This was on board the Magic, a 52 foot Morgan Yacht off St. Pete Beach, Florida May 23, 2013. We were on a full moon dolphin drumming cruise.
Next cruise is June 23 on Sunday. Go to the sign up page and get a space reserved now!
http://www.buddyhelm.com/full-moon-dolphin-watch-drumming-sailboat-cruise
This one is for Ray Manzarek
excerpt “History of the Groove, Drummer’s Story” Russell Buddy Helm ©2013 All Rights Reserved
1985. We’re standing in his living room up in Benedict Canyon, talking about his current production, the band ‘X’ and I decide to blow Ray’s mind. I said, “I used to be at the Beaux Arts Coffee House in Pinellas Park, Florida. Ray jerked his head back in surprise “Is that place for real? Jim used to talk about it all the time.”
It was one of the most infamous coffee houses on the East Coast. Every great folksinger played there. Gamble Rogers would often grace the funky old establishment with his brand of Southern gentlemanly music in the Sixties. Folkies leaving New York on their way down to the Gaslight in Coconut Grove might stop in for a gig. The coffee was bad, the pay even worse, but the experience was worth the price of admission. Tom Reese had been a dancer with Ballanchine, in New York and Beaux Arts coffee house was his hometown art piece. His mother ran the door and she would not let anyone in for free unless you were performing. Full size statues of the three turbaned wisemen and a camel stood guard over her little metal box holding a roll of orange tickets and change for the $1.75 admission price. It was the birthplace of the Bethlehem Asylum. This place was a very important oasis of culture. I saw art house movies, like ‘The Bed’, that UCLA film students had only heard about.. There was that one local bad boy who would read his poetry, get the local girls in trouble, get thrown off of more than one college campus and ruin the careers of college roommates before he went to L.A. and formed a band with Ray Manzarek called The Doors. Beaux Arts was an off white three story Tennessee Williams antibellum mansion drenched in Spanish moss. Dim Tiki lamps lurked in the backyard jungle that was the spawning ground for great music and no doubt several love children. The screened in back porch was where the poetry and folk music occurred amidst sofas, easy chairs, tailless Manx cats, bad portraits and chessboards. The Bethlehem Asylum first performed here; in this humid, dusky, tropical wet dream. It was our home. Our bass player Jim had a bachelor pad upstairs with fuzzy red flocked fleur de lis wallpaper he had put up himself. The living room had a high ceiling with rows of chairs, sofas, more bad paintings and a large movie screen for showing incredible 16mm movies from Tommy’s friends in New York. It was no wonder that Jim Morison wanted to make movies. This was where we all saw the cutting edge in avant garde cinema. Fresh movies arrived every week as well as great folk music; both local and national performers.
I was in Ray’s Benedict Canyon living room in LA to shoot the only television commercial ever made for the Doors. Ray was a patron of “New Wave Theater” because he produced the LA punk band ‘X’ and they performed on the show hosted by Peter Ivers. I shot the handheld live band footage, my experience as a drummer gave my footage extra style. The director asked me to see Ray about making a Doors commercial to run in between the punk /art damage bands like Suburban Lawns, the Circle Jerks, Suicidal Tendencies, and of course, “X”. Ray laid out the Doors album covers on his living room floor, video taping them with a soundtrack from Strange Days feeding into the Sony portapak recorder. It was our first project together. We soon progressed to screenwriting. Ray had some good ideas using punk rock music in Chinatown where the local bands could perform at the Hong Kong Cafe and Madame Wong’s. He used a story from author Maxine Hong Kingston, with a touch of Black Orpheus; to be shot verite style in the gritty downtown L.A. Art Ghetto. Ray would drive from Hollywood to my studio loft in the worst part of Downtown L.A. and park his vintage Mercedes gull wing sports car with original cream colored paint job amidst the bums and homeless people sleeping in the gutters. His car never got broken into. He had a charm about him that was palpable. No wonder Jim Morrison liked him. They were magic together, I am sure. Some of that magic came from the Beaux Arts Coffee House in Pinellas Park, Florida as well.
excerpt “History of the Groove, Drummer’s Story” Russell Buddy Helm ©2013 All Rights Reserved
www.buddyhelm.com
Mermaid painting I did in about 1989. Oil on Canvas with relief castings on frame.
May 17, 2013
There has been a lot of progress with the HelmTone healing drum Protocols. I have been busy but I received some new subscribers and I also felt that it was time to replenish the energy in this private section of the blog.
The drum is like a battery. You need to play it to recharge the energy in the battery and in yourself. This refers back to Wilhelm Reich’s work with Orgone Therapy dating back to the 1950′s. He discovered the life force in a scientific and quantifiable way. He described it in his lab notes as a blue white light that surrounded and infused all living cells. The orgone energy is his term for the life force. The drum generates life force. Dr. Reich created a box called the Orgone accumulator where the patient would sit inside and gather life force into their system. The box was lined with animate and inanimate material that would attract amounts of orgone and store it inside the box. This is much like what the djembe drum does….
If you want to read the rest of this essay, go to the subscriber page and sign in. http://www.buddyhelm.com/helmtone-drum-protocols-member-page
If you need to become a subscriber first go here:http://www.buddyhelm.com/helmtone-healing-drum-protocols-sign-up
Then I will email you a password. Then you can go into the private database and get in depth information.
For the private youtube videos I will need to get your youtubre acount name so that you can view the exclusive training videos. so email me your youtube acount name.
We met a very cool guy yesterday from South Africa, Paul Tracey. Originally his family was from Great Britain. His father, Hugh Tracey is famous for being one of the first Europeans promoting African Music and created what is now called the Kalimba based on the African thumb piano called Mbira. This bass xylofon sounds incredible. The wood is from a gnarly tree commonly called “Sneeze wood” because if you sand it you will sneeze. To cure the wood they wrap the pieces in pineapple leaves and bury them in a fire pit. The wood comes out colored and very hard. The sound is deep and sweet. Here are links to a BBC documentary on Hugh Tracey and his very compassionate explanation of what it is like living in rural South Africa sixty years ago. Great footage!
part 1 – 24 minutes
https://vimeo.com/41472208
UPCOMING HEALING DRUMMING EVENTS IN THE FLORIDA GULF COAST
Thursday, May 23, Rock n Roll blues jam at 7 North in St. Petersburg, 1250 MLK Blvd. 5 PM pot luck, food and drinks 727-422-7336. Friday, May 24, Dolphin Full Moon Drumming Cruise on St. Pete Beach at Dolphin landings 727-688-9096 6pm. Be there or be square. Saturday, May 25 Healing Drumming Meditation in Citrus Springs(Crystal River) 828-230-3939 at 4pm. Sunday Nature Coast Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, 7633 North Florida Ave (rte 41) Citrus Springs at 10:30 AM Sunday morning. Then Monday evening in Gulfport at the Longhouse at 8 pm. Be there and get some spiritual groove!
Our tiny little shop in Santa Monica is about the size of three parking spaces and we squeezed thirteen drummers in last night and even had a little belly dancing too!
Watch live video from Buddy Helm Drumming on Justin.tv
We have been sailing a 42′ Morgan ketch rigged yacht operated by Dolphin Landings on St. Pete Beach on the gulf coast of Florida. The dolphins come in to us before sunset about 6pm then stay with us as we cruise out into the gulf from Boca Ciega Bay. We watch the sunset on open water, sometimes seeing a Green Sunset which is auspicious. Then we continue to drum back into the dock arriving about 9 pm. It is a magical event. The drumming beats have to be right for the dolphins to stay with us. It usually takes the group a while to settle down and get into the laid back slow grooves that the dolphins like. The deep downbeat tone goes out into the water through the hull. Sometimes the dolphins put their nose right up against the side of the hull where I am playing. Once during a wedding ceremony several dolphins swam on the side where the bride was sitting in her white dress. The dolphins sang to her for most of the way back in-an hour. I had never heard dolphins sing in harmony before. There was a lot of love on the boat and the dolphins picked up on it. The ultimately slow trance groove that the dolphins responded to was a six beat pulse with the low middle-of-the-drumhead downbeat tone happening every sixth beat on the “one”. This orients the group and the dolphins to anticipate the next downbeat pulse at a relaxed pace. They have jumped up in the light of the full moon then repeated the jump, picture perfect. Sometimes they have bundled up in a ball at the aft and swirled around each other in a splashing ball of four or five smaller dolphins. If they don’t like the groove because it is too aggressive and loud, they will pull back and cruise at a distance of about forty yards. When we get slow enough to maintain a meditative 6/8 swinging groove at about forty beats a minute they come in close and cruise with us. They will click and chirp too. This is always a chancy situation. Sometimes they will not show themselves if the water is too rough or the captain is being dork. This happened on the Atlantic coast at Lake Worth where the captain was a young pushy know-it-all. The boat was full of people, about two dozen, and we drummed the right way but the dolphins would not show themselves. We could feel them out there but for some reason they would not surface. In the middle of the voyage the young captain started boasting about HIS big drum. He brought out a cannon. An actual cannon that used a shotgun shell. The heavy cannon was set up on the deck pointed out at the water. It was about three feet long and on wheels. It was like a real cannon on a pirate ship! The captain insisted that I shoot off his cannon. It was really loud and everyone covered their ears. The blast reverberated down into the water. No wonder the dolphins would not show themselves.
Next cruise is on May 24, Friday at 6pm at Dolphin Landing on St. Pete Beach.
The next drumming full moon dolphin cruise will be with Capt. Dan on his 42′ Morgan called “Magic” out of St. Pete Beach. Capt Dan. is the perfect person to run the ship. He is considerate, practices yoga, eats healthy and has a great sense of humor. His compassion and wisdom of the sea is endless. It is always a pleasure to sail with Captain Dan and his crew at Dolphin Landings.
Sign up on line to assure a place on board the “Magic” either on my website or on Dolphin Landing website.
See you there!
