The drum rhythm baits the hook of "We Will Rock You." In sports stadiums, it begs for a game-saving touchdown.
But pounded out as a communal pulse from a sacred drum circle led by a one-armed rocker whose fall and rise is heavy metal legend, it becomes prayer.
Rick Allen, Def Leppard's drummer, is sitting under an oak tree in shorts and a T-shirt with one sleeve tucked inside. He is shaking an instrument called a cabassa and, with a bare foot, tattooing a bass drum set on soil that was once part of an Indian village and is now the Chumash Interpretive Center in Thousand Oaks.
To the left and right, 65 people holding drums in their laps turn the pulse into a percussive chorus of ancestral homage.
"To destroy the indigenous wisdom is to destroy the blueprint of our very survival," said Allen two days earlier in Malibu where he lives, rolling from one favorite topic -- the knowledge planted centuries ago by Indian tribes -- to another. "Somewhere down the line you and I are related. That's what we have to realize: the interconnectedness of all of us. We can't do it alone."
Four months shy of 40, Allen wears a large, unadorned metal ring in each ear and Buddhist rosary beads around his neck. A hard-rocking Leppard for 24 years, he channels spiritual energy into the Raven Drum Foundation, a nonprofit group he runs with his fiancee and partner, Lauren Monroe.
They use the byplay of rhythm as a tool that helps people realize they can create and be part of something. They stage drum circles for physically and emotionally disabled children, cancer patients, addicts and others.
They also gather at places like the Chumash center for percussive mantras that attract drum circle regulars, spiritual seekers, musicians who chat about their "American Idol" auditions and a fan from Huntington Beach who has seen Def Leppard in concert seven times.
White sage is burned to purify the ceremony. There is talk of empowerment and overcoming fear. Participants draw circles in the dirt as part of ancient rituals aimed at casting out negativity to be replaced with joy, peace and unity.
They dance and, of course, they drum -- tubanos, congas and tambourines fusing into one. Most play with the rhythm. A few play off it, providing counterpunches and exclamation points.
If things are in balance, every drum can be heard.
"In some circles, there's too much testosterone. It's not about that. It's about a simple rhythm. The power is in the syncopation," said Allen, describing the circle in a way that conjures images of a locked door coded to open only in response to a drumbeat. "You feel the closeness. You see parts of people you don't necessarily see when you first meet them."
Metal for the soul
Five days after the drum circle, Allen and Def Leppard were in Cadott, Wis., headlining a day's worth of a Rock Fest that includes groups like Twisted Sister and Alice Cooper. Held throughout a long, loud weekend, the festival draws as many as 25,000 head-banging Midwesterners a day.
If Allen followed custom while preparing for the show backstage, he burned white sage and let the smoke cover and cleanse his body. He uttered a mantra of hope that the show creates positive energy and the music helps people. He asked for protection from negativity.
And then he and others in a lineup unchanged since guitarist Steve Clark died 12 years ago after mixing painkillers and alcohol hammered out hits like "Photograph," "Pour Some Sugar on Me" and "Bringin' On the Heartbreak."
It's not just drum circle rhythms. Hard rock can be spiritual too, Allen said. Always has been. He just didn't always know it.
As a boy growing up in Dronfield, England, he just liked the power of a beat. He'd walk alongside drummers in marching bands to feel the beat. By the age of 10, he was playing in bands. At 15, he was invited to join newly formed Def Leppard.
Six years later, the band was becoming one of the loudest and biggest groups of the '80s, having recorded "Pyromania," which sold 7 million copies in the United States. Befitting the history of the genre, Allen evolved into a hedonist who drummed, drank and drugged.
He was "dabbling with cocaine" on New Year's Eve 1984 -- the day he was driving his Corvette-Stingray outside Sheffield, England, and joined a roadway dance with a red Alfa Romeo. It passed him, slowed, then sped when Allen tried to get around it.
After several miles, the drummer decided to end the game by gunning his car around a corner. He lost control and the Corvette rolled. He was thrown free but his left arm stayed in the car, pulled off by the seat belt.
A doctor told him he'd never play again. Allen proved the prognosis wrong by learning to use electronic foot pedals to operate the drums that were once the jurisdiction of his left arm.
The challenges weren't all physical. Allen describes it as a spiritual awakening and remembers how the loss of blood jeopardized his life.
"At a certain point, I didn't think I was going to make it. I think that opens something profound," he said, describing his life or death as a choice. "It's a fight or flight sort of thing. I felt like it wasn't time. I felt like I had so much to do."
Language is limiting. Allen struggles to verbalize realizations that have nothing to do with words and worries about casting things in a context that seems too out-there.
He talks about how immediately after the accident, he could still feel the energy of his missing arm. Others sensed the same thing. Asked to touch his hand, his father said there was still something there.
It made Allen think about mortality.
"If you take an arm away but it's still there ... what happens if you take away the whole person?" he asked.
Kathleen Allen-Daly, his mother who is visiting from England, remembers visiting the hospital and sitting by the bed until early in the morning, talking about aspects of life that had never before been discussed. She remembers him saying the crash was a kick in the backside and he needed it.
"He was changed totally," she said.
Language of the beat
Allen showed up at an interview at a Coffee Bean in Malibu, a few miles from his hillside home, with his fiancee, his 6-year-old daughter Lauren, his mother, his stepfather and a cairn terrier named Ricky.
While the others headed for a park, Allen and Monroe tried to explain how the crash became a path.
"It allowed me to experience life more vividly," he said. "I'm grateful for the teachings and the lessons learned."
Because it created his interest in the body's energy, the accident also led him to Monroe; she's a massage therapy teacher who studies tribal culture and energy medicine.
They met about three years ago in Boulder, Colo., when, as part of a class demonstration, she performed energy therapy that sounds sort of like a massage except she never touched Allen's body.
They clicked. She started giving him visualization exercises to use on tour as physical therapy and also to put a compass on his spiritual interest, guiding it with goals or intentions.
They plan to marry in October.
Together, they explain how Raven Drum Foundation is geared to give challenged people a sense of accomplishment and power. The group's motto is "educating the spirit through the arts."
Allen and Monroe talk of how the circles help people enter a meditative state, losing and sometimes finding themselves in the rhythm. They describe it as therapeutic, remembering how a little boy who suffered a stroke was able to uncurl his hand and strike a drum. And then there was the girl who kept screaming until she heard the jingle and rhythm of bells strapped to her wrist.
Percussion speaks where language can't, Allen said. It's been that way since the days when people beat on their chests to communicate.
"The whole idea of the drum is firmly embedded in our DNA," he said.
Allen and Monroe weave indigenous philosophy and respect for ancestry and nature into everything they say. Allen noted that when one nation attempts to take over another, the most valuable asset -- the culture -- is almost universally ignored.
They talk of not only how drums and sacred rituals create energy but the importance of guiding that creation by focusing minds and hearts on a common, constructive goal.
Allen described times, both in the circles and Def Leppard shows, when everything seems in sync. It's as if the rhythm controls the drummer instead of the opposite.
At those moments, the energy is tangible.
"It feels like a blessing," he said.
