Some reminders I’ve pinned eye level at my work desk:
* Get comfortable being uncomfortable
* Stay in your three-foot world
* What would I do if I wasn’t afraid?
* I think mental toughness is a man’s ability to defeat the voice in his mind that is telling him to quit.
* How dangerous it always is to reason from insufficient data
* It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write.
* Freaking out is not an option
–end–
SKF NOTE – I find the toughest part of recollecting how I became a freelance writer and managing editor of Modern Drummer is getting right the sequence of events. More than once I was sure I did this before that, only to discover the opposite is true.
Also, my writing motivations are often hazy. Or maybe my motivations were as simple as, “I want to do this.” Or, “I’m following my heart.”
Imagine having a passionate interest in something for 35-years. Everything related to your passion you collected during those years is kept in a large, secure barn. One day you draw the window blinds, drain the pipes and turn off the water, call the power company and have them turn off the electricity, lock the front door, and walk away from it all.
Thirty years later, for the first time, you unlock the front door and walk in. You’re standing in the center of half-a-lifetime of your work. You haven’t forgotten all of it. But you have forgotten some of it. And much of what for half-a-lifetime was your passion, your life focus, is now out-of-focus, scrambled.
Sorting through 35-years of memories after a 30-year hiatus. How do I do this? And when it seems most overwhelming is when the doubts kick in: Why have you unlocked this door? Why are you combing through boxes of memories? Who cares?
Beginning this work in progress I knew experience would most likely prompt me to revise my initial plans. For example, I thought answering the question, “What were my writing influences?” would be an easy single-entry blog post. Not so.
I’m learning it’s okay to have short blog posts. And if some subjects take longer to piece together accurately than others – so be it.
SKF NOTE: This is an excerpt from my 1983 interview for Modern Drummer with Fred Below. I was at the MD office taping the interview during a phone conversation with a suction cup mic and an audio cassette recorder. Fred Below was speaking from his home in Chicago.
In 1983, unless you had attended the Roy C. Knapp School of Percussion in Chicago – there was mystery surrounding it. It had a great reputation, but very little was known outside of Chicago about the school’s curriculum and teachers.
Mr. Below’s remarks make clear two additional points: First, he was an exceptionally well-schooled musician. Second, that not all Chicago Blues drummers were simply “feel” players.
SKF NOTE: I found the full transcript from my 1983 interview with Gary Chester, published that year in the April Modern Drummer. The transcript is about twice as long as a typical MD feature interview at that time, suggesting Gary shared words of wisdom beyond those in his interview.
Scott K Fish: How did you develop good time?
Gary Chester: I studied time. Time is the whole essence of playing. Davey Tough, Nick Fatool, and another cat who just died in a fire, Morey Feld. These guys are not soloists or nothing, but their time is so gorgeous. I love time.
SKF: Did you used to talk to Davey Tough about time?
GC: We used to sit and play brushes all night. Him and I.
SKF: With a metronome?
GC: No. Just between ourselves on a cardboard box. What grooves we use to get! That’s the trouble with the younger generations. They don’t know time as well as they should
SKF: Until you started session work you never messed with a metronome?
GC: No. I never had to play with a metronome because God gave me something inside me. I have a born-in quarter note. So I don’t have to worry about that. But, when I went into records there was no click track playing. It was just the pulse of the room.
I don’t think you can show me a record that starts and ends in the same tempo, which is acceptable.
Gene Krupa
In my first blog post I write of how important to my eventual music writing was hearing, at age six, my Uncle Bob’s recording of Gene Krupa‘s China Boy, and also, discovering Uncle Bob’s mismatched four-piece drumset and loving its “sound” – especially the small tom-tom.
As important to my music writing was the varied music heard at home, friends’ homes, on radio/t.v., in school. I asked Mel Lewis how he learned to play drums to different styles of music. He said, “Ears.” Listening! Mel was familiar with many types of music. By the time I started drumming, then writing about drumming, I too was familiar with many types of music.
Rock was in its infancy when I was a kid, so I grew up hearing the popular music of my parents’ World War II generation, plus the emerging rock music of my generation, mostly on AM radio. My mother loved Al Jolson. She also played the upright piano at home and I loved hearing her play, “Theme from the High and the Mighty,” by Dimitri Tiomkin.
Other songs/melodies I liked growing up were, Stephen Foster’s Beautiful Dreamer, from the movie Mighty Joe Young, Nat King Cole’s Ramblin’ Rose. Mitch Miller had a hit t.v. show of his men’s chorus singing “an alternative to rock ’n’ roll.” In his New York Times obituary it said, “Mr. Miller came up with the idea for his singalong albums in 1958, drawing on a repertory that ordinary people had sung in churches and parlors for decades.”
My 7th grade music teacher, Mr. Robinson, often taught our class to sing those same songs, often by singing along with Mitch. (Mr. Miller also played oboe on and produced some of Charlie Parker’s string albums.)
My classmate, Kevin Darby, was the first to introduce me to rock ’n’ roll. Kevin tried explaining it in words. I don’t remember what he said, but he finished by playing me his brother’s 45-rpm Party Doll, by Buddy Knox (1957).
The Party Doll drummer is David Alldred. Of Alldred and the Party Doll recording session, Buddy Knox said, “We didn’t have a drummer, but a boy by the name of David Alldred, who joined the band later, was a session player for Norman Petty, so we used him. I can remember looking at him and all he had was two drumsticks and a box with cotton pushed up in it. I still think that makes a heck of a drum sound.”
Alldred was ahead of his time. Today it’s fashionable to have very expensive drumsets that sound like boxes full of cotton.
Gene Krupa, great American songwriters, early rock ’n’ rollers. These are examples of the sounds of my earliest musical life.
To be continued….
–end–
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