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Looper's Delight
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Stephen Goodman wrote: "In a kind of balance, I spent the mid-to-late 60s with a transistor radio under my pillow every night (even at summer camp in Vermont, where Cousin Brucie on WABC wasn't hard to get), and so my nocturnal appetites were fed a combination of Motown, Brit Invasion stuff (including four chaps), and pop psychedelia like "Pictures of Matchstick Men and You" or "Red Rubber Ball". " I fucking loved 'Red Rubber Ball' when I was a young teenager (that and the aforementioned Motown, Stax Soul, James Brown and Brit Invasion with a smattering of folk music (Joni Mitchell, Dylan, etc.) and later, liberal doses of Psychedelic music and what was then called Hard Rock (Zeppelin, Free, early Tull, James Gang, Cream, et. al.). My sister's musical tastes had a huge impact on me except for her love of novelty songs. I still can't abide the combination of humor and music for some odd reason................................it's sacrilege on this list but I just never got Zappa until I heard him play instrumental music with George Duke, Jon Luc Ponty, the Underwoods and the Fowler brothers----dont' ask me why, I just don't know. Anyway, I digress...............I got the single of Red Rubber Ball and played it over and over and over. I must have been 12 years old. Music was all around me (my family were all musical) but I didn't 'get' music in a personal way until I discovered the top 40 and got my first cheap transistor radio. I suppose you all know the trivia about who penned that tune originally? If not, I have a sweet surprise for you. I've never heard anyone else profess that they listened to it. I feel a little less existentially lonely reading this post, Stephen. Thanks!. Now, who else was in love with the song 'Sunny" by Bobby Hebb? I'll really feel like I belong to the human race again if someone was into that one.............lol. It was the very first song I learned how to play on Christmas night 1966 after getting my first snare drum and pair of sticks. I ran over to my best friend Bob Murphy's house and his parents had purchased a Cappa Minstrel (sp?) electric guitar and a Fender Champ amp. I went to his house every single day for three straight months and we learned songs for our first band, the Concave Image <blush> My dad finally broke down and rented me a drumset at that point and all hell broke loose in my life. ************************************ I, too, spent two or three years listening to a tinny mono earphone under my pillow in the mid sixties. That ended when I quit playing clarinet and started playing in bands as a drummer. For some odd reason I was playing in a band before I even knew how to play...........all the beer we could drink at San Jose State fraternity parties. I was so insecure that I didn't let anyone in my high school know I was playing those shows. A very successful casuals musician, Joe Sharino, was my sophmore 'gofer' when I was the Senior editor or our school newspaper. He also played other frat parties and neither of us knew that the other were playing rock and roll on the weeks. Later I played the same stage Elvis played in Vegas with Joe...........staying at a five star hotel and being paid oodles of money for a single show.. God, I was horrible in those days, but a very hard hitter and minimal..................guess I did something right...................way, way too angry to take lessons from anyone. Didn't take my first serious lessons until after I had already started making all my living from drumming but that's another long winded story, I'm afraid. I was so afraid of double strokes and rudiments like paradiddles that I played only single stroke rolls for the first 15 years I played. I was making all of my living as a solid groove drummer, using only single stroke rolls completely unable to read music. It wasn't until I developed the rhythmic system that I use to this day that I taught myself to learn how to read and changed my whole drumming life forever. It was starting to teach that made me see how important it was, but I digress......................... (((((((((()(((((((((((((()))))))))))))))))())))))))))))) yours, Rick