Drummer Life Quotes

You’ll learn, as you get older, that rules are made to be broken. Be bold enough to live life on your terms, and never, ever apologize for it. Go against the grain, refuse to conform, take the road less traveled instead of the well-beaten path. Laugh in the face of adversity, and leap before you look. Dance as though EVERYBODY is watching. March to the beat of your own drummer. And stubbornly refuse to fit in.

My life had taken a stranger turn than I could've ever imagined. What was I doing on this path? Where was I headed really? Who was I to take on a battle between powers I didn't understand— armed with a runaway cat, a uniquely bad drummer, a pair of garden shears, and an Ovaltine-drinking teen Galileo? To save a girl who didn't want to be saved?

I also feared boredom and mediocrity much more than I feared failure. For me, great is better than terrible, and terrible is better than mediocre, because terrible at least gives life flavor. The high school yearbook quote my friends chose for me was from Thoreau: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

All the eggs a woman will every carry form in her ovaries while she is a four-month-old foetus in the womb of her mother. This means our cellular life as en egg begins in the womb of our grandmother. Each of us spent five months in our grandmother's womb, and she in turn formed within the womb of her grandmother. We vibrate to the rhythms of our mother's blood before she herself is born, and this pulse is the thread of blood that runs all the way back through the grandmothers to the first mother.

If he emotionally cheated on you remember this before you take him back. It was a choice to do it and in his mind a chance for a better life than what you offered.

Thus began a break of undetermined length and meaning.

Why would someone for whom talking was torture want to talk all the time before thousands of Athenians? Because otherwise he’d have drown himself at high tide. My sister- so shy, so sincere- once wanted to be an actress. The best jazz drummer I’ve ever heard had only one arm. We all choose a calling that’s the most radical contradiction of ourselves.

There's something wrong with that boy." Clay sounded mystified. "He's talented, ain't no one gonna argue that, but yeah... something." Sweaty, tired, and sore, Romeo sat on the mat in the massive martial arts center Clay owned with Jules and Wyatt. While trying to catch his breath, he watched Tino move to the beat of his own drummer as he worked out using a punching bag. With white headphones in his ears, his brother bounced and danced and kicked at that stuffed sack of beans, and for the life of him, Romeo couldn't tell if he was trying to hurt the thing or date it.

Have you noticed, now, the way people talk so loudly in snackbars and cinemas, how the shelved back gardens shudder with prodigies of talentlessness, drummers, penny-whistlers, vying transistors, the way you see and hear the curses and sign-language of high sexual drama at the bus-stops under ghosts of clouds, how life has come out of doors? And in the soaked pubs the old-timers wince and weather the canned rock. We talk louder to make ourselves heard. We will all be screamers soon.

Keep pace with the drummer you hear, however measured or far away.

We’re all geniuses. Life is merely overpopulated with singers who play drums, and, drummers who sing, to pay rent.

I remembered that you can find joy in work and life, and if you do it right, they fuel each other-like dueling drummers, better and better, one after the other.

It is often said that the first sound we hear in the womb is our mother's heartbeat. Actually, the first sound to vibrate our newly developed hearing apparatus is the pulse of our mother's blood through her veins and arteries. We vibrate to that primordial rhythm even before we have ears to hear. Before we were conceived, we existed in part as an egg in our mother's ovary. All the eggs a woman will ever carry form in her ovaries while she is a four-month-old fetus in the womb of her mother. This means our cellular life as an egg begins in the womb of our grandmother. Each of us spent five months in our grandmother's womb and she in turn formed within the womb of her grandmother. We vibrate to the rhythms of our mother's blood before she herself is born. And this pulse is the thread of blood that runs all the way back through the grandmothers to the first mother. We all share the blood of the first mother. We are truly children of one blood.

The Armorys of this world don't steal. They serve their country right or wrong. Or they do until the day when they come face to face with real life and their warped rectitude deserts them and their faces unlock and become real, puzzled faces like everybody else's. So there's another god for you that's passed its sell-by date: enlightened patriotism, until this afternoon Nick Armory's religion. (ch. 14)

Life is a paradiddle... R-L-RR-L-R-LL... R-L-R-L-RR-L-R-L-R-LL... R-L-R-L-R-L-RR-L-R-L-R-L-R-LL... (repeat) ...put 1 stick in front of the other & find the zone!

Gene Simmons after three months in the Gobi Desert? The Hunchback of Notre Dame following corrective surgery? An escaped Muppet? The drummer from Ratt?

Steve talked to me a lot about being abandoned and the pain that caused, he said. It made him independent. He followed the beat of a different drummer, and that came from being in a different world than he was born into.

Time marches to its own drummer. It cannot be varied, cannot be manipulated by any agent, and cannot be violated. It can only be studied and respected –indeed, Time is our Master.

For a bass player to find a drummer with the exact same mindset is a rare and special thing.

At first I would be taken aback by that observation, then I would think of them seeing other drummers on television, often faking it or playing less physically demanding music, and understood why they had that impression. I guess drumming wasn't hard work for every drummer, but it certainly was for me, the way I liked to play — as hard as I could, as fast as I could, as long as I could, and as well as I could. Playing a Rush concert was the hardest job I knew, and took everything I had, mentally and physically. I once compared it to running a marathon while solving equations, and that was a good enough analogy.

A person can allow a tyrannical world to bully them. One can kowtow to the demands of petty tormentors; blithely accept being the drummer boy for other people’s private parade. Alternatively, a person can seek to obtain autonomy over their life.

The disabled elite, if you will. The surfer with one arm, the mountain climber with no legs, a drummer with one hand. And, deep down, I knew I should be proud of them. They were my community, and they were only working to erase stigma for the rest of us. But I didn’t feel proud. I felt bitter. Jealous too. Angry that they weren’t just great surfer, record-breaking mountain climber, and successful drummer. To me, they were a reminder that the world will always view me differently—put me in a different bracket—even if I landed myself on a pedestal. I didn’t want to achieve despite myself. I didn’t want to defy anything. I just wanted to feel ordinary. To not overcompensate every day. I wanted to be bad at things and have people laugh at me because that’s life. I didn’t want pity.

It was the most monotonous day of my life,” he replied without a second’s hesitation. Then his rigid face broke and re-formed itself into the best smile ever, so that for a moment he really did look as if he had slipped through the bars of whatever confined him. “As a matter of fact, I thought you quite excellent,” he said. This time she did not object to his choice of adjective. “Will you crash the car now, please, Jose? This will do me fine. I’ll die here.” And before he could stop her, she had grabbed his hand and kissed him hard on the knuckle of his thumb.

Charlie Watts’s drums on “Street Fighting Man” are from this little 1930s practice drummer’s kit, in a little suitcase that you popped up, one tiny cymbal, a half-size tambourine that served as a snare, and that’s really what it was made on, made on rubbish, made in hotel rooms with our little toys.

If the woman has the physical fitness and the meritorious luck to bear his children, the family was a fortunate one. Villagers always looked at sterility with a squinted eye, and its fault and the misfortune lay solely on the woman's part. As such, a childless woman often became culprit for her entire life.

Only a drummer-boy in a ballad or a story could have been so in the thick of the fight. She was taken into the confidence of passions on which she fixed just the stare she might have had for images bounding across the wall in the slide of a magic-lantern. Her little world was phantasmagoric—strange shadows dancing on a sheet. It was as if the whole performance had been given for her—a mite of a half-scared infant in a great dim theatre. She was in short introduced to life with a liberality in which the selfishness of others found its account, and there was nothing to avert the sacrifice but the modesty of her youth.

Listen, does your boy know how to work? Try to teach him to work, to sacrifice, to fight. He better learn now, because he’s going to have to do it some day. Lloyd Hale was a sophomore on that first team we took to Junction, and he asked me one time what I meant by “fight.” Well, I don’t mean fistfight, like we used to do back in Arkansas, I told him. I mean, some morning when you’ve been out of school twenty years and you wake up and your house has burned down and your mother is in the hospital and the kids are all sick and you’re overdrawn at the bank and your wife has run off with the drummer, what are you going to do? Throw in?

great drummer, you’ve got more than 50 percent of it right there. It’s like the frame of a house. Kenny keeps really good time—at times it’s perfect time. But his style, his feel—he’s a little bit ahead, yet the hi-hat is right on the money. That feel is what I love. It’s got kind of a lean to it, and that’s what rock and roll is.

It is often said that the first sound we hear in the womb is our mother’s heartbeat. Actually, the first sound to vibrate our newly developed hearing apparatus is the pulse of our mother’s blood through her veins and arteries. We vibrate to that primordial rhythm even before we have ears to hear. Before we were conceived, we existed in part as an egg in our mother’s ovary. All the eggs a woman will ever carry form in her ovaries while she is a four-month-old fetus in the womb of her mother. This means our cellular life as an egg begins in the womb of our grandmother. Each of us spent five months in our grandmother’s womb and she in turn formed within the womb of her grandmother. We vibrate to the rhythms of our mother’s blood before she herself is born …. Layne Redmond, When the Drummers Were Women

And when they start talking, and they always do, you find that each of them has a story they want to tell. Everyone, no matter how old or young, has some lesson they want to teach. And I sit there and listen and learn all about life from people who have no idea how to live it. Nobody knows how to just shut the fuck up and look out the window anymore. The bathrooms are tiny and filthy and you have no choice but to piss all over yourself when the bus swerves, but the streetlights look like blurred stars exploding in the window when it rains at night, and you can sleep knowing that if there’s an accident and everyone on the bus dies it wasn’t your fault. Someone fat and snoring will sometimes sit beside you and sweat on your shoulder even though it’s twelve degrees outside, and someone else with a big head shaped like an onion and dirty hair that smells like fish sticks will sit in front of you and recline their seat into your lap. And you’ll be trapped and sleepless and sad for the entire ride. But then other times you get two whole seats to yourself, and when that becomes your idea of luxury you know you’ve found something that no one else is even looking for, and if you gave it to them for Christmas they’d return it the next morning as soon as the stores opened. And then you get to think of yourself like the little drummer boy, playing for Jesus even though he’s too young to understand, even though nobody in Bethlehem really likes percussion and they think you’re a cheap ass for not bringing gold or frankincense. And it’s a shame when you realize that you won’t get to be in the Bible, and it doesn’t seem right. But then nobody gets to be in the Bible anymore, no matter who they are or what they do, and the sooner you realize that the easier it all becomes. But it’s still a shame.

Daniel came up and walked beside her, and the other victor walked beside Ghanan. For the briefest instant,Daniel's fingertips grazed her bound wrists. Ix Caut tingled at the touch. Just outside the temple door,the four drummers were waiting on the ledge. They fell in line behind the processional and, as the party descended the pyramid's steep steps, played the same hectic beats Luce had heard when she'd first arrived in this life. Luce focused on walking,feeling as if she were riding a tide instead of choosing to put one foot in front of the other,down the pyramid,and then, at the base of the steps,along the wide, dusty path that led to her death. The drums were all she could hear, until Daniel leaned in and whispered, "I'm going to save you." Something deep inside Ix Caut soared. This was the first time he had ever spoken to her in this life. "How?" she whispered back, leaning toward him,aching for him to free her and fly her far,far away. "Don't worry." His fingertips found hers again,brushing them softly. "I promise,I'll take care of you." Tears stung her eyes.The ground was still searing the soles of her feet,and she was still marching to the place where Ix Caut was supposed to die, but for the first time since arriving in this life,Luce was not afraid.

Translating how that latter fact came to life in the studio, engineer Chuck Zwicky explained from his own observations during the recording of the album that “the way that Prince’s music comes together has everything to do with how he views the individual instruments, and for example, when he’s sitting down at the drums, he’s derivatively thinking about Dave Gerbaldi, the drummer from Tower of Power, and that’s a real fascile and funky drummer; and when he plays keyboards, he’s thinking about James Brown’s horn player, on one aspect; and when he’s playing guitar, other elements creep in, because he loves Carlos Santana, and Jimi Hendrix, and this other guitar player named Bill Nelson, a rock guitar player from the 70s. And so these aspects all come together to make this unique sound that is Prince, and it’s not rock, it’s not funk, it’s not jazz, it’s not blues—it’s just his own kind of music. I remember there was one particular moment when he started playing this keyboard line, and I’m thinking ‘He can’t play that, that’s Gary Newman.’ And at that moment, he stops the tape, and turns and looks at me and asks ‘Do you like Gary Newman?’ And I said ‘You know, the album Replica never left my turntable in Jr. High School after my sister bought it for me. I listened to it until it wore out.’ And he said ‘There are people still trying to figure out what a genius he is.

suppose it’s not odd, then, that I have trouble reconciling my life to those of my friends, or at least to their lives as I perceive them to be. Charles and Camilla are orphans (how I longed to be an orphan when I was a child!) reared by grandmothers and great-aunts in a house in Virginia: a childhood I like to think about, with horses and rivers and sweet-gum trees. And Francis. His mother, when she had him, was only seventeen—a thin-blooded, capricious girl with red hair and a rich daddy, who ran off with the drummer for Vance Vane and his Musical Swains. She was home in three weeks, and the marriage was annulled in six; and, as Francis is fond of saying, the grandparents brought them up like brother and sister, him and his mother, brought them up in such a magnanimous style that even the gossips were impressed—English nannies and private schools, summers in Switzerland, winters in France. Consider even bluff old Bunny, if you would. Not a childhood of reefer coats and dancing lessons, any more than mine was. But an American childhood. Son of a Clemson football star turned banker. Four brothers, no sisters, in a big noisy house in the suburbs, with sailboats and tennis rackets and golden retrievers; summers on Cape Cod, boarding schools near Boston and tailgate picnics during football season; an upbringing vitally present in Bunny in every respect, from the way he shook your hand to the way he told a joke.

A Code of Nature must accommodate a mixture of individually different behavioral tendencies. The human race plays a mixed strategy in the game of life. People are not molecules, all alike and behaving differently only because of random interactions. People just differ, dancing to their own personal drummer. The merger of economic game theory with neuroscience promises more precise understanding of those individual differences and how they contribute to the totality of human social interactions. It's understanding those differences, Camerer says, that will make such a break with old schools of economic thought. "A lot of economic theory uses what is called the representative agent model," Camerer told me. In an economy with millions of people, everybody is clearly not going to be completely alike in behavior. Maybe 10 percent will be of some type, 14 percent another type, 6 percent something else. A real mix. "It's often really hard, mathematically, to add all that up," he said. "It's much easier to say that there's one kind of person and there's a million of them. And you can add things up rather easily." So for the sake of computational simplicity, economists would operate as though the world was populated by millions of one generic type of person, using assumptions about how that generic person would behave. "It's not that we don't think people are different—of course they are, but that wasn't the focus of analysis," Camerer said. "It was, well, let's just stick to one type of person. But I think the brain evidence, as well as genetics, is just going to force us to think about individual differences." And in a way, that is a very natural thing for economists to want to do.

What would be the natural thing? A man goes to college. He works as he wants to work, he plays as he wants to play, he exercises for the fun of the game, he makes friends where he wants to make them, he is held in by no fear of criticism above, for the class ahead of him has nothing to do with his standing in his own class. Everything he does has the one vital quality: it is spontaneous. That is the flame of youth itself. Now, what really exists?" "...I say our colleges to-day are business colleges—Yale more so, perhaps, because it is more sensitively American. Let's take up any side of our life here. Begin with athletics. What has become of the natural, spontaneous joy of contest? Instead you have one of the most perfectly organized business systems for achieving a required result—success. Football is driving, slavish work; there isn't one man in twenty who gets any real pleasure out of it. Professional baseball is not more rigorously disciplined and driven than our 'amateur' teams. Add the crew and the track. Play, the fun of the thing itself, doesn't exist; and why? Because we have made a business out of it all, and the college is scoured for material, just as drummers are sent out to bring in business. "Take another case. A man has a knack at the banjo or guitar, or has a good voice. What is the spontaneous thing? To meet with other kindred spirits in informal gatherings in one another's rooms or at the fence, according to the whim of the moment. Instead what happens? You have our university musical clubs, thoroughly professional organizations. If you are material, you must get out and begin to work for them—coach with a professional coach, make the Apollo clubs, and, working on, some day in junior year reach the varsity organization and go out on a professional tour. Again an organization conceived on business lines. "The same is true with the competition for our papers: the struggle for existence outside in a business world is not one whit more intense than the struggle to win out in the News or Lit competition. We are like a beef trust, with every by-product organized, down to the last possibility. You come to Yale—what is said to you? 'Be natural, be spontaneous, revel in a certain freedom, enjoy a leisure you'll never get again, browse around, give your imagination a chance, see every one, rub wits with every one, get to know yourself.' "Is that what's said? No. What are you told, instead? 'Here are twenty great machines that need new bolts and wheels. Get out and work. Work harder than the next man, who is going to try to outwork you. And, in order to succeed, work at only one thing. You don't count—everything for the college.' Regan says the colleges don't represent the nation; I say they don't even represent the individual.

Steve Jobs knew from an early age that he was adopted. “My parents were very open with me about that,” he recalled. He had a vivid memory of sitting on the lawn of his house, when he was six or seven years old, telling the girl who lived across the street. “So does that mean your real parents didn’t want you?” the girl asked. “Lightning bolts went off in my head,” according to Jobs. “I remember running into the house, crying. And my parents said, ‘No, you have to understand.’ They were very serious and looked me straight in the eye. They said, ‘We specifically picked you out.’ Both of my parents said that and repeated it slowly for me. And they put an emphasis on every word in that sentence.” Abandoned. Chosen. Special. Those concepts became part of who Jobs was and how he regarded himself. His closest friends think that the knowledge that he was given up at birth left some scars. “I think his desire for complete control of whatever he makes derives directly from his personality and the fact that he was abandoned at birth,” said one longtime colleague, Del Yocam. “He wants to control his environment, and he sees the product as an extension of himself.” Greg Calhoun, who became close to Jobs right after college, saw another effect. “Steve talked to me a lot about being abandoned and the pain that caused,” he said. “It made him independent. He followed the beat of a different drummer, and that came from being in a different world than he was born into.” Later in life, when he was the same age his biological father had been when he abandoned him, Jobs would father and abandon a child of his own. (He eventually took responsibility for her.) Chrisann Brennan, the mother of that child, said that being put up for adoption left Jobs “full of broken glass,” and it helps to explain some of his behavior. “He who is abandoned is an abandoner,” she said. Andy Hertzfeld, who worked with Jobs at Apple in the early 1980s, is among the few who remained close to both Brennan and Jobs. “The key question about Steve is why he can’t control himself at times from being so reflexively cruel and harmful to some people,” he said. “That goes back to being abandoned at birth. The real underlying problem was the theme of abandonment in Steve’s life.” Jobs dismissed this. “There’s some notion that because I was abandoned, I worked very hard so I could do well and make my parents wish they had me back, or some such nonsense, but that’s ridiculous,” he insisted. “Knowing I was adopted may have made me feel more independent, but I have never felt abandoned. I’ve always felt special. My parents made me feel special.” He would later bristle whenever anyone referred to Paul and Clara Jobs as his “adoptive” parents or implied that they were not his “real” parents. “They were my parents 1000%,” he said. When speaking about his biological parents, on the other hand, he was curt: “They were my sperm and egg bank. That’s not harsh, it’s just the way it was, a sperm bank thing, nothing more.

Grandfather Shi must have loved Ita Thao. His relatives were certainly making his last hours there memorable ones. Though the ceremony did not have strippers (at least none that we saw), there was no shortage of other elements designed to produce 'hot noise' that's an indispensable feature of any Taiwanese funeral. Designed to celebrate the life of the deceased and ensure their smooth passing into the next world, Grandfather Shi's hot noise included gongs mixed with rigorous Buddhist chanting, pop music, karaoke, and later, a live band complete with drummers and an accordion. All of this was taking place under a covered tent set up in the alleyway next to the Cherry Feast Resort, where we'd booked a three-day stay in advance.

Frankl spent most of his time in camp laying tracks for railway lines. This was not the life he had planned for himself. This was not his passion, or his dream. This is not what he would be doing if he were marching to the beat of his own drummer. But this was the life events had assigned to him. And it became clear to him that what sort of person he would wind up being depended upon what sort of inner decision he would make in response to his circumstances.

The leaders, drummer Carleton Coon and pianist Joe Sanders, had met in a music store and formed their group in 1918. They sang duets through megaphones: hot, roaring numbers, and Sanders’s bubbly greeting—“Howdja do, howdja do, you big ole raddio pooblic”—gave further evidence of the unstilting of America. The nation charged into the new era with music that had never been heard outside small bistros and smoky Harlem speakeasies. Radio was bringing these locations into thousands of homes, making such obscure regional groups as the Coon-Sanders Nighthawks national celebrities. Listeners with crystal sets were picking up WDAF from afar, and interest in the band spread well beyond the Midwest. Coon-Sanders took on road engagements: they were among the first bands to do one-night stands, engagements that were soon engrained in big band life.

Sometimes I feel compelled to do something, but I can only guess later why it needed to done, and I question whether I am drawing connections where none really exist. Other times I see an event – in a dream or in a flash of “knowing” – and I feel compelled to work toward changing the outcome (if it’s a negative event) or ensuring it (when the event is positive). At the times I am able to work toward changing or ensuring the predicted event, sometimes this seems to make a difference, and sometimes it doesn’t seem to matter. Finally, and most often, throughout my life I have known mundane information before I should have known it. For example, one of my favourite games in school was to guess what numbers my math teacher would use to demonstrate a concept, or to guess the words on a vocabulary test before the test was given. I noticed I was not correct all the time, but I was correct enough to keep playing the game. Perhaps partially because of the usefulness of this mundane skill, I was an outstanding student, getting straight As and graduating from college with highest honours in neuroscience and a minor in computer science. I was a modest drinker even in college, but I found I could ace tests when I was hungover after a night of indulgence. Sometimes I think I even did better the less I paid attention to the test and the more I felt sick or spacey. It was like my unconscious mind could take over and put the correct information onto the page without interruption from my overly analytical conscious mind. At graduate school in neuroscience, I focused on trying to understand human experience by studying how the brain processes pain and stress. I wanted to know the answer to the question: what’s going on inside people’s heads when we suffer? Later, as I finished my PhD in psychoacoustics, which is all about the psychology of sound, I became fascinated with timing. How do we figure out the order of sounds, even when some sounds take longer to process than others? How can drummers learn to decode time differences of 1/1,000 of a second, when most people just can’t hear those kinds of subtle time differences? At this point, I was using my premonitions as just one of the tools in my day-to-day toolkit, but I wasn’t thinking about them scientifically. At least not consciously. Sure, every so often I’d dream of the slides that would be used by one of my professors the next day in class. Or I’d realize that the data I was recording in my experiments followed the curve of an equation I’d dreamed about a year before. But I thought that was just my quirky way of doing things – it was just my good student’s intuition and it didn’t have anything to do with my research interests or my life’s work. What was my life’s work again?

Once, in Belgium, Karl Burns had been given a load of Belgian francs to spend and given the impression it was an awful lot of money. Carroll and Smith, the terrible twosome, howled with laughter when the naive drummer returned 20 minutes later, exploding, ‘This won’t even buy me a fucking packet of cigarettes!

The Eighties were a little like the Fifties—it was sort of a conservative era, money conscious, politically nasty, and Republican,” says former Mission of Burma drummer Peter Prescott. “And usually that means there’s going to be a good underground,” he adds with a laugh. “There’s something to get pissed off with communally.

The combination of cutting ties with the McCartneys and losing his father hit Denny hard. “Leaving the band was the hardest decision I ever had to make in my life,” the drummer said, “and it was one that affected my life profoundly. The years that followed were not pretty; for many, many years, they weren’t pretty. I didn’t know what to do with the situation. I had a problem with alcohol over it, which I solved. It was a very, very difficult journey for my wife and I to go through.

Please listen to the hi-hat on the recorded version of Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks.” Listen through once. Allow yourself to be trans- ported back to the time or place when you first fell deeply into that trance of sound, so wide and powerful it gave a new depth to your life, a depth you had not known to search for. Or maybe this is the first time you are hearing the song. In that case, I imagine you prefer different music altogether. Maybe you discount rock and roll as ego-driven, disconnected from that channeled light of Bach or Satie or Django or Monk. No matter. Allow the resistance to rise here as well, then wait for the moment the song breaks through, rings that same truth, that same transportive bell of beauty, that hyp notic atmosphere music offers. How beautiful to find lessons in our resistance. This may be a foundation of spiritual practice, to dive into the center of no and investigate. All those pronouncements and walls dis- solve like so much dust under the microscope of mind. The trance of song—loud, immense, gorgeous—does the same.

One of the finest drummers I’ve ever heard, Ringo Starr has earned for himself the love and respect of music lovers worldwide as a daedal drummer and lively singer. He rolled smoothly on the drums in a song like The Beatles’ A DAY IN THE LIFE. On HERE COMES THE SUN, he hit the skins with dexterity and vim. His voice as a singer carries the weight of sempiternal melody, as it ought to be distributed on the edge of clarity. His song PHOTOGRAPH runs deep in me with the sweet but gentle rage of bacchanal principles.

Killing life in whatever way, will drag you along the hell's way.

There are so many things we expect God to do: lead us, bring good people into our life, give us a life of abundance, make us happy, fix our problems, fix other people, triumph over our enemies, etc. However, why do so many people think they will get any of this if they choose not to live righteously? If you choose to hurt other people and not take any responsibility for it or live your life as if everyone else is the problem, except you then God is going to lead you back to the same people, same places, same situations so you can fix the same problem you ran from. God is not standing in your future telling you to forget what you did. He is standing in front of you telling you to go back and undo what you did! He leads you to places that change who you are. He doesn't lead you to places to forget who you are.

While reading some old articles to jog my memory for this book, I came across an article in the Chicago Sun-Times by Rick Kogan, a reporter who traveled with Styx for a few concert dates in 1979. I remember him. When we played the Long Beach Civic Center’s 12,000-seat sports arena in California, he rode in the car with JY and me as we approached the stadium. His recounting of the scene made me smile. It’s also a great snapshot of what life was like for us back in the day. The article from 1980 was called, “The Band That Styx It To ‘Em.” Here’s what he wrote: “At once, a sleek, gray Cadillac limousine glides toward the back stage area. Small groups of girls rush from under trees and other hiding places like a pack of lions attacking an antelope. They bang on the windows, try to halt the driver’s progress by standing in front of the car. They are a desperate bunch. Rain soaks their makeup and ruins their clothes. Some are crying. “Tommy, Tommmmmmmmmy! I love you!” one girl yells as she bangs against the limousine’s window. Inside the gray limousine, James Young, the tall, blond guitarist for Styx who likes to be called J.Y. looks out the window. “It sure is raining,” he says. Next to him, bass player Chuck Panozzo, finishing the last part of a cover story on Styx in a recent issue of Record World magazine, nods his head in agreement. Then he chuckles, and says, “They think you’re Tommy.” “I’m not Tommy Shaw,” J.Y. screams. “I’m Rod Stewart.” “Tommy, Tommmmmmmmmy! I love you! I love you!” the girl persists, now trying desperately to jump on the hood of the slippery auto. “Oh brother,” sighs J.Y. And the limousine rolls through the now fully raised backstage door and he hurries to get out and head for the dressing room. This scene is repeated twice, as two more limousines make their way into the stadium, five and ten minutes later. The second car carries young guitarist Tommy Shaw, drummer John Panozzo and his wife Debbie. The groupies muster their greatest energy for this car. As the youngest member of Styx and because of his good looks and flowing blond hair, Tommy Shaw is extremely popular with young girls. Some of his fans are now demonstrating their affection by covering his car with their bodies. John and Debbie Panozzo pay no attention to the frenzy. Tommy Shaw merely smiles, and shortly all of them are inside the sports arena dressing room. By the time the last and final car appears, spectacularly black in the California rain, the groupies’ enthusiasm has waned. Most of them have started tiptoeing through the puddles back to their hiding places to regroup for the band’s departure in a couple of hours.” Tommy

The shows taught Brown what it felt like to play with a great band and an ass-kicking drummer. For if Connor wasn’t in the league of Earl Palmer, the drummer Richard recorded with, he was mighty fine all the same. (And Connor did play the indelible drum part on Richard’s “Keep A Knockin’.”) He had turned

The participatory economics (Parecon) project, for instance, envisions direct democracy at every level of society; but this vision for a postcapitalist world translates into endlessly ramifying staff meetings over every detail of life – hardly the inspiring stuff of utopian visions.35 Under Occupy, many general assemblies devolved into similar situations in which even the most mundane of issues had to be painstakingly addressed by a collective.36 The acrimonious debates over drummers making too much noise in the Zuccotti Park occupation are just one particularly farcical example of this. The more general point is that direct democracy requires a significant amount of participation and effort – in other words, it entails increasing amounts of work. During brief moments of revolutionary enthusiasm, this extra work can become inconsequential; yet after the return to normality it is simply added to the ordinary pressures of everyday life.37 The extra work of direct democracy is problematic especially because of the constitutive exclusions it entails – particularly for those who are unable to attend physically, those who do not feel comfortable in large groups and those who lack public speaking skills (with all the gendered and racialised biases inherent to these factors).38 As the Occupy movement went on, the general assemblies simply collapsed, often under the weight of exhaustion and boredom. The conclusion to be drawn from this is that the problem of democracy today is not that people want a say over every single aspect of their lives. The real issue of democratic deficit is that the most significant decisions of society are out of the hands of the average person.39 Direct democracy responds to this problem, but attempts to solve it by making democracy an immediate and bodily experience that rejects mediation.

Using a double bass drum in rock came about as a way to emulate what John Bonham of Led Zeppelin managed to do with one bass drum. His foot was so fast that it took most drummers two kick drums and both feet to mimic it.

beat. Each drummer’s got a signature as to whether the hi-hat’s a little bit ahead of the snare. Charlie’s very far back with the snare and up with the hi-hat. And the way he stretches out the beat and what we do on top of that is a secret of the Stones sound. Charlie’s quintessentially a jazz drummer, which means the rest of the band is a jazz band in a way.

There was Charlie Watts, Savile Row suit, perfectly dressed, tie, shaved, the whole fucking bit. I could smell the cologne! I opened the door and he didn’t even look at me, he walked straight past me, got hold of Mick and said, “Never call me your drummer again.” Then he hauled him up by the lapels of my jacket and gave him a right hook. Mick fell back onto a silver platter of smoked salmon on the table and began to slide towards the open window and the canal below it. And I was thinking, this is a good one, and then I realized it was my wedding jacket. And I grabbed hold of it and caught Mick just before he slid into the Amsterdam canal. It took me twenty-four hours after that to talk Charlie down. I thought I’d done it when I took him up to his room, but twelve hours later, he was saying, “Fuck it, I’m gonna go down and do it again.” It takes a lot to wind that man up. “Why did you stop him?” My jacket, Charlie, that’s why!

Charlie Watts has always been the bed that I lie on musically, and to see that note about how to “rectify” his sound seems extraordinary. But like Stu, Charlie had come to rhythm and blues because of its jazz connection. A few days later I write, Charlie swings very nicely but can’t rock. Fabulous guy though.… He had not got rock and roll down at that time. I wanted him to hit it a little harder. He was still too jazz for me. We knew he was a great drummer, but in order to play with the Stones, Charlie went and studied Jimmy Reed and Earl Phillips, who was the drummer for Jimmy Reed, just to get the feel of it. That sparse, minimalized thing. And he’s always retained it. Charlie was the drummer we wanted, but first off, could we afford him, and second off, would he give up some of his jazz ways for us?

In America people like Bobby Womack used to say, “The first time we heard you guys we thought you were black guys. Where did these motherfuckers come from?” I can’t figure that out myself, why Mick and I in that damn town should come up with such a sound—except that if you soak it up in a damp tenement in London all day with the intensity that we did, it ain’t that different from soaking it up in Chicago. That’s all we played, until we actually became it. We didn’t sound English. And I think it surprised us too. Each time we played—and I still do this at certain times—I’d just turn round and say, “Is that noise just coming from him there, and me?” It’s almost as if you’re riding a wild horse. In that respect we’re damn lucky we got to work with Charlie Watts. He was playing very much like black drummers playing with Sam and Dave and the Motown stuff, or the soul drummers. He has that touch.

The band all thought I was mad, and they sort of indulged me. But I heard a sound that I could get out of there. And Jimmy was onto it immediately. “Street Fighting Man,” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and half of “Gimme Shelter” were all made just like that, on a cassette machine. I used to layer guitar on guitar. Sometimes there are eight guitars on those tracks. You just mash ’em up. Charlie Watts’s drums on “Street Fighting Man” are from this little 1930s practice drummer’s kit, in a little suitcase that you popped up, one tiny cymbal, a half-size tambourine that served as a snare, and that’s really what it was made on, made on rubbish, made in hotel rooms with our little toys.

It is often said that the first sound we hear in the womb is our mother’s heartbeat. Actually, the first sound to vibrate our newly developed hearing apparatus is the pulse of our mother’s blood through her veins and arteries. We vibrate to that primordial rhythm even before we have ears to hear. Before we were conceived, we existed in part as an egg in our mother’s ovary. All the eggs a woman will ever carry form in her ovaries while she is a four-month-old fetus in the womb of her mother. This means our cellular life as an egg begins in the womb of our grandmother. Each of us spent five months in our grandmother’s womb and she in turn formed within the womb of her grandmother. We vibrate to the rhythms of our mother’s blood before she herself is born. . . . Layne Redmond, When the Drummers Were Women

from my Linkedin post: The sudden cardiac arrest of a Buffalo Bills football player, Damar Hamlin reminds me as a cardiologist that widely available, basic life support classes teach the two primary determinants of victim survival: -time to initiation of effective cardiopulmonary resuscitation, -time to electrical defibrillation. As described in my memoir, Different Drummer; "Cardiac resuscitation has evolved from physicians cutting open a patient's chest and rhythmically squeezing the victim's heart...to closed-chest compressions at a rate equal to the song Stayin' Alive'... Defibrillation can now be administered by trained laypeople using an automated external defibrillator, a device that is often available in public facilities...

After the show Humphrey Barclay, a highly talented Harrovian Head Boy who could act, direct, and draw cartoons, introduced me to John Cleese, a very tall man with black hair and piercing dark eyes. They were very complimentary and encouraged me to audition for the Footlights. I had never heard of this University Revue Club, founded in 1883 to perform sketches and comedy shows, but it seemed like a fun thing to do, and a month later Jonathan Lynn and I were voted in by the Committee, after performing to a packed crowd of comedy buffs in the Footlights’ Club Room. Jonathan, a talented actor, writer, and jazz drummer, would go on to direct Pass the Butler, my first play in the West End, and also write and direct Nuns on the Run, a movie with me and Robbie Coltrane. The audition sketch I had written for us played surprisingly well and, strange details, in the front row, lounging on a sofa, laughing with some Senior Fellows, was the author Kingsley Amis, next to the brother of the soon-to-be-infamous Guy Burgess, who would shortly flee the country, outed as perhaps the most flamboyant of all the Cambridge spies—for whenever he was outrageously drunk in Washington, which was every night, he would announce loudly to everybody that he was a KGB spy. Nobody believed him

It’s at this level we find one of the biggest differences between the northern and southern hemispheres in human terms. For us, there’s nothing at stake anymore; we barely notice that life is a challenge. The only time we meet the brutality of existence is when we see hurricanes, floods, fires and drought on TV. The most daring thing we do is catch a plane to New York, Paris or London to go shopping. And we breed people who can’t bear this emptiness, people who parachute off mountains, paddle canoes down waterfalls, throw themselves off bridges tied to an elastic rope – just to get the kick that tells them they are alive. It’s not like that in the southern hemisphere. Death, or ruin, is a real entity for poor people in poor countries. There’s no safety net, no social care, no social security. If you have an accident or lose your job, you’re literally on the slippery slope, and without a parachute or elastic tied around your ankles, please note.

It had been a little less than 24 hours since Julie had finally told someone, specifically a pink loving drummer, about what was really up with her. It had been almost 48 hours since they played the Orpheum, she and Luke kissed for the first time, and she sat collapsed in an alley questioning all her life decisions. So. Not a very eventful weekend then.

When I listened to his drumming, I literally heard voices speaking to me, sometimes in a whisper, sometimes in a scream. This was something that I never experienced while listening to any other drummer, and at times it almost scared me. There was something about the space between his notes that made the electrical impulses in my brain stutter, and time would slow in the milliseconds before each snare drum hit, as if I were falling into a crushing black hole over and over again.

Kensie wasn’t risking a future with Trey for the great love of her life, she was risking it all for a drummer with a big dick.

Washington valued well-played music in army life and assigned a band to each brigade. At one point he chided a fife and drum corps for playing badly and insisted that they practice more regularly; a year later, after the drummers took this admonition to an extreme, Washington restricted their practice to one hour in the morning, a second in the afternoon. He was also irked by the improvisations of some drummers and, amid the misery of Valley Forge, took the trouble to issue this broadside to wayward drummers: “The use of drums are as signals to the army and, if every drummer is allowed to beat at his pleasure, the intention is entirely destroy[e]d, as it will be impossible to distinguish whether they are beating for their own pleasure or for a signal to the troops.”44

A native man in his small wooden boat was hoping to make one last sale. He held up a woodcarving of a Haitian drummer and shouted up that I could have it for only $10. I wasn’t really interested and was ready to walk away when I heard him offer it again, this time for $5. Looking at an approaching police boat, I agreed to the deal, and lowered my $5 down to him in a bucket. He ignored the cops, who were ordering him away from the ship using a megaphone, and tied the carving onto the lanyard that, just before, had a bucket attached to it. The police warned him once more, to back away from the ship, but the deal was more important to him. Just as I pulled on the lanyard, I heard a shot go off. It took several moments for me to comprehend what had happened. The cop had shot the man I was bartering with! I could see that it hadn’t been a warning shot as blood came from an obvious wound right between his eyes! I continued pulling my carving up and over the railing. Looking down I saw the patrol boat heading back to shore. The poor vendor was floating face down, alongside his boat. As the ship started to pull away, I saw that he was adrift in a growing pool of blood, which was spreading out around him. Life was cheap here and I realized that the old woman’s prediction had come true. I had seen death before leaving Haiti!

Liquor Vicar is like a weekend I have always wanted to have. Filled with fun, crazy people on an adventure that no one could imagine. Well, no one other than Vince, I guess. Turns out one of my favourite drummers will become one of my favourite novelists, too. Ain’t life grand that way?” Alan Doyle, author of ‘Where I Belong’ and ‘A Newfoundlander in Canada: Always Going Somewhere, Always Going Home’, singer, songwriter, actor and founding member of Great Big Sea.

Adoring fans, hipsters, bohemians, and wannabes lined up outside the narrow storefront club at 5 Cooper Square, hoping to catch Monk and his legendary quartet—John Coltrane, bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik, and drummer Shadow Wilson. That night, Monk wanted to celebrate. Friends, family, and enthusiastic fans surrounded him. His “‘un’ years,” as his wife Nellie used to call them, were about to end.

The facts of a man’s life ain’t very important, but it seems like they should get said anyways.

The pyramids in Egypt and the temple at Angkor Wat built for Suryavarman II in Cambodia—what do they have in common? They share the conceit that the soul of the dead lives on in the stone. That hard gray gilded edifice is not merely tufa or granite. It is the abstract become concrete, the ineffable expressed, the soul in the stone. It is hard to know who needed this conceit more: the king who ordered his own memorial or the priest who attended him. Im- mortality was at stake for the king. For the priest, it was his liveli- hood. While the king was alive, the priest thrived on his living presence. But kings do not live forever. The problem was how to make the beat go on when the drummer left town. The answer seemed simple: Don’t let him leave. Let the stone become the soul. We need a word for this. I suggest incairnation. Incairnation is a big idea. It is no accident that kings, priests, medicine men, writers, composers, artists of all stripes, have taken it up. After all, incairnation is precisely what happened to the Earth. The Earth was a stone that became imbued with life. The incairnators of history were trying to replicate that ancient magic act. [- Samuel Jay Keyser]

As Cash headed back on the road for most of August, Rubin brought in some musicians to explore dressing up some of the tracks—guitarist Mike Campbell from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and bassist Flea and drummer Chad Smith, both from the Chili Peppers. To

I applied at Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard after my band broke up. I really wanted to work there because it involved the love of my life, music. It was also located on the world famous Sunset Strip, a place I dreamed of going to ever since I was a teenager in the 80's to become a rock star.

There was no hatred in the polar bear's stare. Nora was just food. Meat. And that was a humbling kind of terror. Her heart poured like a drummer reaching the crescendo. The end of the song. And it became astoundingly clear to her, finally, in that moment: She didn't want to die. And that was the problem. In the face of death, life seemed more attractive, and as life seemed more attractive, how could she get back to the Midnight Library? She had to be disappointed in a life, not just scared of it, in order to try again with another book.

A few months after we’d started Bikini Kill, Kurt asked Tobi to be the drummer for Nirvana, and Tobi said no because she was convinced our band was going to change the landscape for women in music. I’m saying that again, for the people in the back: Tobi Vail could have been the drummer for Nirvana, but she chose to be in a feminist band instead.

I really wanted the backing [track] to be burning the balls off the whole thing,” said Paul. “We came to do it and we had a lot of trouble, actually, with the drumming. We ended up with Jimmy overdubbing a track and he had much more of a dirty feel—he was out of his skull at the time—but he helped to give it a dirty feel.”14 While McCulloch was making his recording debut as a drummer, Paul sat in the control room, his bass plugged into the console, and played along. By the end of the session, ‘Rock Show’ was complete.

The first matter of business was backing vocals for ‘Cook of the House,’ and once that was complete, Paul saw an opportunity to further democratize Wings. Denny now had two vocals, and Jimmy and Linda had one each. That left Joe, and it was not lost on Paul that the lonely protagonist in ‘Must Do Something About It’ had a lot in common with the drummer.

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.2