What makes a drummer tick?
Catagory: wood-shed
And gack, and gzzz, and zot, and . . .
By Rob Laymon
The best thing about drum corps is that it brings you into contact with people from diverse backgrounds and interests, to share with them something deeply profound and personal.
...it’s certainly unfair to compare drumming to something like schizophrenia. Schizophrenics don’t have to tap on everything.
Like underwear.
No, seriously. The best thing about drum corps is that it brings you into contact people who, no matter where they come from, are just as odd as yourself.
That was certainly true in my case. I joined drum corps because I sought to hide my oddness – that is, I am a drummer.
I started drumming in 1975 and have not been able to stop. In drum corps, I was among other drummers, practicing long hours with them, often wearing clothing.
Let me at this point address my comments to those of you who are not drummers, but may have a connection to them, such as by marriage or some other professional relationship. This way we may better understand each other, and pity may at last be shed on this most misunderstood of personalities.
Drumming.
You may think that people choose to become drummers. They don’t. You may think drumming is a musical preference. It isn’t. Drumming chooses its victims. There is growing evidence that drumming may be genetic in origin, like some illnesses, though it’s certainly unfair to compare drumming to something like schizophrenia. Schizophrenics don’t have to tap on everything.
Newton saw a world of mass and velocity. Einstein saw a world of light and energy. But drummers know the world only as rhythm and tone. Freud showed us the personality consisting of id, ego and superego. In drumming there is a fourth component: walking bass.
This creates problems.
You long term friends of drummers understand. There is no object in this world, anywhere, anytime, that will not be drummed upon if a drummer can reach it. Drummers can actually hear surfaces calling to them: “Please, please, drum on me. I have wonderful resonance.”
In the early stages of a personal relationship, this can lead to confrontations. It can happen in church, when all heads are bowed in silence, and a persistent noise emanates from a pew in the back.
“What’s that?”
“What’s what?”
“That tapping.”
“Tapping? That just happens to be Blue Devils 1989!”
“Well stop it!”
“But I’m not even to the stick work!”
Later in the relationship, though, the drummer’s foibles often are better understood.
“Triplets? What’s wrong? You usually play sixteenth-note patterns in the movie theater.”
There are of course, secondary personality quirks of drummers, such as their tendency to develop bizarre fixations. I once marched with a drumline that, in the course of a long, hot, difficult tour, began to worship blimps.
Blimps assumed a deeply religious significance for us, even if I can’t remember why. The rest of the corps was dismayed, to say the least, when, at the first site of one of those majestic super-balloons, the entire drumline would fall to its knees in supplication.
...the drummers moaned achingly, prostrate on the ground.
It’s a good thing we never marched in the Macy’s parade.
“Oh, it’s just a blimp,” they would tell observers as the drummers moaned achingly, prostrate on the ground. “The drumline is really into blimps.”
But more than that.
Maybe it’s the drummers I’ve known were always conscious of forces higher that themselves. Maybe through their constant tapping, drummers are trying to syncopate with the Great Rhythm that binds us all together.
Maybe, deep down, they hope we’ll all get in touch with the same beat.
There are worse hopes, it seems to me.
(Tappitta tap tap tap…)