I'm a Rhythmic Evangelical - keeping the collective heartbeat alive.
So, there I was, fall of 2000, stick in my hand, playing a wonderful drum with 12 people I'd never met until that night. This drum, a Mother Drum named Heart of Peace had traveled to find me from across the country and held me in her grip. When All was said and done, I turned to my wife and said, "I need to make one of these".
Make. Not buy - make.
This was the first drum I'd ever played.
So, off I went, trying to find materials and ideas only to discover lots of ways how not to make a drum. I goofed with stuff from other friends to get ideas, only to find them well beyond my ability, when I discovered a supplier of kits and parts in Oregon. The first drum, a small laced hand drum, was lopsided and funky looking, but it played. The second was a little better.
They both sounded great - warm, comforting, different from the congas and trap sets I'd enjoyed on the radio for over 35 years. There was a resonance far beyond the physical. It spoke to something deep inside, something primal and familiar, something I never even known I'd forgotten.
Then came Thundering Moon. With a group of friends on a summer solstice, she was born. A Mother Drum, our house drum, a sweet voice, a truly resonant personality. It was only weeks later that friend came to me and asked, "So, how much to make one for me and some friends?"
"How much?" Money? For something I REALLY enjoy? Hmmm.....
So I made another Mother drum. Then a hand drum, then another, then I found someone that actually wanted to Retail my drums, and, well...
May 2004, I quit my 20 year career and started making and selling drums full time. I had to. There was no choice. The little voices inside my head wouldn't let me do anything else...
So, here we are....
To suggest that people are more than a little surprised to find a 6' tall, Norse blonde making and hawking drums in a style most commonly associated with the American Southwest (among others, but these are my most popular) would be putting it mildly. However, the style is really pan-cultural and dates back at least 8'000 years. That makes even my Germanic ancestors look like tykes. After all, how else do you make a drum with no glue and no metals?
No, I don't know why I wound up with that original, ancient style, but the voices - the spirits, perhaps - kept pushing me, refining, telling me how to move on and update and change and rework and improve.
What you'll find here is the result of years of experimentation and refinement and a couple of past lives worth of remembered know-how.
My apprenticeship was done in the ethereal.
My drums are hide and wood - the elements in their purest form. I work with a spiritual medium in a world that seems to have forgotten what the word means sometimes. Yet, here they are - warm, inviting, speaking to parts of us we've forgotten we've forgotten. Yet, speak they do.
So, today the conversation is carried on from a small garage/workshop in a quiet residential neighborhood, an old pickup truck, and a traveling show that finds me away from home half the year - either selling or teaching drum making Playshops - trying to catch up on the spaces in between. I've never worked harder in my life.
But it's worth it. It's so worth it. Every time one of my drums finds it's new mate it's as though a bond has formed that has been waiting for centuries. Love at first sight, as it were. There's no other explanation. Bonds are formed, people are happy, the journey begins.
Not too bad a way to go through life, working with wood and hide, taking a crazy hobby and finding new friends and relationships all while (hopefully) earning a living.
Nope, not to bad a way to go through life at all.
