Written for 1997 Memoir Class

Linked from Edward Louis Levin

One of my first memories is of playing along with records, with a pair of drumsticks on a little green wooden footstool. I was six years old in 1950, and really loved my dad. We would spend long hours together, with him playing his collection of jazz 78’s, and me drumming along on my little wooden stool. I had certain favorites, usually happy up-tempo Dixieland numbers. Somewhere around the house I still have the home disc recording he made of me playing along with “South” by Pete Daly and his Chicagoans. It’s old and scratchy enough to be almost unlistenable now, but it still has that infectious bouncy beat, and there’s my enthusiastic sticks tapping along on the wooden stool, in and around the beat, an innocently joyful sound that could make any cynic break into a silly grin.

This was a really great collection of jazz 78’s — Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Jimmy Lunceford big band records, and a lot of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie be-bop 78’s he bought as they were coming out in the late 1940’s and very early 1950’s. He was very knowledgeable about jazz, which was a sort of elite, kind of early hip thing (he always referred to people that didn’t know about the wonders of the jazz world as “laymen”). I could see he took great pleasure in transmitting this esoteric knowledge to his receptive and appreciative first son.

To me my dad was this warm, loving, super-beautiful physical specimen. This much is certainly true: he had won the Southern California AAU gymnastic championships, with first place in the rope climb, flying rings, and horizontal bar in 1942. He still has the blue ribbons and gold medals in a case at home, along with some incredible pictures of him doing an Iron Cross on the rings. Really beautiful.

He had learned gymnastics at the playground across the street from where we lived in West Hollywood, and met my mom at Fairfax High. When he was called up into the Army Air Corps they made him a physical training instructor and wrote stories about him in the base newspapers when he arrived. After a while they started training him as a ball turret gunner in the B-17, but the war ended before he was sent overseas. It’s a good thing, too, because those little plastic bubbles under the planes were the easiest targets and the first to be shot out of the sky.

He had started his record collection while still in high school but really built it up while in the Air Corps. When he got out in 1945 and started life as a civilian, he was working as a sort of office assistant for his brother’s finance company. He really hated that place, working for his brother, repossessing cars that were collateral for the high interest loans they made to poor Mexicans in East Los Angeles. His joy was his family and his record collection.

When I listen to the old disc recording now I think about where the drums have taken me. They have been my companion for as long as I can remember, taking me far from the joy and innocence of that little guy tapping on the green stool. From the stool I graduated to cushions on the couch, and then in high school a full drum set in the living room. It went with me to my dorm at Stanford, and then off campus, as I started to drop out, first rooming with a great jazz trumpeter in an off-campus house. Then the transition from jazz to rock, with the beginnings of the San Francisco rock scene of the sixties. I was near the center of that maelstrom for five or six years of loud rock and roll, playing at the Fillmore and Avalon ballrooms and in the “house band” in Golden Gate Park during the so-called “Summer of Love” in 1967. It left me with a bunch of great stories about Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, many of the other characters that came through our gigantic party. In 1971 I was a founding member (and drummer in the rock band) at the largest farming commune in America. Now another twenty-six years later, I’ve been through several careers, including 13 years in corporate management, mostly with drums safely tucked in the closet. One memorable exception was a weekend retreat with about 250 men where I found myself at the center of a huge primitive ritual, playing on the largest hand drum I’ve ever seen. And now I find myself beginning to apprentice with a master drummer who teaches storytelling and group facilitation for schools and businesses.

Still sitting on a desk in my home office is a snapshot, from about the same time as the disc recording, of a little boy squinting at the camera. He’s playing on a toy drum set on the sidewalk in front of a house, across the street from a playground. I think he must be hearing that bouncy internal rhythm, poised to play along with the pulse, to ride the rhythmic wave, not really knowing where it would lead.