Jack Sperling, King of the Big-Band Drummers
From Bunny Berigan to the NBC Orchestra
HAVE YOU GOT TWO MINUTES and 25 seconds? I’d like you to meet somebody.
You may not know his name, but if you listened to the radio or watched TV in the 1960s, you’ve heard his drumming.
When you check out this song, if you’re used to listening to drummers, tune in to the solid chunk of his hi-hat on the 2 and 4, no matter what his hands or his right foot might be doing. It’s reinforced by a ride cymbal pattern so sturdy you could build a house on top of it. Meanwhile, the left hand is skittering across the snare like a dog herding cattle, growling here, nipping there, barking when he has to.
If you can’t hear the drums as a separate entity, that’s okay. You can feel them in the way the song drives relentlessly forward, in the way you can’t quite catch your breath when you listen to it.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is Jack Sperling.
HIS STORY STARTS in the original Big Band era — he was 18 when he got his first big break with the Bunny Berigan Orchestra. He met Tex Beneke during WWII when they were both in the Navy, and after the war, when Beneke took over the Glenn Miller Band, he called Sperling to take the drummer’s chair. (Miller died in 1944 under mysterious circumstances; see my story, “Perfidia.”) Here’s Sperling on Beneke’s hit version of “St. Louis Blues March,” where he seamlessly goes back and forth from martial snare to swing, while keeping the beat firmly in the pocket.
Tex Beneke, “St. Louis Blues March”
Sperling moved to LA in 1949 to join Les Brown and His Band of Renown. His old friend Henry Mancini, who’d played piano with the Beneke band, started getting him work at Universal. Sperling moved over to the Bob Crosby band (Bing’s brother) in 1954 for the bigger paycheck that came from Crosby’s daily TV show. By 1959 he’d taken a gig with the NBC Orchestra, which had him playing The Tonight Show, The Andy Williams Show, Laugh-In, and even Let’s Make a Deal. Meanwhile, he was freelancing on albums by Pete Fountain, Bobby Darin, Henry Mancini (including Peter Gunn — yep, that’s him on the theme song), and dozens of others.
Here’s a great bit where he plays the drum set barehanded:
OK, one more, some of that heart-pounding playing like the Darin song at the start of this story, this time with Pete Fountain from 1962:
And just one more. Fountain, whom Sperling called “beautiful to work with,” thought enough of him to give him what we’d call a solo album today, Pete Fountain Presents Jack Sperling and His Fascinatin’ Rhythm (Coral, 1961, long out of print).
Listen to how melodically he tuned his drum heads, how he alternated between hi-hat and second bass drum with his left foot, how he could play so fast and clean and true that nobody else could touch him.
LISTENING TO JACK SPERLING, I have so many questions.
Where does that incredible drive come from? Is it quantifiable? Could you do a computer analysis and find that he was playing just a nanosecond ahead or behind the beat? Or are the drums simply responding to the force of his personality?
What was it like to be him? To have been playing professionally since he was 15, to have been at the absolute top of his profession by his 30s, to be handsome, charismatic, and poised like he is in the “Fever” video, to have money, respect, and undeniable talent?
It takes a certain kind of person to play drums. When it comes down to it, the drummer has to impose his or her will on the band, to say, “My rhythm, right or wrong. Follow me or get off the bus.” You could look at that as confidence or as arrogance, depending on the drummer and how charitable you might be feeling. For sheer aggression, you’d be hard put to match Ginger Baker (see Beware of Mr. Baker), or Keith Moon, or John Bonham.
I speak from experience. I started playing drums when I was 16, in 1966, and by the early ’70s I was pretty good. I was also a bit of a jerk, very sure of my own opinions and not especially concerned with the feelings of others, especially women. By 2003, when I attempted a comeback after a decade of not playing, life had taken me down more than a couple of pegs, and I was not a very good drummer anymore.
Maybe Sperling was good enough and admired enough and paid enough that he escaped the worst of the drummer’s personality traits. I can’t find a negative word about him in my research, and he had nothing but praise for others. Ronnie Tutt, Elvis’s great drummer, offered this testimonial when asked about his inspirations:
“There was a guy named Jack Sperling. He is a kind of guy that didn’t know me from anybody and I got his number from someone, a mutual friend. And even though I only had a chance to speak with him on the phone maybe twice, he spent hours on the phone talking to me and encouraging me. And that was a great gift because at that time in my life I needed that kind of encouragement from a wise man who was playing with top people and had a major TV show in L.A. He was playing the Dean Martin show. He had a distinct sound and approach to the playing. It was amazing that he gave time to speak to a nobody. . . . He was just a good guy like Louie Bellson.”
“Jack, you’re gonna have a lot more fun keeping time than playing solos. Think about the time.” (Al Zahler)
Still, there is a just a hint of darkness in his 1983 interview with Modern Drummer: “Playing drums — that’s it for me. I may be less of a human being because of it. If you’re that involved and love to do it that much — and it pays you off in personal gratification that much — maybe you shortchange other aspects of your life. Maybe you’re not the father, the husband, the good friend you should have been. It’s really a full-time thing if you’re going to go after it all the way.”
The style that Sperling played in, the big-band style, actually reached its apotheosis in the 50s and 60s, long after the classic big bands themselves — Miller, Basie, Goodman — had faded. Its home was network TV, with orchestras like Ed Sullivan’s, conducted by Ray Bloch, or Sperling’s NBC Orchestra, or the orchestras that did commercials for Doublemint Gum.
Sperling lived to 2004, long enough to see big bands become too expensive to use. The late-night TV shows all have small combos, Broadway shows use recorded or synthesized virtual orchestras, jingle factories are all digital now. Sperling was the best of his kind at the end of an era, and he has no successor.
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Thanks for reading! Below are links to three articles that are essential to knowing what Tell It Like It Was is all about. “Blogging with Tell It Like It Was” is Neal’s attempt to keep readers abreast of any changes happening here while “Introduction to Tell It Like It Was” is our mission statement for this publication.
And “Introduction to The Toppermost of the Poppermost” explains the project that John, Lew, and Neal embarked upon months before launching this publication: a series of articles that review every record to make it all the way to #1 on the Cash Box Top 100 charts from 1960 through 1969.
