ERIC CARR’S 70TH BIRTHDAY - THE STORY BEHIND THE CREATURES OF THE NIGHT DRUM SOUND
By Greg Prato / http://bravewords.com
During the early ‘80s, two rock drummers did a masterful job of replicating the enormity of John Bonham’s drum sound—Bobby Chouinard on Billy Squier’s Don’t Say No, and most definitely, Eric Carr on KISS’ Creatures Of The Night.
Coming off of a string of albums that saw the then-still masked quartet moving further and further away from their earlier hard n’ heavy sound, KISS (which at that stage was comprised of Paul Stanley, Gene Simmons, Ace Frehley, and Eric Carr…although Frehley was preparing to exit) wisely decided to get back to basics on Creatures Of The Night—their tenth studio effort.
The second KISS album that Carr appeared on (after replacing original drummer Peter Criss), Creatures was released on October 10, 1982. And while it has rightfully gone on to be mentioned in the same breath as Alive!, Destroyer, and Rock And Roll Over as one of KISS’ all-time best—and certainly most focused and inspired—offerings, the album underperformed chart and sales-wise, resulting in the band ditching the make-up (and unfortunately, also Carr’s thunderous drum sound) a year later.
July 12, 2020 would have been Eric’s 70th birthday (he sadly passed away on November 24, 1991, after a battle with cancer), and to mark this occasion, below is an excerpt from an earlier book of mine, The Eric Carr Story (available for purchase as a paperback version or a Kindle download here which focuses on the recording of Creatures, how Carr obtained his famous drum sound, and what several renowned metal drummers thought of the album and drumming.
Michael James Jackson (Creatures Of The Night and Lick It Up producer): “We ran two studios at the same time, in the same building, and we’d go back and forth between the two of them. We put Eric in a separate room by himself. There was a big focus on trying to get as close as possible ... not to the exact sound of John Bonham, but we tried to get some of the character of Bonham’s sound. You can’t ever duplicate what anybody else has done, because it’s not just the echo, it’s not just the environment, it’s not the ambience—it’s also the sound of the drums, the way they’re hit. There’s so many factors involved, [like] the humidity in the room. All those factors are involved in what the overall ambience is and sound is. But there was a real determination to try and create a sound that really had a character to it that was along those same lines. So Eric was put in a separate room—not even a booth [but] a separate room—and was close-mic’d and distant-mic’d. We had spent a lot of time—we might have spent a couple days—trying to really work and find the sound, specifically around the drums. Because on that record, the drums have a character to them. That is what gives that record an identity. Eric was way into it, because it was his ‘glory moment.’ It was when all the focus was on Eric. He was willing to do whatever it took to achieve that particular thing, and also, was very focused on his playing. I always appreciated that he really cared about exactly what he did and how he was going to sound. And then later, that record was mixed by Bob Clearmountain. It was made very clear to Bob that the particular overall character of the drum sound was a key element in the record. So when he mixed it, he added some of the echo that the Power Station became very famous for. There was an elevator shaft there that he had put a microphone down. He could send the signal into the elevator shaft, which would resonate, and the mic would bring that back. So some of that is also mixed into the drum sound on Creatures. Clearmountain did a great job, because one of the hallmarks of Clearmountain in those days was he had the unique ability to get more low end onto a record that would translate over the radio. A lot of engineers can put it on a record, but you never hear it on the radio. Bob had a methodology where he could really sculpt that in, in a way that if the record got played on the radio, you could hear that low-end character very clearly.”
