R.I.P.: Sandy Nelson, Influential Drummer Dies at 83

Sandy Nelson, one of the few musicians in pop history to score Top 10 hits as a drummer — something he did early in a career that included more than 30 albums — died on Feb. 14 at a hospice center in Las Vegas. He was 83, reports The NY Times.

His son, Joshua Nelson Straume, said the cause was complications of a stroke that Mr. Nelson had in 2017.

Mr. Nelson was a session drummer in Los Angeles in 1959 when he recorded “Teen Beat,” a propulsive instrumental whose dominating drum part was inspired by something he had heard at a strip club he visited with fellow musicians.

“While they were looking at these pretty girls in G-strings, guess what I was doing?” he said in an interview with The Las Vegas Weekly in 2015. “I was looking at the drummer in the orchestra pit.”

“He was doing kind of a ‘Caravan’ beat,” he added, referring to the jazz standard made famous by Duke Ellington. “‘Bum ta da da dum’ — small toms, big toms. That’s what gave me the idea for ‘Teen Beat.’”

Mr. Nelson had played in the backing band for Art Laboe, a popular Los Angeles disc jockey who also had a small record label, Original Sound Records, and Mr. Nelson took the song to him hoping that he’d press it. Instead, Mr. Laboe tested it on his radio show.

“The little rascal, he played the actual acetate from the lathe,” Mr. Nelson recalled, “and he wasn’t going to press it up unless he got a few calls.”

Mr. Laboe, he said, got three calls from impressed listeners, and that was enough: Mr. Laboe pressed the record. By October 1959 it had reached No. 4 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, a rare achievement for a drum-centered instrumental.

Mr. Nelson scored again in 1961 with “Let There Be Drums,” which reached No. 7.

Two years later, he was riding his motorcycle on Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles when he collided with a school bus and was badly injured. Part of his right leg was amputated. But he returned to drumming, learning to play the bass drum with his left leg.

Sander Lloyd Nelson was born on Dec. 1, 1938, in Santa Monica, Calif., to Lloyd and Lydia Nelson. His father was a projectionist at Universal Studios.

“My parents had these roaring parties with Glenn Miller records,” he told L.A. Weekly, “and the sound of those got to be like dope to me — I had to hear those records.”