Blame it All on Little Ricky: How I Became A Drummer

I met my first love when I was eight years old and my love for her has continued to burn in my heart right up through today. In fact, it has gotten stronger over the decades. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my whole life up till then. Her name was Gretsch. She had a very sexy pair of tom-toms and she wore a beautiful sky-blue pearl wrap. And of course, she belonged to another.

When I was eight, most of my neighborhood friends had formed a Cub Scout den, and like any red-blooded eight-year old American boy, I didn’t want to be left out, so I had my folks sign me up. Although dressing up in the uniform was fun (we got to wear them to school on the days of our den meetings) and I enjoyed the boisterous den and pack meetings, ultimately I turned out to be poor scouting material because I was an overly-cautious kid (read: a chicken shit). And photographic evidence has subsequently revealed that I looked incredibly dorky in my blue Cub Scout uniform with the yellow neckerchief. (To be fair, the uniform didn’t make me look dorky, it’s just that at eight-years old I was an inherently dorky kid in desperate need of the orthodontia that was soon to come my way.) I only made it as far as a Bear Scout, with an arrowhead or two underneath. (I don't remember what the arrowheads meant, but I do remember that having only a couple meant that I didn’t advance very far).

Even a Cub Scout uniform's coolness didn't have

enough power to un-dork the author

when he was eight-years old.

One time, our scout pack had a big luncheon at the Sportsmen’s Lodge, a local facility for hire that hosted corporate functions, weddings, graduation dances and bar-mitzvah parties. The entertainment at the luncheon was a jazz combo featuring child actor/drummer Keith Thibodeaux, who played “Little Ricky” on I Love Lucy.

When the curtain opened, there were a few teen-age musicians plus an even younger Thibodeaux, who was seated at a gorgeous sky-blue pearl Gretsch drumset. This was the very first time in my life that I’d ever seen a drumset in person, and I was absolutely mesmerized by it from the moment I first saw it. When the band began to play I was transfixed by the drums — by how they seemed to sparkle under the stage lights, by how Thibodeaux looked as he moved while he played them, but mostly by how they sounded. That SOUND! The whole time the band played the drums popped and rumbled while the cymbals shimmered and pinged. When the music got quiet you could still hear every note the drums were playing, and when the music got loud you could feel the drums in your chest! That afternoon the sound of the drumset came to live inside of me, and it’s been living there ever since.

Keith Thibodeaux, right around the time he played for our Cub Scout pack. 

During intermission a couple of my friends and I went up to the stage and talked with Thibodeaux. (That was another thing that drew me to the drums that day — they were being played by a kid my own age.) When he went to join his bandmates on break we told him that we would “guard his drums”. The other guys quickly lost interest and left, but I stayed and sat on the edge of the stage next to those drums right up until the band came back to play again. It just felt like I belonged near them. When we left the luncheon, everything about those drums, but especially their sound, was still resonating inside me — I was really hooked.

From that day on, whenever I heard music on records or the radio I locked in on the drums. I tried to decipher the music the drums were making. I paid attention to exactly when each drum was being played as part of the music. After a while I felt like I was starting to decode what the drummers were doing: using the bass drum and snare drum to carry the beat and keep the song moving, using cymbals for color and accents, and using tom-toms for short, melodic passages.

A few months later I heard a record on the radio that turned what I thought I had learned about how drums were played completely upside-down. On this record the drums weren’t simply keeping the beat and keeping the song moving. On this record the drums were the song! There was also some surf guitar in there, but it was the tom-toms that were up front and telling the story. On this record the drums swung like mad; it was impossible not to tap your foot to them. And to top it all off, on this record the drums sounded absolutely HUGE! Even through a tiny AM radio speaker this sounded like the world’s biggest drumset. The record was called “Let There Be Drums”, and it was recorded by drummer Sandy Nelson and guitarist/producer Richie Podolor. As one of my Hanukkah presents that year, Mom and Pop took me to the W.T. Grant store on Van Nuys Boulevard so I could get my very own copy.

My copy of "Let There Be Drums" became just as worn as this one.

When we got home with the record I asked Pop to play it on his big hi-fi system. I sat on the floor and listened while it was playing, and I must have said something about what a great drummer Sandy Nelson was, because I can remember Mom turning to Pop and saying "Do you think he’s ready for 'Sing, Sing, Sing?'" Pop said "Sure", and when "Let There Be Drums" was finished he got up and put on his copy of "Sing, Sing, Sing" from Benny Goodman's Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert, with Gene Krupa on drums.

I sat silently on the floor between the speakers, listening in absolute amazement to Krupa’s drumming for the entire thirteen minutes that song played. Krupa’s drumming swung harder than Nelson's, it had more musical twists and turns, and it told a longer, deeper and more involved musical story. And the drums sounded even bigger and more musical. My head began to spin. All I could think was “how on earth is he doing that?”

The LP that started it all.

By the time “Sing, Sing, Sing” ended I had decided that I was going to figure out exactly how on earth he did that. At that moment my identity was firmly and irrevocably established as: A Drummer. That is what I had been built to do and it’s what my life has revolved around ever since. Being A Drummer is what has given my life meaning ever since that moment sitting on the floor between the speakers, having my breath taken away by the music Gene Krupa made on his Slingerland Radio King drums back in January of 1938.

After that revelation I began playing “air drums” along with records and along with whatever was playing on the radio in the house, imagining that I was sitting behind a typical 4-piece drumset (like the one I had seen Thibodeaux playing) and playing the drum part on that particular record. This began to deepen my understanding of how the drumset was played and how the drums fit into the music. Even though I didn’t have any drums, I was indeed becoming A Drummer.

-Hyam R. Sosnow