Russell Buddy Helm

Buddy, can you give me titles and brief descriptions of the specific workshops you plan to conduct at Heartland?  We’re getting ready to go to press with the brochure.

Combining good grooves with good intentions.
Finding the right mix of basic and advanced rhythmic patterns with the right affirmations that swing and manifest! This is a fun, easy, empowering drumming process that creates the Safe Space for our intentions to manifest. Creating our protective rhythmic cocoon. Visualizing  rhythmic white light. Verbalize our intentions with rhythm.

Healing using sensual  Orgone grooves.

A rhythmic application to Wilheim Reich’s historic “discovery” of Orgone life energy in the fifties. Drumming as Orgone Accumulator. Curing illness using Orgone. Rhythmic grooves to stimulate Kundalini sex force.

Maintaining Sacred Space quantum drumming .

This is about prolonged grooves that create energy vortex; maintaining relaxation and meditation while drumming. Creating a Coherent Energy Field using the downbeat. Rhythmic intention with stamina.

Afro and Cuban hand drumming together.

How we combine rhythmic traditions to get sacred grooves for our cultural mix. The Clave and Samba combined with Second Line and Funk. The Blues as a healing tradition. Soloing within the arrangement. Speed balanced with feel.

When I first started to teach the HelmTone healing drum protocols around the country, I chose Atlanta as one of the first proving grounds. If they got it in Atlanta then it had to have some credibility. I have always loved Atlanta, dating back to the free concerts in the Park, where the Great Speckled Bird was the greatest underground newspaper in the country, and the Allmans were playing for everybody. It had been a few years and a lot of karma under the bridge since I returned to Atlanta, looking for a connection to the truth and soul that I had experienced there back in the sixties. The healing drum therapies were successful in Santa Monica, California but that was not like the rest of the world. I had to test it out on ‘real people’. Bill Liggins was one of the first therapy workers I met. He was sincere, outspoken, a survivor of the Acid Viet Nam era and still had a bawdy sense of humor. The first Ghana Djembe I handed him, he dropped it. I knew he would. He was dealing with stuff. That’s why I was here; show people how to use the downbeat to get realigned in our souls and bodies. I looked at the drum he had just damaged; one of the vertical black strands had been neatly snipped by the edge of the rental car door when I handed him the drum. I wasn’t upset, visually, but these are my babies. They come all the way with me from California, but I could see he wanted to get inside that drum. So I showed him how to do it. We even had a session with one of his clients and I showed him how to use the drum as a therapy tool. He got it. That drum survived several more long trips around the country and is now living happily in Lawrence, Kansas with a women who eventually had the rope replaced and is leading drumming therapy groups there. Bill was one of the first drum therapists.

Excerpt: “History of the Groove, book three” Russell Buddy Helm©2014 all rights reserved

1945. Nordhausen was hidden deep in the German forest, unseen by Allied bombers searching for this most secret, most advanced Nazi rocket facility. The convoy of American trucks arrived out of the woods stopping at the entrance to the underground factory. The German rocket scientist stood just inside the shadow of the gaping entrance, waiting for the American OSS officer getting out of the lead truck.

“They are sending a lieutenant to rescue me and the V2 rockets!?” He said impolitely in a crisp high German. “Where is Colonel Roberts?”

“His jeep was hit. Your Stuka’s are still busy.” The OSS officer answered in equally concise German.

“Your name?”

“Helm.”

“You are German. Yah?”

“Pennsylvania Dutch.”

“Aaachh! That is what good German’s call themselves in America? You have limited time to load. Russians are close, but our disk ships will delay them ..for a while.” He gestured to the camouflaged landing strip. Lt. Helm wasn’t sure of what he was looking at; the shape of a soup bowl, upside down, about thirty meters diameter,  ten meters in height, standing on tripod legs. The iron cross insignia was displayed on the side, like all German aircraft, but it was being painted over to match the rest of the grey seamless hull.

“What is the propulsion system?” Lt. Helm was intrigued. He had studied the German technical manuals on the V1 and the V2 rockets. He had redesigned the V1 for the US Navy back in Cape May. This new unexpected prize of war looked formidable.

“Gravity resistance…and other world technologies.” The German rocket scientist added condescendingly. The OSS lieutenant tried to ascertain his meaning, gave up and responded in American slang. “Well our boys in the white lab coats will have a ball with that one.”

“That is not part of your war plunder, Lieutenant.” He spoke English in a very passable American Midwesern accent while he gestured to the stand of ninety monolithic V2 rockets in the darkness of the hanger,   “Your war booty.. are the Vril 2.”

“What does that mean? Vril?”  Lt. Helm queried in high German.

“It is Aryan metaphysics. It means Life Force.” The Nazi said with a tinge of fanatically inspired theatrics. He was still a believer in the Third Reich.

Something moved at the edge of Lt. Helm’s peripheral vision; a person? A thing, grey with unhuman movements, moving around the disk ship. It looked at him with large, dark ovoid eyes filled with unreadable intention. The disk ship rose straight up, soundlessly, except for a deep unsettling hum. It zipped off to the east faster than anything the Lieutenant had ever seen.

The grey interloper was gone, but its presence lingered like a bad daydream.

excerpt “History of the Groove, book three” Russell Buddy Helm ©2014 all rights reserved

I dreaded The Visions; always clear, always detailed. When I was young, I didn’t see the significance. Standing in the deserted hallway of Weston Elementary in Elkhart, Indiana, I had a vision for the rest of the world. We are light born into bodies. I remembered that from before.

“Why are you in the hall?” The cruising principal echoed down at the thin third grader.

“Singing in class.” I said officially. I wanted to defend myself, but he was put off. Sometimes we just have to sing. We were making clocks out of a paper plate and some brass fasteners with  hands pointing to the numbers. I sang Bill Hally’s hit, Rock Around the clock. It seemed appropriate. Sometimes we just gotta sing.

excerpt “History of the Groove, book three” Russell Buddy Helm ©2014 all rights reserved

“He could talk the skirt off a WAVE.” My mother described my father after I questioned her while still in high school and dealing with girls. My band, Those Five, was a hit. We had a following. Mom made sure I had cool Carnaby street type stage clothes. She made a paisley vest that survived until 2014. I didn’t wear it that much. She did not have a father, I learned slowly. He had left them when she was still a girl. She raised her brothers and sisters and took care of her mother on the farm in central Indiana. When she married my father who she had met on a trip to the East coast, she was hoping to be saved from the life she would have had. We make bargains.

Memories are never the same. Nothing is ever the same; it changes. The groove is a demonstration of this elemental rule. There is a constancy of pulse with variations on top, interspersed.