RIDERS ON THE STORM - John Densmore

WILD CHILD
I’ve always loved music. As an eight-year-old, I never understood the constant genuflecting up and down at St. Timothy’s Catholic Church, but the organ player got to me. The stained-glass windows were pretty, but the smell of that incense and all the mumbling was weird. And those twelve pictures of people hammering that guy’s wrists and feet to a wooden cross were disgusting.
My mother insisted that I go to church with her and my older sister, Ann, every Sunday. How did Dad get out of it, anyway? I wondered. At least Mom let me go up to the balcony where I sat in the back pew next to the organ pipes that were the loudest (the low notes). Mr. K never smiled, but when he played the low notes with his feet, the walls of the church shook. Especially my seat. I was usually alone up there and I could see Mom and Sis downstairs. No one sat up there except on Easter and Christmas when the church was full. Too loud. Mom said Mr. K got too carried away with the volume pedal. Mr. K also had a red nose on Sunday morning. Maybe he got too carried away with the bottle the night before.
When he played “Ave Maria” I seemed to leave my body. I imagined Mr. K playing so loud that all the windows in the church would break and everyone downstairs would turn around and look up at the two of us and we would be smiling. I just knew that would make Mr. K smile.
At home I enjoyed my parents’ Glenn Miller records, and their classical collection as well. Music hypnotized me and transported me out of my little suburban bedroom into fantasyland. At eight and a half years old I asked my parents for a piano and lessons. They obliged and rented an old upright. I took to the instrument immediately. My parents never forced me to practice, although sometimes they gave me subtle prodding. “Your lesson is the day after tomorrow!” Mom would say. I enjoyed playing a piece after I had learned it, especially for an audience.
Even as a kid I knew that what made the difference between a great musician and a mediocre one was what was played in between the notes: the feeling you gave the silences as well as the sounds. I preferred fooling around on a few chords I had learned rather than learning new pieces. It put me into a trance to take a section of an old warhorse tune like “Love Is a Many Splendored Thing” and make it my own with some crude syncopation.
By the time I got to Daniel Webster Junior High School in West L.A., I wanted to join the band and play any instrument. It didn’t matter. I thought of the clarinet, but my dentist said it would screw up my teeth (I already had braces). The band director, Mr. Armour, suggested drums. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to practice because of all the noise.
But Mr. Armour was persistent. He showed me a drum practice pad made out of rubber and wood. It didn’t seem very exciting, but I could get started at home as soon as possible and worry later about talking my parents into having the real thing.
Eventually they agreed, but in the meantime I had to take private lessons. My greedy little eyes nearly popped out of my head when I first entered Mr. Muir’s Drum Shop in West L.A. I had passed by the shop several times before, practically drooling on the windows as I lusted after a gleaming set of new drums. Mr. Armour said I would advance quickly if I took private lessons, so again my parents obliged. It was terribly frustrating having to be taught the nine essential drum rudiments on a silly piece of rubber while being surrounded by sparkling drums of every color. But Mr. Muir insisted that I wasn’t quite ready for the big, loud drum set—or his ears weren’t ready to hear my earnest pounding. I was eager to impress him because my lesson followed Hyle King’s, a weird fourteen-year-old kid with greasy sculptured hair. But he was a hot drummer and an even hotter piano player. A musician at fourteen.
I suspected my parents of paying Mr. Muir off to keep me away from those cacophonous drums until the last possible moment. It was for the best. Those damned nine essential rudiments gave me my touch. It made the difference later on between a tree-trunk-slamming, heavy-metal technique and a subtler jazz-rock style.
A year later, as an eighth grader, I became the bass drummer of the symphonic band at school and the tympanist with the orchestra. In orchestras, tympani (kettle drum) players spend a lot of time counting bars of music until it is time to come in and play. However, the tympani are usually called for at the end of symphonies, where dramatic drum rolls accentuate the crescendos. I enjoyed providing the dramatic climax of “The Great Gate of Kiev,” the final movement of Pictures at an Exhibition by Moussorgsky. (They were simplified classical compositions, of course.)
In high school, I graduated to the marching band. With our horrible plumed hats and gaudy, rigid uniforms, I felt like I had joined the army. In those days, playing in the marching band ranked next to having leprosy, but I loved the feeling of power one got when playing with forty other musicians.
I worked my way up from bass drummer to cymbal player and, finally, first snare drummer. To develop a solid sense of time, learning the basic drum beats first (called the “grandfather beat” in Native American cultures) is of primary importance. I was earning the right to play the complicated rhythmic nuances of the snare parts. When playing trap drums or the entire drum set, you put it all together and play all the percussion instruments at once: snare, bass, tom-toms, and cymbals. I was fortunate to learn the drum instruments separately, so that I had a thorough understanding when I put them all together.

It was 1960. Kennedy was debating Nixon. The Pirates were beating the Yankees in the World Series. Wyatt Earp was the most popular show on television, and The Apartment won the Oscar for best motion picture. Singers like Pat Boone and Fabian were at the top of the pop charts.
It was not yet cool to be a musician. If you were a football player, you were definitely the coolest. Basketball was second in “cool,” then baseball, track, and finally tennis. The jocks with their lettermen sweaters got the girls. If you were on the tennis team, you might be considered gay—no, back then they were called faggots.
I was last man on the tennis team and, to top it off, in the marching band. Looking back, music was my salvation through those lonely adolescent years, as it would prove to be for years to come.
Luckily, in my second year of high school I was asked to join a pop band. My mother painted our logo on the front of my bass drum—“Terry and the Twilighters.” All the other guys in the band were from Catholic families like me, but they went to parochial schools. After I threw up in the first grade of our local Catholic school, my parents thought public school might offer less pressure. So I ended up attending University High School, or Uni, as we called it, but I couldn’t get out of catechism classes on Saturdays. The Twilighters started playing the Catholic school circuit around L.A.—Marymount, Loyola, Notre Dame—and I found I could impress the girls with my drumming, or maybe I was just the new kid in town. Whatever it was, I noticed that I was being watched, which made me show off a little. I could feel everybody’s eyes on me, and I milked the attention with melodramatic self-importance. I thought I was a pretty good drummer, and with an audience I was inspired to concentrate even more.
Now I had my own clique. At one of the Catholic parties, I got real friendly with a girl named Heidi. Her skin was olive and she had a great smile. She had been dating Terry, the leader of the band, so when she danced with me and put her arms around me so tight, I couldn’t believe it. That night I dreamed of taking off her Hawaiian muumuu and running my hands and lips over her soft, round body. In the morning my sheets were damp.
We started dating and I tried to get her to “go all the way,” but she had been warned for many years by the nuns at her school about the eternal damnation of sexual desire. In addition, she had promised her mother to remain a virgin until marriage, so the best I could get was some serious petting. I remember attending Marymount dances with Heidi, and the nuns, the little penguins in my dreams, not only frowned at her low-cut dresses, but they came around to make sure there was daylight between our bodies on the slow dances. Terry didn’t say anything about Heidi and me, but I felt some guilt over stealing my best friend’s girlfriend. Rehearsals were impossible afterward, and the band folded.
After a couple of years of playing casuals (weddings, school dances, bar mitzvahs) as a drummer-for-hire, I graduated from high school.
My grades had been average in all my classes other than music and sports, and no major universities were seeking a snare drum player for their marching bands.
So by the fall of 1963, it was off to Santa Monica City College, where I majored in apathy and changing majors. First it was music, but I thought I could never make a living at it. Therefore, I switched to business. After getting a D in accounting—the second time around—I thought someone was trying to tell me something. Maybe college wasn’t for me.
But music was in my blood. I didn’t have time for studies because I was hanging out at the music building jamming with the cats. The head of the department used to storm across the hallway.
“Could you guys please turn it down?” he would plead. “I’m trying to rehearse the junior orchestra.”
Despite all the hassling, we were doing something right. We were the foundation of a mutha of a marching band. By the middie of my second semester, our SMCC band had been accepted in the citywide competition at the Rose Bowl.

“Bbbbbbbrrrrrrrr! Bbrr!” the whistle sounded. I kept my head locked straight ahead as we marched through the streets of Pasadena on our way to the stadium. Peripherally, I could just pick up the groove coming from the ultra-cool black band from L.A. City College. I didn’t think it was possible for a marching band to swing, but these dudes did it.
We had no sooner sat down inside the mammoth stadium than the results were announced. The judges, who had been placed surreptitiously along the route, called the winners up to the stage.
I don’t remember the third-place winner, but I’ll never forget the runner-up.
“Placing second in the 1964 All-California Junior College Marching Band Competition—Los Angeles City College!”
A roar went up from the stands.
“And the number-one band in the state … and the winner of a national TV appearance … Santa Monica City College!”
We won! Best band in the city!
A month later we were in the L.A. Coliseum for the Pro Bowl. My most vivid memory is of standing in the tunnel about to go out to the field when Big Daddy Lipscomb, old number 33, passed by as the teams came in for half time. He was the most colossal guy I had ever seen. Or ever hoped to see.

In the summer of 1964 something amazing started happening to the music scene in L.A. New clubs were opening up and down the Sunset Strip: Fred C. Dobbs, the Trip, Bedo Ledo’s, and the Brave New World. The bands that played there weren’t into top 40 music. They played their own stuff, at deafening volume. Every night I could, I would go to Hollywood with a high school friend, Grant, and hang out at the clubs until two or three in the morning. There was no age limit because they didn’t serve alcohol. My parents were sure I was going to end up in the gutter.
My parents. Mom was a native Californian from a good Catholic family with five children: the Walsh clan. Margaret Mary went to Beverly Hills High during the Depression and became a librarian. When she was sixteen, Ray Blaisdale Densmore moved in next door. He had driven his family across the country from York, Maine, to the suburbs of Los Angeles when he was only twelve. At twenty-three, Ray attended USC in pursuit of a degree in architecture and moonlighted as an actor with the Santa Monica Players. Mom was also making money as a commercial artist. They dated for several years before he proposed. She agreed to marriage if he agreed to having their offspring raised Catholics. He wasn’t about to convert, a hesitation possibly rooted in the fact that his father had told his four sons that no matter what they did, they shouldn’t marry a Catholic!
As it turned out, they all did.
I was raised with my older sister, Ann, and my younger brother, Jim, in a middle-class home in West L.A. It was the Ozzie & Harriet show and I was Ricky. I identified with his droll sense of humor in the face of such well-meaning but ultimately square parents. I grew up restless and anxious to get away from home, but when the notification arrived from the State of California Transportation Department that a freeway was going to be built right through our property, I remember being devastated. My roots were being paved over. Now there is a freeway on-ramp where “home” was. It reads “San Diego Freeway North.”
Maybe that instability is why my parents wanted me to grow up so conservatively. By the time I was in high school, the pressure was on for me to cut my growing, shoulder-length hair and concentrate on my studies like a normal kid.
The breakaway had begun. I was feeling a pull from suburban L.A. into the clubs of Hollywood.
I was in junior college now, but I sensed there was a whole scene out there that I knew nothing about. I began by scouring the unknown streets of Venice and Westwood, and eventually made my way into Hollywood. It didn’t take long to be seduced by the bright lights and dark corners of Sunset Boulevard.
I was discovering a new world of music and people. Grant and I were nineteen-year-old jazz buffs and very condescending toward rock ‘n’ roll, but we sensed that something special was beginning in the rock scene. The popular bands emerging in L.A. at this time were the Byrds, Love, and the Rising Sons, with Ry Cooder. I dreamed that if someday I could just be in a band like Love, I’d be happy. They had so many chicks hanging around! The first couple of times I saw Love I was somewhat shocked. They were bizarre, even for 1964. Arthur Lee, the black lead singer, wore rose-tinted granny glasses, and they had a guitar player whose pants were so tight it looked like he had a sock stuffed inside his crotch. They were a racially mixed group and seemed to be friends. After experiencing Love, I knew I had a ways to go before being hip. They wore bright colors, leather vests, and suede jackets with fringe everywhere. I wondered if they went out on the street like that.
The audiences were composed of nonconformists, to say the least. It was a fashion show for freaks: long hair and beads, leather capes and pinstriped pants, suede moccasins, paisley shirts, and Nehru jackets. Pretty tame by today’s punk standards, but outrageous for a West L.A. suburban kid of the mid-sixties. Those cats were hip. Hippies. Flamboyant and free-spirited characters. Their uninhibitedness was infectious. I did belong somewhere! It sure wasn’t with the Tab Hunter crowd at college.
After the clubs closed at 2 A.M., everyone went to Canter’s on Fairfax, probably the best deli on the West Coast. How Canter’s survived those years is a tribute to tolerance. What a scene. Food was hurled across the room as often as it was eaten. It was fun to let loose and act outrageous and loud, usually just up to the point before being hassled by the waitress and thrown out. When celebrities like record producer Phil Spector or the Byrds would come in, the place would erupt in applause. Twenty years later Canter’s became a night hangout once again, for the punk crowd. Musical styles can change, but lox and bagels endure.
In order to support my Hollywood habit, I needed a car, and I was desperate to stay away from home as much as possible. So I went to work in a Chinese laundry folding shirts in a room that never dipped below ninety-eight degrees. And that was in winter. It was like taking a sauna every day. I drank gallons of Orange Crush and ate Twinkies by the box while singing the Sweatshop Blues, and somehow saved enough money to buy a ‘57 Ford convertible. Hot damn! It was painted silver. Weeeeuuhh! When I got it home I stepped into the backseat and my foot went clear through the floorboard to the pavement beneath.
Undaunted, Grant and I were sure that because of the tuck-n-roll dashboard and the glass pack mufflers, we could pick up all sorts of girls. So we cruised Westwood, the movie theater and slick shopping district of L.A. near the UCLA campus. And we cruised. And cruised. Listening to Henry Lewy on KNOB, “the jazz knob.” And coming down with the “Summertime Blues” because the chicks would hear the weird be-bop and wouldn’t get in the car. Hey, does anybody actually pick up girls in cars, anyway? Even the handsome types? The beach bums? The G.Q. crowd? I don’t believe it! It was the first of many precious myths to be exploded.
In addition to the Hollywood scene, Grant and I frequented several jazz clubs. The best were the Lighthouse, Shelley’s Manne Hole, the Bit, the Renaissance, and Melody Lane down on Adams Boulevard where no honkies ventured. The convertible wasn’t scoring, so we had plenty of time to hear new music.
Like many other white jazz buffs, my first exposure was to Dave Brubeck records. In the old days the record stores still had listening booths, so Grant and I expanded our musical knowledge without having to buy anything. We turned on to Les McCann, the black piano player whose style was a funky-gospel type of soulful jazz. In those glass booths you could monopolize the turntables and headphones for about twenty minutes before the sales-conscious management would prod you into a purchase.
Some kids went to the movies for escape. We found it with jazz. Coltrane and Miles seemed to us to be the culmination of twenty years of jazz. This is where we got religion. It was a kind of raw spiritual anarchy. Grant and I would talk in passionate riffs about how these jazz geniuses were “out there,” playing in the cracks between the chords, searching for the unknowns beyond chord structure. Grant’s father described Coltrane’s music as sounding like someone stepping on a cat’s tail. People who thought it was noise hadn’t followed jazz through its evolution from be-bop to cool to free form. How could they possibly understand? We were elitists without knowing what the word meant. It was our secret society.
Any time I would drop the needle on Live at the Village Vanguard to hear “Chasin’ the Trane,” the bellowing, driving energy would make me imagine I was actually inside drummer Elvin Jones’s body. The tempo pulsed in my veins.
I’ve spent the last twenty-five years trying to recapture that—dreamtime?—through music, acid, sex, books, travel, anything to Stop the World, as Don Juan tells Carlos Castaneda.
But mainly music.
Grant and I went to see Les McCann play live at the Renaissance Club, where Lenny Bruce had performed. It was our first time in a jazz club. We were ushered to a table in the back behind a pole. Sheepishly we ordered our soft drinks, knowing we would be carded if we tried for beer. We were the only white people in the joint. The Renaissance was intimidatingly cool. It had an attitude. We hadn’t cultivated one yet.
This comedian came on. His shtick was to snap his fingers once, wait about ten seconds, then do it again. This went on for about five minutes, culminating with beatnik-cool “All right”s and “Hey, baby”s. I didn’t understand what he was trying to do, but his personality was infectious. He seemed crazy and I loved that. I identified with nonconformists. Years later the finger-snapper —Hugh Romney, a.k.a. Wavy Gravy of the Hog Farm Commune—would be the host at Woodstock.
We ventured down to Redondo Beach to hear Cannonball Adderley at Howard Rumsey’s Lighthouse. Waving his right arm in a circular motion, Cannonball would start snapping his fingers, counting off an extremely fast tempo. While keeping up the count-off (he snapped on the off beats, two and four in a 4/4 tempo, a difficult thing to do—you have to feel the one and three beats in your head or take slight breaths on one and three to keep the count-off steady), Cannonball would do some jive-talk with the audience and the band.
“Snap-snap-snap—Are you ready, Joe (Zawinul)—snap-snap?”
Nods his head affirmatively.
“Snap-snap—Are you ready brother Nat—snap—snap?”
“Yeah … uh-huh.”
“Snap-snap—ladies and gentlemen—snap—BROTHER NAT IS READY!—snap-snap—ONE-snap-TWO-snap-ONE-TWO-THREE-snap …”
Then they would roar into “Jive-Samba” or “Dis Here,” and my mouth would hang open in disbelief at the fast, tight groove.
Shelley’s Manne Hole was the jazz club. It was very expensive, but we scrounged up the money somehow. Though we were obsessed with meeting girls, jazz was our substitute. Grant, being a keyboard player, dragged me to see Bill Evans five or six times. At first I didn’t get it. He was so subtle. Then I realized what incredible touch he had. It was not cocktail music, as some critics suggested. I sat right next to the stage when Art Blakey, king of the press drum roll, grunted his way through smoldering Afro-jazz rhythms. He was in his late forties then, but his playing still had energy; more energy than my own drumming, and I was only nineteen.
Kerouac and Cassidy saw Charlie Parker in his prime. We saw John Coltrane. Several times. He was unbelievable. Everyone in the club would make a path as he walked by, out of respect. When he picked up the tenor or soprano sax and started the old Johnny Mercer song “Out of This World,” Trane indeed left this world. With his eyes closed for his solo, he