Dave McClain: Part Man, Part Machine Head

By Jared Cobb

Originally Published in the April 2007 issue of DRUM! Magazine

Down and out, dead in the water, nowhere to run. Bay Area metal band Machine Head carries a back-breaking metaphorical suitcase full of Been There Done That Got Screwed dirty laundry — most of which had the band teetering on the brink of extinction — through every rehearsal, every recording session, and every concert they play. The blistering speed, the violent rage, the wicked words are all testament to the tumultuous times the Machine has endured. Most bands would break, all bands would bend. But this band is no band at all — they’re a monstrous mechanical middle finger spitting boiling blood in the face of adversity. And then begging for more.

Gluttons For Punishment

Why else would a controversial metal band with a rocky past, yet on the cusp of a potential platinum resurgence, open up their highly anticipated new album with a 10-minute, 27-second Civil War—themed grand proclamation? The Blackening welcomes listeners with the ferocious sprawl of “Clenching The Fists Of Dissent,” one of four tracks on the eight-song album exceeding nine minutes in length. The track has more ingredients than a street vendor hotdog, more changes than Michael Jackson’s profile. Yet the album’s welcoming mat, like Blackening as a whole, somehow works. It could be the colossal song structures or the infuriating guitar play or the bloodthirsty vocals that separate this Machine from the countless other screaming bags of hate available on today’s metal market. But, eh, we don’t think so. Just a quick listen and Machine Head’s distinction jumps out and kicks you square in the face. It’s the drums, man. It’s the drums.

Dave McClain is the Hemi engine under the hood of the Machine. All piss and pistons, he’s a beastly basher with venomous speed and thunderous power yet enough creative deceit to effectively juggle these razor blade drum parts without so much as a paper cut finger. Crisp and strong, complex and blinding fast, McClain is a determined woodshedder armed to the teeth with talent. And his work on The Blackening could certainly be his best yet, as he and his bandmates felt a newfound freedom while taking on the album. “We went through so much stuff as a band for our last album,” sighs McClain, articulate and humble. Quieter than you’d think. “I think we went through more stuff during a six month period than most bands go through their entire career. There was a time we didn’t have a record label, we just lost a guitar player, we didn’t have anything. What are we going to do? Well, we could fold it all in right then and there, or we could keep going. it, let’s keep going. So we just started writing stuff.

“It was almost a freedom, not having to worry about songs going too long or making a single or all that stuff. And Through The Ashes Of Empires was received so well, like a rebirth almost. So we wanted to take that same approach and carry it over to this album. It felt good, it was fun, and we wanted to take it to a new level.”

The band will usually spend about a year writing songs for an album, and Blackening was no different. While singer/guitarist/producer Robert Flynn is the undeniable driver of the Machine, the creative process is nonetheless a highly collaborative effort. “Everybody brings in riffs,” McClain explains. “I play guitar too and write stuff, so I’ll bring in some ideas, along with everybody else. We have a dry erase board in the practice room, and we start naming riffs. Like we had this one riff called “Iron Russian” because it sounded kind of Russian and like an Iron Maiden riff. So we give them stupid names and go from there, trying to put the songs together. Over the year of songwriting, we definitely go through a lot of demo processes — probably three or four times.”

Even McClain’s drum parts are open for collaboration. It takes a true pro to welcome suggestions from fellow band members (especially from guitar players), but McClain considers these suggestions essential as well as comical. “Rob and I are always working on the drum stuff. He thinks he’s a drummer. He’s kind of a closet drummer, and sometimes he’ll have these ideas that are kind of, in a way, dumbed down. He’ll suggest something really simple that I would probably never do on my own. But he’ll make me try it and sometimes it actually sounds pretty cool. Most of the parts he suggests are cool to people who don’t really understand drumming.

“One thing he always says is, ’Dude, do it backwards!’ So I’ll have to do things like go up the toms instead of down the toms. We’ll record it that way, then I’m like, great, now I have to play it like that every night. He gets a kick out of it.”

Studio Speed

They say you can tell a man by his drumming. While this may not work as a blanket theory, it certainly applies in the McClain study. When discussing his approach and his drumming philosophy regarding his studio recording sessions, it boils down to the two traits most prevalent in his ideology as well as his technique:

efficiency and meticulousness. “The last couple weeks of writing, before we head into the studio, Rob and I really work hard on the drum parts. I hate getting into the studio and not being prepared for stuff. Just sitting there. So once we get into the studio, I’m ready to fly through the drum parts. I recorded these eight drum tracks in two days. The first day we did six tracks, then two tracks the next day. I leave the tougher songs for the end. Then we spent the next two days just trying different things — changing up fills or adding different layers.

“Every album up until this one, we’ve used a full-band scratch track. But this time, we got in there and we did it with just Rob and myself. It was just the two of us for the drum pre-production the two weeks prior, so we thought we’d see how it went. We don’t use a click track or anything; we just go in there and rock it out. And Rob’s the person I feed off the most when we’re playing. So we did it this way and it was awesome. It worked out great.

“Taking two other guitar players out of the equation cuts down so much of the noodling factor. Normally it takes so long just to start a song. You have three guitar players there and one person plays a little noise, then the other guitar player starts doing it, and it just goes on and on. So this way we cut out the five minutes of waiting from when we’d say we were starting a song and when we actually started it.”

Goodbye to guitar player noodling? Does life get any better than that? Yes it does, and it starts when you hear the drum sounds on The Blackening. On an album like this, it’s so easy for the drums to get swallowed in the bloody mud of screaming vocals and guitars. Not the case here. Snare hits like a stick of dynamite in a catcher’s mitt. Tom tones like church bells. Bass that makes your scrotum ache.

“It took us longer to get drum tones than it did to actually record the drums. We tried everything. We tried different drums, different heads, different mike placements. There were a couple things that were really surprising to me.

“We switched out my maple drum set for my birch drum set. I never realized how different the two sets could sound. It was amazing. And then switching up the heads really opened up the drums and it sounded so good. I just wanted to sit there in the studio and just play my drums all day. It blew me away how much better the birch kit sounded. It just opened everything up. The tone had more attack and it rang out more. A complete 180 from the maple kit. So I’m sticking with birch when we hit the road. Pearl is making me another birch kit right now. “I had been using the same kind of drumheads for probably ten years. But we decided to try some different head combinations. We started using Emperors for the top heads and Ambassadors for resonant heads, and the sound we got from that was amazing. We tried a couple snares, but mostly I stuck with my Pearl piccolo snare because I know how to tweak it out and make it rock.”

Double Kick Pistons

All this talk of power and efficiency and tone would be simply wasted words if McClain couldn’t provide that one delicious ingredient essential to all meaningful metal: a devastating double bass. He lays it thick and fast throughout Blackening — from running speed rolls to tight uppercut fills — and takes pride in his efforts to become one of the most skilled double bass players in today’s metal scene.

“I practice a lot just by myself. When we’re home, I practice at least three days a week, usually four or five. I’ll play our songs or geek out and play solos or just work on things. I’ve had this double bass breakthrough in the last couple of years. I started doing heel-toe doubles on the kick drum. On our last album, Rob wanted me to do this drum part that was just super fast. ’Dude, how am I going to play that?’ Every once in a while I could get it, but not with any real consistency.

“Then before we went out for that tour I was messing with my drums and realized something: I could bounce my drumsticks on my drumhead, so why couldn’t I bounce my bass drum beater on my bass drumhead? So I started doing it and it took some time, but I’m to the point now where I can do full-on double-stroke rolls with my feet — and do it super fast.

“Another thing I did that got my speed way beyond what I considered to be the fastest period in my life is I lowered my drum throne. For a long time I sat really high, almost as high as the throne would go, and I started having problems. During a tour I started noticing that some of the easiest double bass parts were getting a little harder. So I went back home to my practice room and messed with everything.”

That’s right, more woodshedding.

“I made every possible adjustment to my pedal and my technique, and things weren’t getting any better. Then I remembered that I used to sit really low — like Tommy Aldridge low — so I practiced a couple days with my throne lowered. My foot speed came back, and then some. I couldn’t believe how fast I was going. Now I’m faster than I’ve ever been. I can probably play single strokes with my feet as fast as I used to play doubles.”

Becoming The Machine

The hard work started early for McClain. You don’t become such a technically proficient drummer without starting quick and playing often. As a young kid growing up in Texas, McClain used idols and influences as headphone instructors, but did incorporate some formal lessons early on.

“I took lessons for about a year when I was 11, learning how to sight read and that stuff, but for the most part I learned drums from playing along to Rush and Judas Priest albums. After my first year of playing drums, I was pretty much playing in some kind of band from that point on. I think playing in bands early on was definitely a key to my growth as a drummer. When you play with a band you’re kind of thrown in the fire. You’re not playing to a record anymore. You are the record.

“One of the first ’gigs’ I can remember, I was probably 13 years old and my friend’s sister had a backyard Halloween party for her 13-year-old friends. We played Judas Priest songs and Kiss songs, Thin Lizzy, all that stuff. I think there were like five kids in the backyard, but it was the big time for us. We used my friend’s room as the dressing room. We were rock stars.” Indeed. Luckily those early bands avoided the all-too-common candy corn overdoes of their time and McClain drummed his way into his twenties, and out to the Left Coast. “I moved to L.A. when I was 20 and went through the whole thing of playing in bands and trying to make it. Eventually I got the call from the Sacred Reich guys. That was the first time I could really support myself with music. They were signed and touring and all that. I thought I had made it, that I was at the finish line. Little did I know I was just at the starting gate.”

While the Sacred Reich gig was a huge step for McClain, it truly was just the beginning for him. The Reich had the fury and cult following his talents craved, yet they were unable to match McClain’s drive and determination. The invaluable experience was a dream come true, but eventually that dream just wasn’t enough. Then the phone rang.

“I was with Sacred Reich and basically got hooked up with Machine Head through a mutual friend who knew they were looking for a drummer. When Rob first called me, Chris Kontos was already out of the band and they were on their second replacement drummer. He said they were auditioning drummers, and I kind of went along with it. Then I called him back and said I wasn’t really interested in doing it and that I was going to stick it out with Sacred Reich.

“A couple weeks went by and I was like, ’What am I doing?’ Machine Head was a totally hard-working band that had this drive. They just had this thing. So I called Rob back, flew out to Oakland, and auditioned. And that was it.”

1997’s More Things Change marked McClain’s Machine Head debut. Now, a decade later — through all the pitfalls of abuse and turnover, with the occasional highlight tour or release — he literally deflates at the thought of doing anything else with his life. The wind leaves him, and he can’t even think about, much less discuss, his life without metal and without drums. The best he can do is take away the metal component. Drums stay.

“If I wasn’t playing metal, I’d definitely like to be a country drummer. You know, the cool country stuff. The style is so cool and different. I love those train beats and that stuff. And to me that cool country stuff has the same attitude as metal. It sounds weird, but I can get the same feeling listening to some types of country music that I can get listening to metal.”

Once an outlaw, always an outlaw.

From trick-or-treat kid shows to sold-out metal festivals, the pistons pumping the Machine seem to never stop. We’ve talked about efficiency and attention to detail, but enough cannot be said about the amount of determination it takes to succeed as a drummer in the metal world. Underpaid, under-appreciated, and overworked, McClain wouldn’t have it any other way.

And if this hazardous highway sounds to you like a yellow brick road, he offers his advice.

“The most important thing is just sticking with it, no matter what. It’s a hard thing to do. Just don’t stop doing what you’re doing because a lot of people just give up. I hate to even think about where I’d be right now if I had given up. I can’t imagine not having music as my life and not playing drums. I’m completely stoked about my life. Every day I think about how lucky I am that I’m doing for my job what I love to do. So don’t give up.

“Really, if you just love playing the drums, then everything else will fall into place.”

McClain Massacres Machine Head

Dave McClain’s blisteringly fast, intricate footwork perfectly propels Machine Head’s heavy guitar riffs. We get a glimpse into his fierce style of playing on “Clenching The Fists Of Dissent” off of Machine Head’s new album, The Blackening. This ten-and-a-half- minute metal opus begins with syncopated cymbal chokes and a very speedy sextuplet fill down his toms that lead into more of the same and a longer, full-measure sextuplet fill. We get to catch our breath during a short break at the 2/4 bar before McClain launches into his double-time double bass groove. It sounds like he’s playing the &’s on his crash, but the cymbal is placed back in the mix. In the second bar of this section McClain plays a cymbal accent pattern of 3 e ah 4 & ah, and a couple bars later plays a tasty sixteenth- note fill from his snare to his ride cymbal. At the 2:47 mark, he changes his pattern and plays 1 e & ah 2 e on his kick drums and crashes. Later, he plays the same bass drum pattern, but this time with a half-time feel created by the snare pounding 3.

DRUM! Notation Guide

McClain’s Setup

DRUMS Pearl Masters Birch (Custom Camo Finish)
22" x 20" Bass Drum
14" x 3" Snare
10"x8"Tom
12"x9"Tom
16" x 16" Floor Tom

CYMBALS Zlidjian
14" New Beat Hi-Hats
18" Z Custom Rock Crash
8" Splash
10" A Splash
17" Z Custom Rock Crash
21" Mega Bell Ride
20" China High

PERCUSSION Pearl
Tambourine

Dave McClain also uses Pearl hardware, Remo heads, Shure Microphones, and ddrum AT modules for triggering kicks and toms.

McClain’s Selected Discography

1993
Independent
Sacred Reich

1995
Hempilation: Freedom Is Norml
Various Artists

1996
Heal
Sacred Reich

1997
The More Things Change
Machine Head

2000
Year Of The Dragon: Japan Tour Diary
Machine Head

2001
Supercharger
Machine Head

2003
Hellalive
Machine Head

2003
Through The Ashes Of Empires
Machine Head

2005
Roadrunner United: The All-Star Sessions
Various Artists

2006
The Blackening
Machine Head

2011
Unto The Locust
Machine Head