Then came the drum set. The story behind it is complicated. Esther’s mother was proud of her daughter’s voice. Above all, she looked forward to her daughter singing in church. Esther went to college, sang some more. Her mother, I don’t know quite when, bought her a small electric organ to play at home but Esther never used it. She already played piano some but didn’t take organ lessons and soon she left home for the Big City four hundred miles away. Ten years later, her mother was gone and the organ sat unused in her parents’ home in Elyria, OH. When Jeremy came along, Esther decided to turn the organ in for credit at the music store where her mother had bought it. It wasn’t a lot of money but it was enough to get Jeremy the basics of a drum kit- sticks, ride cymbal, snare and tom tom.
Esther had already seen to Jeremy’s musical –and other kinds of- growth. She was filled with ideas how to make stimulating toys. She took half-pint milk cartons, emptied them out, cleaned and filled them with pebbles and nuts to make rattle boxes and then strung along a cord and hung them across the kitchen door. Hit the cord with a stick and bingo, bongo, you’ve got noise, kind of a beat-upon maraca. Put on a record, preferably rock, and you’re part of the band, playing your pebble boxes with the Big Guys. Hanging from the ceiling in Jeremy’s bedroom was an old tire re-purposed as a swing. When he wanted to hammer, he hit flat-headed tacks into the cut off tree stump that served as his (second) work bench. (The first work bench Esther had made to her specifications by a local woodworker.) I helped her make a set of blocks out of empty milk cartons, painted primary colors.
I helped but the impetus and ideas came from Esther.
The drums, though, to be honest, I pushed that. Maybe it was because I’d always wanted to play drums but never had. But I think it was more a way to connect Jeremy, still young, with music, a visceral way for him to interact directly with the records we played over and over while he was awake.
His favorite record was The Band,”Get Up Jake.” He would drum away at that song and sing the words at the top of his lungs. I’d join in singing and if Esther was near, drag her into the living room to dance.
I had a close-to-awful record of Buddy Miles doing his one semi-hit, “Them Changes.” We played that too. Later, when I bought the one-side-of-the-record-great-other-side-sucks album of Carlos Santana and Buddy Miles on New Year’s Eve 1970, I played that: the two tunes by John McLaughlin, “Lava” and “Marbles,” and Buddy’s “Them Changes.” The Al Kooper-Steve Stills version of “Season of the Witch,” of the Super Session album. I LOVED that one!
ADDITIONAL LISTENING
Carlos Santana-Buddy Miles: “Them Changes” (1970)
Super Session: “Season of the Witch” (1970)
MUSIC & ME 