billy Ward like sense of creativity. In this DVD Benny Greb teaches you how to “speak drum” There isn’t anything revolutionary in terms of what he’s teaching, it’s how he’s teaching it that is the real selling point. This isn’t one huge system it’s actually 3 or 4 smaller ones that he’s teaching you by relating them to something very intuitive to humans, language.
Maybe I’m all alone in this but before I picked up this DVD I had no idea who Chris Layton was. Maybe that’s a forgivable offense but I also didn’t know who Stevie Ray Vaughan was either. So if you do know who Stevie Ray Vaughan was then placing Chris Layton in your mind will be easy. He was Stevie’s drummer in Stevie Ray Vaughan and the Double Trouble band, making him either the double or the trouble. I’m not sure which. 
Latin music is something that isn’t often covered in depth in most drum instructional videos. There are a lot of books on the subject but for some reason they don’t seem to have attempted to seriously cover this topic in a video. Well, Phil Maturano has filled that gap with this DVD. Like with pretty much every other DVD I’ve reviewed, depending on which description you read (there’s a million of them) you’ll come away with very different ideas of what this DVD is supposed to offer. I’ve seen descriptions pretty much saying that not only will you be able to play latin music like a pro, you’ll also be able to speak fluent Spanish and make a mean Paella. 
There was a time in Terry Bozzio’s history where he wasn’t the king of huge drumsets… he was king of big hair. This video is a record of how he approached his drum solos at that time. His solos back then are very similar to his solos these days but he used a much smaller kit back then, only five toms a snare and two bass drums… tiny. His solos are long orchestral inspired pieces that I just don’t particularly care for. 
