OLD SCHOOL DRUMMING

 I recently joined a Facebook group called Old School Drummers. I did it at the invitation of a friend and former fellow drummer, Mark Paulus of Lima, Ohio. 

I also did it against my better judgment. Mainly because I haven’t been anything like a real drummer in decades. But then, again, if you’ve ever been a drummer, it’s something that stays with you for the rest of your life.

Truth be told, I can still read the music and hear the licks in my head, even if my hands and feet stubbornly refuse to reproduce them with anything close to accuracy. And I have instant recall of the feeling of being at the top of my game—never great, surely, but good. Maybe even very good. 

Every day, I find myself lamenting the fact that I ever stopped playing. I know that if I’d continued, still today I would be as good as I was way back when. Perhaps better. But after having stopped for several decades, having timidly taken it up again is, I suppose, self-indulgent. I will clearly never be even a shadow of the performer I once was. Playing now will never be anything but a salve to help relieve the sorrow of having neglected and lost something once so hard-earned, precious and vital to me.

But, okay, it is what it is. No crying over spilt milk. And here we are. Starting over, like a false toddler learning to walk again. 

In the end, I decided to take up my friend’s invitation to join the group, because, as I say, the acute memory of what it’s like to play and play well makes me conversant on many of the subjects that this group generates. Even though, I can’t, like many of the other older members who never quit, post videos of myself cookin’ on the drum kit at age seventy-something. The reality is that, if I were to post myself playing, the proverbial jig would be up!

People talk about all sorts of things on the OSD site. It’s a highly populated and very active community. Drumming, it seems, is something we’re really passionate about. It’s incredible the range of topics members find to discuss. There are all sorts of opinions about which drums are the best and why. The size, weight and quality of drumsticks. Which bass pedals and hi-hats are most effective. Why one brand of cymbals is better, brighter, mellower, etc. than another. And, by the way, what’s the best way to clean cymbals…or should you clean them at all? How to best restore pearl finish and metal hardware. Best drum heads and why. Drum tuning and how it affects sound quality. Different configurations of drum kits and why one might be more effective than another. Ways to get around symptoms of aging like arthritis and hand and wrist pain and still keep drumming.

Dan (middle) with fellow Wapakoneta High School
drummers Jane Siferd and Mike Krebs.

And then the more obvious discussions about who “the world’s best drummer is/was.” Which groups from which eras were the most outstanding in the worlds of jazz, hard rock, soft rock and fusion music. Which learning aids are the best to buy. And then there are myriad videos of great drumming to wow us and bring back memories of some of the greatest old school drumming ever heard.

So anyway, the other day, there was a sort of “remember when” post that featured a pair of VeriSonic hollow aluminum drumsticks from the nineteen-sixties and asked if anyone remembered them. I did. Quite well. I immediately recalled when we got them in at Porter's Music Store, where I worked in Lima,  from age sixteen through eighteen. We had them in a special display in all sorts of sizes, from light jazz sticks to thick 3S sticks used for marching band. I also remember that, for a little while, the Wapakoneta High School drum section I was in had them in the school team colors of red and white—red shafts, white tips and butts.

They came in a variety of colors—all with white tips and butts: metallic red, green, blue and gold being the most popular. Most of the Facebook Old School Drummers reacted with laughing face emojis. Some said they’d remembered seeing them but never bought any. Others said they’d bought a pair but never could see the advantage or didn’t like the sound they produced. One guy said he’d had a pair and that they’d lasted him about ten minutes. Most, obviously, being old school, thought them an absolute travesty. If sticks weren’t oak, maple or hickory, they simply couldn’t be considered sticks. 

But I can still recall how trendy we were in the sixties. It was a time when the new generation was out front and emerging, an era when even many older middle-class people were trying to keep up with the trends, wanting to be cool and hip. It was the Age of Aquarius. The New Age, when liberal was the height of cool and conservative was the enemy Establishment. Clothes, music, art and writing were all embracing the trendy nature of the times. If it was new and cool, we wanted it. So would I try aluminum drumsticks? Hell yeah!

So, here’s a funny story. I had just bought myself a couple of pairs of VeriSonics. One pair metallic green, the other gold, if I remember right. I wasn’t convinced they were what I needed for my work as a nightclub musician. I felt good old hickory lent itself better to jazz and fusion music. But in my “sage” seventeenth year, I had a theory about why the VeriSonic sticks were better for concert work than traditional wooden sticks. They were, I reasoned, identical, and so, perfectly balanced, with perfectly molded and matching tips. That meant, I told myself, that they were much better designed, scientifically speaking, for the absolute precision required by symphonic band and symphony orchestra work.

No matter how much I sought to reason and justify my trendy purchase, the truth was unavoidable. I’d bought them because I thought they looked cool as heck. The rest was just window-dressing.  

With fellow scholarship-winner Dave Stroh

Well, shortly after I got the new aluminum sticks, I won a scholarship to attend the renowned Ohio University Summer Music Workshop (now known as the OU Music Academy).   It was a summer music clinic for supposedly gifted young musicians. (I mean, most of the kids I met there, ages fourteen to seventeen, were indeed musical prodigies, but that only served to make me wonder what the hell I was doing there).

I ended up doing well, however, being chosen in performance challenges to be the head percussionist for both the symphony orchestra and the symphonic band. Personally, I think it was because I was the only percussionist with broad knowledge and ample experience playing tympani (kettle drums), on which the others failed to impress, but who knows?

The orchestra was directed by talented Ohio musical educator Charles Minelli. It was my first experience with a real symphony orchestra. I thoroughly enjoyed it, mostly sticking to tympani for challenging pieces of classical music including the Grieg Piano Concerto, which featured my new friend from Cleveland and extraordinarily talented pianist Curtis Jefferson, Cesar Franck’s Symphony in D Minor, and Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, among others.

But it was in the symphonic band that I felt most at home, since I had been playing in local and all-area concert bands since junior high. The man in charge of the band was probably the most renowned of the instructors at the workshop—Lt. Colonel William H. Santelmann, US Marine Corps (retired), who had been the twenty-first director of "the President's Own" First Marine Band, which was founded at the end of the eighteenth century and one of whose directors had been “the March King”, John Phillip Sousa. The colonel's own father, William F. Santelmann, had been the band's nineteenth director.

Lt. Colonel William H. Santelmann

Santelmann was an incredibly talented and highly intimidating conductor. I doubt any other director could have gotten what he did out of a symphonic band made up of high school teens in the short couple of weeks that he had to work with us. I had seen him absolutely demolish several of my peers in the band during the days of rehearsal leading up to the closing concert, and I wanted to make sure I was never on the receiving end of his fury.

Anyway, all went swimmingly, with me performing at the top of my game, also mostly on kettle drums, while meticulously keeping the rest of my section in check as well. But during the last rehearsal before the event, I decided to play the snare drum part in Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. And, of course, I broke out my lovely gold VeriSonic sticks for the occasion.

It was as we were playing the climactic crescendo to The Great Gate of Kiev that, for the first time, the colonel's ice-cold eyes locked on me, and he suddenly cut the band off in mid-crescendo snare roll. You could have heard a pin drop—and might well have heard me peeing down my leg, had I not quickly gotten my panic under control—when he stared me down and said, "Young man, are those knitting needles that you are using?"

I laughed. He didn’t.

"No sir," I said, recovering a bit. "They're balanced aluminum sticks for a cleaner, more even sound."

I think I half expected him to say, "Oh, how interesting. May I see them?"
Instead, he gave me the most withering of glares and hissed, "Newfangled trash. I hope you have a traditional hardwood pair with you, or you can leave now and not come back."

Luckily, I did.

Yes, the colonel was indeed, old school.