42-year-old actor Rainn Wilson, known from tv series like HBO\'s Six Feet Under and NBC\'s The Office, and more recently movies like Juno and Missing Pieces, drums up his career in The Rocker. In this film Rainn acts as Robert \"Fish\" Fishman, a long-retired drummer for an eighties hair band who gets a second chance at fame with his nephew\'s teen band.\"As soon as the movie got greenlit, Guitar Center delivered a big drum set to my garage. The next morning, a drum coach showed up and we worked four, five days a week for for a couple of weeks. I not only had to learn drums, I had to learn heavy metal drumming, I had to learn the songs for the movie, which I’m playing along with. And the stick twirl — gotta learn the stick twirl. This drum coach I was working with was all about putting on a show behind the kit.\"
Drumming opened Rainn\'s mind and changed music from a more of a cerebral exercise into something very physical:
\"When you drum, you\'re just loud and you\'re just pounding away. When you get into the mindset of the drummer with the sweat and the pounding and the ugly face and the whole thing. It\'s an incredible workout and it\'s not even of your body but about concentration. It requires an amazing amount of focus. Perhaps that\'s why my \"drum face\" came naturally to me. You try playing the drums and try making a normal serious, serene face. You can\'t do it. You just look weird when you\'re drumming and you\'re intense. We started rehearsals and they thought it was hysterical what I was doing with my face, but I didn\'t even think about my face.\"
Of course Rainn watched several famous drummers to get inspiration for his role as Robert \"Fish\" Fishman in The Rocker:
\"The iconic drummer of all time is The Who drummer Keith Moon so I watched a lot of Keith Moon but he\'s impossible to emulate. He\'s too good and too crazy and too specific. I also watched a lot of heavy metal videos back in the day of Mötley Crüe\'s Tommy Lee and Def Leppard\'s Rick Allen. Except for Keith Moon and John Bonham rock drummers before metal were quite faceless. You had all these great bands and you had no idea who the drummer was. Metal was the flowering of the rock drummer.\"
Although Rainn Wilson enjoyed watching the hard-hitting metal drummers, Rainn names Philip Selway from Radiohead and Glenn Kotche from Wilco as his favorite sticksmen: \"They are the best drummers in rock \'n\' roll\".
Pete Best, best known as the original drummer for The Beatles who got sacked just before they recorded their first hit single Love Me Do, has a small cameo in the film. Rainn recalls:
\"There have been plenty of band members kicked out of the band before they got big during the course of rock \'n\' roll but he\'s the most famous. But he\'s not bitter. He said, \"You just don\'t know how things are gonna work out. I got six grandkids and I get to tour the world with my band.\" We had a little scene that will be on the dvd. I find it highly ironic that Pete\'s scene got cut from the movie, except for a tiny moment where you can see Pete at the bus stop reading Rolling Stone magazine.\"
You can find more info about the film, including a trailer, at ionlydrumnaked.com.
