History of the Groove, Healing Drummer: Personal Stories of Drumming and Rhythmic Inspiration

empowering.

In nineteen sixty five Dick Clark introduced ‘Those Five’ to the world on local television in St. Petersburg, Florida. He liked us. We were different. We didn’t wear uniforms. We were more like the Rolling Stones than the Beatles. All the other local bands in the show wore uniforms, imitating Paul Revere and the Raiders, the stars of Where The Action Is, a concert tour across Florida. It was a beach extravaganza hosted by Dick Clark. We were four sixteen year olds, with one older juvenile delinquent lead singer with a fake ID. We were all very tall compared to Dick, but he didn’t mind as long as he was on a pedestal above us. He was having a good time. Hundreds of girls were screaming and crying, calling out our names. Hand printed signs floated on a sea of arms in the Bayfront Center. One was big enough for me to see from the drum riser,

Smile! Buddy!

Weeping, screaming teenaged girls reached for us as we left the stage. One sixteen year old girl with tears of adoration running down her flushed face reached through the cop’s arms, touched me, and gave me a bracelet. It was manufactured hysteria, and somewhere in our teenaged hearts we knew it was phony but the girls were willing to play the part. So were we. It’s all downhill from there.

Facebook comments:

S.S.S. : I was there…just not weeping. I was smiling and screaming for a band I loved to hear.

R.S. : It had to start somewhere

PR: boy howdy

Mama Cass huddled on a chaise lounge with my lead singer. They had been like this for three days. Talking art? Poetry? Love? Life?… I’m sixteen- what do I know about life? But here was the Southern singer/songwriter meeting Mama Cass; the great earth mother patron of the arts. She was the visionary who introduced Graham Nash to David Crosby and Stephen Stills in her Laurel Canyon salon.

It was decided. We would come to LA. We were all only sixteen years old but our lead singer/songwriter was a bit older. It seemed like a normal progression for us. We were getting really good. Alan, our friend and booking agent was supervisor of activities for City of Clearwater and he put this meeting together. We had no idea how unique this moment was. The hotel pool had been closed for the night. Only our two bands sat around. There was no booze, no drugs, no groupies, no music business. Just us. John Phillips was on the phone in a room with the door open to let in the balmy Lakeland, Florida night air. Denny came and went like a ghost, occasionally murmuring to Michelle, the benevolent blonde rock queen having a precious moment of quietude just sitting and watching. My band had watched the Mama’s and Papa’s performing to huge sold out audiences for the last three nights. It was a life changing lesson in professionalism and also in the pure joy of playing really great music. I approached their drummer, sitting at a cabana table. I had no idea it was Hal Blaine, the greatest LA session drummer. This guy had cut more hits than any other drummer in the world.

The illusion perpetrated by the labels and rock star management is that all the rock band members played their own instruments in the recording studio, and some did. But the reality was that usually a group of anonymous session musicians played on all the tracks for a wide variety of pop music coming out of LA, New York and London. This secret LA group of expert musical mercenaries was called ‘The Wrecking Crew’.

You’re great. I said offering my hand to the drummer. He smiled and shook my hand.

Fast Eddie….from Chicago. He said with a sly grin. His hand was strong and relaxed. The perfect drummer handshake.

This is The Doctor he said with a gesture.

The lanky red haired lead guitar player was wearing a white Ben Casey doctor’s shirt and was clutching a black medical bag. They congratulated us on coming to LA to record. Then Eric, the Doctor opened his black bag and pulled out a small black metal box with a button on top and two guitar jack holes. It was a real Fuzz Tone. He handed it to Wally, my lead guitar player.

Here. Take this. Eric said.

It was like Spock beaming down to a small rural Southern town and giving the most unsuspecting kid a full powered phazer. We were speechless. This kind of technology would not arrive in the backwoods of Florida for years. It was the most gracious thing I had ever witnessed.

The contracts arrived in the mail. Joe Osborn, the bass player on the Mama’s and Papa’s tour would produce our album. Joe and the rest of the Wrecking Crew studio musicians were the back up musicians for all of the hits coming out of LA. It was a sure thing for Those Five.

Soon, some of the parents of Those Five had their last say. We did not go to LA at the virginal age of sixteen. I protested bitterly, You’re ruining my career!

Several years later, I am sitting in the drum booth at Capitol recording studio in LA playing for Vince Martin, a Coconut Grove pal and well respected hit song maker from the early Sixties New York folk scene. Capitol had decided to give him a budget so he called in his old friends and me, a newer friend, to record. I had arrived in L.A just a few days earlier on my own journey. The timing of immediately going into Capitol Records, descending into the almost sacred cavernous honeycombed studios to experience how the big dogs do it was priceless. I felt destiny was moving me.

Eric Hord walked into the session. Amazed at the cosmic coincidence, I jumped up to shake his hand,

You probably don’t remember… but you gave my lead guitar player your fuzz tone when you were in Florida with the Mama’s and Papa’s.

Eric started laughing. Then Van Dyke Parks was laughing and Vinnie was laughing. Joni’s husband, Kevin, on bass started laughing. Leon Russell’s engineer started laughing.

You’re right. Eric said. I don’t remember!

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PC, DW, DPM and 6 others like this.

VM: lovely!:)-1973-eric played with us at capitol—slide 12 licks that I can still hum-miss doc:)

ES Eric the doctor Hord- more of Rick’s memories from when he lived with Denny in Laurel Canyon and then later in the Grove -don’t we all have amazing moments to share- and Buddy, you share them sooo well-

Vince Martin; same same buddy-keep on keeping time:))

DF Great writing, brother. But then I’d expect no less.

Russell Buddy Helm: Are you expecting? August 31 at 12:58pm · Like · 1

PC I still say you need to do a tome of all these stories. I never get tired of hearing them.

SS Great story! P ‘s right—put all those tales into a book. Miss you!!!

SS Are you ever coming to the Catskills again?

Russell Buddy Helm: I want to..

SS: My casa es tu casa—para siempre!!!!

JW–F: Great Story Russell Buddy Helm thanks for sharing

RS: I’m so glad you remember all this stuff!

KCBL: Maybe a book of your memoires is in order.

Like tributaries coming together to feed the Big Muddy, the grooves in the fertile delta around New Orleans as well as the rest of the US blended, making a soul moving music that was a little bit of a lot of different cultures. Eric Hord was a moving target if anyone tried to pin him down to style of playing. He could play anything. But in the early sixties, Rock Grooves and Folk Grooves did not coexist pleasantly. Folk musicians were tempted to pick up the beat a little bit to get some excitement going, but if they got too aggressive there was always some critic in the audience who wanted their traditional folk singer to behave,

Sell Out!

They would shout at the troubadour if he stepped out of his designated mellow mode to try something in a more raucous groove.

This happened once with Tim Buckley in San Francisco at the Boarding House on the first night of my first tour with him. It hurt Tim immensely. But he continued to develop a style that changed music. Eric Hord came from folk music and his stint with the Mamas and Papas was pivotal in introducing folk music to the wider audience of pop music. For the Folkies to play a folk song without a group was based on certain rhythmic grooves strummed or picked on folk guitar; four or three beat patterns that did not have too much syncopation. There were lilting three quarter waltz patterns that were part of every culture, slow six beat patterns that came to be called the Blues. These had worked for centuries in the traditional folk ballads from Europe and Africa, South America, and Native American. But by changing the writing style from their traditional acoustical folk grooves and using an electric guitar, the M’s and P’s invented Folk Rock along with a bunch of other pickers from the Folkie world.

The back up musicians had to make it work. Eric and the armies of backup players had to come up with grooves, tempos, signature licks, hooks and intros for this new form of music that had not only great lyrics and melodies but also had a political impact. Good stuff. The anonymous players on the records in all the studios from LA to New York and London were melding grooves from different ethnicities like tributaries in a great flow of consciousness bringing everyone into a state of heightened egalite.

The last time I saw Eric Hord, the guitar player for the Mama’s and Papa’s and session guitarist for Vince Martin, he was hitch hiking up Laurel Canyon Boulevard just above Sunset Strip. It was a Sunday afternoon and I was returning from my first national tour with Tim Buckley. I was riding back to where ever I was going to stay as dictated by my self appointed crazy ass manager, Peggy from Coconut Grove. I’m feeling guilty that I’m riding in the back of this limo she had scammed. Suddenly, she needlessly yells at the driver sitting right next to her up in front of the glass partition.

Pull over! Pick this guy up. I know him!

The stretch limo sighed up to the curb, frustrating all the VW micro busses, having to gear down behind us before their climb up into The Canyon. The door opens, the LA sun pours relentlessly into the cool darkness and a shadow slides smoothly in. Our eyes adjust. It is Eric Hord. He looks at me and smiles then glances around the stretch. His gaze comes back to meet my eyes with a penetrating, questioning amusement.

So, It looks like you’re doing pretty good, Buddy.

I jumped to correct his assumption. I had not become a stupid ass idiot rock star.

No Eric. This is not what it seems.

He put his finger gently to his lips. Then he smiled.

It never is.

He leaned up to the glass partition and tapped.

You can let me out here.

Explosions of light splashed off of Jerry Lee as he pounded out the devil’s beat. Golden, wavy locks tumbled down from his pompadour and hovered around his sweating aristocratic, ecstatically upturned face. His leopard skin suit shimmered with lascivious hip gyrations as he snaked around the piano bench. His patent leather shoes danced up and down the Steinway keyboard ruining the rental piano for any other customer, unless they expressly wanted to buy a seven foot grand with Mr. Lewis’ signature scuff marks on the top.

Jerry Lee’s sixteenth note pounding technique on the piano was aggressive and sexual. He was playing all the notes he could possibly hit at a fast tempo, changing the blues from the swinging six beat pattern that was traditional folk black Southern blues, adding a healthy dollop of white country folk which was a straight up and down four beat, with an overlay of up tempo gospel. This new thang was called rock n roll. His cousin was a famous evangelical preacher and Jerry was somewhat of an embarrassment to the righteous. His personal conflict between boogie woogie and being a good southern white Christian did not take. He was a bad boy.

His wife didn’t move a muscle while Jerry Lee was performing. She just stood there in the wings, wearing a leopard skin dress that made her look older than her real age. She was about my age.

Our show had been great. Jerry Lee’s celebrity pixie dust was on us too. It was a contagious time. A band could feel great because of the euphoria that the music was generating. Everyone felt the rock n roll energy. It was a liberating enlightening juice running through everyone like sensual electricity. It was great to be alive and in a band. The local girls screamed for us, while their boyfriends sulked at the back of the Star Spectacular auditorium complaining about paying the $1.25 admission so their girlfriends could run down to the stage and scream at Those Five. This had resulted in several showdowns at lunchtime at Clearwater High.

Clearwater High school was not integrated until my senior year, 1967. The only black teacher taught Americanism versus Communism, a propaganda class which passed for social studies in the Deep South. Marion Freeman was rejected by all the white teachers, so I ate lunch with him. He gave me a valuable gift of an archival recording entitled Field Hollars from the Deep South. I learned who Leadbelly was. I heard the authentic recordings of men and women and children singing while they were picking cotton, recorded by Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress in the fields of Mississippi, Louisiana and Georgia. It turned my ears on to the source of rock and roll; the blues. I felt the movement of the picker’s bodies as they sang in harmonic unison reverberating back to their origins in Gambia, Senegal, Congo. Their grooves moved me and I saw them in my mind’s eye, moving down the rows of angry white cotton bushes that cut their fingers as they picked. I fell in love with the music, the intensity, the brilliant honest solution to a formidable condition. Survival rhythms. My classical musical education and drum and bugle corps style of drumming began to mutate. I started to feel those field hollar grooves in my drumming. I started to understand what the English rock n roll invasion was all about. They had taken American black music, reconstituted it and sold it back to the uninformed American white kids.

Richard was the water boy for the football team. Extremely intelligent, not really an imposing figure. Not tall, built like Odd Job, the rotund assassin in the James Bond movies that were so popular at that time. He whispered to me at lunch.

The coach told the defensive linemen to kill you. Your rock n roll band is a bad influence. You said you didn’t want to go to Viet Nam. They’re going to hurt you. Bad.*

There was that place again; some remote country that no one knew anything about but was sucking up young men then sending them home in bags. It was a meat grinder. The footballers were waiting for me at the end of the hall.

You need to learn how to defend yourself. Richard advised. Come down to my dojo.

What’s a dojo? I asked, preparing for another onslaught of redneck bitterness. My band, my longish hair that was gooped back with Dippity Do during school then washed out to barely cover my ears when we played, was a personal insult to these young southern white males who were as mean as snakes. The fact that I could get their girlfriends to dance threatened their definition of manhood.

A school for martial arts. Richard said then faded away.

Richard was a different person in his martial arts school; ageless, black robes, inscrutable and deadly. I learned the katas; the dances of death. The word got around high school. The next time I was confronted by the footballers, one of their football groupies ran up to them and warned them,

He’s been studyin’ Ku RA tay!

No fair! The tackle jeered at me from a safe distance.

Come on. I said with calm assured casualness. I won’t hurt you…too much.

Amazing what a little public relations will do. This was an interesting new mind set. I was not the victim. I liked it. The fear that had always been present in my mind relaxed a little bit and I actually smiled, laughing at the irony.

I was left alone after that but I had acquired great tools; Zen meditation and the writings of Alan Watts and other Eastern philosophers. The paperback, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones stayed in my back pocket every day and guided me through the perilous waters of adolescence. It also felt compatible with my drumming, the thing that I had been doing since I was eight years old. I had an intuitive feeling about how profound this connection was.

The grooves of our hit rock songs became my meditations. Active high body energy insights into what the mysterious grooves did to the bodies of the people who were able to let themselves dance. A little too fast? I would slow the groove down, or lay it back in the pocket as the old blues guys would say. Be late to the downbeat and watch them start to dance.

One night on a balmy Gulf weekend, when Those Five played at the Surfer’s Club on Madeira Beach, I had an epiphany about what ‘The Groove’ did to teenagers. I sat onstage behind my Ludwig drum set that looked coincidentally exactly like Ringo’s black pearl drum set I had bought used from the best drummer in high school, Sharon. She was moving on. Women in those days were not getting their part of the rock n roll action. Most guys starting bands did not consider a girl drummer as cool. Too bad for them. My first drum teacher was a woman so I always saw women as drummers. Usually better than the guys.

I watched my generation dance to our beat. They were all jumping up and down together in ecstatic dance. It was a tribal experience that felt sacred and secret. They were sharing the mojo of the hit songs of the day: Roy Orbison’s ‘Pretty Woman’, ‘Summertime Blues’ by Eddie Cochran, ‘It’s all over now’ by the Stones, ‘Lightning strikes again’ by Lou Christie, on and on…(Lou Christie’s wife drummed with us at Seasons in Santa Monica fifty years later). But what I saw was the essential human experience of sharing a groove. It made us all belong.

Now they talk about Oxytocin being the chemical that creates this bonding; the chemical that appears in the blood when a mother bonds with her newborn infant.

The same chemical cocktail occurs when people share music together, especially in a band. Blame it on the Oxytocin.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to. It was in my blood I suppose. But I disagreed with their lame fashion sense; suede elbow patches turn me off. I reacted in fear and it sealed my fate.

She picked me up in a theater arts course that I had grabbed at the last minute during the grueling undergraduate enrollment in the USF gymnasium where grown men, football stars in high school, were crying because they could not get enough easy credits to stay out of the draft. This was before the lottery. If your grade point average dropped below 2.3 they could come and take you out of class, send you to basic training then directly into the killing jungles of Viet Nam and probably not come out in one piece.

My new girlfriend, slightly older, much more worldly than I was, had her way with me for a few months. She showed me a newspaper photo where she was stuffing a flower down the rifle barrel of a National Guard soldier at an antiwar rally in Tampa. She was much wiser in the ways of the world.

Nancy invested a great deal of time and effort in grooming me. She talked me into attending a private on-campus group therapy session for stutterers even though I was not a stutterer.

You’re just a regular person, she explained, Who can give them some safe conversational support. I did not think it was a good idea but she enjoyed getting me to do things.

Don’t get angry at them. She advised me before entering the group session. This is their chance to talk with regular people in a safe setting.

The redneck campus psychiatrist immediately accused me of being confused about my maleness because I had long hair like a girl, but I had a beard like a man. This was the Deep South in nineteen sixty eight. His attack on me gave the stutterers a green light to join in a group decimation of me.

I let them thrash me for an hour. They didn’t stutter very much at all. My knuckles stayed white on the armrests. I stifled any angry retorts. Nancy was very pleased. I felt like a butterfly on a pin as she examined my self-control. I wanted to be enraged; she had set me up, but I never really could show my anger. My mother had made sure of that. My repressed emotions would come out at some inappropriate time later on in my life. When I saw this repeated behavior years later, I called it ‘delayed stress’.

She seduced my lead singer. I had no control over her. She certainly had power over me. She gave me a ring she had gotten in Iran where she had grown up as a ‘State Department Brat". She said it would protect me as long as I played the drums. My grade point dropped because of her late night active social activities. I received my 1A status with orders to report for my physical examination in Jacksonville. I called to tell her I was being drafted and she immediately drove across Tampa Bay on the causeway to my family’s house and gave me a pill, ordering me to swallow it.

What is it? I asked.

Swallow it. She commanded.

I have the dubious training from an early age to do what an older woman tells me to do, even if it is a beautiful women telling me to take LSD. I had no father to train me otherwise.

We spent the night tripping in a piano player friend’s huge family lakeside estate, listening to the new Beatles White Album. She was in control, asking questions. She complimented me later for handling the whole sensory onslaught so well. It didn’t seem like that big of a deal. It wasn’t that interesting to me. I was used to stressful situations although I didn’t really know why. The vibrating red and black carpet was a minor amusement. The brand new Beatle’s album was profound even without acid. But she observed me while ‘Revolution Number Nine’ intoned endlessly on the turntable. It was John Lennon’s mind trip on vinyl. It’s a bit psychotic. I seemed to pass the tests that Nancy was running on me.

I was heading for the killing fields of Viet Nam in thirty days. I was not crying about it.

A fellow drummer, another skinny long hair in Tampa gave me the name of an old general practitioner doctor who documented his heart condition. stating that his heart would not withstand the rigors of military duty. Sure. I sent up an appointment with the good doctor.

Do you want to go to Viet Nam? He asked me quietly.

I shrugged. No, not really.

When I arrived at my draft physical exam in Jacksonville, I sat at the back of a large screened in room painted army green filled with a hundred other boys.

Fill out these forms. The master sergeant growled aggressively at the front of the room.

If you have any questions…. you will be drafted.

He sat down and ignored us. It was a muggy, hot, humid, sweltering day. My mind was trying to comprehend the stack of papers in front of me. I was having a hard time focusing. I hadn’t eaten much in three days. A voice whispered to me.

Psst! Are you Buddy Helm, the drummer?

He was an enlisted man; sitting in a nearby school desk like the rest of us, but wearing a white medic’s shirt. He was also sporting a handlebar mustache and was wearing leather boots. He was A Head.

My little sister loves your band. He whispered. She said you were gettin’ called up. Give me your papers.

He glanced at the master sergeant who was studiously avoiding any eye contact with the room full of draftees. I handed this apparition in white the inch thick stack of forms. He quickly flipped through it filling out everything in the blink of an eye. He handed the stack back to me with the smooth ease of a ghost.

There. That should do it. He whispered. He rose quietly and then he was gone. I didn’t even look through it. I knew whatever he had written down was in good spirit.

I did not try to fake injuries or screw up the hearing test like so many of the other boys were trying to do to get out of the draft. I had some kind of inner groove going that would look out for me. I knew it because it had protected me before. I trusted it.

Are you a musician? The belligerent army doctor accused me as I stood in line shoulder to shoulder with a hundred other nervous eighteen year old boys in our underwear.

Yeah. I said evenly. My long hair was like a red flag to this bull and his two Marine escorts.

Well…That makes it official now, doesn’t it? He sneered with