A DRUMMER'S HEARTBEAT

         
Sensuous imagery often lingers in a young child’s consciousness, sets aglow the blue touch paper of imagination and may even shine the torch along a distant career path. Today’s youngsters still revel in wafting sparklers like magic wands.

My first conscious memory of such indelible impressions was the crackling bonfire night of November 5, 1936 when I was a toddler of three.  So many indelible colours and strange new sounds:  those whooshing rockets fizzing through the night sky to unleash their shower of silver sparks; the deafening penny bungers that drew gasps of shock or shrieks of anxiety; snaky jumping crackers with a string of small red and green wicks - you lit a bigger wick and cringed back as the compacted wicks jumped in jerky directions; the Vesuvius cones spilling with effluvia of richly coloured purples, reds and yellows; throw downs that made unsuspecting victims jump with a pop pop pop slamming behind them; oh and pinned on nails against a wooden post, spinning Catherine wheels like comets of blazing fire; the silver plume of Roman candles bursting into a myriad coloured stars falling in an arc.  Ah, yes, who can forget those showers of golden rain?

Yet those magical firework displays are also discoloured by painful memories.  At thirteen I was silly enough to sidle up to a lighted rocket that refused to launch into the stratosphere from its bottle.  I probed around, then removed the cap.  Whoosh!  The blasted thing shot off, leaving me staggering back with burns on my face, black hair burnt and a twenty per cent loss of vision in the left eye.

As I travel back through time, so many images suddenly tumble out of the mist.  At the prompt of colours and sounds, I still witness the skirl and drum tattoo of pipe bands marching at the coronation of King George VI, the tartan greens and reds of kilts and sporrans against shiny busby black.

Preps, at the age of three, I envied the lone drummer who played at morning assembly, the most highly regarded figure at school, for all the children marched to the beat of his drum.  Those were the days when the flag monitor would run the Australian flag up the pole and we bush kids would sing God Save the Queen, then recite the Patriotic Declaration:

           

       I love God and my country,

                                           I honour the flag, I will serve the Queen,

                               And cheerfully obey my teachers, parents and the law

My father happened to be the headmaster of that higher elementary school.  I implored him to let me have a turn.  At last he relented, with cold eye and furrowed brow.  Not long after,  shock and horror!  I’d somehow jabbed a hole through the drum skin!  Dad was not best  pleased, went fuming for days, so I didn’t get the gig.  It was obvious, though, even to him - I had a passion for rhythm and soundscape.  Mum’s pots and pans I would turn upside down and tap out different sounds  with a pair of kitchen knives, perhaps unconsciously trying out changeable arrangements of note

At fifteen, I was offered a drum kit by some would-be drummer at Rosebud’s life-saving club.  His asking price, a mere fifteen pounds.  Somehow I had scraped together twenty-five pounds and flourished the sum without even attempting to bargain, so thrilled was I, despite its crummy appearance.  I set up the kit in the lounge room with its gaudy red and gold temple blocks resembling Chinese sculptures.  The lounge room!  That was a special concession, being the most important room in the house conserved for receiving visitors.  The floor tom-tom, the bass drum attached to which was the smaller tom, the snare drum, the high hat cymbals on the floor that you tapped with your left foot and a cow bell that you struck on top with a stick.  Regrettably, there were no skins on the bottom of these drums, so they resonated with a wooden, clicking sound.

In 1950 I was obliged to become a member of the Musicians Union if I wanted to play gigs.  Its branch office was based in the heart of Melbourne, Little Collins Street, but I had to convey by tram my drum kit, which included the caboodle of hardware in awkward cases - chrome arms, tripods and seat.  Since I had three sections to carry and only one pair of arms, I was forced to make three separate journeys every fifty metres.  I carted one section to the tram stop, then dashed back to pick up the second lot, then did the same thing with the third.  When the tram groaned to a halt, it took so long for me to load up that the human cargo was delayed by several minutes.  Worse was to follow, for when we arrived at Flinders Street station, rush hour was in full swing.  Again I was compelled to make the crossing over Flinders Street from Swanston Street six times in all, fearful of depositing parts of my precious drum kit on the other side of the road on Princes Bridge, what with all the young kids who might knock or nick something.  During the agonising wait at the slow change of traffic lights, I would lose sight of the drums in the blur of traffic.

Then after another nervy triple scurrying over Collins Street, I finally lumbered up to Little Collins Street and the office of the Musicians Union.  The stout, old woman with overly rouged cheeks and a thick coating of ruby red lipstick sitting at the ancient upright piano gave me some tasks to accomplish.  In a good-humoured ocker accent, as if she genuinely wished to make me a member, she asked:  ‘Do you jist wanna join the Union?  She’s apples.  Now we’re gonna play the palma waltz.’  Then:  ‘Now we’re gonna play a beguine.’  Next she asked me to demonstrate the fox trot, tango and modern waltz.  So far, so good.  ‘Now we’re gonna play the rumba.’  She thought to throw me with that, but I had wised up beforehand to the kind of questions she’d ask.  Luckily, there was no one else to test me.  Most likely, an experienced examiner would have asked more searching questions.

So now I had my credentials, I was happy as Larry - a professional musician, at last!  Perhaps I’d gone further in my musical career than I should have:  I didn’t have the patience to rehearse long hours; I couldn’t read music; I didn’t have a teacher.  But I was an intuitive muso empathetic to the other instruments, providing the sound behind what you hear other instruments creating.  That’s what it’s all about – syncopated rhythm and patterns of sonic layering.

So in 1949, determined to make some money to buy a decent drum-kit, I threw away a scholarship to Melbourne Grammar.  At the time, I was sergeant of drums in the cadet corps band, large drums, fifes and bugles, and had carried off the Arnold Tanswell Playle Memorial prize for mathematics presented to me by Lord Casey of India.  My teacher parents were appalled and saddened by the decision. 

‘Who in his right mind would turn down an offer from Grammar,’ my father thundered, ‘one of the best academic schools in Australia?  What’s more, a guaranteed ticket to a handsomely paid job for life!’ 

Though wringing her hands before her pinnie, my mother was more conciliatory, more understanding.  ‘If you are sure you have found your dream, your destiny, Lester, we won’t stand in your way,’ she sighed.  ‘Your father will come round . . . eventually.’

So after four years of enjoyment at this eminent bluestone school, it was time to actively pursue my long-held dream.

First, though, I needed some loot.  Factory work was easy to find, so much easier than today.  I worked night shift from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m.  First at Shetland Knitting Mills, where I set up the looms to produce women’s cardigans, then at Holeproof Socks, where I disgraced myself at the sock and pattern-making machines by turning out socks with no patterns.  By 4 a.m. I was bushed, falling asleep at the machines.

However, I was delighted to buy the old drum kit of a former Melbourne Grammarian, Johnny Arnell.  A child prodigy on percussion, he too was an erstwhile member of the corps of drums, fifes and bugles band.  By that time he’d become a good-looking professional drummer with long, blonde hair playing showpieces at the Tivoli Theatre with Sybil Faithfull, the accordionist.  His tonal poems eliciting different patterns of sound fascinated me.  I very much admired Johnny.  At a cadet camp at Puckapunyal he tuned up a nest of different drums using independent hands for different rhythms.  His all-white drum kit, a reputable Premier from England, was in good nick, with skins top and bottom!  Soon I was badgering St John’s Church in Camberwell to let my band play at its fellowship dance.  Our repertoire included The Pride of Erin, waltzes, such as the Circular Waltz, the tangoette, fox trots and progressive barn dances.

Now that I had earned some cash, I bought the Rolls Royce of radiogrammes, an HMV, so I could listen to the popular music of the time:  Bing Crosby’s lilting, melodic Dear hearts and gentle people; Ragmop, a rhythm and blues number made famous by the Ames Brothers; the lachrymose Irish song Galway Bay . . . Such numbers I could accompany in the lounge with my brushes, switching from two beats in the bar to four then back to two.  Much encouraged by both parents, I was beginning to appreciate the fascinating variety of rhythm and melody.

 After the war Melbourne, starved of entertainment, hosted some great artists at the Festival Hall, otherwise known as the House of Stoush:  three of the finest improvisers in Ella Fitzgerald, Artie Shaw and Buddy Rich, the drummer in Tommy Dorsey’s orchestra; the wise-cracking Jerry Colonna with his spoof of a voice; the big band sound of Ted Heath; the jazz combo of Johnny Dankworth and the mellifluous Cleo Laine backed by his Quartet; Graeme Bell and the Dixieland All Stars; the rock explosion of Bill Haley’s Comets .  .  .  When I learned that Gene Krupa was coming to town, the drummer who shifted drums from the back of the band to the front line, I jumped over the moon.  Renowned for his very showy choreography of rhythm expressed in his physical gyrations and his ‘I’ll be kind to you, little drums’, Krupa was due to make an appearance at a certain venue.   I waited for this little guy with the big reputation to materialise just so I could touch greatness.  Such was my reverence for the trailblazers who had ignited my own starlit ambition.

It was soon evident that a musical career wouldn’t pay the bills; it wasn’t regular work.  In the fifties, pros might go full-time or work on the soundtrack behind the commercial ads on TV.  The Musicians Union acted as an agency booking gigs for their mates.  But to make some real dough, I needed a straight job. 

In the 1950s aspiring teachers were thrown into a teaching position without much experience or training.  You were left to sink or swim, so you quickly found out at some cost whether you actually liked kids.  As a spotty, pimply, insecure, unkempt lad of eighteen unaware of the machinations of the world, I fetched up in a rural school in Bangholme, teaching eight grades in the one classroom as well as training the monitors who assisted me.  These were pupils from the upper grades who could undertake helpful tasks with the very young ones.  I took charge of forty-one pupils on my own.

As a teacher starting out, you were jack-of-all-trades:  you boarded, rode a bike to school, tended the garden.  You ran the school committee, where you rubbed shoulders with adults.  Every week you earned two shillings and sixpence shovelling up the night soil, then paid a couple of boys a shilling each to empty the pans.  As a result of being flooded out one time, thirty cattle lay dead in our yard.  Jeez, that was a real health scare.  When the school records were damaged by water, I laboriously wrote over the almost illegible details.  You had to be zealous to cope and many dropped out.

One miserably wet cold winter’s day I decided I’d had enough of this way of life.  Besides, my mother was now a widow and elderly, so I wanted to be a brick and support her.  I jumped on my pushbike to cycle to Dandenong and then by train into the Education Department in central Melbourne to cross swords with the chief inspector.  On the way my old greatcoat caught in the chain, leaving its skirts ragged.  I must’ve looked like a homeless tramp.

‘I will not be put off!’  I barked at the clerk, demanding to speak to the chief inspector, while he tried to dissuade ‘this lofty eminence’, as he termed me.

Just then another inspector entered the office, a fierce bully of a man with a familiar face.  ‘I know Tremlet,’ he declared smugly. ‘Thirty-five times late!’

How wet was I behind the ears?  I’d dutifully and truthfully entered my every lateness in the time book, the so-called ‘lie book’, since many teachers falsely entered times of their arrival.

‘That has nothing to do with the matter in hand,’ said the chief inspector to his underling, somewhat brusquely.  ‘I admire this young man for initiative.  Now, Lester,’ he said, turning back to me, ‘how can I help you?’

‘I’ve been posted to Gippsland!’ I blurted haplessly.  ‘But I was expecting a transfer to a city school.’

Next he asked if I would take on a one-teacher rural school for a few months, then he would grant me a city posting to a large school with many staff.  Situated one hundred and fifty miles from Melbourne, my new appointment registered a mere thirteen pupils, but at least one in every grade from 1 to 8.  There was one solitary store nearby, no electricity anywhere.  I boarded with an elderly couple in a modest weatherboard, where lamps were essential.

I still regret that dreadful time when I was forced to administer the cuts.   Ordering the culprit to hold out his hand, I brought the strap swishing down.  Unfortunately, he jerked his hand away so that I struck myself a painful blow on the leg.  Of course, the kids all hooted with laughter, while I struggled not to show my own physical pain and acute embarrassment.  Next time I firmly grasped the offender’s wrist.

After I transferred to Auburn South primary, I had more opportunities to play gigs at weekends.  Soon I was juggling twelve sessions a week.  I’d play at the Hotel International, Essendon till 11 pm, then motor on to a nightclub next to the Tivoli till 3 in the morning, then sleep for three hours before choofing off to school.  I must’ve had a pretty fit body, but I knocked back a fair few stubbies.  Usually, management supplied the beer, sometimes the patrons coughed up.

So rugged was my schedule that I’d fall asleep sitting in my chair at the blackboard, vaguely hearing the kids murmur, ‘Shhh!  Don’t wake up sir.’  I used to wear a plain pair of pyjamas, the top resembling a standard shirt, so I kept it on for teaching.  First period we held morning talks, with the kids crowding round on the rug at the front.  ‘Good morning, Nicky Prosser,’ I’d say.  ‘What exciting things can you talk about today?’  And that exercise would keep running for an hour or so, giving me time to figure out what to do next.

One of my most embarrassing days as a teacher came when I played acting principal for the day.  I was fourth in line at Tallyho Boys Village, Wesley Mission.  I wasn’t informed about the inspector’s visit, which just my luck chanced to be on a Monday, the morning of assembly.  For a start, the Union Jack was raised upside down.  For the Patriotic Declaration, instead of saying, ‘I honour the flag and I will serve the Queen,’ I bumbled into ‘I serve the flag and will honour the Queen.’ 

I was desperate for something inspiring with which to start the day to impress the sour inspector.  When one of the boys conjured up a stumpy-tailed lizard, I struck gold and invited the inspector to give a spiel on the little critter.  Of course, he was flummoxed and stammered on about a few obvious physical details.  But he enabled me sufficient time to conjure one of my inspirational brainwaves – fractions by coloured squares!

I rummaged around in the desk drawer for my collection of coloured squares, distributed them to the class and asked them to fold them into different shapes:  quarters, eighths, sixteenths etc.  The kids were thoroughly absorbed.

The inspector studied me closely:  ‘Mr Tremlet, I received a shocking impression of you when I arrived, but I am prepared to take a chance on you.’

These tough, testing times helped me in organisational skills and contact with people of diverse personalities owning a vast array of talents.  More significantly, I enjoyed this completely different lifestyle of jazz, which allowed for a ‘chilling out’ from the stresses of teaching! 

After working as freelance drummer, I led my own jazz band for thirty years.  Jazz satisfied my craving for freedom.  Individuals can express the widest range of emotions, from doom and gloom to ecstatic jubilation, no longer dependent on someone else’s black and white notes.  But to be commercial, you had to play fairly melodic music for dancing in a restaurant.  When jazz clubs came into fashion, such as Black and Blue, the music scene changed dramatically.  Not only was the music different, as the lyrics gave way from teeny-bopper sentimentality to more realistic boy-girl relationships and protest songs, but the subdued lighting and murky atmosphere encouraged less formal, more spontaneous expression.  Rock music incorporated the mood of protest, with its fashion of long hair, the drug culture and most notably its attitude towards war in Vietnam.  After The Twist craze, freed from partners and dependency, girls became far more uninhibited, wild even.  Formal dancing steps were forgotten in the melee of human bodies writhing in crowded confines.  Gone were the fox trots, waltzes, such as The Circular Waltz, barn dances, even The Pride of Erin and the local church dance.  Instead, a mindless shuffle crept into the discotheques with more than a hint of sleaze.  No longer did girls feel mortified if they weren’t asked to dance, nor did boys risk rejection.  You did not need a partner to cavort enthusiastically on your own.

As a professional drummer with my own trio, comprising piano, bass and percussion, I took the chance to travel to exotic haunts on a cruise liner, the Angelina Lauro, in the South Pacific, stopping off at Fiji, New Caledonia and  Auckland.  For first-class passengers, we provided music appropriate to elegant dress – refined melodic jazz:  evergreens such as The Shadow of Your Smile and the haunting Laura, as well as bossa novas, Brazilian rhythms, Guantanamera to the cha-cha.  Although the ship possessed stabilisers, they weren’t always effective, so I construed a spider web of ropes to keep the cymbals on their stands.

An unproven theory of mine is that we love rhythm, as it is inculcated covertly into the human race through our inbuilt drum machine that pulsates and grooves steadily as our heartbeat.  We play a few lead-in notes.  I watch people’s feet instinctively begin to twitch and move in time.  The drums give you rhythm, your ears give you melody.  Suddenly, the boat pitches.  Squeals, shrieks, splayed legs, clumsy tight embraces, helpless laughter.  Then the comforting hugs morph into gropes, squeezes, frottages a deux.  Transformed, I am a voyeur in dim lights.

Then again we played in some very plain and cold venues, such as pubs and halls in mechanic institutes.  In those days the pubs closed at six p.m., so it was not uncommon for a bloke to order five drinks for himself, line them up on the counter and swill them down before six o’clock. The bona fide law on Sundays stated that if you drove twenty miles from the GPO, you could have an alcoholic drink with your meal.  Many took advantage of the loose definition of ‘meal’ and dined on a mere hamburger or modest salad to get their grog.  Naturally, this concession led to a surge in drink driving and road accidents.  What a foolish law!

For about twenty years I played at seaside resorts for six weeks at a time - every night in the week during the Christmas school holidays.  My first ‘big’ engagement was playing on the foreshore at Lorne in the Beach Hall Palais.  This was a six-piece combo with trumpet, clarinet and trombone in the front line and piano, bass and drums in the rhythm section.  Very young and raw, I could not even keep the bass drum pedal operating for a full musical number, since my calf muscles hadn’t developed enough.  Fortunately, there was a very good bass player who set down a steady pulse, which covered up for my failings.

Music changed my life in that it gave me something to do that was very time-consuming and took me into many wonderful venues – from private homes to restaurants to inter-state and international travel (all performing in various- sized musical combos).  One stirring performance occurred at an Irish wedding held at Port Melbourne town hall.  Approximately three-quarters of the way through the festive evening an all-in brawl began – women included!  Fortunately, we were strutting our stuff on the elevated stage – and had been pre-paid!  We tried calming music to quell the animal instincts on show below us, such as Over the Rainbow and The Loveliest Night of the Year, but might as well have played Stand up and Fight! or Light up my Fire!  As the function slid into a fiasco, we slipped out the back door – suspecting the Irish were in their element and having a whale of a time!  And what a wail it was.

From the bandstand I could testify to the socio-economic differences and spending habits between the two major political parties.  On a Friday night I would play music in a combo for the Young Liberals in a private mansion with sophisticated ambience and lavish catering, including fine wines and top-shelf liquor.  On the Saturday night I would play for Young Labor’s dinner dance at Richmond town hall, whereby the patrons would stagger in with their eskies full of beer and Pimms No.1 for the females, with Lindeman’s Ben Ean Moselle served with the meal - a vastly lesser affair altogether.

Music also introduced me to some of the most creative and talented improvisational musicians in Australia and I was blessed to perform with many of them.  Subsequently, my appreciation of other forms of music than jazz has been heightened – particularly classical music.  I envy the timpanist in every large classical orchestra and sometimes wish that I had studied and practised ten hours a day for years to become part of a famous symphony orchestra.  This type of performing being highly regimented to the written score lacks the freedom and creativity of the spirit of jazz, so I am not certain that I would have enjoyed my playing so much.

One had to be dedicated to nightlife as a musician.  Some drawbacks included hectic travel to venues, much carrying of instruments (three trips to the car each time to cram all the gear in) and very late nights.  Usually, one had to keep an eagle eye out for flashing blue lights and the avaricious constabulary breath-testing the .05 liquor legal limit.  Several times I felt compelled to abandon the car and walk into freezing winter nights, rather than face that ominous flickering.

A quirky musical experience took place when I was playing in a small combo backing floorshows for the first striptease performers in Melbourne at the Britannia Hotel on the corner of Swanston and Lonsdale streets.  The strippers were German frauleins and the show was compered by Syd Heylen, a well-known T.V. actor and identity.  He would nightly use the pun ‘The drummer is cymbal-minded’, whereupon I had to give one of the cymbals an almighty wallop!  This piece of nonsense typified the standard.  The whole show was less than salubrious but the patrons, after much lubrication, loved it.

I played a very important role for the strippers, as I had to build a crescendo on the drum kit for each piece of clothing and underwear removed.  After many performances I became somewhat blasé and bored.  At times I wouldn’t be watching and failed to build the dramatic crescendo.  When this occurred, a pair of panties or bras would land on my head, much to the mirth of the clientele.  Naturally I was told to do this deliberately, thereby forming an integral part of the comedy.

My favourite combo was keyboard, bass and percussion, the same as the Oscar Peterson Trio.  I loved the music but still had to concentrate.  You’d take drinks break through the night to relax.  If it were a dry job, no alcohol, you’d stick a straw into a flask secreted away.  Playing till the early hours of the morning, tired and usually hung over, I’d close my eyes, all the while listening, listening for the inner rhythm, a pulse, a feeling for the music gelling and the team’s perfect co-ordination.  Sometimes, though, you sensed a jarring disaster:  wrong accents, wrong anticipation.  To put instincts into practice demands technique, a competency with the instrument.

Within my skull I often hear the gentle, rustling whisper of my brushes at play, redolent of Smetana’s river, the Vltava, burbling timelessly through the Czech countryside to Old Town, Prague and the Elbe beyond.  Other times I hear the more abrasive sound of my sticks, as of aboriginal music-making, when scents of the bush tease my nostrils.  Take the snare drum, where the strings of the thin, curly wire vibrate on the bottom, offering a crisp treble snap-snap.  Lift them off and you create a dull tom-tom.  And whenever I swim underwater, a rare occurrence now that I’m shuffling along in my eighties, I distinctly hear that echoic, subacqueous thumping of my heart, as the beat of my life is sounding its coda.

                                                                                                                                         Michael Small

January 19-May 5, 2015