Russell Buddy Helm

‘Time Is A Construct.’ is an old rubric, but what has that got to do with drumming? What we have as our own, is not the past. It is our perspective on the past. Energetics here. We keep that stuff alive by pondering it, reworking the ending, contemplating commensurate results of said event, and generally trying to make sense out of the moments in our lives. This is sometimes referred to as therapy, or meditation, or poetry, or the blues. The point of view is what is cogent to the drummer. With the right grooves we can slip and slide into and out of ‘time’ and rhythmically affect reality, that includes the past, as well as present time and future time.

The drummer reveals the fabric of time, and we witness that it is not substantial. It is our group agreement. Much like the downbeat in drumming. It is an immediate consensual instant when people agree to sharing the downbeat. Community happens. Time stands still. Or time can go where you want it to go. We have a time machine.

Visiting the past while you keep a steady very relaxed groove is an interesting journey. The action of hitting the groove yourself is protective and cleansing.

We can take care packages back to our former selves; things to help them survive. A prayer if nothing else. But in the long run we sense a change in the present time when we feel this has been a successful sojourn into what we call ‘our past’.

excerpt: “History of the Groove” Russell Buddy Helm ©2015 buddyhelm.com

78. On the Road again

1990

The decision to go out back on the road was not taken lightly. Decades had passed since I knew the touring life. But for some unexplainable reasons, I had no fear about doing this. I felt as if something were pulling me along by my nose, in the right direction, to manifest something that was needed in our culture; Sacred Drumming.

In a sense it was the “Blues Man” tradition. When I had traveled with Chuck Berry back in the early Seventies, the individual promoters would supply musicians along the way. I would have to do the same thing now- in nineteen ninety one.

Every town, every New Age store, every festival, yoga center, healing center, beach drumming group, and individual one-on-one drumming therapy sessions, all would be my band. But as with Chuck Berry, there would be no time for rehearsal. Chuck assumed, rightly so, that any musician who walked on the stage with him should know Chuck Berry’s catalog of songs, and there were a lot of them. Lots of hits; Maybeline, Memphis, Brown Eyed Handsome Man, Roll over Beethoven, Ce la Vie Say the Old Folks, many more, plus his last hit- My Dingaling, which we had to sing.

I did not have a catalog of hits songs, but I had the grooves that made up those songs. And those grooves were universal. If you grew up listening to rock n roll, Rhythm and Blues, Soul music, you knew these grooves. We didn’t need a guitar or melody for lyrics, although I often heard the lyrics of many a great song running through my head while I grooved and jammed with people all over the world; Japan, Australia, Kansas, Brewster in Cape Cod, Treasure Island in Florida, Coconut Grove, Austin, Asheville. Twenty five years of touring with a djembe, a tambourine on my foot, and my custom djembe stand. No one was doing it…yet. There were some drumming groups who were purists and played only African drum songs, and they were often adamant about not allowing any other kind of djembe drumming. This had been inherited from their African master  drum teachers who played from a place of great cultural identity. But I kept teaching the downbeat method using Rhythm and Blues grooves, and it always worked. People got into a groove and they felt much, much better.

I was watching the expenses as best I could.A record company or management agency was not paying the bills. There was no tour support except for Cathy holding down the store, and giving me a place to come back to after these culture wars. Sometimes I was out for seven or eight weeks. I stayed in people’s homes. No motels. I do not like hotels and motels; too many bad associations, plus there was no money for that luxury. I preferred the hospitality of strangers, who soon became close friends. I learned about people’s lives in places like Bisbee, Arizona, Adrian, Michigan(drumming with 1,000 nuns), Austin, with a lawyer who got his wife to dance by playing the drum. Rosie, the sound healer in Sarasota, Martial Arts masters who were husband and wife in Nagoya, Japan, and a cattle rancher in Bendigo, Australia. All these people wanted to drum. I saw the huge impact this was having. I couldn’t stop doing this.

Occasionally I would talk to Charlie, who was still out with Hall and Oates for thirty years, and we would cross paths often. He would come to a fire dance and play his flute, then go back out on a first class worldwide tour and play with Daryl and John, Mick Jagger, all the top groups. He was a good friend and encouraged me although the healing aspects of the drumming were not something he was particularly interested in. He liked to play over my grooves. He always liked to do that.

excerpt: “History of the Groove” Russell Buddy Helm, 2015 copyright buddyhelm.com

Going back to the djembe after achieving a certain level of mastery on a drumset, I came to understand the inherent power of folk music in our survival. Going from a high tech drum set to a hand carved wooden drum with a goatskin was going back to the roots of the rhythm. It was the folk art of drumming. There lay hidden secrets about myself and the world in all it’s different dimensions. The essence of rhythm is otherwordly, out of our realm, wordless. There are no words in our culture for what rhythm can do. Rather it was studiously avoided for fear that some demonic deal would ensue. The healing is there, past that fear.

This is an evolution of a television show.

When I left the film/TV business 28 years ago. I was post production supervisor for Dallas, Falconcrest, Knotts Landing, Hunter, etc.The top shows of that era. The only consolation for selling soap opera I had back then was that when we broadcast Dallas worldwide, people in Beirut and Belfast and Joburg would stop shooting each other to find out who killed JR. I felt the calling to come back to the drum, but there was no meditation drumming in our culture back then. It had to be created out of thin air. This current production is DIY with no budget. I love working at the grassroots level with nothing but ingenuity and good intentions. A lot of people have participated along the way, and what used to take me a city block full of satellite dishes and an army of personnel can now be done on a laptop with a few button pushes. But content is what always matters. This is a networking of consciousness and good intentions with people all over the world.

Damsels in Distress

When I was a young rock drummer there were plenty of romantic opportunities with willing young women. The sense of celebration was contagious and everyone was feeling the liberation of psychology from what had been the Eisenhower mentality, very conservative, but humanistic with the focus on fulfilling the American Dream for the family. This evolved into the Summer Of Love for the following generation; all things possible. But with the largesse of prosperity also came emotional strain never experienced before in such a land of plenty. Anxiety, bad judgement, disillusion in the status quo, seeking of a new family without the prejudices of our biological, earthbound parents. So, instead of the wanton desecration of virgin temples I often listened to their stories. In an attempt to understand my own stories. After all these years, I am still doing the same thing. I am getting to be a good listener while I am going deaf. I drum with a lot of women. Different kinds of women drum. Admittedly some of the younger of the generations I  drum with are a total mystery. But thats what happens when men get blind sided on purpose. The shadow is projected from the warrior male and the women, a certain type of women, will take on the shadow, the Great Sorrow, and deal with it, to turn it to the good. The Sacred Whore, as perceived by some. Instead, I am the listening drummer and their stories are amazing. I envy some of them, feel great sorrow for others, while they hit the drum in a relaxed manner, a very slow forgiving groove. This liberates psychology and they come to terms with what they have to negotiate to move on. Some men tend to just hit it until it breaks with little concern for cosmic repercussions. Although there are a few men willing to ride the groove to higher consciousness with good intentions. But clearing the path for the story teller is what I have been doing, keeping out extraneous distractions while they spin their yarns.

Excerpt: “History of the Groove” Russell Buddy Helm ©2015 buddyhelm.com