The Human Drummer
Thoughts on the Life Percussive
© 2008 by Hal Howland
[The Human Drummer is a book manuscript that I decided is more useful in cyberspace than in a drawer. Agent and publisher inquiries are welcome.]
Acclaim for The Human Drummer:
“Bravissimo! What a wonderful achievement. This is a great contribution to what we are all about.” Fred Begun, principal timpanist emeritus, National Symphony Orchestra
“Really enjoyed it very much! Hal has obviously done his homework. Great reading, understandable, and should be in every musician’s library.” Hal Blaine, studio drummer
“Hal must be congratulated! He offers much wisdom into the performer’s life and the realities of the business. Young drummers would find it inspiring.” Tony Cirone, principal percussionist, San Francisco Symphony Orchestra
“Opens the drummer’s world to everyone!” Britt Conley, Washington drummer-photographer
“Very interesting! Glad to know that my name is mentioned among such notables.” Andrew Cyrille, avant-garde jazz drummer
“Fills a niche! Says many things of interest to both drummers and laypersons, entertaining, explains the everyday world of the working musician, substantial—there is an interested readership out there for this book.” Peter Erskine, drummer and leader
“Compelling, humorous—I can offer only words of praise!” Chet Falzerano, drum historian
“Wow! Talk about comprehensive. I also like his very ‘human’ approach to all his subjects.” Vic Firth, former solo timpanist, Boston Symphony Orchestra
“Truly a masterpiece, and every drummer should read it! Nothing like it has ever been written. It is a wonderful piece of literature: his command of the language is magnificent and the ideas expressed in such flowing narrative as to retain the reader’s interest throughout. A work for the ages.” William F. Ludwig Jr., drum manufacturer
“Very enjoyable, very well written!” Chet McCracken, drummer, the Doobie Brothers
“Progressive thinkers like Hal are exactly what we need!” Alfonso Pollard, Washington freelancer and union activist
“Intelligent and to the point! There’s a lot to learn from this book.” Harry Schroeder, Solares Hill
“Eminently readable!” Rick Van Horn, senior editor, Modern Drummer magazine
“A masterpiece! I love it. As a teacher, I need to know this.” Ginger Zyskowski, owner, Professional Drum School, Hutchinson, Kansas
Excerpts from this book have appeared in Internet Generations and Modern Drummer.
In memory of Art Blakey, Elvin Jones, Max Roach, and Tony Williams
Contents
Interview: John Densmore Sorts It Out
Interview: Graeme Edge, Veteran of the British Invasion
Index (print version only)
I almost majored in English instead of music, and I’ve never stopped wishing occasionally that I had. I did minor in English, but in truth either subject could have been the “safety net,” because I love both equally. When the uncertainties of the music business got to me I’d fantasize about an agreeable, uncomplicated life teaching at a little college in the mountains, donning my herringbone and savoring the sound of my heels on old polished oak as I ambled to my American Literature class, the morning sun buttering ivy-covered eaves. Then, remembering that I so often felt like an outsider when playing some style of music I happened to know rather well, and imagining similar doubts about the literary life, I figured, Yeah, but how could I play music on the side, and where, and with whom? A lame jazz trio composed of bored old teachers in some local fern bar? I had put in much more time preparing myself as a musician, so, as they say in the yellow wood, I took the road less traveled by.
I nevertheless kept writing. My first published work was some bad poetry in my high-school literary magazine, Mentor (1968). The first serious piece was my master’s thesis, “The Vibraphone,” in the summer and fall 1977 issues of Percussionist, the journal of the Percussive Arts Society (PAS). About that time, my friend Judy Daley told me of an ad she’d seen in the union newspaper International Musician, seeking drummer-writers for a new magazine called Modern Drummer. Knowing it was to cover mostly pop and jazz, but having no such writing samples to offer, I submitted some scholarly papers that of course were promptly rejected, and I put MD on hold until something caught my fancy that I thought they’d like. I read the first few issues of MD, thinking, Well, surely this will improve. The main thing that bothered me about the early magazine was that it seemed to be covering only the most recognizable big-band and rock drummers. The readership seemed primarily to be young white males, and I thought a broadening of horizons was in order. Over breakfast one morning in 1978, scanning as I always did the Washington Post for the list of upcoming performers at Blues Alley, I saw a name that never fails to warm my heart: Art Blakey. I’d first heard him ten years before in The Hague, in a Birdland-like drummers’ concert that included Max Roach and Elvin Jones as well as Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. Buhaina’s jovial demeanor both at the drums and as an emcee had thoroughly charmed me. Now my blood was rushing with the prospect of sitting with him in a quiet room and asking him questions, questions he’d answered thousands of times before, in the name of educating the misguided flock of young white males wielding drumsticks. I had yet to learn that animated Art Blakey was hard of hearing and that no room he inhabited could be called quiet. I phoned the club secretary, who referred me to Art’s manager, who was understandably reluctant to grant me an audience. I called back as requested, and this time I could hear Blakey in the background: “Give me the phone!” When that venerable croak of a voice came on the line I presented my case, and, much to my delight, he said, “Come on down; I’d like to see you.” So with one thesis interview under my belt, Leonard Feather and Kate Turabian on the shelf, and every Blakey album I owned under my arm, I set off for a little motel in Arlington, and I was a paid author. The curious result appears in the October 1978 Modern Drummer.
My father, Harold Howland Sr., died in 1980—a wrenching rite of passage for me. I took comfort in the fact that my private-teaching practice had taken off nicely before Dad died, because not only did it convince him finally that I could make a living as a musician, it realized one of his fondest bits of advice: “Try to find work within five miles of your home, so you’re not sitting there in your car suffocating on those fumes for two hours a day.”
It was Dad’s intention that I would one day inherit his house, since my brother and sister both owned houses and had normal jobs that involved sitting in their cars suffocating on those fumes for at least some portion of the day. When my mother, Elizabeth (Spell) Howland, passed away in 1989, I was faced with the emotional roller coaster of going through the house and sifting through photo albums, letters, Dad’s speeches, and many other familiar old things. I began to take stock of myself in relation to the way my parents had lived. Dad was a career diplomat, and as a teenager I was naturally iconoclastic about anyone over thirty, especially a Republican; of course by the time I reached thirty I was quite proud of my old man and most of what he stood for. The fairly unbiased encouragement my folks showered on my musical intentions had always amazed me.
Writing had been a shared passion for Dad and me since my high-school days. It was one subject we could discuss calmly during the turbulent sixties. Our family had hosted the likes of Robert Frost and William Faulkner. Dad’s correspondents had included Erskine Caldwell, Walter Lippmann, Samuel Eliot Morison, Carl Sandburg, John Steinbeck, and Thornton Wilder. Now, my fortieth year fast approaching, I started letting go of some of the less fulfilling musical gigs I’d been routinely accepting for so long and devoted more energy to writing.
Early in 1990 I was working simultaneously on two or three articles on various aspects of drumming. My friend Britt Malmgren (now Conley) read one of the pieces and suggested that I write a book. The more I digressed here and opined there and realized that much of this body of writing didn’t fit the technocratic mandate of the drum magazines, the more I began to agree.
Here, then, is The Human Drummer, a collection of essays on drums, music, and life. Having an affinity with John Cage’s sense of order, I decided to address a variety of subjects alphabetically: chance with purpose, like life itself. Feel free to skip around.
The book is autobiographical to the extent that it’s based on my experience. I hope the subjective and often personal information may help you recognize something worth embracing, as well as something to avoid. We needn’t agree on which is which.
This book is for the drummer. But it’s also for the teacher, nondrumming musician, fellow baby boomer, parent, and anyone else who might enjoy reading musical stories, tips, interviews, and other arguably useful information.
A drummer will know most or all of the words used here. Further information appears in the chapters called “Shopping” and “Terminology.” Then there’s this glossary . . .
Throughout the text I mention various publications, companies, and organizations. Most of these, if I think they might still exist, are listed in the Bibliography or in the Directory. None of them represents a paid endorsement of any kind. I am honored to play Ludwig drums, Zildjian cymbals, and Vic Firth sticks, but, like most folks, I pay for the stuff.
I’ve always felt that drummers care too much about equipment and not enough about music, forgetting that many professionals use modest configurations of unspectacular gear. The only way to change that attitude is to see ourselves, the manufacturers, the media, and the arts in perspective: to preserve our independence, our spirit, our humanity.
I wish to thank the following colleagues for reading the manuscript and offering valuable suggestions: John Aldridge, Hal Blaine, Tony Cirone, Britt Conley, Stewart Copeland, Andrew Cyrille, John Densmore, Peter Erskine, Chet Falzerano, Vic Firth, Bill Ludwig Jr., Chet McCracken, and Ginger Zyskowski.
I wish also to thank Remo Belli, for seeing the big picture; Ray Benjamin, collector, for trading me one of his last two copies of the Ludwig 1963 catalog; Britt Conley, for bringing a drummer’s eye to her photography; Vic Firth, for his versatility; Fred and Dinah Gretsch, for preserving a great American tradition; Bill Ludwig Jr., for loaning me one of his last two copies of the Ludwig 1963 catalog; Robert Paiste, for showing the potential of the open mind; Roger Pierce, American consul in Amsterdam, for trying to locate my own lost Ludwig 1963 catalog; Rick Van Horn, senior editor of Modern Drummer, for encouragement early on; the Zildjian family, for continually rediscovering its colorful history; and all the family, friends, teachers, students, colleagues, and others who have inspired and nurtured my love of music and words.
The epigraphs in this book are from A Dictionary of Musical Quotations, compiled by Ian Crofton and Donald Fraser (© 1985).
Note to the editorial fetishist: I wrote most of this book in the 1990s, guided by the thirteenth and fourteenth editions of The Chicago Manual of Style. Not even I am meticulous enough to reconcile the manuscript with the substantially revised fifteenth edition, published in 2003. Comedian David Steinberg once said that a typical writer could never commit suicide because he’d never finish revising the note. In that spirit, let’s move on.
Music-making as a means of getting money is hell.
—Gustav Holst
In most ways I’m a textbook Virgo. I don’t believe in that stuff, really, but I must admit that I fit the mold insofar as I’m neat and orderly. My former timpani teacher, the National Symphony’s Fred Begun, whose birthday happens to be the same as mine, 30 August, once said, “Virgo wants to do everything one way.” This characteristic can be a fatal flaw or the focused path to wisdom, depending on your point of view, but in any case I’ve always been rather an all-or-nothing kind of person.
The musician’s life presents a golden opportunity to attain all or nothing. I knew this when as a teenager I decided to make music my career, but of course I didn’t anticipate the marvelous variety of exaltations and insults that lay ahead. After playing professionally for a few years I came to the conclusion that the only thing about the music business that isn’t completely abhorrent is the music itself.
Within that narrow perspective you still have a basic decision to make, namely, whether to play good music and probably be poor, or to play mostly awful music and, if you’re lucky, make a living at it. If you don’t live in Los Angeles, Nashville, or New York your chances of achieving more than adequate success are greatly reduced. The purist attitude leads generally to a day job, perhaps but not necessarily in the music business, allowing you to play whatever you want more or less whenever and wherever you want, and this is the approach many freelancers take. The irony of purism is that it may lead also to chronic rustiness from a lack of regular performance. Earnest repetition in a ticking practice room is no substitute for the quick reflexes needed in the charged atmosphere of the gig, and artistic pride doesn’t mean much if the final product is mediocrity. The opposite “practical” stance holds that any playing is better than none and can evolve into a full-time gig, in town or on the road or both. This is great for developing chops, consistency, stamina, versatility, and other necessary skills, and most players probably seek out or stumble into this situation at least once in their careers. For some it is a happy way of life, for others pure torture, but for all it leaves little room for creativity. You’re out half the night and sleeping half the day and playing everyone’s music but your own, and it can become just as dull as the most grueling day job. It can also be just as much trouble as pursuing stardom.
I crave diversity. I become bored and dissatisfied doing the same thing for too long, and I’ve been able to enjoy many different performing and recording opportunities in all genres. These gigs run concurrently with few conflicts because I observe a two-week cancellation-notice policy and I find a sub whenever necessary. I can play each style of music on its own terms because I’m not locked into any one of them. There’s nothing more obnoxious than a frustrated jazzer’s imposing pet licks on an innocent rock band just because that’s his or her only musical outlet.
Probably every player is forced at least occasionally to play a particularly dumb gig to pay the bills. There are various names for these ordeals: casuals, society gigs, general business (GB) gigs, penguin gigs (for the inevitable tuxedo), and so on. I used to fantasize that on these gigs the backing musicians should be allowed to hide their identities with smiling Richard Nixon masks, such as novelty shops carried during the Watergate scandal. An especially embarrassing gig would be known generically as a nixon.
Bassist Bill Rodney and I were laughing about the not unheard-of practice of running a band that plays its serious gigs under one name and its commercial gigs under another. He came up with the best wedding-band name I’ve heard yet: the Prostitones. Somehow I don’t think the father of the bride would be amused.
Then there’s the most cynical band photo I ever saw, at a resort in the Poconos: the middle-aged leader out front in a heavenly beam of light, and his dispensable young sidemen standing about ten feet behind him, their faces in total darkness. Hey, wait, I think I’ve worked for that guy!
But the concept of the suffering artist is no joke. The painful realization that the average person (and many a musician) fails to understand or appreciate good music, the daily stress caused by often overwhelming financial pressures, and fierce competition within the overpopulated music business can lead to depression, damaged self-esteem, pessimism, resentment, and open hostility toward audiences, colleagues, friends, and relatives. The situation is hardest for the composer, whose creations may lie idle because he or she can’t penetrate the barrier of resistance built into a culturally illiterate society that considers music a trivial and suspect indulgence. People love music, to be sure, especially when it’s free, and would be hard pressed to live without it; but if you were to eavesdrop under all those portable headphones out there it’s unlikely you’d hear anything of lasting value.
The key, of course, is education. Classical music, jazz, and other highly evolved art forms have long been popular in Europe, Japan, and elsewhere, partly because arts education is an integral part of those societies and is well supported by their governments. The United States is such a young nation that much of our culture is still based on our revolutionary origin and our rise to political power; the amount of serious attention the government and the public give to the arts is negligible. Occasionally this situation seems to be improving: when politicians and citizens around the world discover the open exchange that always has existed among artists, when less money is wasted on military paranoia, when Madison Avenue unwittingly popularizes classical and avant-garde music by giving it the same faddish treatment it gives any decoration that might sell toothpaste, when whole new generations of young jazzers decide to reenact Miles Davis’s career, when there is at least slightly more public discussion of the deplorable state of American education, there’s hope our people are learning finally that to know art is to be human, and not to know it is to be something less.
You can help give the arts a better place in American society by writing your representatives; by supporting your local arts council, arts teachers, and organizations like Americans for the Arts (see Directory); and, of course, by participating.
The exalted moments that make it all worthwhile, though they may come infrequently, are powerful indeed. That sense of history that sustains you when you join with your colleagues to interpret a work of great artistic importance; that most beautiful knowledge during a particular performance when the audience is right there with you, absorbed in something you’re creating at that instant, an electric awareness that vibrates in the air and reaches into the soul of everyone in the room; that miraculous occasion when you’re so well centered that you step outside your mind and calmly hear yourself playing a passage that you never heard before, that came from some higher force, or that you’d not normally consider yourself capable of playing; or just that great feeling of spontaneous fun that washes over you when you’re playing outdoors for a large crowd on a perfect day, the breeze blowing through your hair and caressing your dancing cymbals, all the pretenses of the conventional performance space lifted away like a cloud—these and many others are the fleeting revelations that we musicians live for, and that we can never predict or take for granted.
There’s no easy reconciliation between Art and Money. You simply have to do what you feel is right, whether that means delivering pizza by day and writing symphonies in the midnight hour or quitting music altogether because you can’t stand bastardizing it. In any case, if you stick it out, it pays to be flexible: you never know who’s listening.
On 1 November 1992, forty-eight hours before millions of disaffected Americans elected President Bill Clinton, Washington Post critic Hal Hinson predicted that “we are on the brink of a renaissance of spirit that will make the ‘60s look like a dress rehearsal.”* No fooling.
*© 1992 The Washington Post. Reprinted with permission.
How well the orchestra conducts Mr Beecham tonight.
—Vaslav Nijinsky
To grow as an artist you must go out of your way to work with the best musicians you can. You will gain immeasurably by being the youngest or least experienced member of a group, even if it means accepting a healthy dose of more or less constructive criticism. If you listen to what your colleagues say, at the same time not being afraid to speak up when you have something valuable to contribute, you will establish yourself as a worthy professional. On the other hand, as studio drummer Hal Blaine often observed, you can do permanent damage to your reputation by placing yourself in situations for which you’re not prepared. If you tell a bandleader on the phone that you play a killer samba and then can’t deliver on the gig, that information will travel just as fast as any good impression you’ve made. Since the drummer is often the effective leader of a group regardless of whose name is on the bill, it’s important to communicate relaxed confidence mixed with honesty and humility so you can drive the ensemble with the strength and flexibility your colleagues expect of a drummer. Remember always to keep your eyes and ears open, on stage and off.
Whenever someone calls you for a gig you can’t make and asks you to recommend someone else, or whenever you must find a sub for a gig you’ve already accepted, pick someone who will perform as well as or better than you would. Even if the sub ends up inheriting your steady gig, the leader will remember your professional courtesy and will more likely call you again than if you send an amateur in your place, hoping to prove you’re indispensable. If the caller is someone you wouldn’t want to work with yourself, perhaps it’s best just to say you can’t think of someone to recommend; short notice is always a good excuse. We’re all in this thing together.
Never badmouth your colleagues by name, even if someone else does and tries to draw you into the fray. Jealous backbiting is rampant in the arts, and it reflects poorly on everyone involved. Those who engage in this behavior usually live to regret it.
Your ego may get a boost from being the best or most experienced member of a group, and the more musical hats you wear, as a composer, arranger, multiinstrumentalist, and so on, the more likely it is you’ll occasionally fall into this situation. Sometimes it’s inescapable, if, for instance, you need to put together a group that can commit to your project without a number of other obligations; and sometimes it’s more pleasant to work with eager young players with lots of time and enthusiasm than to juggle the busy schedules of superior freelancers. In the long run, though, unless you’re blessed with Art Blakey’s gift for attracting prodigies, being a musical babysitter will get old fast: you find yourself spoon-feeding harmony lines and chord changes to people who don’t know their theory, waiting forever for people to learn parts (often the only thing separating good musicians from great ones is the time they need to prepare their work), resolving rhythmic disputes among players who haven’t learned to settle into a groove, reliving rites of passage, handling immature attitudes, feeling frustrated and angry, becoming the least popular member of your own band, and so on. It’s worth it to suffer the inconvenience of assembling the best available personnel; you’ll have more in common with them as people, and musically you and your audience will be much happier. Let someone else weed out the wannabes.
Many people, particularly these poster kids for mediocrity, have the notion that the best musicians are cocky, expensive, and generally too much trouble. In my experience the reverse is nearly always the case. The better players have less to prove, are experienced at a variety of professional relationships, and often are more than glad to accommodate your schedule and your budget. If your product is of good quality, good musicians will want to work with you.
Being a bandleader can hurt your own freelance career, though, in that people will think you’re so busy with your project that you’ve no time for theirs. The more organized, visible, and successful you are, the more likely this is. The only way around it is to keep the word out that you’re available, without sounding desperate (even if you are).
Most of the bandleaders and conductors I’ve worked for have been competent and occasionally enlightened artists. But any sideperson can provide a long list of leader gripes, ranging from the petty to the frightening. Here are a few of mine: (1) conductors who forget you exist until they hear your part enter, whereon they suddenly begin “cuing” you and motioning for more, or less, in an attempt to conceal their negligence; (2) singers who insist on counting off the songs and then ordering you to speed up or slow down midway through after they’ve decided they don’t like their original tempo, which changes from night to night; (3) keyboardists who start songs without you, as though you were their drum machine, unconcerned with musical form; (4) self-taught leaders who waste hours at rehearsal or in the studio doing things the hard way because they think ignorance is the key to originality; (5) leaders who joke with the audience at a bandmember’s expense, not realizing they make the whole group look stupid; and (6) leaders who fail to tell you in advance that the gig is nine hours away in a dark alley up three flights of stairs on a microscopic stage, the club owner doesn’t speak English and doesn’t unlock the building till an hour before the show, and the teenaged opening act expects to use your drums.
Without craftsmanship, inspiration is a mere reed shaken in the wind.
—Johannes Brahms
An issue that’s bothered me for a while is musical competence. Far too many of the musicians who perform in public are simply awful. They lack talent and training, they can’t sing, they play out of tune, they can’t groove, they don’t stand a chance of doing justice to their or anyone else’s music, and, typically, the crowd loves them. These acts land their gigs through sheer audacity, presenting to clueless promoters a slick demo package and an effective sales rap, and are taking huge amounts of money from legitimate musicians who deserve to be compensated for their years of practice and professionalism. This inequity has grown steadily since the birth of rock and roll, which created a precipitous erosion of musical standards. As any bandleader knows, everyone has access to the same jargon; often it’s impossible to tell over the phone whether you’re talking to a hack or to the next Charlie Parker.
An old fantasy of mine was that a musician wishing to perform in public for money might be required, like a doctor, lawyer, or plumber, to obtain a business license. To qualify for this license a musician would audition before an independent or government panel of music professionals and complete a written theory test. The license would be renewed every few years with periodic reevaluation. Anyone not measuring up to a certain standard, say, that of a graduate music major, would be barred from performing for pay. These requirements would eliminate thousands of dilettantes immediately and discourage thousands more from applying. Policy would be enforced by a licensing organization and by the musicians’ union, and musical fraud would be treated legally the same as any other crime. I’m not talking about restricting creative freedom or making everyone sound alike; the vast majority of employment opportunities involve Western pop musics and their many common characteristics. This field is grossly overpopulated, not only by poseurs but also by gifted, underemployed musicians—presenters and the public have proven they can’t tell the difference. Flexibility would be built into this system to preserve the variety and authenticity of folk and ethnic styles, gigs would be classified according to the position music occupies—a lounge keyboardist wouldn’t need the qualities of a concert pianist—and of course no one would be prevented from performing gratis or from writing the great American song in the privacy of home. Oh, well.
Pop musicians don’t hold a monopoly on incompetence. Another group of players who could stand a few extra hours in the woodshed is the period-instrument classical community. Performing on original instruments, using quasi-authentic performance practices, has been around long enough now that audiences and critics no longer consider it a “new” idea. Radio announcers no longer feel compelled to introduce every authentic recording as “performed on original instruments.” The popularity of period performance indicates that its logic appeals to a public eager to strip away falseness and veneer in music as in other aspects of life. The better period-instrument orchestras and chamber groups play on a level equal to that of any modern ensemble—witness John Eliot Gardiner’s virtuosic Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique—and that’s the standard by which all authentic groups must be judged. No more can we excuse bad intonation of gut strings affected by the weather, botched notes on valveless brass instruments, insensitivity in a timpanist whose little wood sticks are less forgiving than their fluffy descendants. There are still technocrats who maintain that period instruments belong in museums, along with the scholars who insist on playing them, and too many authentic groups vindicate that argument by concertizing and recording prematurely. The problem seems to be nothing more than inadequate rehearsal. Many of the same players compose the famous British period orchestras, for example, yet the quality of their recordings is erratic. Much has been made of the fact that it’s cheaper to record in Europe than in the rigidly unionized United States—but both continents have produced their share of unlistenable period recordings. The audience shouldn’t have to be part of someone’s research. The only difference between Beethoven as played by the Hanover Band and Beethoven as played by the Chicago Symphony should be point of view. Either approach, though it may have its fanatic adherents, is valid. Neither performance, therefore, should suffer by comparison.
[Of music] Her strictness, or whatever you like to call the moralism of her form, must stand for an excuse for the ravishments of her actual sounds.
—Thomas Mann
When I was a kid I thought cymbals went tssss. That’s how they sounded to me on records. Everyone knew the cliché jazz hi-hat lick, tss-t-ts-tss, translated into Ride Cymbal as ding-ding-a-ding, or, according to Shelly Manne, spang-spang-a-lang. When I began playing drums and became a regular and not altogether welcome fixture at the Family Music Centre, my impulse on entering the shop was to walk over to a hi-hat, grab a stick, and go tss-t-ts-tss. The first time I did it, though, what I heard was more like clang-clang-ker-splunk. This unpleasant surprise was due in no small part to my untutored approach to the instrument. But it also was my introduction to the many ways a cymbal can sound differently live than it does on record.
I learned immediately from my peers and from drum catalogs that the only cymbals worth owning were made by a family called Zildjian, that every real drummer played Zildjians, and that I would too if I expected to be taken seriously. I quickly adopted this attitude and, whenever visiting a music store, would automatically bypass the Zankis, Kruts, and other unthinkable brands and go right to the Zildjians, which often were stacked vertically so you couldn’t pull one out without making a lot of racket and inviting the wrath of one or more vigilant salespeople.
I could never accept the sound of these venerable cymbals. It was all clash, bong, and roar, with none of the delicate shimmer I’d established in my head as the true sound of a cymbal. Avedis Zildjians were it, though. My first set, a pair of 14” medium hats, an 18” medium, and a 20” medium ride, were as good as any cymbals anywhere, but I can’t say I ever got to like the way they sounded.
About this time, the mid-sixties, Ludwig’s catalog began touting these unknown cymbals from Switzerland called Paiste Formula 602. Their descriptions make them seem, on paper, much more like my imaginary cymbal sound, and I was impressed that Ludwig had put their good name behind this underdog brand; at the time Ludwig was Paiste’s U.S. distributor. I was equally impressed with Paiste’s creative approach to cymbal making: besides the usual types there were tiny, thick Bell cymbals, cupless rides that purportedly didn’t build up loud overtones, and other exotica. They went so far as to claim that Joe Morello, the star of their catalog, used Paiste cymbals.
I didn’t know Joe Morello from Joe DiMaggio, but the catalog said he played with Dave Brubeck. My parents’ only jazz record was Brubeck’s Jazz Impressions of the U.S.A., so I put it on the turntable—and lo! there it was, my imaginary sound! Joe’s cymbals pinged, hissed, and purred exactly the way I thought they should. Now, for all I know the cymbals on that album could have been A. Zildjians. And it would be a few years before I would hear a little guy named Tony Williams.
The rest of my Joe Morello story is in “The Right Stick.” Its significance here is that Joe opened my mind to an alternative. I know now that any good drummer can make any cymbal, high-born or humble, sound good, and many of the qualities I listen for in a cymbal are present in different models by all different brands. Two of the favored cymbals in my collection are a 15” K. and a 14” A., both old top hi-hats. And of course an interesting cymbal doesn’t necessarily sport a designer label. I have a couple of ancient oddities, a 12” Leedy, sans tambourine jingles, and a heavy and much-hammered 14” Stanople, made in Italy and also at one time sold by Ludwig, that are occasional visitors in my expanded jazz kit.
In the sixties cymbals were marked, if at all, with small, discreet lettering that identified them as rides, crashes, hi-hats, and so on. Spurred probably by Paiste’s willingness to experiment with new shapes and alloys, an unbecoming race ensued in the seventies to see which company could offer the most specific types of cymbals and which could desecrate them with the biggest, most garish ad copy. So many dedicated cymbals appeared that no self-respecting drummer would have dreamed of riding a crash cymbal or crashing a ride cymbal. All through the eighties I had to explain to one student or another that what matters about a cymbal is how it sounds and not what’s proclaimed on its surface. The classification craze shows no signs of abating, of course, and it has defined certain archetypes. But there’s no law against using these instruments for purposes other than those for which they were designed, as their designers would be quick to point out. Mickey Toperzer of Drums Unlimited understood this well enough to order his Zildjians unstamped so buyers would rely on their ears and not their eyes—until Zildjian discontinued that courtesy. In 1996, Paiste got the message and rediscovered the beauty of unsullied bronze in its fabulous K.-inspired Traditionals line.
Here’s a tip you won’t get from the manufacturers: a coat of paint stripper and a few minutes will free you from commercial bondage.
I was never much concerned with cymbal classification, and the sounds I heard from my favorite players’ cymbals confirmed the feeling that cymbals are intensely personal instruments. I loved the big, slow crashes Ringo Starr got from his rides; he never used piercing little cymbals, and his famous open hi-hat wash was bold and invigorating in those days when producers and engineers did everything possible to keep drummers in their place. Whenever I heard a great jazz drummer perform I noted that musicianship is the key to eliciting a certain sound from a cymbal. The last time I checked in with Elvin Jones he was playing three 20” cymbals, one heavy and two mediums, the last two with rivets. He occasionally switched their positions to give each instrument a chance to “sing lead.” Max Roach was getting everything you could want from an 18”, a 19”, and a 20” Pang. And Tony Williams, whose dark, beautiful cymbal colors have inspired generations of drummers, was using a similarly unexceptional setup, all mediums.
Closely tied to cymbal classification is positioning. There are so many lovely sounds you can get from each cymbal that you should place them so you have easy access to the whole instrument—bow, bell, edge, top, and bottom. Generally that means keeping your cymbals low. I get uncomfortable if a cymbal is above shoulder height, and I don’t like having my cymbals’ positions dictated by my other instruments. Normally my drum set is a four-piece, but even if I augment it I make sure I can get to every inch of every cymbal. Maybe it’s a “jazz” attitude, maybe it’s a fascination with the metal sounds I heard as a child in the Middle East, but I think this logic is important. On the other hand, recording engineers use different mikes for cymbals than for drums, and they sometimes like you to mount your cymbals high for maximum separation—and you should cheerfully comply if you hope to be called back. I accept the notion that high cymbals allow a certain showbiz appeal. Big gestures, such as those necessary to reach a cymbal that’s out of reach, have always been important on TV and in grandiose rock venues. It’s true also that the huge setup, physical power, and complete lack of subtlety the average rock drummer uses really do require that cymbals be placed up and out of the way, as it were—why be able to stroke the grooves of a crash cymbal with the end of a brush when all you’re going to do is attack it with all your might? Cymbal positioning, like drumming itself, is about the transfer of physical energy to produce musical sound; how much energy you expend, and how needlessly or gracefully you use it, depend on the style of music you play and where you’re playing it. Rock and roll, to paraphrase Bill Bruford, is a young person’s game. A drummer’s cymbals tend to get lower as he or she gets smarter.
The only way to land a big job [in music] in the United States is to proclaim arrogantly that you would never stoop to take it.
—Pierre Boulez
Some of the day jobs I’ve endured to afford my music career have been in the field of music. All have been educational in some way. I’ll discuss them briefly as points of reference.
My first day job was a three-week voyage as a sixteen-year-old steward aboard the Dutch merchant ship Hilversum (see “A Life Percussive”). Although hardly a conventional summer job, it certainly was a memorable experience. The work—making beds, preparing food, waiting tables—was a drag, the environment often noisy and dirty. I could relate to the other boys, educated British and Dutch kids working their way across the Atlantic toward some higher purpose; and the crew at large, composed mostly of coarse veteran sailors, was amusing. The pay was negligible. Again, it was an adventure.
For part of the summer between high school and college (1969), I was a ticket clerk at Marty’s Playland on the boardwalk at Ocean City, Maryland. This gig entailed observing the scores people achieved on various games and awarding the appropriate tickets to be redeemed as prizes. It amazed me how seriously some people took their play, and how quickly they barked at me if I wasn’t right there the moment they scored. In addition to this unpleasant duty, the job required sweeping and cleaning; I sustained a rather nasty groin pull one morning by jumping up to polish the top of a pinball machine. Marty’s was no less a drag than the Hilversum, and it lacked any hint of adventure. Well, there was the steady stream of nominally dressed girls wandering in off the beach, but I was too embarrassed to speak to them. In its way Marty’s introduced me to the tedium and humiliation inherent in most day jobs.
During college (1969-73) I worked on the music-department stage crew, but that job hardly counts, since it was very part-time, it paid next to nothing (about fifteen bucks a week, as I recall), and it was rather enjoyable. I would recommend such an experience to any performing artist: it never hurts to know what goes into a production from behind the scenes. I got to meet a number of wonderful performers. I also got in on some of the backstage jokes that enhance one’s appreciation for the artistic life. When the New York Shakespeare Company arrived, not only did the actors themselves set up their ingeniously portable sets, they revealed that one of their pastimes was taking on different personae from town to town. On this particular evening the sign on their bus read The Harry James Orchestra.
I put in exactly four days in a fast-food restaurant in my first year of college. On the afternoon of the fourth day I cut my finger on an onion slicer. Shortly thereafter, while I was mixing mustard in a vat, my bandage came loose and several drops of blood dripped into the mixture. When I nervously brought this calamity to the manager’s attention, he laughed and said, “Just mix it in. Nobody’ll notice—and if they do, they’ll think it’s catsup!” I left and never went back. This experience did yield two positive results: (1) it reinforced an already profound distaste for fast food (my tale is mild compared to others I’ve heard about those places); and (2) when my speech-class teacher subsequently assigned a talk meant to persuade people to accept or reject something, voilà: a topic made to order.
I had an enlightening job the following summer (1970). I was a desk clerk at a beach motel that was owned and operated by, and catered to, gays and lesbians. I was one of very few straights on the property. The owner reluctantly hired me because I assured him of my discretion. His other employees, young schoolteachers and professionals summering in a safe conclave, were pretty entertaining. Since I doubled as pool attendant, I somehow became known as Tarzan. Occasionally someone would make a slightly familiar remark, which we both would laugh off, and which I secretly would find at once rude and flattering. It gave me a perspective on what it must be like for a woman in the mainstream workplace, smiling her way through a cloud of innuendo. Mostly, though, I saw the varnished pain of bright, gentle people driven underground for the crime of being different.
The next summer I spent a few days in a telephone soliciting office. That occupation is offensive enough for all concerned, but it turned out that what they were selling was trips to the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, a scene for which I had no affection and less desire to promote. (I’ve since learned to appreciate certain aspects of country music, but don’t tell anyone.) In the evening I was teaching beginning guitar to a friend, and one day I brought my twelve-string to work to keep it out of the hot car. The boss, a big man who appeared to have sipped his share of Jack Daniel’s through the years, saw the instrument case and asked, “You play any country music on that thing?” “As little as possible,” I replied. He was not amused.
Later that summer I worked briefly in a gas station. This was when gasoline was thirty cents a gallon and you didn’t get out and pump it yourself. I didn’t know much about cars, but I didn’t have to. Only two memorable events, both painful, stand out from this ordeal: (1) the day I gashed my wrist between the trunk handle and bumper of a rusty old Volkswagen (worker’s compensation was sending me little checks for months afterward); and (2) the day I remained standing innocently behind a mid-fifties Chevrolet whose waist-high intake pipe was angled so that a torrent of gasoline shot out all over me before the nozzle clicked off. Then there was the geeky uniform we had to wear.
Another interminable college summer job involved delivering major appliances for a discount department store. This was long, hard work in oppressive heat and humidity, and when my supervisor wasn’t spewing sophomorically filthy jokes he was putting me in some life-threatening situation. He once got us stuck on a flooded bridge, and the only thing that saved us from being washed over was the weight of the refrigerators we were hauling. This job’s only saving grace was the beautiful Shenandoah Valley scenery.
Early in the summer after college (1973), while I started making musical contacts that led to a full-time Top 40 gig, I endured some truly unsavory work for a temporary employment agency. They’d call you early in the morning and ask if you were available that day, but they wouldn’t tell you what the job entailed until you said yes (rather like some musicians I know). Then, depending on how desperate you were, you’d accept or reject a grueling day’s labor mopping up some warehouse or moving furniture. Not recommended.
That June, Vic Bernhards, a trumpeter from college then working as a National Park Service Ranger at Wolf Trap Farm Park for the Performing Arts, told me Wolf Trap was seeking ushers. It sounded like a painless way to hear a lot of free concerts, so I applied. Indeed the part-time job turned out to be fun and enriching, and my co-workers were fellow humanists. The work itself required all the intelligence of a zucchini, and during extended Broadway musicals things got pretty tedious, but overall I had a good time. Like many musicians’ “day” jobs, it paid relatively little. One evening I had an incredible experience: A young woman came through my line, stopped, and exclaimed, “You’re Karen’s boyfriend!” Since I’d had two girlfriends named Karen, one of whom lived there in Virginia, I assumed that’s whom she meant. Then it dawned on me that this girl had attended my high school in Holland. We laughed and chatted for a few seconds. I was about to ask for her number, but the line was a mile long, and her sturdy escort was glaring impatiently at both of us; in an instant she had disappeared into the breezy night. Later I looked her up in my old yearbook and recognized her as Angela Robinson, freshman, class of 1972. I tried unsuccessfully to find her in the phone book. Maybe you have to be a government brat to know the meaning of such a moment.
The most humbling job I ever had was as a drugstore cashier during my first year of graduate school. I was spending my days scaling the heights in the company of Monteverdi and Mozart and my nights with yet more semiliterate bosses and rude customers. I did raise a chuckle when as a trainee I failed to recognize the town mayor and kept him waiting while I routinely called in his ID. Unlike some of his constituents, he was a good sport.
I landed a full-time musical day job in 1976, while waiting to hear if I’d won the audition for a road gig that was months away. Working the sheet-music counter at a mall music store was relatively peaceful, if you could block out the polyester-clad organ salesmen. Again, I worked with artists, most of the customers were teachers, and there was much to learn about diverse repertoires. A humorous case of culture clash occurred the day a stout, middle-aged woman dressed in cowboy boots, jeans, and a flannel shirt came in and asked a theory question. I capped my explanation with something like, “And it’s this way pretty much throughout Western music.” The woman stepped back in surprise and drawled, “Now, how’d you know I play Western music?”
After spending the first half of 1977 on the road with a glitzy show band, I returned to D.C. to work with a promising songwriter. Since our sporadic gig schedule hardly paid for rehearsals located forty-five minutes from home, I was forced to seek out another day job.
Like many musicians, I’d always thought it would be fun to work in an instrument shop. Every time I’d ever asked about it, though, the local positions were filled, or the owners didn’t hire working players.
I was at Drums Unlimited one day, sharing shop talk and lamenting the musician’s mercurial fortunes, when the boss’s delightfully droll daughter, Shelley Toperzer, took me aside and told me that longtime assistant manager Peter Driscoll was leaving. Having been a customer since 1965, and knowing that Mickey Toperzer was hardly one to mince words, I felt I had nothing to lose by applying for the job straightaway. After expressing his distaste for my shoulder-length hair, Mickey granted me one of the pearls he so often couched in a stream of caustic editorial: “A lot of drummers romanticize this business all out of proportion. The thing you’ve got to realize is that retail is retail, whether you’re selling drums or screwdrivers.”
Undaunted, I went over to Pete and asked him what the job was like. It turned out he was leaving to fulfill his second love: fixing motorcycles. Although he’d become practically part of the family—Mickey’s wife, Shirley, ran the office, Shelley was the buyer, and manager John Popielasz (Populous) had been there since the early seventies—Pete was ready for a change. Even a noisy cycle shop offered him a kind of peace he’d never know in the shadow of Mickey’s difficult personality.
Pete Driscoll was also a fine player; he had Bill Reichenbach’s finger-control technique down to a tee. Like me, Pete played Gretsch, and, like me, he knew better than to engage Mickey in a conversation about that particular brand. A few years later Pete would buy one of my old Gretsch kits through an ad in the Post. To Washington’s loyal Gretsch fans, Pete would be missed. For a while, I tried to fill his shoes.
I showed up for work at nine o’clock one sunny May morning in my best approximation of mainstream business attire and began my tutelage in John Popielasz’s easygoing style. I’d been playing for fifteen years, but what I didn’t know about percussion was staggering.
First of all, shortly after I was hired, the new Ludwig catalog came out—which in the drum business was analogous to the publication of the federal budget. In 1978 Japanese drum companies were just beginning to exert a serious influence on the market; American firms still led the pack (though their quality control had hit rock bottom). Ludwig products were so standard throughout the industry that you could talk entirely in model numbers and the average drummer would understand you. Having started out playing Ludwig, I thought I knew their line fairly well. Not so, my Liverpudlian window-shopper! Ludwig had just introduced their new molded shell, they’d recently taken over Ringer timpani, they had new lines of hardware and cases, and there were whole worlds—drum corps, mallet instruments, ancient replacement parts—with which I had only a player’s familiarity.
Even more intimidating than the reams of product information I had to digest was the variety of tastes, opinions, attitudes, needs, wishes, dreams, and demands expressed by Drums Unlimited’s astounding range of customer types: everyone from the government (Washington’s numerous military groups), school systems, and symphony orchestras throughout the world to panicked parents, smart-mouthed teenagers, and thousands of regular colleagues. I had to discuss and recommend truckloads of products I’d never considered using myself, and I felt obligated to keep my own preferences out of the conversation as much as possible.
But the most distressing confirmation I made at Drums—and, again, this dilemma exists in every business—was that truth and profit don’t necessarily mix. One of the house maxims, for instance, was, “Never sell what you don’t have.” If we were out of a particular timpani stick, I was encouraged to point the customer toward another model that was in stock, even if the player had expressed a preference and was a longtime friend who gladly would have waited till the right one came in. It’s not the most vicious lie of all time, and many conceited merchants think they’re broadening their customers’ horizons when they engage in this tactic, but I found it intolerable.
Almost as taxing were the pontifications of self-styled superstars who would come in with their admirers on a busy Saturday and take up my time while the shop was full of students with legitimate questions. Usually if these bashers bought anything it would be a few pairs of sticks that they would spend half an hour pointlessly rolling and tapping on the counter.
Then, of course, there was the noise. Practically no day went by when a rock drummer or a classical percussionist didn’t come in and try out every crash cymbal in the building at full volume. And just the insidious clatter of professionals and curious amateurs tapping, shaking, and scraping things throughout the day would build in my brain like some wartime flashback. In the evening I’d leave the place feeling the same way about drums and drummers that most people do.
In short, I was a lousy salesman. I had known this going into the job, of course—I’d never been particularly gregarious, and selling is no occupation for someone who doesn’t enjoy an eight-hour faceful of people—but I had somehow expected my love of music to pull me through. The stress was too much. And Drums Unlimited was a tranquil Japanese garden compared to a general music store! After only a couple of months on the other side of the counter, I was burned out.
Mickey did respect my scholarship and organizational skills, though, and he knew we’d both be happier if I were tucked safely behind the scenes. This realization coincided with Shelley’s own mounting concern at the load she was carrying, having to order and inventory thousands of instruments, accessories, and publications from every corner of the globe. We decided I would take over the library, the inventory of children’s instruments (Orff-Schulwerk and the like), and the mail. I would also help write and edit promotional literature. Mickey hired an aggressive young salesman, Woody Hume, who was perfect: he could sell the stuff and still be smiling at five o’clock.
I was saved. I wouldn’t have to deal with the public, I could wear what I wanted, I could learn more about the bookish side of the business, and I could still buy my gear at ten percent above cost.
Shelley and I developed a most enjoyable working relationship. She knew on paper every percussion instrument ever made, and I knew something about playing it. I helped her appreciate the contents of famous drum books she knew mostly through their sometimes unreliable publishers. In honor of my little cubicle she called me Radar; I dubbed our monthly Orff report the Book of the Dead. Any undersized product became known as the Jazz model; any item that sounded dull and lifeless was the Recording model. Particularly tedious paperwork often felt the smack of our bright-red BULLSHIT rubber stamp. And we evolved a telepathic system of looks and asides to express our bemusement at the ego-stroking activities of the sales floor.
One evening Shelley and her younger brother, Michael, just home from college, came to hear me at the Childe Harold. (How honored I was to set up my drums on the same stage where I’d seen Elvin Jones and Tony Williams.) On this particular night I was trying out some unfamiliar heads, and the kit sounded terrible. The wood and glass walls of the small room didn’t help. I endured the first set and went over to say hello to Shelley and Mike. Noticing my discomfort, the puckish heir to the Toperzer dynasty proved he’d inherited his share of Papa’s sarcasm. His first words to me were, “Wanna borrow my drum key?”
In the days ahead, I had the opportunity to examine every instruction book and performance piece in the world’s most comprehensive percussion library. I noted the books that made the most sense to me, which weren’t necessarily the classics, and the fact that there were a lot of people in the world making a peaceful living teaching privately at home. From these revelations Howland Percussion Studio was born.
My year and a half at Drums Unlimited was an experience for which I’ll always be grateful. Looking back, all the equipment I bought, all the catalogs I collected, and all the insider education I received seem insignificant next to the respect I gained for the entrepreneurs who compose the percussion industry. Most of these individuals began as drummers with an idea and the curiosity and resolve to see it through. When Mickey spoke of Remo or Ludwig or another big name, it was always “he,” never “they” or “it.” Mickey understood that whether he was ordering a dozen drum sets from a corporation or a single chime plate from a woman sitting at her basement workbench, he was dealing with the dream and commitment of one person. Before closing the shop in 1996, as he surveyed more than thirty years on the world musical map, Mickey Toperzer saw far beyond the confines of that little building in Bethesda. Opinionated? Inflexible? Arrogant? You bet he was. But like another famous curmudgeon, Buddy Rich, Mickey rose above his notoriety. In his awkward way he could be warm and kind; and no one cared more about preserving the art of drumming. He knew things about the instrument that have eluded whole generations of professionals. When what you were seeking was not on the shelf and not in the book and dismissed by the mainstream as a lost relic, Mickey was the only game in town.
My new home teaching studio got off to a painfully slow start, while I awaited results from promotional mailings, ads, and clinics. I was aware of being just the newest teacher in a city already well served by members of the National Symphony, military drummers, and other veterans. But after a few months I started getting recommendations from colleagues, schoolteachers, and music-store personnel, and by the end of 1980 I was teaching about a dozen students. Beginner’s luck and a convenient location near public transit and the junction of two interstates played no small part in my early success. My enrollment grew steadily over the next few years to thirty students and fluctuated wildly thereafter. Our society’s perverted cultural priorities and its unwillingness to support the flagging educational system it pretends to care so much about were a source of some frustration.
As a convenience to my students, I maintained a tiny retail business, Vienna Drum Shop. I offered the same discounts as the big guys so students would learn to distinguish a deal from a rip-off.
Even once my home business was established, rough times occasionally sent me out to another day job to fill in the blanks.
For a short while I worked the counter in one of those chain music stores where they sell cheap instruments at list price and hire young teachers off the street. This depressing experience only stiffened my determination to make it independently.
I managed the shipping warehouse of EPM Publications, owned by the family of Jon Metzger, the vibist in my jazz band. That job wasn’t as grim as it might seem: I had the place to myself most of the time, I learned more about the shipping business than my one-man record company ever needed to know, and the job was ten minutes from home.
In 1994 I accepted a disposable position as a jazz buyer and newsletter editor with Tower Records. Low pay, high-school policy, and excruciating noise (some called it music) grew old fast.
My friend Annette Gallant, a wonderful songwriter with whom I briefly co-led a band called Lost Ambulance, heard about a job opening for which we thought I was well suited. In 1996 I became the concert manager of my graduate alma mater, the Benjamin T. Rome School of Music at Catholic University. In 1998 I was appointed to the percussion faculty. I would retain this latter position but flee the first, which consisted of babysitting on a biblical scale.
In 1999, having outgrown the last symptoms of academic nostalgia, I was named the development assistant and librarian of the National Chamber Orchestra, whose timpanist I had been since 1984.
In 2000 I accepted an administrative position with the Florida Keys Council of the Arts (see “A Life Percussive”). More selling, politics, and babysitting.
I’ve paid some dues for my decision to major in performance instead of education. But what have I missed along with dubious institutional security? The joy of cringing in the November mud with an unlistenable marching band? The privilege of door-to-door selling to save the spring tour? Taking a lifetime to scale a brick wall of bureaucracy? No, thanks. I’ve played a wider variety of high-quality music in thirty years than most educators play in their whole lives. The classroom is our noblest workplace, and those who excel there have my undying respect.
Since 2004 I’ve worked in peace and quiet at the Monroe County Public Library in Key West. In 2006 I retired from teaching. On the side, I play the gigs I enjoy and politely decline the rest. Life is good.
A drum is a woman.
—Duke Ellington
I’ve always taken good care of the things I touch, perhaps as a result of being a middle child: the line that determines what’s yours and what’s not is pretty blurry until you’re old enough to have set up certain defenses. I was taught that musical instruments are precious and in many cases priceless, so it’s always made sense to me to treat them with respect.
Percussion instruments are easy to care for, and few things can go wrong with them. There are whole books written on this subject (see Bibliography), so without covering too much old ground I’ll pass on a few common-sense tips from someone not blessed with an abundance of common sense.
The biggest headache in equipment care is your drums’ finish. No matter what type it is, natural wood, lacquer, pearl, chrome, fiberglass, or Plexiglas, the finish is the hardest feature to maintain and the easiest to destroy.
I needn’t describe here the challenge of keeping up with my first metal snare drum, a Ludwig 400. For the fanatic there are a number of polishes available at the local auto-supply shop, and percussion companies make various products. Windex or any store-brand glass cleaner and a soft cloth do a fine job on undamaged chrome. I’ve never had much trouble with pearl-finished drums. Again, Windex works, and there are many other products available. Do not use Windex on wood!
The whole time I had my first set, however, as much as I loved my Oyster Blue Pearl, I always wondered what was under it. Why shouldn’t a drum set be a beautiful piece of furniture like a grand piano, I thought, and why doesn’t anyone make one like that?
Well, in 1971 I picked up a Gretsch drum catalog. I started leafing through it, appreciating all the quaint, funky features that make Gretsch drums so appealing—and there it was, the Progressive Jazz kit in Hand Polished Walnut. The other drum companies had made lame attempts at natural maple and mahogany, but here was a true instrument. The rich, honey-brown color brought out graceful swirls of grain, showcased in a glassy, flawless clear lacquer. In those days Gretsch was owned by the Baldwin piano company in Cincinnati. This was the most beautiful drum set I’d ever seen, and I thought if I were ever to own one like it I’d set it up in my living room and never take it out of the house; it was too good to subject to the rigors of professional use.
This impression was reinforced when I happened on one of these sets in my college town of Harrisonburg, Virginia. I was always customizing bits of hardware, and, since I hadn’t acquired the tools or skills to do any of the machine work, I started visiting a small shop called Shen-Valley Band Instrument Service, owned by a friendly old craftsman named Mr. Doval. I walked in one day with my latest stripped bolt or hacksaw project, and there on a pedestal in the corner was this breathtaking Gretsch four-piece in Walnut. It might as well have been Michelangelo’s Pietà. I began to take in the realization that someone had shared my sense of utter extravagance and built the drum set of my dreams. I looked at it from every angle. I couldn’t find a single thing wrong with it.
Again it hit me, the dull ache of reality: Yeah, but how would you feel the first time some clumsy bass player crashed into these wonderful instruments? These are the Stradivarius of drums. But someday, just for sheer personal satisfaction, to have and behold in the sanctity of home . . .
My reverie was shattered by Mr. Doval’s proud acknowledgement. We started talking about Gretsch, and he shared some of his considerable knowledge on the subject. Then he opened a creaky drawer and pulled out a worn copy of his “latest” Gretsch catalog, copyright 1966. “Here, you can have this. Not many people appreciate these drums anymore.”
I fell in love with Gretsch drums. I pored over my small but growing collection of catalogs, I studied, imagined, planned, and fantasized. I memorized model numbers and reveled in arcane bebop language; they even listed the sizes differently, 12” X 8” instead of 8” X 12”. Try as I might I couldn’t imagine actually carrying and performing on those beautiful Walnut drums, but in my heart I now was thoroughly a Gretsch man.
In matters of fashion and politics, I was winding up my Black Period. I wore black, decorated my dorm room in brooding-poet black, espoused radical left-wing thought, and, inspired by Spencer Dryden of Jefferson Airplane and Joe Bauer of the Youngbloods, I decided I could maintain both my image and my instrument’s gigworthiness by going with black drums.
I drove up to Chuck Levin’s Washington Music Center in Wheaton, Maryland, the area’s only open-minded Gretsch dealer, and ordered a Gretsch Name Band set (similar to a Ludwig Super Classic: 14” X 22”, 9” X 13”, 16” X 16”, 5½” X 14” wood snare) in Jet Black Nitron, a glossy covering.
To my dismay, I discovered after a few weeks of use that the solid-color finish showed minute scratches that would not have appeared on the complex pearl finishes I was used to. I never found a satisfactory solution to this problem.
Finally I thought, This is ridiculous, even basic black is too much trouble, why not go the distance? So I hopped in my VW Bus and headed back to Wheaton and ordered the same set in, gulp, Hand Polished Walnut.
What a thrill I felt when I showed up at Chuck’s a few weeks later and opened that big carton. Joe Nardy, my salesman, had been playing Gretsch for over forty years, and his excitement was as palpable as mine. One after another I carefully removed each drum from its heavy inner bag and celebrated with relief that the gorgeous finish was perfect. It was supremely self-indulgent, and I remember thinking of Daisy losing herself in the luxuriant mountain of Gatsby’s shirts.
Caring for the wood finish turned out to be much easier than I’d expected. The outer layer of lacquer is remarkably strong and resistant to minor bumps. It does have a tendency to check (develop hairline cracks) if exposed to sudden or extreme variations in temperature or humidity, but you can avoid this problem by not leaving the drums outside in a hot vehicle all day or in a cold one all night. It’s best also to avoid direct sunlight. Owning these fine, old-world instruments is a holistic experience, and whereas you must accept the responsibility of caring more for them than for utilitarian drums, it’s a good deal easier at the same time to accept the aging and character-building effects of nature than the careless accidents of people. With a wood finish you become one with the earth.
The easiest things to use on the finish itself are a spray or liquid furniture polish and a soft cloth; keep your old cotton T-shirts. My favorite polish, as recommended by the craftsmen at the Modern Drum Shop in New York, is Guardsman. It cleans and shines well, it doesn’t mess up chrome hardware, and, unlike your drum set after a week in a nightclub, it smells good. Pledge or a similar product works fine. I’ve used Old English lemon oil, but that can dull your chrome. (Old English is great on porous nonglossy surfaces.) You could go to a lot more trouble and rub a fine paste wax into the finish, but it’s not worth it considering how quickly the drums get grimy in the workplace. Gretsch used to recommend Gretsch guitar polish. Gibson and other luthiers offer good polishes; Martin polish is especially fragrant.
A common, preventable injury occurs to a wood-finish mounted tom-tom when it is allowed to scrape up against the snare drum or floor tom. The neatest solution to this problem is the Fibes Sta-Way. The Sta-Way is a pair of soft plastic bumpers attached to the ends of a short metal strip that fits under a keyhead. Its minor shortcomings are that (1) your tuning must take into account the slight flexibility of the metal strip, and (2) if the two drums are not snug you get a squeak that a recording engineer might not appreciate. Danmar has a similar Drum Bumper. Reunion Blues, maker of beautiful leather instrument bags, offers a leather Bumper Pad that ties to your tension rods with thongs; this one has neither of the Sta-Way’s drawbacks and has the advantages of quick removal and double use as a muffler. At any rate, don’t just let your fragile wood drums crash into one other when you play; it takes only one night to ruin them.
If you’re careful carrying, setting up, and taking down your drums, and if you offer any necessary gentle encouragement to your bandmates to show your instrument as much respect as