Big Drum Thump

In case you were worried that Tommy Lee wouldn’t have anyone to kiss on New Year’s, breathe easy. He and Pamela Anderson are spending the evening together in Montreal. In Pam’s own words, “How romantic.”

You see? Hot chicks not only dig drummers: they sometimes even want to be drummers. The delightful, delectable Dido discovered just how much fun skin bashing could be as she was recording her recently released third album:

Drumming made me listen to music differently—especially when I started playing along with things. I would do this thing of playing along with my iPod.

I’d actually love to be in a band at some point.

The thing that would excite me next, to learn more, would be to play for someone else while they’re singing. That would be really interesting.

Participants ask that the Gumball be referred to as a “rally,” but it’s really pretty much a race—a 3,000-mile race on public roads. Sound dangerous? Don’t be such a wussy: only a couple of people have died so far.

The race (er, rally) was founded in 1999 by former model Maximillion Cooper (awesome name, by the way), and the drivers are generally well-to-do car fanatics (e.g., just the entry fee for this year’s Gumball was about $120,000). Along with David Hasselhoff, Orlando Bloom, and Tara Reid, the celeb drivers in the 2008 race include Travis Barker, who we expect to burn some serious rubber as the representative for all thumperkind.

We’ll be scouring the Web for pics of Trav in his vehicle, which we’re betting is a muscle car with Zildjian Pitch Black logos. Let us know if you got the goods.

But not in a full-on gay way. No, the drummer wants Depp to play him in the possibly upcoming movie based on Motley Crue’s extremely entertaining and readable autobiography, The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band. Sound like a stretch? Like how in the hell is 5′ 10″ Depp going to pull off 6′ 2″ Lee? Well, we’re not at all worried. If Depp can do Hunter S. Thompson so brilliantly, dude can act the shit out of anybody.

And some other stuff in this interview about The Rocker, but it’s really only the drums that matter, of course. He says:

How tough was it to learn drumming? I took drum lessons with this guy named Stuart Johnson who’s been in a lot of bands and we got to work for a couple of weeks before I went up to Toronto and really, he was just playing me like Zeppelin and White Stripes and a lot of real basic drum beats. So we worked on a lot of basic drumming, but then he also really coached me on the specifics of heavy metal drumming which is a whole art form to itself.

Cool. Almost cool enough that we can overlook the misspelling of Neil Peart’s name:

Yeah, we went to see Rush. There weren’t any really metal bands playing at the time when we were shooting in Toronto. We certainly didn’t have time. We were shooting 6 days a week, but we went to play with Rush and got to hang out with Neil Pierce and got to actually play his drum set. That was a pretty rare privilege.

We have absolutely no inside info on this latest bit of gossip…but when did that ever stop DIY reportage?

Some celebrity blogs are reporting that Tommy Lee was a no-show at Pamela Anderson’s birthday bash in Las Vegas this weekend. The two recently reunited as cuddlebugs, so Lee’s absence does seem somewhat odd, though not entirely damning given that he and the rest of the Crue guys are super occupied with Cruefest and their new album. But how to explain these pics from WireImage of Pam getting cozy with Criss Angel? Man, we’re not even going to try. Just get ready for the shit slinging and fist swinging.