Drummers as an inferior class

Savoring the persecution

“Drummers are known to be a race on their own.”
- Joe Morello

“General Browning, I am a Pole, considered by some to be smart.”
- First line spoken by Gene Hackman playing the Polish general Sosabowski in A Bridge Too Far

Hey, let's talk about a favorite topic of drummers: why does everybody hate us so much. God, it's good, apparently; the rich liquor that is the feeling of persecution. Let us feast at that trough. Let's mix some metaphors, drummer-style, because we're so unsmart. 

Pretty obviously, playing the drums is kind of a low-prestige occupation in the eyes of much of society. Not a serious activity, or much of an art form— a joke instrument played by people of questionable intelligence. It's like telling somebody you're in motocross. 

I'm not immune to it; when asked what I do, usually I'll say “musician”, and then drummer if they ask what instrument. I'm not embarrassed about it, but it sounds more serious to say musician first. I used to be worse. When I got my scholarship to go to the U. of Southern California, I would talk to classical students there and feeling abashed that I was getting money for playing the drums, while they were taking out loans. For a time, working this site's titular river boat gig, I was embarrassed to be getting paid more to work fewer hours than most of the crew. Boy, was I dumb. 

Among musicians, the comments happen the most among students. People in their late teens/early 20s are more competitive, and have not accomplished anything yet, and tend to be overly status-oriented. They'll go at each other over the general status of their pursuits, and future prospects as they imagine them. Who goes to the best school, who has the best pedigree, who plays the biggest bulls**t instrument, and who plays a real instrument. I saw a lot of that in California, and from players from the Northeast.  

Later on the attitude comes from mediocre musicians— who don't value the drums, and/or who are mad that drums are a more attention-getting instrument than their own. They may feel bullied by the drums— their physicality, and dynamic power. A lot of players never learn to play with enough power to compete with the drums played at a normal, musical volume.  

Aside: Which is not to say that it is not still our job to accompany them and help them sound good. But they have a job too, to learn to get a sound and make themselves heard and play their instrument better. 

It is easy for drummers to feel clueless around other instrumentalists, with their mysterious “chords” and “pitches” and “fingerings” and whatnot— which they've been talking about routinely since they were children, and we mostly learned later, with less regularity, and greater effort. It can make it appear that they're doing something harder than what we do. They are not. All major instruments have a low bar for entry— people start them as little kids, without even any priors. They didn't make anyone pass an aptitude test and do four years of coursework to pick up a guitar. All instruments, and the music written for them, are designed to be playable by humans.  

In fact those other musicians are 100% as clueless about drummers as drummers are about them. That's a huge deficiency, considering how important our job is to a group sounding good. But it's normal, and fine, so long as they value us, and we can relate to each other on a purely musical level. 

Normal citizens make offhand comments because 1) they're lazy, and 2) they heard someone else say something about a drummer once. The ones that actually give you grief really want to be doing what you're doing— they hate their jobs and feel untalented, and they deal with it by trying to make you feel that way too. They were raised by bad adults who made them feel bad for wanting to do anything creative, and they are not good enough people themselves to overcome that and decide to not be that way to others. 

Occasionally you get comments from music fans and from bad, part time drummers, to the effect that you are not famous and are therefore a failure. The same type of people who also attack famous people for not being as famous as they once were, or for not being as famous as somebody else. The drummers may come at you for not being as famous as a drummer they like— thinking that liking the famous drummer gives them credit for that drummers's accomplishments, elevating them above you. 

I've seen repeatedly online part time drummers attempting to gatekeep who gets to be called professional, limiting it to people whose only source of income is actually performing on their instrument— an increasingly rare species of music professional. It's a way of dragging professionals down to their level, because virtually all professionals make some of their money doing things besides performing.   

Online trolls— sad losers who want to make other people feel bad to the level at which they hate themselves— are a very low grade of opponent. They dedicate their entire lives to that pursuit, and engaging with them is a mistake. Non-responsiveness and dismissal are the best tactics if you choose to do that. 

Troll: [makes stupid/insulting comment calculated to compel you to respond]

You: All right, good luck with that.   

You don't speak to the “substance” of their comment. To the extent that there's any substance to it, they don't care about it, it's just a hook to get you to respond as they try to string you along for as long as possible. It's a pure game, and if you're going to respond, learn to do it non-responsively, and detatch. 

More generally, being defensive about anyone's comments or attitudes is losing. You won't convince a determined loser that what you do isn't a joke. I don't defend the activity. If I feel like fighting with someone about it, I'll defend the job, and the business. Like, the IRS thinks I'm working a real job, I have several decades of Schedule Cs to prove it. In the objective sense of being an economic entity answerable to the government for your accounts, your work is as serious as anyone else's in the world. People even pay you in real currency, and everything. 

It helps if you work on having a professional bearing, and a sense of professional correctness, appropriate to the situation. That puts whatever anyone says right off the table as anything deserving an emotional response. Or any serious response. You have the choice to not participate. You have to be detached from whatever reality someone is basing their comments in. It's harder if you've put yourself in an amateur situation, so try not to do that. 

And you can't secretly believe they're right. It can take a long time in life to have basic confidence in what you're doing even without somone challenging it. If you were lucky enough to not be raised and educated surrounded by offensive people, it takes some adjustment to handle them effectively and non-defensively. 

Be clear on it: all of this stuff comes from bad-to-mediocre people, and bad-to-mediocre musicians. It's completely beyond the pale for normal fulfilled people, or for good musicians. Normal people think the drums are a fun instrument, and that anyone who can earn their living with it is lucky. Good musicians value good drummers. For someone to say something negative about it directly to you should be surprising, a sign of exceptional smallness of character. 

Very occasional quote of the day: epic

From Hal Galper on Facebook:

“I’d heard a recording of an interview with Coleman Hawkins that stuck in my brain. He said you had to go to the city twice. The first time to learn the city,  the subways, where the jam sessions were and meet the doorman at every jazz club in town. You can then evaluate your playing relative to the scene, figure out what you had to get together and go home to prepare yourself for your next and hopefully permanent visit. It took me three times 

Boston at the time had two top level jazz clubs. George Wien’s Storyville was across the street from The Stable. The NYC bands came to town I'd interrogate them to find out what it was like to go to the city. Everybody had a different story. That's when I realized what happens to you in New York City only happens to you!

I was failing miserably in high school except for Shop as they called it. Grasping at straws, my parents got the idea to send me to a technical prep school my sophomore year in Boston’s Copley Square, coincidentally just across the street from The Stable, Boston’s local jazz club. I had my lunch breaks there, eventually taking a couple of bongo lessons from the club’s janitor just do do something jazzy. I’d bail on the classes spending the rest of day hanging around the club catching the sounds of Serge Chaloff rehearsing from my perch at the top of the ramp that led down to the basement venue. That was where and when I first met and took my first ever jazz piano lesson with Ray Santisi. He hand-wrote out a lead sheet with the melody to Moonlight In Vermont with some simple, nice sounding changes telling me to come back when I’d learned it. I didn’t tell him I couldn’t read. My 2nd lesson, Ray asked me to play the tune. I sat frozen staring at the lead sheet. He opined “forget it kid, you’ll never play.” I remember hearing the receding Doppler Effect of his shoes as he walked up the ramp and out of the club.                                                                                                      

Back in Salem again I came home, unkempt but unbowed. But It was too late, I’d caught the bug. Didn’t know if I could play. How could I? I knew nothing. I spent my senior year of high school cutting classes, jamming with my first trio in the back room of the school’s music director, Mr. Devoe. My bass player was Mary Burke from Tennessee and local drummer, John Pramis. Mr. Devoe, he got me. With an unending supply of pre-signed absentee approval slips in hand I jammed my way through my senior year ostensibly working on “the senior revue.,” which was actually true. Having the courage of my ignorance I played my first trio concert at the Review. Two originals. The first was in the key of C, the only key I knew a little bit about at the time, following with another in C minor, which I knew even knew less about. I knew nothing about form or structure. Considering the absolute silence that ensued, it was at best a head-scratching performance. 

You want this record.

I was facing a bleak and uncertain future until I learned Massachusetts had a State program offering financial support to disadvantaged students for tuition to go to college. I had lost my left eye in a childhood accident and qualified for full tuition at any institution of higher learning of my choosing. Really? Looking forward the end of the semester I expected to be called down to the Dean’s office because my attendance record was so bad.  He said, “Mr. Galper, if you do’t start doing any better you won’t  graduate.” Prepared, I gave him a mental F—K you, asserting I didn’t didn’t need no stinkin’ graduation because I was going to be a jazz musician. I left triumphant. My path was clear and didn’t attend my graduation.

A year later I was studying with Ray again at Berklee College Of Music. He’d play the piano while I sat  beside him, watching his small hands skitter over the keys in awe. If you were quick enough to stop him and ask, he'd show you what he played. I hadn’t become much of a better musician since our abortive encounter at The Stable and didn't learn a thing that semester. However, I studied with him again a year later and redeemed myself. I was much faster and copped royally!

Ray had been playing 6 nights a week at The Stable forever when he handed his seat over to me! I mean, who does that? I was playing seven nights a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays with Herb’s big band, the weekends in a Varty Haroutunian’s quintet with Herb Pomeroy and Monday nights with Sam’s quartet or Gene Distatio’s Quintet. One night he came into the club, pulled me aside to remind me of our first two lessons. I had completely forgotten the incident. He told me he’d learned an important lesson as a teacher. “Never second guess a student, they can surprise you.” Considering the context, his gesture was incredibly sweet and generous. He didn’t have to tell me that and he did so without ego. A lesson in humility learned and never forgotten.

“Never second guess a student, they can surprise you.”

Following 3 years of intense study with the great Madame Chaloff I was overly protective of my new chops. Alan Dawson was the drummer with Herb’s big band. A great drummer and a prince of a man but he was a lick-stepper, following my lines too close, duplicating the rhythms I was playing. I Hate That! Duplication is death to the music. Playing what you play isn’t dialog. All that tells me is you can hear. Don’t play my ideas, play your own ideas! Can’t have a conversation if the other person says the same thing back to you. I’d have to breakup my phrasing to get away from him. Not bad training in itself but I was staring to lose my hard won chops. The crazy part of me got out of the box and I lost my cool. Like an idiot I pressed Herb with an ultimatum, it’s either me or Alan. No one else in town could play the band’s drum charts and they had Ray Santisi. I was promptly fired having unknowingly broken protocol, instantly becoming persona non grata in Boston. Lesson learned. I have since never given an ultimatum to anyone. In any case, no matter what, it’s inevitable you’ll eventually bypass the musicians you came up with. You’ll know when it’s time to leave town when they make you leave. You’re a reminder they didn’t stick to the true path. So I left, giving what few gigs I had to Mike Nock, split with my first wife to Berlin to Paris to test the waters. I was back in Boston a few months later  month without a wife, broke with a brick of hash strapped to my chest, the proceeds of which kept me alive for six months. I figured, gee, I guess it’s time for me to go to The City. Duh! 

Stuffed my life into an old blue Navy B4 ever-expanding suitcase and took a bus out of town. Was told to get off at the Port Authority unawares there were two Port Authority bus stations. I got off at 178th St at 2 am with nineteen cents in my pocket, dragging my B4 down a deserted Broadway to West 75th St where I had a couple of friends I’d met the previous summer who’d let me sleep on their floor until I got my shit together. Tried to bum a penny to get 20 cents for the subway but everyone I asked gave me a weird look. Had I known more about NYC culture I would have asked for a dollar. As I walked downtown B4 in hand I kept thinking “welcome to New York Hal, welcome to New York.”  

Looking back, I'm more than ever convinced most of the important decisions in our lives are made below the level of consciousness, something I expect to expound upon in the future.”

Very occasional quote of the day: privilege

“The only sensible way to regard the art life is that it is a privilege you are willing to pay for.”

- Robert Henri, The Art Spirit

Family matters

The following may not be of a lot interest to everyone, but that's what www.blogspot.com is all about. So stand by, we'll get back to drum stuff soon enough. 

I've been dealing with some family things lately, hence the erratic posting. Mainly, my mother, Jeanette Bishop, was hospitalized over the holidays, and then died last week at age 91. It was an emotional rollercoaster of hope and despair, but in the end it was not a terrible way for her to go— she was lucid until the final couple of days, and had a good attitude about it the entire time, whatever the outcome. All of the family made it in, and my wife Casey read out loud from her memoir— mainly selections about her family life in Coos County, Oregon in the 1930s-40s. 

In addition to raising four kids mostly by herself, she majored in music and theater at the University of Oregon, and worked as a music teacher in the 50s, then got her Masters, and worked as a grade school counselor and teacher in the 70s-80s, and finally as a real estate agent in the 90s. In her last years she dedicated a lot of time to writing. She was always extremely supportive of all of us in all of our pursuits, which were not those of normal 9-to-5 civilians. 

Right now we're looking for a spot to bury her ashes at the Masonic Cemetery in Eugene— a very rustic graveyard founded in 1859, close to where the family lived and went to school. Many of the town's founders are buried there. When I was a kid it was a spooky, overgrown mess— I wanted to shoot a vampire movie there. In recent years it has been

My sister Christy and I at Masonic

cleaned up and maintained, and is accepting new burials. It's on the national registry of historic places, and is about to become an accredited arboretum. 

I never put much stock in burials or memorials, but it is the kind of place you would want to be buried— an actual living park connected to the surrounding neighborhood, and visited regularly by humans, because it's pretty and atmospheric. When we visited there were people walking their dogs, and a couple of lone young people of a poetic temperament hanging out. There was a sign reminding joggers that this is a cemetery, not a training ground. So the place gets used. The antithesis of those horrible corporate places where no one would (or does) ever go except out of obligation. 

She was the last of my parents— my father, Melvin Bishop, passed away in 1971, just before I turned 4 years old. He was a jazz and art fan and a heavy reader, with a modernist and satirical sensibility. He was a career civil servant working in Seattle, Kaiserslautern, Germany, Washington D.C., and San Antonio, Texas. At the time of his death he had been promoted to head of all United States government personnel worldwide, and the family was preparing to relocate to Washington D.C. for that job.

We found out several years ago that he also worked for the CIA— a distant relative was told that when he was getting a security clearance: “Did you know you have a relative in the CIA?” My father worked in personnel for the Department of the Army most of his career, so we assume the CIA activity was in Germany, working as a case officer, and/or screening former Nazis or war criminals, or current communists. We've submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the CIA to get more information. 

He traveled a lot and worked a lot, so I don't have a lot of memories of him. I did get one “iconic” memory out of it, when I was 3— during a family road trip, walking with him at sunset at a Hopi cliff dwelling site in New Mexico, trying to copy the way he walked. In fact that's the only time I can remember being alone with him. 

Our idealized Kennedy era middle class situation kind of fell apart when my dad died, and I had a quasi-feral 70s childhood, nevertheless surrounded by a lot of music, art, and general creativity. My mom was busy getting her Masters in counselling, and then working to support us. In kindergarten I didn't speak to anyone the whole year, except to a girl friend, who is now an accomplished sculptor. Everyone thought I was mute, but I was just committed to a concept. Then starting in the second grade I went to a hippie alternative school and became a little exhibitionist lunatic. 

I like the way it worked out. In our house there were a lot of interesting art, music, books, and design objects to discover, and I was largely left alone to make a lot of mistakes and pursue whatever I was interested in. 

Surviving are my sister Christy, a gifted interior designer; John, the most professionally accomplished drummer in the family, and record label owner; and Scott, the most unambitious genius in the world, who cared for my mom in her final years; and myself, and my daughter Jenny. 

Death march life advice

“I made a decision to set goals for myself. I've got to make it to that herd of caribou. When I got to that herd of caribou I would establish another goal for myself. I never established long term goals that were impossible to reach, I never established a goal that said 'Oh, I want to get home.' That was not one of my goals. My goals were short-range, only to keep me walking and keep me alive. Because I knew that if I fell down, I'm dead.”

— Bataan death march surviver on how to survive when you've been captured by the Empire of Japan and are being forced, in 110 degree heat without food or water, to march or die. Also how to learn to play the drums.

Two performers

Dave Camp

Just had an acquaintance, and fellow Portland musician die this week— Dave Camp, a very talented, charismatic, rock & roll guitarist, singer, and songwriter. I think he was a couple of years younger than me, in his early to mid 40s. I haven't kept up with what he's been up to, but I know he slammed it out for years in the lower middle class of creative musicians— he was working a lot, doing a few biggish things, and surviving. A successful, beloved, artist, though not rich, and not famous. Apparently a few months ago he discovered he had cancer, and then he died from it this week.

As sad as the loss of him is— I know a lot of people who are absolutely heartbroken right now— I more feel like celebrating the completion of a successful life— I want to say congratulations, Dave, you were an artist. 

Another performer, whose name I've forgotten, was a walk-on entertainer on a cruise ship I used to work on— part of a corny, four-person singing group. He worked the straightest of straight jobs— for a bank, or something— was nearing retirement, and was very proud of the very ample nest egg he had set up for himself. A conversation in my presence included the phrase “Two words: compound interest.” The story about him is that one day, a couple of years after I knew him, he was not feeling well. So he went to the doctor, discovered he had cancer, and died from it a few months later.

He may as well have spent his life writing poetry or making abstract paintings.