Lorne Wheaton: Drum Tech with Jimmy DeGrasso and Alice Cooper

This month, PM chats to Lorne Wheaton, who has spent the last couple of decades tech-ing for some of the best drummers on the US rock circuit. Lorne fills us in on his current job with Jimmy DeGrasso and Alice Cooper, as well as his ongoing eight-year association with Rush’s Neil Peart.

Since first venturing out on the rock & roll road with fellow Canadians Max Webster back in 1977, Lorne Wheaton has occasionally plied his trade as a production manager, stage manager, guitar tech, bass tech, and was even credited as Executive Producer on Rush’s 2007 album, Snakes & Arrows. But it’s drum tech-ing that has always been his number one passion. Top drummers who have counted on Lorne’s skills and expertise over the years have included Charlie Adams (Yanni), Keith Carlock (Steely Dan), Mickey Curry (Bryan Adams), Steve Smith (Journey), Alex Van Halen (Van Halen) and Dony Wynn (Robert Palmer). However, much of Lorne’s time over the past eight years has been spent as personal tech for Rush’s legendary drummer, Neil Peart, both in the studio and on tour, a position that would undoubtedly make many a backliner go green with envy.

When we speak to Lorne, he’s busy in the midst of a brand new project: tech-ing for Jimmy DeGrasso, Alice Cooper’s current drummer. After first joining the crew for the last leg of the Along Came A Spider tour in Russia back in June, it’s now time for an all-new Alice Cooper production — Theatre Of Death. “We’ve even got a Broadway director directing this!” laughs Lorne. “We’ve been in Indiana outside of Louisville, Kentucky, rehearsing this, and we do the first show on Friday here. Then we go up to Columbus and Cincinnati, we do about 10 US shows, and then we’re off to Australia for three weeks. We come back from there and we do some more US dates, and then we go back to Europe and pretty much finish the year off.”

As well as tech-ing for DeGrasso on the Theatre Of Death tour, Lorne will also be playing a number of other roles: stage carpenter, in which capacity he’s already built the drum riser; MIDI technician, which involves firing off various sample triggers using a Roland SP-404 during the show; and also teleprompter for some of Cooper’s lyrics. Thankfully for Lorne, this latter off-stage role means he’s managed to escape having to wear the kind of ghoulish costume that all the other backline boys have to adhere to.

“Everybody on the crew apart from me is doing it,” laughs Lorne, “but because I’ve actually volunteered to run the teleprompter for Alice, I’m not out there dancing around like a zombie. I’m too old for that nonsense! Some of the music for this tour is older stuff and Alice has just got too many things going on up there to remember all the lyrics, so we’ve decided to use a teleprompter.”

“It’s a budget-minded production,” explains Lorne. “We did a mock load-out to make sure that we were all gonna go into one truck. Production equipment is an expensive thing to transport, especially nowadays, so the manager wanted us to at least try and get it all into one 53ft truck, which is the American semi version of the lorry. We carry our own front-of-house desk, a monitor desk, the stage monitors (mostly everybody in the band is on in-ear monitors), and then there’s all the backline stuff and all the prop stuff, so it’s quite jammed in this truck. We don’t carry a PA, and we don’t carry the truss system with the regular power lamps. We carry moving lamps that go onto the trusses when we pull into different venues, and we also use their stacks and racks, which is the PA that they supply for all the bands that come in.”

Since Rush came off the road last summer, Lorne has also kept himself busy working with Neil Peart and a slew of top guest drummers for the Buddy Rich Memorial Concert in New York towards the end of last year, in addition to a stint of work with Yanni as drum, percussion and guitar tech. The hook-up for Lorne’s Alice Cooper gig came through a good industry contact.

“I got an email from my Sabian guy, Chris Stankee in California, regarding going out and working with Jimmy DeGrasso on Alice Cooper,” he says. “I had met Jimmy when I did a Sabian clinic tour with the R30 drum set and one of the venues was Jimmy’s in San Jose, because Jimmy owns a drum shop, San Jose Pro Drum. He’s played with Roth and he’s played with Megadeth he’s made his mark everywhere! He’s a great rock drummer, he’s got good feet and he’s great at double kick drum work, as he uses a lot of it with Alice Cooper and I’m assuming he used a lot of it with Megadeth. We’re both as cynical as you can probably get, but it’s all in fun, of course, so we sort of work off each other and see who can p**s off the next guy quicker. It’s all fun and games out here, and I’m enjoying it.”

Kit-wise, Jimmy DeGrasso has a pretty large setup, but being Neil Peart’s drum tech, that’s something Lorne is more than used to handling. There’s possibly only going to be one change from the kit that DeGrasso was playing on the Russian leg of the Along Came A Spider tour. “Right now, we’re gonna try out two 24-inch kicks, and that’s what I was working out yesterday after the run-through,” Lorne explains. “He’s decided to check out these 24 x 15s and we’re seeing how they work for us. We were using 22 x 17s before this, but he wants to see what we can do with these. Obviously, they’re much different to play and they sound quite different, but we’re gonna see if we can make ‘em work. We’ve only got one run-through today to figure it out, otherwise we’re gonna go back to the 22s.

“Jimmy’s also got eight-inch, 10-inch, 12-inch, 13-inch, 15-inch, 16-inch on the toms, and he’s using a Jimmy DeGrasso Pearl signature snare. Then he’s got a couple of Pearl Rocket toms to the left and over the top of the small eight-inch and 10-inch. He’s got eight-inch and 10-inch on the left of him, and then the two front racks are the 12-inch and 13-inch, and then the 15-inch, 16-inch, and then a 20-inch gong drum. I’ve got what’s probably a 36-inch gong on the back. He’s got a mix of Sabians: some chinas, one Paragon of Neil’s, some AAXs, that kind of stuff. He has 15-inch hats on his main and 14s on his X-hat.

As Lorne has volunteered to run the teleprompter for Alice Cooper, he escapes wearing the crew costumes required by the show!

After load-in, it doesn’t take Lorne long to get Jimmy’s kit up and running. “I come in and build the drum riser, which is 10 x 10 x 4ft high,” he explains. “That takes probably 10 to 15 minutes, depending on how fast the crew is. Setting up depends on whether I have to re-skin the kit. Usually, I’ll put batter heads on the kit every two to three shows on the toms, and the snare I do every day. Then I clean the cymbals and the audio guys do the wiring of the mics, whereas with Rush I do everything that goes on the riser, including the microphones. I’m probably done within an hour and a half.”

Packing the kit back into its cases is going to be quite a tight undertaking on this tour. “There are only five cases on this, versus my 12 on Rush, and I’ve got a lot of stuff packed into these five cases. The hardware case you can’t stick a finger in it! If you pack it the wrong way when you’re loading out, you have to redo it.

“I’ve got two cases of spares that I carry with Neil, but all I’ve got with Jimmy is two backup snare drums and some hardware here and there. They really pulled me to cram everything into not so many cases on this thing, but with Neil I’ve got two guitar trunk-size boxes for spares.”

Lorne actually began helping the odd band while still at high school, and one of his early ‘clients’ was none other than an embryonic version of Rush. “Alex [Lifeson, Rush guitarist] and Geddy [Lee, Rush bassist and lead vocalist] went to a high school in my area, in my neighbourhood of Toronto,” he says. “They were playing the school dances and the coffee houses with John Rutsey as the drummer, and I helped him load in a couple times. I was in Grade 10 at the time and did that with a few different bands. I enjoyed it, so I started doing more of it. Then I left school after Grade 11 and got a job working with some of the local bands in Toronto, and it just went from there!

“The first real big stadium-sized tour I did was in ‘83 with Journey. They came out and saw me when I was working with a Canadian band called April Wine. We were doing a show in San Francisco and they came out to interview me to work with Steve [Smith]. I had no idea how they found out about me, but the next thing I knew we were on a stadium tour, the Frontiers world tour. It was a real learning curve there, but I learned a lot from doing that. Over the years, I’ve just been fortunate to be hired by some pretty large bands.”

“In 1997, I went out as a carpenter on the Rush Test For Echo tour,” explains Lorne. “I had known the guys from when I worked with a band called Max Webster, because they had the same management (Ray Daniels) as Rush did. We did a lot of touring together in the ‘70s and ‘80s, in North America or in Europe and England. I was good friends with all three of the guys. Neil had had Larry Allen as a tech for 20 years, or something like that, but then the horrible tragedies happened [in 1997, Neil tragically lost his only child, 19-year-old Selena, in a car accident, followed by his long-term partner, Jacqueline, who succumbed to cancer 10 months later, after which point the band went on a three-year hiatus].

“At the end of ‘99, Liam Birt, who is Rush’s tour manager and had been the guitar tech for Alex from day one, called me up. At that point, I was still with Bryan Adams, who I’d been with since ‘91. Adams was off for a while, or he was recording or something, and Liam asked me if I wanted to come out and look after all the instruments for a recording session. He wasn’t sure how long it was gonna take, but I jumped at the fact that I could go out and do it in Toronto and I could cover all the instruments.

“We ended up taking a year to record the record because they were in no hurry to push Neil faster than he wanted to be pushed. He was very fragile, and they weren’t even sure whether they were gonna be a band after that. So we came in and just took it day by day, and my days were taken up restringing 30 or 40 of Alex’s guitars. That was the heavy part of the days, taking care of Alex, but we got the kit set up and Neil came in, and he was more into it and having more and more fun as it was going along.

“Then, of course, 9/11 happened, so that kind of put a shroud over everything while we were in the studio. It took a year to do Vapor Trails, and then the next year we went out and toured it and I was the official drum tech. I told the Adams people I was gonna be leaving, which was hard because I really enjoyed working with Mickey [Curry], but it was time to move on. I just needed something new and challenging. I was able to use my own ideas as well with the setups and the designs of things, so it was a real plus for me. Now we’ve become very good friends and I just enjoy the hell out of working with him! He’s a very intelligent person and we work well together.”

Neil Peart is widely regarded as one of the greatest living rock drummers, and Lorne would certainly be the first person in the queue to qualify that claim. “He works very hard at building his drum solos,” he enthuses, “and it’s not just double kick rolls and a lot of smashing cymbals — so much of that can be so boring! It’s like what John Bonham used to do with his cymbal drum solos, playing with his hands and stuff. He’ll always have that little trademark thing somewhere in it, but he is very versatile and he really works hard at his playing.”

When a Rush tour is on the horizon, the hard work starts well before the band actually commence their rehearsals. “[Neil] doesn’t touch a stick at home; there’s not one drum there!” Lorne explains. “But he works very hard when it comes down to it. Usually with Rush, Neil and I will get back together four weeks before the band rehearsals start and I’ll have four days with the kit first. I’ll take it to pieces, redo everything, wax it and have it all set for him. Then he does two or three weeks’ worth of just getting his hands in shape and playing to a CD of songs that they’ve talked about using in the set. We’ve gotta rehearse that for five hours a day, for two to three weeks, and he’ll work the calluses up on his hands. After that, he’ll be ready for four weeks of rehearsals with the band. It’s a nice way of being able to do it; you get time to make everything right before anybody jumps into it!”

When it comes to showtime for Neil Peart and Rush, Lorne dons a few hats aside from his more general drum tech-ing roles and responsibilities. “I run all the electronics for Neil too,” he says. “I monitor his in-ears. We’re both on the same mix, so I deal with the monitor engineer quite a lot. I also change all of the programs and I basically run the show off the Roland TD-20, because it’s all MIDI through the rack. I also spin the riser when it comes to time for spinning!”

When it comes to tuning skins, Lorne has had some great teachers over the years, and he’s happy to share a few insights with us. “I learned tuning from Steve Smith years ago when I worked with him with Journey,” he explains. “Throughout the years, I’ve learned from other guys I’ve worked with. Unlike most people, I haven’t lost my hearing yet! I get a lot of compliments on my tuning.

“With Neil, the upper three toms are cranked up quite a bit, because we have to bring the old concert toms into play with Rush and he has his sound. You take these eight-inch, 10-inch and 12-inch toms out of the box, and we crank them up quite a bit from what they’re pitched to at the factory. But that’s only because that’s Neil’s sound from when he used to have the smaller six-inch, eight-inch and 10-inch concert toms in the old days. He’s just got that sound and we have to reproduce that for him, especially when we start playing the old stuff.”

For Lorne, tuning the drums is not onerously complex or formulaic. You just need a good pair of ears and you need to know the sound you’re looking for, which can mean tuning differently for each and every player. “I just get the best out of the drum shell,” he says. “I don’t look at it as a science, whereas some people think you gotta do this and you gotta do that. So much of the tuning of the drum is in the bottom head, so if you can get that right, it makes it so much easier to get the batter head right, and then you get sympathetic rings round the drum set with the size of the drums that you use. One useful thing I was taught by Steve [Smith] was to use a mallet and not drumsticks for tuning, because you get more of a pure sound out of the head.”

It’s Zildjian all the way for Lorne, as far as cymbal cleaning products go, but sometimes too much cleaning can be a bad thing, especially when you’re a drummer on a bit of a budget. “Even for Sabian cymbals, I still really like to use the Zildjian stuff, because I’ve yet to come across any Sabian [cleaning] product that’s worked for me,” explains Lorne. “Although with Jimmy, I have to use Sabian stuff out here, just for the sake that he likes to use it, but it doesn’t clean half as good as the Zildjian cymbal cleaner I use.

“I pride myself on my clean cymbals, especially with Neil, but the more you clean them, the more chance they’re gonna break eventually. All that black stuff on the towel is actually metal that you’re taking out. Somebody who wants to keep their cymbals for a long time, don’t clean your cymbals, period! Steve Smith has got a ride cymbal he’s had for probably 30 years and it is as tarnished as it could possibly be. But clean cymbals with a clean drum set looks beautiful, and I like that. I also use Windex on the shells, and every once in a while I will wax the shells. If there are any scratches, I use some kinda scratch remover, but that’s only if I have time.”

When Lorne Wheaton looks back at his career on the road with such a host of fantastic bands and musicians, he can’t help but be thankful for the good fortune that seems to have lit up every twist and turn of his personal journey.

“I’ve been really fortunate to have worked with great guys, and that’s partly to do with luck,” he says. “I’ve learned a lot from them, and I think they’ve been very happy with the service that I’ve given them. I hear a lot of horror stories out there and I’ve just been happy to not have to deal with that, especially later in my life. I’m 54 years old now and I’d hate to start working for somebody who I wasn’t enjoying working with; it really wouldn’t be worth the time. I’ve been fortunate to get all the good guys!”

Peart’s kit

Lorne Wheaton takes us through Neil Peart’s DW 2008 Snakes & Arrows drum setup.

“We’ve got the new 23 x 16-inch bass drum. From the left on the racks we go eight-inch, 10-inch, 12-inch and 13-inch on the rack over the kick drum, 15-inch on the left, 15-inch on the right. And then 16 x 16-inch and 18 x 16-inch on suspended.

“Then we were using the VLT snares. The bottom end of the toms from the 13-inch to the 18-inch are all VLT. The rack toms above that are the cross-laminate prototype toms — X Shells — and they were on the upper racks.

“I had them build me DW shells to mount all my V-Drum triggers in so they look a little more acoustic all the way round. And I had a little 12 x 12-inch kick drum, which I mounted the kick trigger into. Then, of course, it was all Sabian Paragon cymbals. My rack consisted of two Roland TD-20s, two Roland XV-5080 samplers and a couple of digital display things. That’s about it — all on a spinning riser!”

Drumming tips

For drumming amateurs the world over, Lorne Wheaton proffers some important advice.

“First of all, get a normal-size drum set — a four-piece to start if you’re a novice. Get just a basic drum set and first of all see if you’re gonna like it. Parents can pay so much for drum sets and then they end up going into the yard sale or into the closet.

“Then you should get a teacher and work at what he teaches you. To this day, Neil takes drum lessons from people like Peter Erskine because he wants to branch out. He doesn’t just want to play Rush songs; he wants to be able to play jazz songs and stuff like that. If you want to get very good, you work at it. Hopefully, you have people like your parents who are behind you, who get you going more on it. Of course, you wanna find somebody you can play with in a band situation, which helps you greatly.

“Learn to deal with your instrument, like how to tune your drums correctly and carry out maintenance on them. Get to know your drum set — maybe tear it apart and put it back together. That’s really how you learn your instrument!”

Lorne Wheaton: Drum Tech with Jimmy DeGrasso and Alice Cooper

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