Bang the drum for Shell
March 28th, 2006
I had no idea that oil drums of a certain vintage produced by Royal Dutch Shell Plc were so sought after by musicians:
[…]
For many of the world’s estimated 35,000 panmen, the sweetest-sounding music comes from the 55-gallon, 20-gauge red steel oil barrels made in Shell’s lubricant mixing plant on Barracones Bay in Trinidad.
A few miles up the road in Port of Spain, beneath the shade of the big breadfruit tree at 147 Tragarete Road, a Shell executive in 1946 made history’s first steel drum from an empty barrel of tractor lubricant bearing the company’s distinctive clamshell insignia.
[…]
According to American jazz musician Andy Narrell, Shell oil-barrel pans made between 1946 and 1967 are as renowned and desirable as the Cremonese violins of Antonio Stradivari, Nicolo Amati and Giuseppe Guarneri. Even the barrels made today are in high demand among pan players.
[…]
One of the early Shell Invaders, Malcolm Weekes, received an annual $2,000 scholarship to attend Howard University in Washington, where he played the double alto (two drums with 16 notes on each pan) for the school’s Trinidad Steel Band and graduated with a degree in chemical engineering. Now retired after a career as a chemist at Bechtel Group Inc., Weekes remembers when he and Mannette forged pans out of toxic barrels.
“We built bonfires to burn out all the crap stuck inside the drums,” Weekes, 65, says. “It was dangerous work. We all inhaled the fumes. But what the barrel had contained also helped define the sound of the drum.”
Mannette now builds about 100 pans annually from the unsoiled barrels that roll off the line at North Coast Container Corp. in Cleveland.
“Weird thing is, nobody’s really sure why a 55-gallon oil drum can be crafted into a musical instrument or why my early Shells have a distinctive sound,” Mannette says. “I once made a drum out of a Shell barrel that had stored perfume. Now that was really exceptional.”
[…]
The full article is marvelous, with much more information about the history of “the only new acoustic instrument to hit the music scene since Adolph Sax came up with the saxophone in 1841.”
[Via Buzz Andersen]