Another installment in this book I’ve been writing (forever) - “Life’s Little Drumming Lessons”
I had always been a traveling performer, a journeyman musician, a drummer in the trenches until I settled down recently in Memphis TN. This photo is from a 2013 Poco tour date in Corvallis, Oregon
1. Streams of Drumming
I never sought to be a famous drummer. I never pursued being on the cover of Modern Drummer magazine. Sure, I wanted to establish a reputation as a ‘good’ or ‘great’ drummer but I’ve always been in pursuit of playing the best music I could play and with the best musicians I could find. Of course, wanting to play on recordings that get released and playing concerts with recording artists was part of my dream, not for the notoriety of doing that, but for the musical gratification and the work gratification. I got to play with some famous people as well, but I’ve always been that guy with the title “…and back on drums”. My goal, all along, has been to keep working full time as a drummer: to make my living with drums in some form or fashion. That led me into many different drum and drumming related pursuits and businesses that have supplemented my performing and recording income. I hear the buzz words “multiple streams of income” a lot. This is part of the story of my multiple streams and how they evolved into my life’s mission. Phil Hood, founder of Drum Magazine, characterized me in a 2019 interview as someone who is constantly re-inventing myself.
I started playing professionally when I was seventeen. I’ve managed to continue playing professionally for 50 years. Of course there were times when I wasn’t performing regularly, but that is par for the course in the music business for most people. Fortunately, most of my “day jobs” were all drum and music related jobs that I sought and drum related businesses that I created.
Being able to turn on a dime and reacting quickly to changes in the music and business world is very important for the working drummer. Being able to roll with the punches is a must because there are lots of ups and downs in the music biz . My career has been up and down so many times that I feel like a submarine captain. I had to declare bankruptcy a couple of times when my businesses sank, once during Reaganomics in the mid 80s and again in the 2008-2009 recession. The old saying that you have to fail to succeed is true. That’s how I learned to cut bait in any stream of income when business slowed down to the point of diminishing returns. Put it in the dry dock when the water is low and move on to something else. Streams can dry up and that is why it is important to have multiple streams and always be looking for new streams as trends and technology change. My student load and performances have never stopped for any significant length of time. It is the other streams of income that have come and gone, or shrunk then bounced back.
I’ve been involved in many areas of the music and drumming business; player, signed recording artist, drum shop owner, music store salesman, drum builder, drum repairman, booking agent, band leader, teacher, writer, publisher, manufacturer, drum events producer, drum product development consultant, instrument appraiser, music social media organizer, drummer related charity drive coordinator, etc. For most of my life I wasn’t able to define my role to myself. I was always juggling many balls in the air - multi-tasking - I used to say “Jack of all trades – master of some”.
2. Drum Community Organizer
What I’ve come to realize in the last two or three years is that almost all those things I did and still do has to do with the drumming community. I’ve lived my life out loud but I’ve shied away from labeling myself something that would sound conceited to others. I remember catching flak from drummers in 1999 in online forums for using the user-name ‘drum guru’. The name of my first website was drumguru.com which was about my private drum lessons. Guru means teacher in the Indian language. But it also means expert, authority, leading light/etc. so the perception by some was that I was acting like a “know it all”. I’ve been called that too! And while I know that I come across sometimes as authoritarian, I’ll be the first to tell you that I don’t know every thing about drums. I have strong opinions, but most confident drummers do, don’t they?
I feel that one shouldn’t “rent his own spotlight”; that, if a title is to be had, it must be given by others. I’ve had many drummers over the years tell me “Thanks for all you do for the drumming community”. I just recently heard this from Paul Wertico. That bowled me over. That recognition from such a world class drumming figure as Paul made me decide to accept and own the title “community organizer”. One definition of a community organizer is someone who builds a group of people or institutions to address a common problem or initiative through collective action. That’s how I look at what I do.
Within the drumming community, my organizing is more about providing services, encouraging online community discussion, promoting events and fund raisers for charity purposes, and addressing problems and needs that drummers have. I have always enjoyed the company of other drummers. Drummers have an unspoken bond with each other, more so than players of any other instrument. Drummers become instant friends, without any attitude or competitiveness. I have always felt dedicated to keeping that community active and positive. My experiences playing in school drum lines, teaching other drummers since age 15, and owning two drum shops put me smack dab in the middle of that community. Not So Modern Drummer allowed me to put my face, or my brand of community organizing out there to serve. Not So Modern Drummer’s founder, John Aldridge, told me that Not So Modern Drummer was his “calling card”. It is my introduction to other drummers.
One of the particular drumming communities that I have enjoyed serving and participating in is the Nashville Drummers FaceBook group, a closed group which is comprised of 2000 working drummers in the Nashville area music business. The friendship and helpful nature of drummers in that group has resulted in real events, fundraisers for drummers in need, group lunches and dinners, and gig referrals. It’s a tough room of thick skinned pros who I admire. Below are pictures of the monthly “Drummers’ Lunch” which have been going on for three decades. Attendance ranged from 10 to 100. The lunch was started in the eighties by George Honea, drummer for the Judds. It had stopped in the 2000s and I re-started it in the 2010s and it is still going strong.
3. Re-inventing Not So Modern Drummer
My interest in vintage drums and drum building was based on music, not collecting or drum history per se, though that was a result. I was literally in pursuit of Jeff Porcaro’s snare drum sound after I played on his Slingerland Radio King in 1979 in L.A. and it never stopped. Many people assume, because I own Not So Modern Drummer magazine, that I am an expert on vintage and custom drums. I do not know everything there is to know about all vintage drums, or even one particular brand, BUT I do know the people who DO. And I’ve learned so much from them. My brain is not geared for remembering every little detail about the different models and brands of drums. I’ve never collected for authenticity – always for sound quality. I use the drums I collect on gigs and recordings.
So, the process that led to where I am now started with my buying Not So Modern Drummer Magazine from Bill Ludwig III. I bought it for the wrong reason. I bought it because John Aldridge told me the Not So Modern Drum Company came with it. I was really not interested in running a magazine. I had been looking to buy a drum company that had a “name brand”. My original plan with NSMD was to focus on selling the engraved drums. That never happened, though I did establish the Famous Drums brand and now sell steam bent single ply drums and raw shells that my son in law, Evan Thomas, makes as well as drum building tools and machines. So I bought the smallest drum magazine in the U.S. that was already leaking money like a sieve – what a recipe for success! I knew I would have to change its direction and its purpose at some point because “print was dead” – dead and expensive! In my drum shop I couldn’t sell one copy of Modern Drummer, or DRUM! or even my own magazine. Speaking of which, I was running a magazine, running my own brick and mortar/internet drum shop in Akron Ohio and touring the nation and the world with Poco at the same time. Talk about multi-tasking and being scattered! So, after I closed that second drum shop in 2010 and moved back to Nashville, I went completely digital with the magazine. I stopped printing the subscription paper quarterly magazine and made it a free emailed monthly magazine in early 2012. Subscribers shot from less than 1000 to 60,000 in a flash, and later climbed to a high of 100,000. That solved the high print and mailing overhead problem, but the business still wasn’t making a profit. Ad revenues were almost non-existent. It took me a few years to figure out how to monetize it with a new business model and get it out of the hole.
The purpose of Not So Modern Drummer in the beginning, in 1988, was to gather the vintage and custom drum enthusiast community together with a simple classified ads rag. Subscribers paid $5 a year for four quarterly issues that were typewritten white pages of ads: For sale and want ads. When John Aldridge started adding feature articles and columnists and color photos and color ads, the classified section was titled “The White Pages” because it was still printed in black and white and put in the middle of the color magazine. It was THE place to go to find what was available from private sellers, vintage retailers, drum shops, manufacturers and custom drum builders UNTIL… Craigslist and Ebay! In the blink of an eye, online sales and auction sites completely obliterated NSMD’s raison d’etre. There was no need to wait three months for the next issue when you could get on a computer and see what was for sale or advertise your stuff in three minutes. So I knew when I bought the magazine that I would have to modernize the White Paper classified ads. I would have to compete with Ebay. I looked into building a site like Ebay but it was ridiculously expensive to do in 2009. There was no turnkey rental marketplace site service available, I would have had to hire developers who would spend months building a marketplace before releasing a first version. Building sites, payment systems, geolocation and messaging was complicated and expensive.
One of the things i changed about the print magazine after I bought it was the cover. It was simplified to show the subject of the feature article. My inspiration was the cover of Reader’s Digest which had that one feature image as well as a list of all the articles on the front cover. This is the most popular cover by far. Moon the Loon!
4. Memphis and GL squared
Fast forward to the summer of 2017. I was single (thrice divorced), 63 years old, living in Music City USA, had quit touring with Poco, playing mostly pickup gigs and was seriously considering getting out of the touring and recording business. I was experiencing “age-ism” in competing for gigs. I was tired of the travel and was becoming a crabby old man about it. I was not in a happy place. My co-workers were not happy with me. Plus I was getting sick every winter for six weeks to two months. I discovered I had a medical condition that was making my work on the road exhausting and debilitating. Something had to change.
I sat out on my back deck one whole afternoon to have a long talk with myself about how I wanted to spend the next phase of my life. I didn’t want to retire per se. I couldn’t. Who can actually retire these days? I would go crazy if I had to stop drumming and being active in the drum world, anyway. I’m too driven and restless.. I figured I still had twenty productive years before I would want to slow down and go fishing. I needed to re-invent myself again – and it needed to be a major re-invention. I asked my self, “what was the happiest time of your life, music and career wise?” The answer came after four of five un-interrupted hours of solitude, contemplation and soul searching. It was when I was in my twenties and thirties playing steady gigs six and seven nights a week with one steady band. And that happened with two or three bands over a period of twenty years. We were playing a variety of music; dance, pop, rock, funk, jazz fusion, and writing original vocal and instrumental music to try to get a record deal. It was a very creative period. Of course, the days of six nights a week in one night club are long gone and the record business has become unrecognizable to people of the era I grew up in. BUT, I knew I could find something like it if I looked hard enough. I decided that I would cut out the negative parts of being a sideman: I would not travel long distances any more. I would cut out playing with bad musicians to make a buck, no more music I didn’t like, no more bad smoky venues with audiences that could care less who is on stage, and no assholes. It was an epiphany. It was also a tall order.
Not too much later I had the first date with my wife, Georgetta, on August 21, 2017, the day of the solar eclipse in Nashville. That was a magical moment. There were so many coincidences. We have the same name. She was called George when she was young. Our friends now call us “GL Squared”. All of our kids were drummers. She is very supportive of and involved in my music career. I wanted to move to Memphis to be with her. Things were looking up. This was a tipping point. Things fell into place quickly. I started working on re-inventing myself by focusing less on long distance travel gigs and more on the drum business. I started looking in Memphis for local work and, in the spring, I found a steady church gig on Saturdays and Sundays, and a teaching position in a drum school immediately. I made the short drive there every week to work and be with Georgetta. I started looking for that steady local band I wanted to play with.
Georgetta Lawrence, the “Booth Babe” at our booth at the Chicago Drum Show 2018
In June of 2018 I moved three 26 foot truckloads (whew!) of furniture, hundreds of drums and cymbals and thousands of back issues of NSMD to a nice old neighborhood in Memphis across the street from Sea Isle Park. Georgetta and I found that local band on Beale Street late one Sunday night. It’s amazing how you can find what you want when you tell the universe what you are looking for; thought into action. By November I was playing in a great eight piece funk and roll band with steady gigs Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights in pretty cool places on world famous Beale Street. The FreeWorld band is the longest running band in Memphis – 33 years – and they met all my requirements I was looking for: great people, great musicians, wide variety of great music, great established places to play and no travel outside the immediate region. I drive fifteen minutes to work, play great music with a fun band, and get a check. BOOM!
FreeWorld! “WE PO’ - Look at us. We so po’ we can’t even afford a razor.”
5. DrumSellers
In the spring of 2018, right before I moved to Nashville, I found a company online that provided a turnkey online marketplace site similar to Ebay and Reverb at a very affordable monthly rate. The software was built for peer to peer marketplaces selling/renting/pooling services like Air BNB, Uber, Fiverr, etc., but not ideal for physical products. BUT it was simple, lean, robust and I could make it work. I could build my Ebay/Reverb type site and revive the NSMD Classifieds! Instead of begging for companies to buy ads in Not So Modern Drummer, I could help them and the readers of Not So Modern Drummer sell drums and make commissions only when they sold! That is the new business mode; the new monetization.
I knew the value of a great brand name and made a list of about 50 names that would work for the site. First on the list was DrumSellers.com. I figured that the url DrumSellers.com was surely taken and I wasn’t going to be disappointed to not get it. It was too obvious. I looked it up on GoDaddy and couldn’t believe it wasn’t taken! Eureka! Five minutes later I owned it – and BassSellers.com too. It hit the ground running in early May 2018 and has been growing ever since. The drummers who buy and sell there see it as a trustworthy community market place. It has grown with no advertising outside Not So Modern Drummer and social media.
DrumSellers.com has become the culmination of all my past drum endeavors because it serves the drum community. It helps drummers, drum builders and drum dealers buy and sell their drums. My job is to provide information and solve transaction and communication problems. It’s a gratifying job. All my skills have come into play with DrumSellers and it has become the focus of my time and energy. During the pandemic, I have spent almost all day, every day working on DrumSellers and working with the people in that community. It has been a great re-inventing of the White Pages of Not So Modern Drummer.
I read a book that my wife, Georgetta, has; “The One Thing” by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan. It is a business motivational book. The gist of it is that “extraordinary results are directly determined by how narrow you can make your focus” – down to the one thing that will mean success to you. They stress the 80/20 Principle which asserts that a minority of causes, inputs, or effort usually lead to a majority of the results, outputs, or rewards. In other words, you need to spend 80% of your time on that one stream that is the most important and only 20% of your time on the other streams. It replaces the concept of multi-tasking: Take care of that one thing first, then subordinate all the other things. I have taken that business philosophy to heart because DrumSellers is such a niche focus in the marketplace. I realized that DrumSellers is my “one thing”; my “main stream”; the 80% of my drum community endeavors. While I have I never made a ton of money in the music business - just made a decent living - I have been successful in achieving my life and music goals. What success means to me now is to make my mark in the local, national and international drumming community and leave a legacy for my wife and my children, Jennifer and Paul, and my grandchildren.
6. PaRumPaPumPum Charity and Museum
Another facet of my drum community experiences in life has been helping drummers in need. It all started in 1985 when a teenager named Terry Lonergan started hanging around my first drum shop in Jackson Mississippi. I gave him some odd jobs to do around the store. Terry was living at the Methodist Children’s Home and would ride his skateboard several miles to the drum shop. He was already a good little drummer but his family situation at the time was not the best. I don’t think he had a drum set, or maybe not a very good one. He would practice on the teaching sets at the store. I wanted to help him. When I had to close the shop in 1987, I let Terry go in and pick out a drum set and cymbals from whatever was left in the shop before the bankruptcy trustee got involved. Of course he picked out a used Camco set. Smart kid. Later I hired Terry to do odd jobs around my house; painting, yard work, etc. I noticed one time that he was having a hard time seeing, so I arranged for him to get a new prescription and frames through the Lions Club, a charitable organization. I lent him my car and sent him to sub on a gig or two. Terry is now a busy drummer in North Carolina and just a really good guy. Wee stay in touch. He gave me permission to tell our story.
There were other students and customers and drummer friends of mine who needed a leg up in one way or another and I was always willing to help if I could. I think I got that from my father who was a minister. He and my mother were always helping people in need. Fast forward to 1999 when I heard about a need at the W.O. Smith music school in Nashville. They needed some drums for the kids they taught for free. I was involved in a usenet group that was labeled Recreation/Music/Makers/Percussion; RMMP for short. I always called it “rump”. It is still in existence as a google group. I organized a “drum and fund raiser”. We collected drums and money to put together a few kits and I delivered them to the school. That’s when my idea for the Parumpapumpum charity was born. There were several other instances over the years where I or a group helped individual drummers to acquire drums because they or their parents couldn’t afford them. I taught lessons for free to those who couldn’t afford them.
In October of 2017 I instigated a campaign with the members of the Nashville Drummers FaceBook group to collect drums and money to buy drums for drummers in Houston who had lost their gear in the Irma hurricane and flood. My friend, Josh Hallock, drove a big truck and trailer full of drums and gear from Nashville to Houston and we gave this gear to those guys so they could work. They had gigs to play but no drums. It was during this particular campaign that I decided to make Parumpapapum a non-profit organization. Georgetta jumped in with her organizational and volunteering skills and got the paperwork and red tape done recently. We are in the first stages of defining the mission of Parumpapumpum as an organization, but its main purposes are to raise money and drums for those in need and to establish a virtual and physical drum museum for the preservation of drum history.
PaRumPaPumPum - George and Josh and a trailer full of drums going to Houston drummers in need.
To be continued….