Pablo Torre Finds Out - The Invisible Hitmaker Behind the Soundtrack of Your Life

Episode Date: November 14, 2025

He's played with Aretha, Steely Dan and thousands more. He's influenced Zeppelin, hip-hop and "MMMBop." He is your favorite musician's favorite musician — a role player with too many rings to count who's been helping you dance for decades. So it's about time you slowed down to appreciate legendary drummer Bernard "Pretty" Purdie. Because at 83 years young, he's rock-steady as ever, with wisdom to burn on the meaning of perfection, consistency and how to keep it smooth in your own valley. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is. Right after this ad. How old are you right now? I'm 83. 83 years old. I just need to introduce the premise of why we put a drum kit into the studio for the first time in our show's history and why I demanded that Bernard Purdy be the person to sit behind it.

Well, the beauty for me is that... part of the sound. So no matter what kind of drum kit that I get, my drumsticks has the length, and it has the capability of that. So I can hear that. And that is all I ever want. The sound that you're making there is the sound that,

I think, everybody who has ever listened to music in America has on some level appreciated, even if they didn't quite know that Bernard Purdy is the reason that they were moving in that way. You're right. But I also want to just make sure I clap on front of the microphone so we can just... Because...

Well, first of all, I'll clap for having you here. Thank you. Bernard, could you clap as well, though, just for tape sink? Could you mind just giving us a clap in front of the microphone? There it is. Even your claps are, of course, perfectly... It's putting everybody to shame who's ever stepped into this podcast studio and has had to take sync a clap. So if you're not watching on YouTube right now, what you should be aware of is that there is, in fact, a fully functioning drum kit in our studio.

Because our guest today, Elkton, Maryland's own Bernard Pretty Purdy, is not just one of the most prolific and underrated figures in the history of recorded music. Bernard Purdy is a teacher. And if you're like me until barely recently, you had never been taught the name Bernard Purdy before. Because another term for Bernard's job is session musician, meaning that Bernard gets hired to take his customized, precisely measured drumsticks, and improve the music of everyone from Aritha Franklin to James Brown to allegedly the Beatles, pretty much all of whom wanted a signature groove Bernard invented called the Purdy Shuffle, which has inspired everybody from John Bonham and Led Zeppelin to the genre of hip-hop.

itself. What a diva. You're a real diva, Bernard, demanding your special sticks. Listen, when I talk with people about something, there is a reason for it. Because everything that I do, everything represents my sound. Your sound, the way you've calibrated over 60 plus years, I do need to explain why and how I'm obsessed with, especially artists who are omission. You're knee present, but can sometimes feel invisible. Yes. And you, I want to quote our mutual friend, Joey Dosick, from the band Wolfpack, one of the great bands that I love.

But I just want to quote him here because he gives you, I think, the scouting report that people need to hear. Joey says, quote, Purdy is at the forefront and in the shadows at the same time. He's on the radio at every moment, every day. everywhere, yet he walks amongst us, mostly unrecognized. He made the soundtrack to our lives. The world is a fan, but the world doesn't know his name. And it's remarkable, man, to look into your life and know that Joey's kind of underselling

you. Well, a lot of people have, but they've done it because they've asked. me to come to them around the world. And I have already, I've been teaching for 60 plus years. Almost 70. Let's just say it's closer to 70. I wasn't going to carry the one there, but I think you're right. What Rolling Stone said about you, Bernard Purdy, is that, quote, the question isn't who Pretty Purdy played with. It's who he hasn't. And so just to give us the numbers here, how many artists would you say you've worked with in total? A minimum of 5,000 different artists around the world.

James Brown. Yes. It's a man's, man's, man's world. If you listen to that, 1966, there you are. Steely Dan? Yes. Home at last, 1977? Mm-hmm.

Guess who? Mm-hmm. Aretha Franklin? Mm-hmm. I'm thinking of Rocksteady. Yes. In 71. The owner of one of the great drum brakes.

Ever. That drum break was an accident. Please explain. Okay. The drum break was an accident because... was Aretha was also keyboardists and vocalists. And the young man who was the arranger and the writer for her, Arif Martin, we had to listen to what she was doing.

So what happened, almost halfway through the song, the sheet music, fell off the piano. And we didn't stop. At Aretha was stopped singing, but not stop singing. And she kept saying, rock, steady, rock! She did that for approximately 12 minutes. And Arif, who saw what was happening, was also the producer, the guy who was in charge of Atlantic records and all that,

finally came out and picked it up, put it back on the piano. Mind you, we were still doing the break. Right, you were still playing. Still recording. We were still playing. The rock. Steady. You know, and she's doing this and waving.

Rock. Yeah. Steady. We never stop. You don't stop. When the boss don't stop, it's that simple. Didn't bother me. I'm just doing my job.

This is the part about you, right? So your legend, and again, I'll keep on listing the artists, right? Yeah. Hall and Oates. Roberta Flaude. B.B. King, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Kat Stevens, Nina Simone, Herbie Hancock, Gil Scott Herron, Louis Armstrong, Al Green, Quincy Jones.

I mean, this, you're a walking Hall of Fame. Well, thank you. I never looked at it. Yeah, but thank you. Is there a song that you're most proud of, that you think back and like, oh, that's actually my personal favorite? I really didn't. I was happy to be there. And I was always happy because I was doing demos.

I was doing demos at that time. And these demos became hits, just like the big artist became hit. I had Ray Charles. I had everybody. I played for everybody. The beauty for me was I was there to do my job, and they allowed me to do it.

But the one that our friend Joey points out, he says, the song that best demonstrates, your strength, your power is ooh child. So this is 1970, it's the five stair steps. Yes. Could you play a little bit of what you did on that song for us, just for people who don't know what I mean when I say, you make that song what it became?

Yes. Oh, boy. Oh, look. Wait, hold on. Were you just like, wait, that kind of. guy's good. Is that the reaction you just had? Yeah. Bernard Perni in 1970 was pretty

good at this. What I was doing I kept the time going and everything that I did was time, time, time. And picking up and allowing it to happen. Let it flow.

Stay out of the way in the vocal, but let it flow. And the figures all that. I was singing all these things. I was singing them. And I didn't realize that I was even singing it.

You know, I was playing it. Oh. But it was a job. The job you did, though, has been imitated, sampled by so many more thousands of people that you did not personally even play with. Okay, so we got to explain why hip hop as a genre owes you something. Okay. How do you explain the Purdy Shuffle? Now that we've got the 12-4 and the 12-8, I'm going to explain to you.

Remember that word called explain. Not explain, but I'm going to explain to you what the Purdy Shuffle is all about. It's going to surprise you. It's quarters. It's eights. The Purdy Shuffle basically happened because of the train. The actual railroad that went by my house in Elkton, Maryland. The train that stopped in Elkton had its own.

Shoot. Didn't know that, did you? The slowdown of the train. because when the train is moving, it's so fast you don't really hear where a time is or anything else. All you know is that as it slows down, you get and then it gets down to that point where it stops to that point where it stops. And it's the same thing when it starts up. Going out, you got, and it just gets up to a certain point

that it disappears. It actually disappears. And you don't hear that, you don't hear it. You feel it. You feel the train. You feel it. When you're on the train, you feel it. It's just something that I picked up and I realized that I had something going.

That's all. And I used to play it because I was only going a block away. So you sampled the locomotive is what happened. I sampled the locomotive. The train that was stopping in Elkton, Maryland. It was the marriage capital of the world for 100 years. What does that mean? People stop into Elkton to get married and leave.

And that's how Elkton became known. The elopement capital of the United States became known for truly, I would say, one of the most lasting vows in American cultural history, which is, if we got a record and we need a drummer, we got to go get Bernard. Led Zeppelin, fooling the rain. And Led Zeppelin, his wife, his wife called me. She called me when he was on his deathbed.

She called me and she wanted me to know how much she felt and he felt about me. And I was stunned. I was stunned. But what you did, the shuffle, which I hope you can show us a little bit here. It's a fingerprint. It's a unique, magnificent fingerprint. The world dances, is what our friend Joey said, laughs and cries to his beat without even knowing its hint.

He influenced everything after him. Now, the difference is that when you do the drums live, There's more space that actually works even more so that it just keeps gone. This is the never duplicated part. When it's half. Time is the only way to make the purdy shuffle last. Where it can bring in, everybody can come in and do their things, and Furny Shuffle can stay on.

But you've got to remember, it only works slower. That part, I want to explain that in the context of a term that I think people may have heard, but I didn't really think about until I started thinking about you, which is the session musician. Yes. Which is to say that you get brought in almost to help the star and to be that what you just did, that timekeeping texture, that everybody knows they want,

even if they don't want to admit that they want it. Yeah. And your job is to fit yourself around some of the biggest egos that have ever lived. Yes. And to make sure that they and the band around you get to be the best version of themselves. Exactly.

For so many years, everybody wanted, but yet they didn't ask for it, because they didn't know what to ask for. The Purdy Shuffle worked for 20 to 30 years before other people and other bands. Drummers were playing it and they were doing it the best that they could even though they didn't understand it.

Right, right. And I was fortunate traveling around the world at that time. I was going around the world in the 70s. You were fixing music one session at a time. Telling people to slow down. This groove is not going to work if you try to... By the way, if you, as the drummer, try to make yourself the star. Yeah. No.

How is it that you made peace with that? The idea that invisibility was going to be the exchange for being omnipresent. just so I could play with the stars. All of a sudden, people started calling me because of what I was doing and what I wasn't doing, trying to take the credit for everything. Hit record is a hit record. No matter how you look at it,

and those hit records still go. Today, they've been going now for 50, 6. 60, 70 years. That ain't going to stop. Who is the hardest person to work with? Because you're the easiest person to work with, okay? Who is the hardest person you had to work with? Aretha was close.

The original divo. Yes. I was also, when I became the musical director, it made it even nicer for me. But I had Quincy Jones. I had run-ins. with a lot of people, all because I was doing something that nobody else was.

Right. I love what I was doing. They didn't understand what I was doing until I showed them. Well, hold on. So Steely, Dan, what they say about you, right? This is what Walter Becker once said about you. Right? Walter says, quote, Bernard always did some unique stylistic thing

that you'd never imagine in advance that nobody else would do. Which is to say that even though your job, as you saw it, was to stay out of the way, you also needed to impress upon everybody else the best version of how to do this. And so there is leadership from a role-playing position. Yes.

And I think of sports. Yes. Everybody knows Michael Jordan. Everybody knows the guy on the poster in the commercials on all the billboards, but there are some athletes whose careers are full of championship ranks. And they do it at multiple places.

And that is its own special thing. That's what my job was. Because my job also, so many demos became hit records. You serve the song first. Thank you. That's... my whole life, because as a kid, when I was playing as a kid,

I didn't quite understand what I was doing, but it was working because it was out of the way. It didn't bother anybody. You know, I'm four years old when I was playing drums, and I knew I was going to be a drummer. I heard it from Mr. Hayward, who the one who actually ended up being my teacher. He was the next block down, next street open.

I was getting attention by the time I was 10, 11, and 12 because I had something, and I didn't know what it was. I just knew that I liked these songs. I like what I was doing and I like what I was hearing. And it was working. Do you remember the moment, and this could be any point in your career, in your 70 years playing music professionally, it seems like. Do you remember the moment when you thought to yourself,

I am doing exactly what I should be doing on this planet? Yes. I knew that by the time I was 10 and 11. Yes, I knew that. had a band by then. What was your band's name? Bugsy. Bugsy Purdy. Was Bugsy Purdy shuffling back then?

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. But the point is that, you know, it was just called a shuffle. You know, do, do, do, do do, do. people. Everybody is. You can I can say this with clarity,

having studied this, in terms of researching this episode, every drummer. I've seen so many articles, so many videos, I've talked to so many of them, they worship you. You are your favorite musician, if you're listening out there. Bernard Perreity is your favorite musician's

favorite drummer. And the way I encountered you, is of course relatively late in life because I'm not a musician, I'm just a guy who likes music. And I went to see Wolfpack at Madison Square Garden. And I was just talking to your lovely wife, Celia, who is sitting outside and this out of this class right now.

Because we were both, it turns out, having this experience of seeing you in your 80s in front of Madison Square Garden. And what I said to Joey that night and what I'll say to you here, it was just one of the most fun times that I've had listening to music, let alone being in what is often a cursed building

on account of how the Knicks have been doing in the course of my life. But that performance, I mean, you've played those intimate sessions as well as the grandest arenas, and I was sort of stunned to hear Celia talk about how moving it was for her emotionally, like tearing up to see her husband,

In 2025, teaching an entire arena of people how to keep time. That's why everything continued for so long for so many years. But the beauty for me was I didn't have to go through the changes anymore. It took me 20 to 30 years to be able to give something. and it stayed, and it stayed, and it stayed. And the thing that I marvel at now that we've been talking for this long is how much you still enjoy it. Oh, that's the whole point.

That is one of the main reasons why I still work, because I love what I'm doing. And I'm so thankful that the man upstairs has given me this, opportunity all of these years, but I had to learn how to do it and do it right. Once I learned how to do it and to do it right, there was no fighting anymore. There was no more fighting, and nobody can take it away from me. And I didn't know until I started going back, not only James Brown. Oh, you name of him.

Bernard, the band Hansen, Mbop. Yeah? That's you too. Yes. The band that had their photo in my older sister's locker also owes a debt to the guy sitting in the studio right now. Yes. Your role on this planet may not be that of the superstar on a billboard.

Yeah, it's not. But you might wind up happier. than all of the big egos and superstars that you played with. Yes. That's why I'm comfortable in my own ballet here. And I really am because teaching is something that I've been doing all my life. And I didn't know I was going to be a teacher. But as time went on, I started developing.

I became friends with the biggest named drummers in the world. I wouldn't in competition. I was just consistent with what I was doing. I never got out of the way of not wanting to play my part, but I sit down sometimes. You know, I used to do that when I was teaching. No, this kept the time And people

You could see this You can see other people Outside the door Looking and listening Oh my God That's that That shuffle That's that pretty shuffle

I was grinned from ear to ear Because I created something There's something about being a drummer Again, I'm not a musician of any kind. I tapped out at piano lessons when I was in grade school. But there's something about a drummer and the philosophy of being a drummer that's different from... I mean, look, because the drum solo is a thing. Yeah.

Right? But you explained to me that when you were doing one of the great drum breaks in recorded musical history in 1971 for Rock Steady, that was an accident. But when I think about guitarists and the guitar solo, there's just something different. What would you explain is different in terms of how you think a drummer as a profession ought to behave in a group? Any drummer, if he's smart, the one thing that you do, you learn what moves people, what moves people. And I'm learning the people with the money and people who are making things work for themselves are all looking. for that little to make them feel good. I just realized this, right?

So you're from the wedding capital of America, wedding capital of the world, and you, a product of that, are also responsible for so many people dancing at wedding receptions. Mm-hmm. Yes. There is something that does feel like you're in this flow state. where people are following your lead and it feels natural

and they suddenly they feel like they're better at dancing than they are I learned how I've really learned how to move my body when I'm playing the groove and it cracks me up because it's automatic it goes on automatic. I've been noticing. It just goes on automatic. If you're not watching on YouTube, you've missed Bernard Purdy really enjoying his own work.

I'm happy. I am happy as a lot. I really am. And it's been... I talk about it to young people. I talk about it to old people. It doesn't matter. I enjoy what I do

when you want to work and you don't want to be putting on the side when you can't do it because you're so mad or you're upset and just that you're not going to work it's that simple you're not going to work

but when you got that camaraderie with the rest of the band and the band looking over it at you and smiling and grinning, you got your job. As you put it, you've been doing this for basically 70 years. You're in your 80s. And what's so clear to me, and I wonder if you think about this, is that whenever, finally Bernard Purdy says, I'm going to hang it up.

God's making me hang it up. You're still going to be in everyone's years. We can't get rid of you. Exactly. Exactly. Yes. And that's why the beauty of it. And when I started going back and remembering all of these other folks that I hadn't played with for 15 or 20 years. Oh, the list is longer. I just gave you a sample of like the name. It goes on and on. Oh, believe me. Believe me is long. There's thousands. That could be an entire episode, just me saying names that Bernard Purdy has played with.

Yeah, because I have done that many recordings. Yes, I've done that many recordings with so many different artists. Songs that have now, they live on. These people became, you know, yeah, they became rich. They became very wealthy. But the thing is, is that I can stay working. All right, I'm not wealthy, but I can stay working and have a good time, love what I'm doing, and not hurting anybody.

And it's a wonderful feeling. It's a wonderful feeling. Bernard Purdy, the man who has kept time for the United States for 70 years, who has been our soundtrack, even though we didn't fully appreciate everything that he has done, I am very glad to find out at the end here that, much like you did for Aretha Franklin in 1971, you're just going to keep playing. I love it. I absolutely love it. Would you mind playing us out?

Sure. Hey, man. Bernard Purdy, as our control room is clapping. So loudly, we can hear it through the glass. Thank you for making this weird show the coolest it has ever been. Thank you very much. Pablo Torre finds out is produced by Walter Avaroma, Maxwell Carney, Ryan Cortez, Juan Galindo, Patrick Kim, Neely Lohman, Rob McCray, Matt Sullivan, Claire Taylor, and Chris Tuminello.

Our studio engineering by RG Systems, sound design by Andrew Bursick and NGW Post, theme song, as always, by John Bravo. and we will talk to you next time.