Groove o' the day: Hugh Grundy — Time Of The Season

Time Of The Season, by The Zombies, is still in heavy rotation on classic rock stations around the world— if you work in a warehouse, you hear this 2-3 times a week, as you have for about the last 30 years. They play this stuff to put you in a kind of state of suspended animation, so you don't notice the time passing. If there isn't a conspiracy between business owners and radio stations, there might as well be. Every day blurs into the next, and you stop noticing that with each palette of dog biscuits you ship, your youth is a little more spent, and you're one step closer to the grave...

...NEVERTHELESS! It's a good track, and there's a lot for drummers to learn from this type of thing.

The main drum beat is of that 60s pop mode we could call “studio pop multi-percussion”, “60s studio pop”, whatever you like. It's a composed part, and different than a drummer would normally play, in that there's very little cymbal— there's no ride pattern:

That groove, together with a hand clap and a vocal “ahh” sound, and a lot of reverb, is incredibly auditorily famous:

There's another composed, part-type beat on the B section— what would normally be called the chorus, except it isn't very chorus-like. It's really a B section with a dramatic ending where they say the title of the song. And, whoops, typo alert— both flams should be accented:

On the solos, which are played on the A section opened up, drummer Hugh Grundy plays more normally, with a rhumba-like beat, and improvised fills:

The little triplet lick on the & of 2 is fairly technical; the tom tom hit and cymbal are played with your right hand, and the snare drum with your left.

The track: