SKF NOTE: Some nice footage here of Nick Fatool. One of my favorite drummers, who I first heard with Artie Shaw’s small group The Gramercy Five.
Fatool was a very musical drummer. Gary Chester cited Nick Fatool as a drummer he admired for his “gorgeous time.”
SKF NOTE: My educated guess on this Vinnie Colaiuta endorsement picture, found among my file folders, is that Yamaha sent it to me when I was gathering info for CREEM’s 1985 Drum Supplement.
I was surprised and disappointed then at the poor quality of this photo. The original is printed on thin, semi-gloss paper — which made it impossible to reprint in a magazine. Pre-digital photography especially, magazines always wanted to start with highest quality photo prints. For one reason, photos lose some of their quality with each reproduction.
When you start with a poor quality photo, knowing it will be of even poorer quality when the magazine is printed — it’s almost always better to not use the photo at all.
I scanned and tweaked my original copy of Vinnie’s photo for this post. Again, not a great photo. But, it is a photo from one of the great drum makers of one of the great drummers. One moment in time.
SKF NOTE: Last week I came across this photocopy, a parody called, Here’s How to Get Your Article into Modern Drummer. I wish I remembered how this came about. This was a great group to work with. Everyone had a sense of humor. Even MD founder/publisher Ron Spagnardi took part in this spoof.
I don’t think this piece was ever published in the magazine. Did we have that much of a sense of humor? But it’s fun for me to look at. Great to see old friends and co-workers sometime between 1980 and 1983.
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Yesterday, 10/14/17, Former MD Features Editor Rick Mattingly wrote and filled in the missing pieces to this MD parody:
I got a letter from one of our writers saying that he was curious about the whole process of accepting, editing, and publishing articles. (I may be wrong, but I think it might have been Rick Van Horn when he was still freelancing from California.) This is how I answered him. No, we never published it, but we sent it to all of our regular contributors. My favorite photo is Dave Creamer looking at a comic book to get layout ideas.
I took all [the photos] except the one of me; Dave took that. It would be easy to do something like that now with digital photography and InDesign, but we shot the photos on film, got them developed and had prints made, then Dave sent them to our pre-press to have them screened, and then he pasted everything up.
SKF NOTE: One of a series of Zildjian brochures from the 1980s, I believe.
SKF NOTE: When I was 17-years old our garage band, Potter’s Field, covered Vanilla Fudge’s version of, You Keep Me Hangin’ On. That’s my first memory of Carmine Appice.
Ten years later, I met Carmine at a Long Island Drum Center drum clinic, the same day I interviewed him for Modern Drummer magazine. At his clinic, Carmine ventured into drumming territory – i.e. odd-time signature jazz fusion — that surprised and impressed me. And he was very easy to interview.
Now, 50-years after the release of Vanilla Fudge’s first album, Carmine continues performing, writing, and releasing new music. By any measure, that’s a career path most drummers would love having.
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