Hey George, As I was sitting here in a funk in a frozen town that doesn't deal with frozen, I got your email. I wrote the following in response to your request for articles. Use it or round file it, but I thought it was pertinent. Could be the cabin fever talking. John
Observations of a Recovering Drum Collector… . by John Aldridge
As most of you are aware, I used to do a lot more with Not So Modern Drummer than read it. In the days before the internet, drum collecting was a different thing. You had to find the drums before you could buy them. There was no ebay, reverb, or anything on a nationwide distribution other than the classified ads in Modern Drummer magazine, which were pretty pricey for the average bottom feeder like me. I was teaching in a small town outside of Tulsa Oklahoma and playing jazz and country in bands at night. I was teaching privately and tried to steer my younger students away from the CB-700 drums that were being pushed as a lower cost alternative to the $400 Supraphonic or Acrolite drum kit. Buying older drums and refurbishing them was one way to bring the top of the line drums within the same price range as the CB700 and other import snare drum kits being pushed in the schools. I just had to find a source for these older but better quality drums.
As a band student growing up in Oklahoma, where the schools were not allowed to sell used equipment as it was replaced, I was aware that almost every bandroom in the state had a hoard of old marching drums, percussion and concert instruments that had either been broken beyond the students ability to repair them, or simple replaced with a new instrument. This was reinforced when I got to college and found decades of old marching gear, in complete sets, stored in the band room closets! When I got into vintage drums, I began bartering with band directors and working with them to see about an exchange for each instrument I wanted with a valid replacement that was new or near new. I got a few drums this way but not without an overwhelming struggle against the entrenched “we don’t sell old instruments” mentality.
I began looking for other sources. The local newspapers classifieds and the weekly periodicals with classified ads that most large cities had (kind of like Craigslist in print) provided some leads, and I spent a lot of time driving in the 100 mile circle around Tulsa to look at and purchase things out of these ads. I also knew that pawn shops occasionally got used instruments in, and as Tulsa was a pretty happening music town, there was a lot of stuff being pawned. When I started buying snare drums, they were very obviously the ones that beginning drum students would be instructed to buy by their band directors in the previous 20+ years. Most of the ones I bought were like new since the desire to play the drums didn’t outlast the slow starting pace. Since Ludwig invested a great deal in marketing to educators, the lion’s share of these drums were Supraphonics and Acrolites. An acrolite would bring $35 without a case or $60-$75 with a case, stand, and practice pad. Supraphonics were not much more. You could pick up a US made top of the line drumset from the 60s just about anywhere for $200-$350, and they were glad to get that much! The demand had not built up to the point where vintage drums were seen as something to be retailed. Even Bill Ludwig II said, don’t by old stuff, buy a new Ludwig drum!
It didn’t take long for me to build up a friendship with a number of pawn shops and music stores to get them to put back things that I was looking for with the promise that I’d stop by and pay them for the items at a set price once a week. From that point on, I had more 60’s and 70’s drums at my fingertips than you could shake a stick at. I began selling to other collectors or using the non-school type snares and drumsets to trade for older vintage drums that I wanted.
As stated earlier, all of this had to be done either over the phone (keep in mind that long distance calls could be as much as a dollar a minute back then), through the mail, or in person. If you sent pictures, they had to be taken, developed and printed, and duplicates made so you could send them to more than one person. Then you had to find boxes and pack the stuff up and drive it to UPS or Fedex and fill out a paper form in triplicate to ship it. That part of the job is about the only thing that has remained the same since then, only now you can ship online and have it picked up at your house. You can even drop it off and have it packed for you. That was not an option then.
Nowadays, if I’m looking for something, all I have to do is pull up Ebay, Reverb, Craigslist, DrumSellers or one of my facebook groups for collectors and type in what I’m searching for. If it’s out there, I can usually buy it without ever talking to the person who’s selling it! If I don’t know exactly what I need to know about a certain drum, I can instantly research it with Google and the other search engines to find everything that is currently available on the topic. There’s one caveat: as time passes, the number of people who have become instant experts after reading an article or two from another internet expert has grown exponentially. Put up a question in a facebook post about a vintage drum on facebook and you’ll likely get more wrong answers than right. You’ll even get some answers that seem perversely wrong, intentionally. Why is that? Because there’s no way to tell if the articles you’re reading were written by a complete bullshit artist, or by someone who actually knows what they are talking about. The internet makes this easy to do, simply because it’s not a personal channel. Once again we have the disconnect between one collector and another, getting acquainted and forming a bond over our mutual interest. Instead, we have a contest for who knows the most and is most eager to prove it!
Although we are now, more than at any other previous time in the world’s history, able to communicate with and contact virtually anyone in the world directly (within limits), the friendship angle that drew me into the vintage drum community doesn’t seem to be as strong. I have friends that I made over the phone and finally got to meet when I went to the various drum shows around the country. To me, those connections are much more real than an internet transaction where I might never even know the seller. I go to drum shows and it’s like a huge family reunion of all the people I used to spend hours on the phone with 30 years ago, except that a whole bunch of my friends have passed away in the intervening years.
I guess the main difference between collecting then as opposed to collecting now is getting to know the person who’s selling the drums as much as knowing about the drums themselves. Some of my best friends, people I met through collecting and custom drum building and engraving, came from a vintage drum transaction that took us a couple of weeks to accomplish due to the delays of mail, photography, and the phone. Taking that time, building that trust and fulfilling your promises was all part of the deal. You either became friends after a while, or decided you could probably live without any further contact with this person based on real life experiences with that person. Those people have become an integral part of my life, some even helped when an encounter with cancer convinced me to change from being a sit down guy to a get up and do some physical work guy. If I hadn’t known them, my life would not be what it is today, and I would not have the jobs that I enjoy as a result of those friendships.
Consider this: a vintage buddy (Harry Cangany Jr.) who happened to be a drum shop owner as well, suggested my name to Ludwig as a possible engraver! Had I not known Harry that well, it probably wouldn’t have happened. If I hadn’t gotten that job, who knows how long or if I would have decided to get out of education and into the drum industry. Another friend made through Ludwig and the vintage drum community (Todd Trent) was instrumental in connecting me with my current job drum teching for yet another friend (REO Speedwagon drummer Bryan Hitt) from the vintage drum community. That connection and the work I do there led others to call me for my services. NONE of this would have happened without those personal relationships that were established through many hours on the phone and a lot of shared experiences. In other words, virtually everything that I do now was facilitated through friends I met in the pursuit of collecting drums.
Although I’m still interested in vintage drums, it's mostly the history that I’m drawn to now, rather than buying anything that piques my interest. I have found just about every drum I ever wanted to find. I’ve played them, and either decided I was bonkers to want such an impractical drum, or I’ve kept them because something in the drum spoke to me, in that it sounded like I wanted to sound. Life has intervened and made me sell a few things I didn’t really want to, but in retrospect, even those choices helped me to define what I truly wanted to keep and could afford to own.
It’s a different world today, and it’s better for the most part. But I do miss the human connection and camaraderie that used to be. Of all the things I’ve owned and collected, the friendships I’ve made and enjoyed over the past 35 years are more valuable to me than all of the drums I’ve owned.