trash can lid as cymbal?

[vvv]

Years ago I saw Willy Dixon open for the Psych Furs.

What relevance, you ask?

Well, the middle band was the Violent Fems, and the drummer played stand-up kick, snare and trash-can lid.

[masonpitzel]

The drummer in my old band found some old cymbals by the side of the road once. They were the flimsiest, wobbliest pieces we'd ever heard, but after hammering their bells flat and driving a truck over them, they made a very nice pair of trash-can-lid-sounding hi-hats.

[linus]

I saw the Violent Femmes a bunch of times when I was a kid (they were from Milwaukee, I was living in Madison). The drummer used a huge metal pail turned upside down over his floor tom on some songs. I don't remember a trashcan lid but he probably used all sorts of stuff.

House of Freaks was a great band from Richmond VA in the Mid 80's. Their drummer, Johnny Hott, used all sorts of interesting stuff on his kit. Cut out bits of cymbals sitting on the drumheads, pails, tamborine cymbals nailed into his drumsticks.
He later played on the first Sparklehorse album and toured with them as they supported that album. I saw a show in Madison with them opening for Son Volt. Johnny didn't play drums live (they had someone else on kit), instead he played a children's phongraph record player, a creepy clown head chime childs toy with a contact pickup attached, and a tiny play electronic drumset that he hit with #2 pencils for drumsticks. Fun show...

[RefD]

i have a school fire-alarm bell (along with a marine siren) as part of the alarm system in my house.

that thing is so loud i had to wrap the edges with duct tape and you can STILL hear it a half mile away.

i should take off the duct tape for a bit and record it.

[wren]

Once I jammed with a drummer who had a "kit" that he'd made out of a trash can, PVC pipe, plastic containers, and scrap metal.

The trash can was plastic, and it was the kick drum (lid off). The PVC pipe was the frame/"rack" that held everything together. The "snare" was a thin but fairly long piece of flashing that was duct taped to the PVC pipe. The "hihat" was a coil of those thin metal strips that have lots of holes for nails or screws (I don't know what it's called) wrapped around the pipe right next to the "snare." The toms were two of those big plastic tupperware-looking tubs (that ice cream comes in) with lids; one was turned lid up, and the other was lid down for different pitches.

I think he had a couple other little doohickeys, but that was most of it. It sounded really good, actually, although it was obviously pretty quiet. And the coolest thing about it was that it all fit in the trash can! No walking back and forth from the car for that drummer...

[premiumdan]

No happy medium between Neil Peart and the Blue Man Group, eh?

Kidding, of course.

-Dan

[vvv]

Johnny Hott played with one of my fave groups, Gutterball, with Steve Wynn.

There was (is?) an industrial rock band (sorta a poppier Ministry/NIN) from Chicago called Stabbing Westward; the percussionist hadda huge vertical rack on which he hung hubcaps, trashcan lids, sheet-metal ...

[radical recording]

Back in the nineties my band used to host what we called "Record Breaking Shows." Fans would bring in old vinyl albums (usually Styx, Journey, Abba--stuff like that) and we would smash them on stage. Our drummer, E. Mitchell (R.I.P), would mount a few of these on his cymbal stands and smash them as he hit the cymbals while playing. Every now and then he'd come across one particularly tough one that wouldn't break, it would just bend.

Not that they ever sounded good but it was great to see the stage at the end of the night littered with all of those record shards.

[fazeka]

Every now and then he'd come across one particularly tough one that wouldn't break, it would just bend.

RCA Dynagroove?