Keeping the Beat: Gordy Knudtson of the Steve Miller Band

Keeping the Beat: Gordy Knudtson of the Steve Miller Band

Join us on the Trout Show as we sit down with Gordie Knutson, the legendary drummer who laid down the groove for the Steve Miller band for over three decades. From rocking arenas with timeless hits like Fly Like an Eagle and The Joker, to pioneering the innovative open and closed drumming technique, Gordie's career is a masterclass in rhythm and resilience. Beyond the stage, he's an educator, author, and the visionary behind GK Music's groundbreaking hearing protection headphones for musicians.

Get ready for an exclusive dive into his musical journey, creative process, and life behind the kit. Now here's The Trout with Gordie. Before we get to Gordie, I wanted to talk to you real quick about the product that Gordie's going to talk about later.

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Weighing just 14 ounces with the cord, they include a quarter-inch and an eighth-inch plug and a 14-day money-back guarantee and a one-year warranty. So elevate your audio with Ultraphones. Order now at gk-music.com. That's gk-music.com. Let me ask, here's my friend, he's an amateur drummer.

He's a banker by trade, but he plays in a band in Chattanooga. So I asked him, I said, I was interviewing you, and I said, got any questions? Normally I never ask people that. So here's what he says.

What is his favorite wood type for drum kit? Um, wow, okay. Not wood. Well, it depends on the gig.

For pop music and for Steve's gig, fiberglass. And here's why. I did a test back when I first started working with Steve back in the late 80s and was making some money and I was doing a fair amount of studio work too.

I'd always done a fair amount of studio work here in Minneapolis. And a couple of engineers, we started talking about what would be the best, you know, the best recording kit we could build or make. So I had my, my brother happened to be a machinist and about at this point, the Noble Cooley thing came along and these, these people have been in business since I believe like the 1700s or the 1800s making wood products.

And they might be mates a few drums, but it was a good, fairly large manufacturing thing. And they started building one piece, maple shells, and they had this lug that had a one, one note at the bottom where it was attached to the shell and nothing else. And they had some logic behind it.

Well, that's the nodal pointer that whatever, you know, sales crap or whatever. So this is an idea, what my brother's a machinist. So I said, would you build me some lugs? If we built some tom-toms using the same principle, this is before they were built, Noble Cooley was building kits.

Oh, wow. So I ordered shells from three different companies that would sell you shells. Keller, who was selling to DW at that point in time, Jasper, who sold to Gretsch.

And then there was this custom outfit out of Saugus, Massachusetts, called Eames. And then I had my current Yamaha set. So we built the things up.

I had basically all the drums are the same sizes. They basically all had the same lugs, other than my Yamaha was a stock kit. And about the time we got this finished, I had all the bearing edges done, all the right, all the technical shit.

So everything is like, you know, try as level playing field as possible. About this time, an engineer I'd been working with in Des Moines, Iowa, had moved up here and become the chief engineer at Paisley Park. And I called him and I said, hey, Tom, I've got these drums.

You want to, can we do some testing one day? He said, oh, man, that'd be great. So I got to go out to Paisley Park. We had four of these wooden kits put up and we went into Studio B. We listened to everything.

They pretty much sounded the same. The Eames stuff sounded maybe ten, you know, five, ten percent better, just a little. Yeah, they cost five times as much as everything else, but it was only about 10 percent better.

And I said, OK, interesting. And then I also was aware of this, these fiberglass drums called Tempest. They used to be called Milestone, but then they were bought by someone else and changed the name to Tempest.

And they were unusual in that they were very thin fiberglass shells. So I had ordered a set from that company as well, same sizes. So after we did the test with the wood shell, the next day we were back in Studio A. We had the winner of the wood day put it.

And then the guy with the fiberglass shells happened to be going through town on his way to Germany for the big show. Yeah. Yeah.

I can't remember what it's called. Yeah, it's like it's like a NAMM over there. Yeah, exactly.

So he came in and we put the we we put the drums together. We listened to the in Studio A. We listened to the wood shell stuff sounded good. We put the fiberglass stuff up and it was like, oh, my God, it was like these three dimensional things coming through the speaker.

I mean, it was it was dramatic. So for pop music there, you know, if you need the hammer of God tom tom sound, fiberglass is definitely the way to go. I thought this is really cool.

You know, I also play other gigs, too. I do some jazz music and that kind of stuff, straight ahead stuff. And I thought, wow, let's build a jazz kid out of it.

So I did that and I put it all together and I took it out in a gig. And oh, my God, it was awful. It was just like the most wrong thing you could do.

It was just, you know, so for the bebop stuff, I like I love the old wood shell drums. I've got an old set of probably 1960s Ludwig downbeat set with a 12 by 18 bass drum and a 12 and 14 tom and a little wood snare. And it sounds perfect with acoustic piano, upright bass.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Jazz, jazz stuff. Yeah, sure.

Exactly. Because it's not it's not going to be boomy. It's going to be real tight, I imagine.

Exactly. So tell your friend if he wants to get the hammer of God tom tom sound, man, I'm telling you, the fiberglass is the way to go. I still like prefer metal snare drums and the fiberglass kick works well, too.

So so the other question, two other questions real quick. What kind of mics do you use? And I'm sure that probably changes to depending on where you are. Yeah, that's in the studio.

It's kind of leave that up to the engineer. Yeah. When we were out with Steve, we had several different things sometimes.

And I found I finally moved to the kind where that's an internal mic. Which is not my favorite thing, but it was what we did live for about the last maybe 15, 20 years. We had as an AKG D112 on the inside of each tom tom.

Oh, well, it the thing I loved about it from the user standpoint was at sound check. You don't have a lot of time sometimes to to just stuff. And yeah, when it's set up and you got to move the drum and then you got to move the mic and oh, I got to do that.

And this and it becomes this big puzzle with the mic and the drum. I just put the drum where it needs to be. And oh, that's cool.

Yeah, I can see that working. Yeah. The drag is, is it it feels it puts a little more of a metallic edge on the sound.

So the the live stuff is kind of different sounding than it does in the studio. Because in the studio, I'm only doing outside my top mic. Right.

And you're and you're in a room. Exactly. Yeah.

But the the upside of the live thing with this kind of edgy metallic sound is it really cuts through the mix on when you have all those guitars jangling and all that stuff going on. These tom tom edgier tom tom things really cut through the mix. The front of house guy loved him.

And he just he was happy using him. So, you know, I said, great, man. And then I was happy because, you know, it worked for setting up and that kind of thing.

Well, I'll ask you this question because this is where we're really going to start here. But I mean, reading your bio and you started at an early age, who was who was the one when you were growing up that you said, oh, that's my best drummer. I want to that's the person that influences me.

Well, there was a kind of a lot of guys. So first I started in playing piano in grade school. Oh, my family has, you know, was not a musical family.

My father was tone deaf, basically. My mother had a modicum of musical talent and she kind of could play a little bit of keyboard. So she got me some lessons of piano lessons.

And all the times the teachers would be telling pulling pulling my mom aside, like, hey, you're your your son's got some good ears. So I did well. And I played up till like I was 13.

I won a state contest for my age. Oh, wow. Yeah, I didn't care for it because I wanted to play what I thought was jazz or, you know, boogie woogie or blues, that kind of stuff.

And they wanted me to do all this classical stuff. Oh, yeah. So I was kind of turned off by that.

But I made up I had I made up some little blues tunes of my own on on the piano when I was a kid. Then when I was and I did that till I was 13, when I was about 10 or 11 in grade school, you had the option to be in school band. And a friend of mine did it one year and he got out of class for a half hour every week.

And I want to do that. I'm there. So I played clarinet for my eye for a year in grade school and then three years in junior high school.

Yeah, because I didn't really have drum. You know, the only thing you got to is when you got high school and you had the marching band, you could play it. But that's not the same thing.

Yeah. Yeah. So I wasn't it wasn't I wasn't a drum guy so much.

But I so I played clarinet and because my mother knew, you know, she had talent. She contacted the symphony clarinetist and I started taking lessons with him. So over the summer after sixth grade, I had started in sixth grade over the summer.

I took lessons from him and he got my tone together and everything. So starting the seventh grade, I was first chair at the thing. I hated it because we're sitting in a band.

You're right up front, you know, and the director's right there all the way in the back. The drummers are around and they had a water fountain back there. And I thought, man, I'd rather be back there.

So I started for somehow I got drums about when I was in ninth grade, 10th grade. I saved up some money and bought like, you know, the Japanese kind of drum set. And I was going to teach myself.

And I played I'm right handed guy. And I had seen guys holding the sticks, you know, where they hold where they play. Yeah.

Like like real as they say, real drummers to write instead of the Ringo Starr. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

So to me, I thought, wow, I'm right handed and this is the hard way to hold the stick. I'm putting a hard way to hold the stick in my weekend. What if I did this? So I did this for about a year.

Same thing that kind of Lenny White and Billy Cobham did. It was like they played right there, right footed, but left handed. Right.

I did that for a year. My I took a lesson, started taking lessons. And my first teacher said either, you know, sort it out straight or do this.

And as you said, either back then there wasn't anybody I saw that could play that would, you know, they were playing match. So I I started going like that. And, you know, I was seeing I saw guys like Buddy Rich, but and that kind of thing.

But the thing that really was attracting me was R&B stuff. So I was had I had all the Aretha Franklin singles. I had, you know, some Motown stuff.

Also had some jazz stuff, some Coltrane stuff and the Buddy Rich records. I used to play Big Swing Face. I used to put the record on and play along with it, you know, lift the arm up so it just can't go over and over and over and over.

I remember those days. Yes. But you know what's funny about you, though? I imagine that you were completely opposite of everybody else in school.

They were probably listening to the Beatles or listen to the Stomp. It's something during the British or something, whatever it was. You're the guy and they're like, who do you listen to? Yeah, Buddy Rich.

I got some jazz here. You know who Coltrane is? Who? Is that a new band? You're probably completely outside the loop when everybody else is enjoying it. Yeah, I mean, I heard that I listened to the radio a lot, so I stayed on top of what was going on with pop music.

But yeah, I didn't have any Beatles albums. I didn't have to me. It was it was nice music, but it didn't it didn't turn my crank.

But I put James Brown on or put on some of that stuff. All of a sudden, man, yeah, they're funny. That's happening.

You know, that's a funny thing to it. Well, and the thing about it, too, is so much of what we do, especially when we get to our age group, you've already been influenced by lots of people. And in return, you influence people because that's what you do.

You've been playing with somebody famous or several people. Yeah, but and then people start listening. Oh, I can hear a little like when people play.

I interviewed a great guitarist out of San Francisco. He's a great slide player and he's a Jeff Beck fan. Him and I are both Jeff Beck fans.

And I told him, I said, I didn't even have to hear I didn't have to hear you're a Jeff Beck fan until I heard you start playing. And I could feel I could hear the influences immediately of Jeff Beck. Now, I'm not a drummer.

So a person like you, you can listen to somebody. Oh, I can hear the influences of fill in the blank or whoever it is, because you can tell by the way they do it. Mm hmm.

But it looked to me like when I was just, you know, looking into your background, a lot of stuff you got pretty. You were you were a talented person very early. And the other thing mentioning that, I mean, you're talking about playing piano and playing clarinet for so you actually got the ability, I would imagine, of reading music.

And how people write music, even though it may have been classical, it's still, you know, things like that. Well, yeah, it was funny that the piano stuff and I wasn't a great reader, but I understood it. And, you know, the concept of bringing the melody out, that kind of business.

When I started playing drums, I actually I loved that the most initially because I didn't have to read any music. I just listened and played along. You know, to me, that was really fun.

Yeah. And then in school they had jazz band and there would be charts you would read in jazz band. But the charts that, you know, they give the drums are kind of funny and it's probably not have too much information in them.

And you have to kind of sort out what's going on. So the more I would kind of understand, because I'd listened to the stuff before I found recordings of it. So I knew it was supposed to sound like and then I was kind of reading and just seeing how how people various people would represent stuff.

But I really didn't have wasn't forced into the reading thing until I started doing jingles. So I got my playing out to the point where and I was networked enough in with the guys because there was a significant jingle business here in Minneapolis in the in the 70s because we have a fair amount of corporate. Yes, you do.

Yeah. So they would do music, some of their music locally. So going in to do a jingle thing now all of a sudden, oh, OK, now you got to read and you got to play with the click, you know? Yeah.

Yeah. And and the more I did that, the better my reading got. I mean, I'm not a I wouldn't consider myself a serious reader.

I can do OK, you know, in certain situations. But I haven't read for so long. I'd be very tentative of accepting any reading gig playing right now.

Well, it's so long you don't have to. I mean, obviously they give you a piece of music, you know, but when was when was you consider your break? I mean, I saw where you play with Roy Buchanan. And but I think that was later on.

When was I mean, writing the jingles is pretty cool because you get exposed to a lot of different types of music because you never know. Someone could be sad, happy, could be whatever. And one day you got to be country guy.

Now you got to be a rock guy. Now you got to be a funk guy. You're really a studio musician.

Yeah, you're a studio musician. Yeah, that's basically my background. And then and then when you get known as that, everybody wants to hire you.

Yeah, you were on that it you got up the list pretty quick. And then the fact this is also in this era, too, where, you know, people were starting to be siloed. Oh, it's these older jazz guys and then the new rock guys.

Yeah. And we're very few people that were that were going between the two or that could go between the two crossover. So that was that was the other part.

And to me, I always got I was you know, I wasn't driven to be a live performer. I was driven to create the sounds and offer the records and the feelings and that kind of stuff that I loved. That was to me, that was where it was, was it was this recording thing.

So now here I am doing it with these, you know, these guys and having to do all this different stuff. Well, you know, I could see with the different people that you've played with, obviously, you played with Steve Miller longer than anybody else. But your influences and all that give you an opportunity to be able to if you're a struggling musician, there's nothing better than I don't want to go.

Of course, things have changed so much now that back then, you know, you could actually get on a record, get royalties. That didn't happen anymore. But but then as a studio person, I mean, we all go back to listen to the Beach Boys.

And the Monkees, all those people that had the same band and the people in the Muscle Shoals that did all this stuff. They just show up and Paul Simon show up. Oh, here's my here's the studio.

I think that gives you a a bigger palette to choose from because you're exposed to so many different things. And then you become this person. It's like it's kind of like it's kind of like acting to me.

Yeah. Amen. You know, you get started as that and they're like, oh, get get Gordy.

He can act like so and so. Right. And then and then I'll get Gordy for that part.

And then eventually Gordy is the person that they want because Gordy is Gordy. Yeah, it's like there's an old joke in there are four phases to a musician's career. I know what you're going to say.

Go ahead. Who is Gordy Knudsen? Get me Gordy Knudsen. Get me a young Gordy Knudsen.

Who is Gordy Knudsen? I had I had a friend of mine years ago, acquaintance of mine was eventually passed away very young. He was in a TV show. And I asked him, I said, and he was a character actor and he was the same way.

I said, I know what's going to happen to you. And of course, unfortunately, it was taken from us too soon. But it was like, oh, get him, because this is the way he acts.

And I asked him that. I was sitting in a golf cart when I said you want it to be where they go, oh, I need you because, you know, and then eventually it'll be the other way. Oh, he's not that.

We've got too many of that. When did you I've asked a lot of people this and maybe maybe you can't recall it, but. Where was and you may remember this or not, when was the moment you're on stage with somebody and you're sitting there going, I can't believe I'm sitting here playing with fill in the blank.

Did that happen to you at like a young age, like when you're I mean, who would it be? I mean, obviously you are pretty well established by the time you start playing a Steve Miller. Yeah. And that was it was like but getting just getting the opportunity to get to the gigs required this kind of security.

Sure. Yeah. Wow.

You know, in fact, the way I got the Steve Miller gig was I used to hang out and I was doing there was a great jazz band in town called Natural Life that played every. Every Monday night, and there was it was the top great, incredible guitar player, Mike Elliott, Billy Peterson was a bass player, Bobby Peterson, piano player, Bobby played with Buddy Rich's band for a while. Saxophone player was named Bob Rockwell.

And the drummer was the first drummer was Bill Berg, who played with Flim and the Beebees, one of the first. Really interesting, great drummer. And then another drummer came in, Paul, you know, pardon me, Eric Gravatt from McCoy Tyner's band came in and that was that was awesome.

Anyway, I'd go down and hang out and we'd we'd every Monday night because that was the thing all the music, everybody was off. It was the night off. Sure.

We were playing five, six nights a week and we go down and hang in this. And I knew I was doing jingles with Billy Peterson. And one day and I think it was like 1980, 1981, about 10 a.m., my phone rings.

He says, hey, Gordy, can you I'm in Chicago with Ben Sidren. Can you grab your drums and fly down here? We got to do a play the quiet night in Chicago and we got to go to Milwaukee to do a gig in Madison to do a gig. And then we finish up in Minneapolis.

I said, sure. So. And Ben played with Steve, didn't he? Was he on the first album or two albums? Yeah, I remember seeing his name.

Yeah. So he was and he was involved. But I had no idea this.

Yeah. So I go down and Ben's a singer and kind of doing a jazz bebopper thing and vocals and writing clever lyrics to old jazz standards, that kind of thing. And I did.

OK, you know, was I God's gift to drums? No, but I I did. OK. And after the thing was over, I said, boy, if you ever need anybody, you know, call me.

So he started calling me. So Billy and I would go out and do this stuff. And it turns out we find out that, you know, he used to play with Steve Miller.

So he decided to do a recording in town on the live side. So it was us and it flew Steve Miller. And I think Phil Woods came in and played and Steve had a good time.

The next year, we're out playing with we're playing with Ben Cedron at Jazz Alley in Seattle. We got a two week gig every night. We're playing three sets for six nights a week.

The first week, Miller was there every night, set an audience and watched every set that we played. The second week, it turns out he was leasing a studio about six blocks away from the club called K Smith Studios. He had at this point he wasn't he had quit touring in, I think, eighty three.

Abracadabra had come out and was number one on AOR. Oh, yeah. He wasn't selling tickets.

So he decided he was going to make a jazz record to fulfill his last obligation for. I do. I remember this.

I remember. And this is the Born to be Blue record. So we recorded this and an eighty seven and an eighty eighty decides, you know what, let's put the record out.

We went it was we we flew out there. We're going to do a tour now. So we booked a six week tour in the fall of eighty eight.

Now, he hadn't been out for probably five years and he we thought, you know, he thought it was going to be theaters because the last time he was out, he's barely booking any tickets. Well, in this time, that's sad to me. I mean, as you just that song was.

I mean, every time he watched MTV, it was like every third song. It was abracadabra. That's amazing to me.

Anyway, go ahead. Yeah. So they to be on the cautious side, because Steve, Steve is a very smart business guy.

He doesn't do dumb business moves. And that's one thing you got to give. He runs organization is really well run.

There are competent people in every position. So he booked a it was a six week kind of theater tour. And and where was this? What part of the country was it in all the US and Canada? OK, so we were really kind of hitting all over.

In fact, I think we were down in Dallas at one point on that tour. But in that time, from 83 to 88, he hadn't been out. Two things happened.

A classic rock radio had started and he was heavy rotation. He his greatest hits CD had come out and it was selling a million copies every year. But Billboard and nobody in Billboard knew about it because they never tracked.

Back then, they weren't tracking any catalog hits. So everything was instantly sold out. And we went to the theater gigs and, you know, thought Steve thought we're going to play this adult slick jazz or, you know, kind of what he called jazz.

And we get out there and it's all kids and they want to hear the greatest hits. And there's oh yeah, there are some funny recordings. I think he's got where we're playing, you know, like he had one thing we're doing.

We did all blues and then he sang the lyrics to CeCe Ryder over the top of it. I mean, it was cool. It was nothing.

It's different. Yeah. So we're doing this.

But all the kids like it was his one show, I think, in Seattle. And you can hear them. Their kids are going, fuck you, fuck you, play the Joker.

Fuck you, you know, just versus Eric. It was hilarious. And then so the following year we went out to oh, in fact, you know, there was one there was one show we did when we went down to down on this tour.

We were playing Dallas and we played the Convention Center, which I had been down before playing same place, believe it or not, with a band out of Minneapolis playing a sportsman show playing behind Victor, the wrestling bear. I bet not too many people you talk to have that on now. So we're doing the sound check.

It is a result of this stuff in this first tour we're having to learn. We had some of the hits, but now we've got some of the other hits. So in Dallas, we had to learn Jungle Love that day.

So it ever hurt. You know, we're doing it. And he hasn't moved the thing.

The dude's an amazing singer.

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