DAMNIT BUY ME A DRUM!

The start of a lifelong obsession and passion

As I related in my previous post, I grew up in the Space Age, but soon, the influence of The Beatles, and for me personally, Ringo Starr, would be overwhelming to a kid fascinated by rockets and astronauts.

I can’t remember this specifically, but according to a story passed on by my mother through family folklore, my interest in drumming began at a very early age. It was not a moment to look back on with pride.

Apparently, I was fixated on a toy drum in a large department store where she and I were shopping in Atlanta. I started pulling on my Moms arm and insisting she buy me the drum, IMMEDIATELY, to which she responded with a firm NO.

My childish response was, apparently, to throw a tantrum, and borrowing what was presumably my parents’ favorite curse word, I screamed at the top of my lungs “DAMNIT BUY ME A DRUM!” This became a sort of psychotic battle cry that themed the rest of my life. Not that I ever repeated it in quite that way again.

Mom, of course, in survival mode, promptly turned on her heel, and left me alone ranting and screaming in the aisle of that department store. All that to save the embarrassment of being tethered to an unruly kid.

I did get a toy drum, after all, a few years later when we moved to Richmond, Virginia. My first act was to march proudly around the neighborhood playing the little plastic marching drum, on a string hung around my neck, and then proceeded to immediately lose my bearings and get lost. Two kindly older ladies found me, upset and crying, loaded me into their giant sedan, and took me around the neighborhood looking for my house, found it, and returned an upset kid to his parents. That was just a few years before an incredible moment. The Beatles and The British invasion.

It’s hard to describe that moment seeing Ringo play for the first time, hearing those records, seeing him on Ed Sullivan. It was a transformative moment in mass consciousness, literally. Everyone had picked a favorite Beatle by the following day, and the media of the time, film, television, and radio (as well as the TV section of the newspaper) were inundated with Beatles-related stories. The music, and Ringo’s unique style of playing sideswiped, open, sloshy hi-hats was completely unique. The sizzle in the cook so to speak.

No sooner had the Beatles arrived, literally in the public consciousness, as well as physically in America, than the rest of British Invasion bands came through the door the Beatles were responsible for opening. Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones would become a huge influence. I remember asking my father to get me a copy of the 45 RPM vinyl single “Dandelion” with those incredible, cannon-like snare fills at the end. It was the most powerful sound I’d ever heard at the time. This is coming from a low fidelity mono speaker in a portable record player, the medium of choice at the time. Unfortunately, it took going back to the store 5 or 6 times before I could get a pristine copy that didn’t skip.

My parents were very kind, as the years went on, indulging my sporadic interest in actual kit drumming, they were not against it, but never really encouraged it. My father, generous as always, got me a budget kit in the early 70s. My goal was, at the time to sound like the drummers in popular bands of the era, like Don Brewer of Grand Funk Railroad, or Ron Bushy of Iron butterfly who crafted one of the most iconic drum solos ever in Rock drumming on the song “In_A Gadda-Da Vida”. It was a seventeen-minute excursion of rumbling tom-toms in the most tribal sense, with psychedelic “effects” like phasing and stereo panning. I didn’t even know or realize that I would never achieve their sounds because the kit didn’t have a hi-hat. There was no You Tube instruction, so you just sort of ground it out. I wasn’t even close.

I ended up selling that drumkit to buy a better stereo, sometimes in the mid 70s. Maybe that wasn’t such a good idea, but, I wanted to hear music with more clarity and fidelity, and THAT wasn’t neccessarily a bad thing. My parents decided that maybe I was spending too much time alone so they got me a vintage Cuban style Conga which I adapted to far more easily than kit drumming without instruction.

Like Dave Grohl among others, I was never formally trained, and if I’m honest, life would have been a lot easier in terms of drumming if I had applied myself to study. I am adequate, I can keep a beat, I have played semi-professionally, and I have taken Ringo’s “less is more and play for the song” as a learning philosophy. I have a nice drum kit and play when inspired.

Speaking of Charlie Watts, I was fortunate, very fortunate, to have seen him play live. Despite ample opportunities to see him play with The Rolling Stones in the 70s I almost didn’t get to see him at all. It was surreal watching Charlie pound out those Rolling Stones riffs and hear them in the air. I was flashing back to sitting in front of that record player as a kid with “Dandelion” spinning around and around and it became a full-circle moment. He passed away within months. The picture is from the Jacksonville Florida show.

I will be talking more about music and drumming influences in future posts and I hope you enjoyed this one.