As the class was about to begin, the other musicians in my ensemble were putting away their cases and taking their places at their instruments. There were definitely no cases with my drums. Nothing to put away for me. As I sat at my garden of droopy plywood and tried to calm my nerves, the harsh critiques that I’d dished out to other students the week before echoed in my mind, and I shivered. Quiet order came over the class and I noticed a weird little sound nearby, an annoying high sizzling buzz, sssssss, just down to my right. What was it? Shit. It was me! It was my right foot on the pedal of my hi-hat cymbals (I’m a left-handed drummer, for all you drummers), trembling so fast it made a buzz roll. I shut it down and looked around to make sure my quivering cymbal roll had gone unnoticed. As my mind scrolled through the music I was about to play, the damn sound started up anew, surprising me as much as the first time. I had to stop it repeatedly. Taking my foot completely off the pedal didn’t seem to occur to me.
As we began whatever cocktail-jazz garbage we’d been assigned, I felt myself losing access to all that had before distinguished my musicianship. The sense of danger, the playfulness. The humor and lyricism. All that stuff, though still in its crude form, should have been fostered and encouraged. I wasn’t a virtuoso but at least I was original. Here in jazz school I was suddenly just some chump with a mean single-foot hi-hat roll and a sagging drum set. I could feel my inner musician retreating to the furthest reaches of my frightened soul.
When the tune was over, and I’d managed to drag it to half of its original tempo, the peanut gallery began to chime in. I’d expected the comments to be harsh, but they weren’t even musical in nature. They were personal, about the scared look on my face, how the bass drum had advanced forward and I had to lunge to reach it. I felt I was being punished for not having the money for a slick drum set. And for my Southern accent. My North Carolina lilt drew further sniggers and eye-rolling—or, at least, that was my youthful perception. The proper criticism, I thought, should have been simple and obvious: Ben’s tempo dragged the whole song down. Enough said. But because I didn’t fit in, didn’t wear the right clothes, didn’t have the right way of speaking and, of course, the right brand-name drums, it was a personal pile-on. As the semester wore on, my performances in the class kept getting worse.
* * *
—
But I learned a lot about swing and music in general in that class, despite the quasi-abusive atmosphere. I learned how to pinpoint performance problems within an ensemble, which formed the basis of how I identified musical problems and their possible solutions during my time as a judge on The Sing-Off, a prime-time a cappella competition series that aired for a few seasons on NBC. Only, as a TV judge, I tried to bring some kindness to this method. All said and done, my experience in my brief time at University of Miami certainly toughened me up. It was an indispensable part of my education as a musician.
As I was chucking drums in the lake, I’d had enough of feeling diminished for not being a rich kid. I’d be happy to never be thrown to the Fundamentals of Swing wolves again. I was also tired of so many of the exchanges I had in Miami, where strangers would repeat what I’d just said back to my face in a mock hillbilly voice. And I looked like a skinny seventh-grade bumpkin in my secondhand flannel shirts (a decade early for grunge) and baggy jeans. Somehow the average University of Miami student of my age looked more like upper twenties, made for TV, with designer sunglasses and muscles. Tom Cruise in the movie Risky Business. It’s like Miami wanted me to know that even though she was far south geographically, she was not culturally Southern or backward, and she made her point at my expense, daily.
* * *
—
As I rolled my drums down to the lake in the middle of the campus, I could feel some of these made-for-TV college bros turning my way, pausing to take note as I hurled the first drum into the water. Soon they began to cheer me on. I wasn’t used to approval from this set. To be fair, I somehow hadn’t really even registered them as human. For me, it was like the plastic mannequins that had decorated the campus suddenly came to life. And for them, it was probably like the little invisible nerd suddenly became a badass. I got a few backslaps and even a “Gimme five!” (This was 1984, prior to the “high five,” which is performed above the head. A proper 1970s gimme five was, of course, executed at waist level.) Mark had his Polaroid camera and made a few snaps of the drums as they floated toward the far side of the lake, where the locals fished. I bowed to a few of my new frat-boy admirers. And for a moment I thought, I might actually miss this place after all.
* * *
—
Bass drum floating in Lake Osceola
MT. LABOR
MT. TABOR SUPERMARKET’S 1960S STOREFRONT sign and the sprawling brutalist structure beneath it seemed a little lost in time—even in Winston-Salem in the year 1985.
MT. TABOR: LOW PRICES WERE BORN HERE AND RAISED ELSEWHERE!
The manager, a dead ringer for Lyndon B. Johnson, glanced over my application.
“What happened to your face, son?”
“I got my ass whipped, sir,” I drawled, like an extra out of Forrest Gump.
I was hired.
Maybe it was the “sir” part. It’s always good to be respectful to your elders, especially in the South. It was decided I’d start in January, when my hand was up to the task. It wasn’t quite Christmas, so I had a couple weeks of winter to acclimatize from the sun and fun of Miami before starting. On my way out, one of the younger scrupulously mulleted stockroom employees corrected the store’s motto.
“Psst! Hey, kid! Mt. Labor: Low wages were born here and raised elsewhere,” he whispered loudly with cupped hands in my direction, as a few of his bag-boy friends laughed.
* * *
—
For the next few months, I clocked sixty hours a week in that damn grocery store. Time slowed and the world outside the supermarket faded into oblivion. I came home exhausted each night. At first, I kept close contact with even the most casual friends back in Miami, whom I thought I might actually rejoin next fall. It seemed my friend Scott, an incredible singer who’d lived down the hall in my dorm, was suing the school after slipping in the dark in the dorm hall and breaking a vertebra. Big news indeed. And my roommate, Doug, had had a visit from the police. This was my fault. At the end of my semester I’d noticed a sign—STOLEN AUDIO EQUIPMENT! CALL IF YOU HAVE INFORMATION!—with a list of the missing equipment, posted in the music engineering department. I thought it would be funny if right next to it I posted AUDIO EQUIPMENT FOR SALE! MUST SELL QUICK—CALL DOUG GROBER, with the same stolen equipment listed at suspiciously low prices. Also, a fellow drummer by the name of Socrates, having recently attended a student Christian forum called “Rock Stars or Voices from Hell?,” had decided to smash all his rock records. Apparently, the AC/DC and Rush albums he listened to had backward messages that might force the listener to smoke pot. I’ve never understood how that works. Why should unintelligible lyrics played backward be so persuasive? Besides, I’d listened to all of that music for years, never even knowing (or caring) what the lyrics actually were forward, and I had yet to smoke marijuana.