 Hello and welcome to the drum history podcast. I am your host Bart van der Zee and today I am joined by the drum engraving master John Aldridge. John, how are you? I'm just fine about yourself. Good. Good. This is really cool because I've seen your work. I think everyone has seen your work for a long time. Basically, I think if you've seen an engraved drum, you have seen John's work. So this is really cool. There's a lot of them out there. There's a whole new crop of engravers that are coming up too that are pretty sharp. Really? It's Adrian Kersler. It just blows me away. He's an artist's artist. But yeah, there's John Christensen who's a jeweler who's just adapting his jewelry engraving techniques to drums now. And he's combining those techniques with wriggle engraving, which is what you typically see on vintage drum engraving. Yeah, that's awesome. And I like how you're very openly like, you want to teach people. You want this art to carry on and you're not very proprietary about it. You like the art spreading. When I started to learn how to engrave, no engraver would speak to me. They would have a nice little five minute conversation with me and then they would just completely dismiss me as a total punter who would never go anywhere. Finally, I talked an old man into showing me his tools and what kind of movement it took to do it. And then I just kind of ruined everything for a long time. So I'd rather see somebody else just avoid the three years of running crap that I did. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Well, so why don't you tell people, let's say someone has no idea what we're even talking about, about drum engraving. Why don't you give a little bit of a description of what drum engraving actually is? And then you can at the same time, where did drum engraving start? When I think of it, I think of black beauties, maybe at Slingerland or... This is an A&F drum that I did yesterday. Wow. It just has a small decorative pattern that's reminiscent of a design that Leedy and I believe Slingerland, maybe even Ludwig, all three used as a decorative pearl inlay design where you had three colors of sparkle. And this is a metal drum, so there's no inlay. So I just engraved that pattern into it. So it's almost... I'll post a picture of it online, but it's almost like a masonic kind of symbol with the pattern, which is kind of neat. And so you're working with a lot with A&F as well. Yes. I work with just about anybody who dials me up on the phone. I'm not an exclusive guy. Engraving is such a narrow bandwidth occupation that there's not any company that would ever want to have a full-time engraver on, because I mean, I could engrave way more than they could sell. And it would also drive the price of engraving down if there were people just furiously at it like there were in the 20s. But this is an example of the tool that I use. Yeah. So explain, because again, people won't be able to see. We're doing video, but folks who are listening won't be able to see. So what is that tool? It's called a graver. It's about a four-inch-long blade with a wooden handle that looks like a file handle on it. You basically hold that with your finger on the tip of it to the direction you're going to engrave. You bury one corner of it because it's a square-headed engraver. And then you walk from tip to tip stroking or cutting the metal out between tips. And you have different widths of blades to create different widths of strokes. You can slide the blade sideways to get a really tight, curvy, wispy-looking line, or you can really dig in and slide the blade through the metal as you're going along to get a groove, like a trench thing. And I don't engrave like a traditional engraver who was taught how to do it right, does it? When you look at Adrian Kursler's stuff, he is a traditional, he did an apprenticeship, the whole thing. He's a legit deal. I'm the guy in the backyard scratching stuff because he couldn't afford to buy it. And this technique that I have is all strictly based on me not knowing what to do and pushing and forcing until I figured out how to do it. And some of these things get me into a lot of trouble because scratch drums. And that's not a handy thing to do. People don't like to get their drum back with an extra line on it. But some of the most interesting patterns that I've ever gotten have evolved from fixing a scratch. Really? You know, it would go off the pattern and it's like, oh, shit, that's way outside the line. So I've got to put something on it that'll cover that. And then I've got to repeat it 16 or 20 times, mirror it so that it looks like it belongs there. Yeah. Man, that's kind of like playing jazz or something where it's like, if you make a mistake, you better make that mistake again so it doesn't sound like it's a mistake. Yeah. Yeah, you better repeat it. And that's the thing about engraving. People look at it and they say, wow, that's so precise and such precision where every one of those patterns is so exactly different. Not so. It's the repetition that fools your eye into thinking that they're all perfect and precision done. Every one of those flowers on every drum I've ever done, every one of those scrolls on every drop, there's something wrong with it. The hardest thing to cut is what I just showed you, that simple little straight line thing. Oh boy, is that a bear. The simpler the pattern and the more it's just exposed to you, the harder it is to cut it because you just, any little bottle, any little jiggle or title shows up in the thing and the longer you look at it, the more you see. But you know, most people look at a drum and their first reaction is they see the whole drum in its entirety and they're looking at all the patterns and that's just what they see. Yeah, you're not looking at that individual little thing. I'm sure you see things where you go, I could show you all the mistakes in every drum I've ever done. Oh man. I used to rate myself on the engraving and put it in the engraving. If you've got a 90th anniversary black beauty from Ludwig hidden in my signature, not my signature, it's actually in the scroll work below the brand. There are little high shaped lines from zero to four for being a really, oh my God, I had a great day today. This looks really good. I didn't scratch anything and didn't screw anything up. And then there's the days when I got through that one. The thing with drums is they're not everyone is the same, even though you get a stack of 30 shells from one company, all came from the same metal shop, all came from the same plating shop. Everything was buffed by the same guy, but depending on how it was treated or not treated, you'll have some shells that have really, really hard spots. You can't see them from the surface. You can't predict when they're going to happen, but all of a sudden you're cutting along through the butter and the crushed glass section comes along. You have to try to get through that and make it look the same as when you're cutting through the butter. And it's really difficult to do. The companies that I'm working with now are not spinning things as much as they're either rolling it or hydraforming it. And when you do those two processes, the metal is not hammered into shape or bent into shape. It's swooshed into shape. But you just bend it into shape and get well, the joints. So there's not as much stress on that metal. I have a lot less problem with A&F drums and joyful noise drums and Ludwig drums nowadays. The 70s Ludwig black beauties were hard, hard, hard to engrave because they were not annealed. They were spun. The spinning marks were still inside the drum. The drum would retain those marks. And boy, when I saw one of those coming down the pack, I knew it was going to be a long day. Yeah, that's cool. Well, so as you're kind of telling us a little bit more of the technical stuff, I should mention also that you were the founder of Not So Modern Drummer, which is like the Bible for a lot of vintage drum people just to be able to use as a resource. So obviously you have a huge knowledge of vintage drums, but I think everyone would be interested in knowing when did drum engraving begin. You can kind of jump around if you want, if there's certain points where it stayed the same for a long time. But why don't you just take us through the history of drum engraving? Well, my awareness of drum engraving probably starts in the late 1880s and companies like Duplex, and I don't even know the other names of the companies right off the top of my head, but they were back in that day, you didn't have the lacquers and paints that we have that are just common usage things. We didn't have automotive finishes, which are predominant in drums today. We didn't have sparkle finishes. They didn't have anything, but wood or metal. And really the only way to ornament a metal shell was to plate it or paint it. And engraving was a really common art form, an industrial art form at the time. You could get just about anything engraved in the 1880s. It was very common. Every shop, which there are a lot of back then, every jeweler had an engraver on staff, and it wasn't hard to find an engraver. Wages were not much above minimum wage. It was a common art, and it was very easy to get done. So just about every drum company that came along had some kind of engraving. Stromberg Drum Company, Ludwig Drum Company, when they started in 1909, Sonor over in Europe was doing it as soon as they started. All of these drum companies were basically just copying from other industries, and the one major industry I can think of, it's the gun industry. And the gun industry uses a different point and very little wriggling on guns, because the metal is so hard that you have to use a hammer with the tool. Same tool I use, but instead of pushing it with my hand and wiggling it, they're tapping along with a hammer and pushing the blade through the metal, and tightening those strokes. But the style of engraving that we recognize right now as this is what engraving is to the drum industry is almost 90%, 95% wriggle engraving, which is exactly what I do. The only reason I learned how to engrave was to do drums. I really wasn't driven to learn how to do push engraving or hammer engraving or chisel engraving, or there's lots of different ways you can do this, but this is what everybody recognizes when you say engraving. Ludwig probably was my motivation for learning to engrave. I had seen some Ludwig Black Beauties, but as soon as I found the Ludwig Black Beauty, I realized there was also a Leedy Black Elite, a Slingerland Black Beauty. The Ludwig, by the way, was called the Deluxe in the beginning. It wasn't a Black Beauty until after Slingerland used the name in a catalog. And Ludwig, two years later, put it in their catalog as a Black Beauty. And since it was not really a licensed term, there was never a problem with that. And everybody kind of refers to a drum finished in black with engraving on it as a Black Beauty regardless of who made it. But every drum company had their version of that. And until pearl coverings came out in the late 20s or mid-20s and became popular, and Piriland and sparkle finishes came into the mix, you just didn't have anything black or white or red paint. And so when those other finishes came out and all of a sudden drummers had a lot more options, at the same time that drum sets kind of came into being, it kind of pushed the engraving thing out of the market. The other thing about engraving on drums is when that market started, a drummer only had a snare drum and a bass drum. That was your drum set. And you might have a Chinese Tom, which was just a little bitty thing with tacked heads that went thump and didn't really make a tom noise, but it was a sound effect. And that's, besides those two drums, that's what the drum set was, was as a group of sound effects to accompany something else or play with a band and make it cheaper than hiring a snare drummer and a bass drummer. So, but you know, as the drum set grew and you had to buy more pieces, all of a sudden you didn't have as much to spend on your snare drum. And since the snare drums that were matching your drum set were cheaper, well hey, why not get a matching snare drum? And so engraving by the mid-30s and the depression, engraving it pretty largely died out. You'll still find engraved drums into the 37, 38, but they're really rare just because people couldn't afford them. The depression was hard on everybody and they just completely disappeared with World War II. And until Gretch did that one in 67 to 71, that was the only hand engraved drum that came along. Ludwig revived the Black Beauty in 76 with laser engraving. You know, every pattern was exactly the same on those, except for it was a variable depth because the lasers were so crude you couldn't get the exact same flower every time. Which is, it's odd, you know, you get this laser to be precise and it wasn't developed enough to be precise. But I started engraving for Ludwig, well I started engraving in 83 and in 89, I guess it was, Ludwig called and Harry Kangani, he used to have a really big drum shop in Indianapolis called Drop Center of Indianapolis. He was a really good friend and I had done a drum for him to give to Kenny Aronoff and then his employees called and had me do a drum for him. Which he sent him a picture of or he sent him the drum, one of those drums he sent to Ludwig and says you should do this and because he was one of Ludwig's biggest dealers at the time they listened to it and they sent me three drums to engrave and that's how I got into working with them. Wow, now how long would it take you to do, let's say someone gives you a Black Beauty, what's the process look like and does every drum that comes out of Ludwig that's engraved go through your hands or do they still use any of the laser process for like mass production? Not on the Black Beauty, the lasers and you know I, while I've done all the Black Beauties they also use Adrian Kershler for things too, but not the Black Beauty. We were supposed to do a 110th anniversary where we were in talks to do that and then the guy that was their product manager Terry Bassette was hired away from Ludwig by Steve Maxwell to run Forkstrom Closet and his other two shops in New York and Chicago. So that 110th just disappeared in a heartbeat and which is a shame because they finally produced an eight lug drum which is what I love. Despite Ludwig not producing a limited edition like that, I've had a slew of them come through here from individuals and shops that want them engraved. So now what is that what is that process though like the length and what does it look like for you if someone sends you a drum? You called me today and you said I need, I would like to have a drum engraved and I know what pattern it is. If you know what pattern it is and I have that pattern I've cut that pattern I can give you the exact price on it. There's a lot of really standardized patterns that are you know 375 to 425 you know things like that. Most of the vintage original patterns from Ludwig and Leedy and stuff you know the Leedy Thunderbird 275. Wow that's fair. 5x14. But that's a real simple geometric pattern lots of straight lines. But like a Ludwig flower pattern like you'd see on the 1990 limited edition that's 375 on a 5x14 395 on a 6.5x14. If you called me say I want a flower pattern on my drum I said great strip the hardware off put the shell in the box send me the shell and you'll be such and such number in line when it gets here and I try not to tell people to ship stuff until I know that by the time it gets here it'll leave here within a week or maybe a week and a half if I'm lucky. Now a lot of times things arrive without me knowing they're going to arrive and they just kind of go the end of the line and a lot of times I plan my engraving time around when I'm going to be on the road you know when I'm at home I'll engrave when I'm not not going to happen. Yeah sometimes months that your drum will sit here while I'm on the road doing something and I'll only come back for a week and at that time I'll try to get to your you know whatever drums are there. But typically if I've told you to send me a drum this week it'll go out by Friday. Wow that's amazing I mean the fact that you can sit there and just have the focus and and get it done. Now are you like I would just be curious do you do like pencil to paper or paintbrush to canvas artwork as well or are you just an engraver? I'm just an engraver and I'm a pretty lousy artist. I draw things I draw my my basic shapes and then I scan them into my computer and I use a vector drawing program to create lines that are perfectly smooth and you know it'll take me a couple of hours to get a nice scroll pattern drawn up to the point where I can then replicate it flip it mirror it print it on a grid that has dots on it for the lug holes in the drum that I'm going to put that pattern on. All the standard patterns they're in the computer. It's kind of like like a tattoo where they kind of lay out a you know a stencil of it and then you follow it. If people ask me do you do tattoos I say yeah but it gets real bloody you got to bring your own tart. Yeah yeah and you have to sign something beforehand. Yeah yeah that's awesome. I mean as you said before the history of drum engraving isn't I mean it's it's fascinating but it's not a super long one like I guess people have just been doing it and it has that kind of like everything in that late 1800s early 1900s just seemed very ornate but like when you hit World War II that didn't become a priority. I find the rolling bombers and all that stuff very fascinating where things changed. Yeah things changed dramatically just as a result of the of the the situation you know and it as we've evolved as a society and technology has come up to us you know we've gone through all kinds of things. The drum set during its infancy went through you know just being a bass drum and a snare drum and then street cars came along and all of a sudden you had to carry your bass drum and snare drum onto a street car. Well we could only get on with what you could carry in one trip so they invented ways to put everything inside the bass drum or make a bass drum that would fold up or something that would allow you to walk down the street with a drum set in your hands and that cycle of making a drum set that you can carry in has repeated a couple of times throughout history as you probably have noticed it. The hip gig and the sonor jungle kits all of those little bitty tiny drum sets that you can carry they're caused by the necessities of things around us like you're playing in coffee shops which are smaller venues that didn't exist you know a long time ago or they did but now we've got them again you know. Yeah I have a few episodes on like the trap drummers and the silent movie era and things like that and it's just I love those because I've watched a bunch of your stuff. Oh great awesome. Now one thing that I think people would be interested in as well is not so modern drummer and for folks who don't know what that is it's basically a magazine or it was a magazine it's still online but based around vintage drums and was just again beloved by people in that community so you want to talk a little bit about that like what made you start that and all that good stuff? Sure sure I was doing a little bit of writing for modern drummer back in the late 80s and mostly it was just little short articles on black beauties and radio kings and things like that and it was just getting started as a writer but I was really getting underway as a drum collector it just hit me like the rabies I had to have them I had to have them now I spent three 400 bucks a month on a phone bill back when long distance was the only way you could speak to someone in the moment. Wow. I still have notebooks full of original male handwritten correspondence between me and people I was doing drums with you know had swaps going back in the morning you know you write a letter I think I'd give you 325 for this drum and you wait for a week to get the response well I was really thinking more 375 you know but it just took a while to get it done but you know there were I had this one from Jim Pettit who's a has Jim Pettit's drum shop there in Memphis and we used to have two or three drums between us flying between us there was no money exchange we were just trading and you know we were trading black beauties and it was you know there was a thing about black beauties you couldn't get one until you had one you know there was a certain number of people that had them and they weren't letting go of but there was a lot of swapping between those people well anyway not so modern drummer came about because when I first got involved with there were only about eight people that I had any clue of that knew about it by the time I started not so modern drummer I was trying to put together a mailing list so I figured if I know eight guys these eight guys have to know a bunch of other people so I sent out a letter to these eight guys and says hey let's quit playing cloak and dagger let's figure out who's doing this stuff so we can all communicate and we can all find stuff I says if you'll send me the names and addresses and phone numbers of people you know that are interested in vintage drums I'll compile a mailing list and send it out to all of our group to our 32 people which is what it had grown to by the time it got out and that started a little directory and to when I printed the directory I said you know I've just written this article for modern drummer if some some of you guys who are into black beauties would take a look at it and help me proof it and stop me from making any ridiculous mistakes please do and so I put that in there with the mailing list and the response that I got back from that says oh you should do this every month John well I had a I was a music teacher at an elementary school teaching kindergarten through third grade at the time that I started it and most of them were printed on the Xerox machine at the school for free or free they knew about it I wasn't stealing they knew about it and they supported but it grew pretty rapidly by the end of the first year we had probably well you can just go back and look at the first year directory and count them because every year for the first five or six years I put out a directory at the end of the year and everyone who joined went into the directory unless you elected not to be in it some people just really did not want to be contacted but they wanted the information and since the internet really wasn't out there yet we were the information it was really the only place you could find it gathered together and printed out in one spot and since I was sending it out anyway and we were busy doing this other stuff anyway how about we put a for sale or trade thing in there so we can swap between each other and if you I'm not going to do this for nothing but for eight bucks a year you can put six lines of ads in each issue it with your subscription so it was basically the first bulletin board for drummers to swap vintage gear on and occasionally find something new about it and as it evolved along you know we added the the wanted for sale then the restoration tips people reproducing things other people started to send me articles so I didn't have to write the whole damn thing myself uh chet falls around over I've cooked um gosh some of these guys are dead now uh but Greg Wilson was like the the early black beauty king I mean he I remember he used to have printed postcards that had five of his favorite black beauties from the 20s and you know I remember he tried to swap me I said okay those in hi-hats for my black beauty I was born yesterday but that's awesome did did modern drummer have anything to say because the name obviously is like a play on did they say anything about it by the time they noticed it which was two years after I'd run it I'd already copyrighted and trademarked the name and since I was in a business arrangement with them they called and they said we have a problem with you using that name and I said well I wish you'd called me a couple years ago when I started using it and they said well we didn't know about it I said I've been writing for you for for all this time and you didn't notice it so they finally said well what's what's your goal I said well my goal is to not be you and to not do what you're doing and to present the other side of it that you seem to not want to show in your magazine because I was I really it was out of frustration with them not publishing as fast as my little impatient mind wanted to get the information out there and to soak up the information from other people and they had a couple of other guys writing vintage articles a guy named Cheech Yero uh he wrote great stuff but they just it was like once a quarter they'd put something in there for vintage drugs and so it was just me being impatient got it pretty much the reason why it happened it turned into a magazine and from that point on it crawled fished and crawled fished and crawled fished or it's a way into being a printed publication that was semi-respectable yeah no I mean it's got a strong part in history and I want to say too that I like modern drummer and that's also I read modern drummer and still do but it was you know at the time I was just sick of modern drums and wanted I wanted some radio kings and a black beauty well it's it's funny because I find myself and right now kind of being the drum history guy of like when people are zigging you zagged and everyone's going modern and then and you realize there's tons of these people out here like obviously people have wanted it too yeah yeah and I learned from everyone of those people but the reason my phone bill was so outrageous was because every time I didn't know something I would call somebody that I thought did and they might say well I don't know but this guy knows so dang the phone thing would start my wife and I it got so bad that we went into marriage counseling over my abuse of the phone talking vintage drums wow you really took one for the team well it sounds funny now but I'd started the newsletter or I'd started trying to get this thing and in this counseling session she says well why don't you just start a newsletter for you and your little drum geek buddies this is wow that's that's a good idea yeah I will and it it saved your it saved your marriage yeah but it but at the peak of it once I went to offset printing and and distribution this was at the very very very tail end of the boom in print publications and I was in Barnes and Noble, B. Dalton, Walden, Bookstop, Bookstar, Borders, Tower Records, every damn one of those places that distributed stuff I was distributed by Ingram periodicals which is the biggest periodicals distributor in the south I believe and they may even be in the United States but it went to 22 different countries I had 1500-1600 subscribers when the internet really hit that's what I had but I was printing 20,000 copies at the school no I'm kidding I went from the school to buying a high output Xerox machine in my house who uh sending it off for to have films made to making the films myself you know I worked as a press assistant when I was a kid on a newspaper so I learned the really really really old way and then while I was working on the old press they brought in a new offset press I was working on a lead type press where you would use hot lead to melt it into a cylinder that would print the page it was crazy but you know watching it go from that to offset press where you have negatives and plates that are printed photographically uh to what it is now digitally I mean I rode that horse all the way through so well you sold it to Bill Ludwig the third yep yep he uh he was you know I love Bill to death but he's not a great businessman Bill's a great drum guy his enthusiasm for drums and his desire to carry on the family's legacy is great but you know I'm a horrible businessman and Bill just wasn't much better than me so he was able to keep it going for about three years but I mean the thing that I was facing the internet didn't slow down when I sold it so he was he was faced with you know well how to do that and I don't think he knew how to turn it into a digital publication and when he got ready to sell it George Lawrence was interested in doing that so that's how he bought into it but uh I ran it for for Bill for about a year after he bought it and I ran it for George for a couple of months after he bought it just kind of helped him get it started but uh I think George made the right call switching it to an online publication there's no place in the world for a small publication to print things it just is so expensive to produce it and send it out that you know it's the cost of the thing is half the cost of producing it so there's no profit in it really the only way to make any money is to reduce those production costs by going online yeah and it's really clear that it's not about the money but no you physically we're just not getting rich no matter what you think no but you can't lose money that's when my kids called it not so many dollars yeah oh I bet and I talked to I remember on the episode I did with Joe Luoma about camco he talked about doing these phone calls back and forth and is it in good shape or is it mint shape is it perfect is what's wrong with it and it's like I didn't grow up with that so I my as a kid I would get the trading post at like a local gas station and look through it for drums and um that's different even then having to call people on the phone and and uh but you're I mean really it's ahead of its time and you were kind of a pioneer with that so that's you should be proud I thought computers were really cool at the time and my wife had just started working on her masters so we bought her an IBM 8088 machine which had the newest thing in the market an amber monitor no internet still yeah the only way to get a file into your computer was to take a disk from one computer to another computer put it in that computer but the first time that I produced not some modern rumor it was done on a typewriter oh wow and then I cut the pieces out that I had typed glued them on to another sheet and xeroxed it that's awesome that's number one right yeah yeah it's still out there but the cover was done on an apple 2e and it was it was in color when I printed it but I could they didn't have color xeroxes then so I can only oh man that's awesome issues uh bill cardwell who don't see and see drum shop he worked for bear aspirin at the time and he conned them into letting us use their color copier to produce 300 copies of the first color centerfold man you're just jumping around from copier to copier yeah copier to copier who's who's got I mean to print a single page of color in 1980 well 92 or 93 the separations would cost you $800 that means to turn it from a color picture of a page into four pieces of film that would prevent color that process cost you $800 and you know I couldn't afford that not for each magazine I wasn't making any money on it but it went from that to well I can push a button in cork express and it will produce those separations for nothing digitally then all I have to do is print the films so it went from being $800 to do this to pushing a button and paying someone 25 cents a sheet to output it on to film I mean it went from the sublime to the ridiculous yeah and technology changes so fast that it's just I mean it's hard to keep up with it and as you said with it being now I love getting it as like a newsletter in the email and you click on it and you go into it and then you can expand and look at the the articles and but it's so deeper than you could ever do with the magazine yeah but there's just something about holding a piece of paper in your hands that I kind of like yeah it's like having a record versus a did something on Spotify you know exactly exactly do you have any memories of like this was my favorite article I wrote or even just vintage drums in in in general like do you have any little fun like facts or historical tidbits that you think everyone would find interesting that your regular listener might not might not know I mean I don't really I don't really consider myself to be a great writer so I was I was just trying to get information out I mean here's how bad it was I knew so little about type setting and design that when I finally did get the ability to put things on a computer and lay it out together on my first Macintosh it went edge to edge on the sheet there was maybe an eighth of an inch border the text was as small as I could make it to get as much information as I could put on it yeah those are issues are almost illegible because they're how much crap can I if I shrink it 30 I can get this 10-point type you know just jam it on and you know it was more limited by how much paper can I afford to buy to take to the school to print with then what should it look like I was not concerned at all with what not some modern drummer looked like for the longest long time it was just about let's get some information out there and it wasn't till I started selling advertisements in it for the longest time I would not sell an ad I just I was violently opposed to commercializing my hobby mainly because it would make the drums that I wanted to be too expensive for me to buy yeah who was your first advertiser Liam Mulholland with a drummer's tradition okay and he's the one that convinced me to do it wow a full boy first off he started with a half page ad and he bought a full page ad and that shop still in business Liam passed away several years ago but he was the first guy to convince me that magazines really exist to sell ads and if you ever hope to pay for this thing you're going to have to sell ads because the subscribership won't even pay for the postage my friend man it's funny John because like we are I have had the the debate with myself of I want to keep the podcast pure and I don't want to because podcasts they typically have advertising at the beginning and I've been like I don't want to have ads I don't want it to seem like I'm selling out if I have let's say Ludwig on an episode about Gretch but boy I tell you when you have a kid and you got to pay the bills you start to think like you know what advertising could be pretty good, advertising could be pretty slick you know yeah you know it it made the difference eventually between me just ambling along as a black and white Xerox publication which I had a friend who stuck to that gun and his name was Dave Seville he had a couple a thing very he started about the same time I did called the old drummer's club in England and it was like a four to six page eleven by eight and a half by eleven folded in half so it was a little booklet Xerox black and white the same exact thing I was doing vintage articles on European vintage drums and our and wanted ads from people over there and for sale their laws didn't allow them to buy and sell that way but they could inform people that they had things so but it was uh he stuck to his guns I think he's may still even be producing it I'll have to get in touch with him yeah his name is Dave Seville SEVILLE but uh there's a lot of guys over in England that you know got into American drums and and as a as a consequence they talked to me and I got into European drums a little bit uh I never did get into collecting those I was just too deep into black beauties and radio kings but uh when I when I first started collecting you could go into a pawn shop and you could buy a supraphonic for $35 a transition badge supraphonic brass then now goes from 750 to 1250 wow and then within 10 years you go in and you ask the pawn shop guys hey you got any drums back there and they go what are you looking for black beauties or radio kings I knew I was in trouble when I started going into pawn shops and they pull out my book or pull out the magazine and said where'd you get that that's hysterical yeah I go into pawn shops all the time and uh I've found that like usually in antique shops I'll have better luck than a pawn shop because pawn shops have the internet now obviously they can look up everything and it's like I'm looking for the the good will find when you go into a pawn shop if you're going to sell something to them the first thing they'll do is look it up on the internet and get a comparable value yeah you know so yeah nothing to be there the internet was the great leveler you know all of a sudden there was no hidden market everybody could get to everything and it's just it's created a lot of confusion because once people see something in print we're conditioned to believe that it's true and there's a lot of people that kind of go off half cock they will have read something that I wrote a hundred years ago that's wrong and they never bothered to see the the correction they just read that one thing and after I learned that it was wrong I corrected it you know but still there's a lot of mistakes out there you know it took me a long time to to figure out don't print it unless you got the proof in front of you you know I was just printing based on anecdotal information at first it was just you know well Bill said well you know Don over here says he had one of these you know that kind of stuff man we have a lot of parallels because there's things with early episodes I've done where I'm like yeah sure you know we'll talk about that we'll talk about this and then I someone a lot when people come out of the woodwork and say hey that wasn't right that wasn't right you missed this this and this and I and I'm grateful for guys like Mark Cooper Rob Cook Brooks Tagler will tell me like hey you missed this this and this I don't even act like I know anything about radio kings around Brooks yeah no I I just quietly learned from him but I like our community because it's typically for the most part very nice and say hey I really love this but you missed this and this and let's try and fix it and stuff that was the story of my life for a long time in the early part of not so modern hey man this is wrong there'll be a review of my book where they've even found it I don't know but they'll this book is ridiculous all of this information is available on the internet why would you even buy this book well let's see you look at the publication date on that yeah internet there weren't no fancy internet when that was published no you were the internet what why don't you tell people so your book is guide to vintage drums tell us about that a little bit as we wrap up here and um because it is seen also like not some modern drummer as just like a you know a handbook for people to follow and learn from uh even though stuff's on the internet well like like everything else that you publish as soon as you publish it it's obsolete and history is proving that with just about anybody who's written anything that's happened in their own time you know other other information comes to light after it's written and that's the number one thing I have to warn people about my book there's a lot more information about there and if you only get a picture of collecting when it started that's pretty much what people were thinking back then in 92 I took a lot of articles that I'd written for not some modern drummer and a couple of other people gave me their articles that allowed me to to use them in there as well chet falls arano let me use his history of the hi-hat uh rob cook helped a little bit with it and uh a couple of other guys you know finishing tips one guy wrote a little blurb about making an adapter plate for when you get a snare drum that you don't want to drill holes in but you want to put a snare strainer on it that'll work so you know that's once I had enough stuff I really hadn't even considered doing a book but Ron Middlebrook who was the publisher of center stream publications uh was going to do the Ludwig book by uh Paul Schmidt and he had been talking to rob cook and rob knew that I had just taken a whole bunch of really nice studio portraits of my collection you know just a few drums in my collection and uh he told him that I had these pictures and he called and asked if I he could borrow one of those pictures or use it on the cover of the book so the drum that's on the cover of Paul Schmidt's book was my black beauty uh it's a 1923 then I found it new old stock it had fallen over on the top shelf of a music store and lain there since the 20s and was yeah and a friend a friend of mine was on tour with Eddie Money and he saw this drum in the shop and he tried to buy it and the guy said no it's not for sale but I've got this other one over here and he it was another black beauty a five before team but it was worn totally out I mean the tension rods had worn down through the collar hooks to the point where they were sitting on the hoop so but I wound up buying that drum I didn't buy it from him I swapped him a Gretsch drum that I got for 35 bucks at a pawn shop for that drum then uh I I says well where's this shop that had this drum that's pristine it's not for sale he goes well I'm not going to tell you you'd go buy it well it's not for sale he says at least tell me the name of the city where it was and he says hey so I looked up his tour itinerary and then just played in Akron Ohio I said Akron Ohio there's only one guy in Akron Ohio possibly have that now it'd be Tom Humphries and it was Tom Humphries Tom owned a place called Ace Music he had worked at the store as a kid and that's when they found that drum and it had been in that store all those years well when the old man that owned it sold it he sold it to Tom and that drum was on display in the shop and uh when Glenn Simmons came through there he's the one that told me about it well I called Tom and I says I hear you've got a black beauty in there that's not for sale he says yep it's an awful pretty one too and it was it was just it had fallen over under a heating vent and apparently the top head cracked it was a cap skid head there were no stick marks anywhere on it still a factory head I wound up talking him into selling it to me and uh if that drum wound up bailing me out of a really really serious situation when my son was born he uh it was complications let's just say I grew $60,000 in debt in one day okay well my friend here Oshiga from Japan he's a drum tech drummer over there called me up and he says John somebody's trying to sell me the drum off the cover of the Ludwig book and I said well they shouldn't be trying to do that because I'm sitting here looking at it it's in my office he says well I want to buy that drum and and I had already told him the story of how I got it right so I said well it's not for sale he goes well what if I offer you stupid money oh stupid money talks what are you thinking and he shot me a price that was so ridiculous I just couldn't say no and especially in light of the fact that I had just incurred this huge debt so it enabled me to get an immediate handle on paying that back bought it for $500 and sold it for $10,000 oh that's like one of the best drum hunting stories I've ever heard in my life that poor hero the yen was sailing high then when he bought it I mean he was like his yen was twice the value of the dollar so to him it was like paying half the price and then the yen went in the toilet and so 20 years later he called me back says you want to buy this back this is man I could never afford to buy it back he goes it won't cost you as much as I paid you and I still can't afford it so he sold it to somebody else and I believe my Colorado has it now of course yeah of course it plays for it yeah so as we finish here what's in your collection right now I have very few drums that are really old or collectible because as a result of that $60,000 thing I pretty much sold anything that was mint or clean or really pristine that somebody would really want to pay a lot of money for when you know I I have one black beauty which I purchased in 1990 or no 89 and it's a formal 14 8 lug black beauty of all the 200 or so that passed through my hands in that 20 years that I was really collecting hard that was the best sounding one that I had and I found there's a lot of variations in sound anything that was made during that time period you got a lot of variations the the rolling was done you know by hand everything was done by hand and it wasn't the precision manufacturing that we have today so you'll get black beauties that sound like oh this is the second coming of Jesus and then you'll get some that sound wow this isn't worth pulling out of the case the ones that are worn out sound great the ones that look pristine there's a reason for it but I have that and I have a set of radio kings which is basically every size from six inch to 20 inch and white marine pearl none from the same set bottom all one at a time some of them I bought that size four or five times till I got one that sounded really good I bought this set purely for the sound that they get the same thing with black beauties radio kings toms and bass drums especially very widely and their consistency and good drums bad drums abused drums taken care of drums I weeded through it and I had the luxury of doing that at the time because they were cheap I mean you could buy a 13 inch radio king floor tom for $100 to $150 and a bass drum $150 to $200 but I went through five 13 inch drums to get one really rocking 13 and the 14s I just had to go through two I have Jean Krupa's 20 inch floor top wow oh that's amazing I got that from Barrett Deems he passed away we would be talking about it he came to my booth at the Chicago show in the late 90s and we're sitting there talking about he says I got this drum in my living room that Jean gave me and I use it for a lampstand and when he passed the the the guy that was hired to get rid of his drums brought it to the Chicago show and I was sitting there looking across the aisle with that drum man that's got to be that drum and it had the tobacco stains on it for him spitting hair from his dog and his cat still on it at the start of the day he was asking $500 for it and nobody wanted it to $500 nobody wanted it to $400 nobody wanted it to $300 finally at the end of the day he says come out to my car and the drum was sitting on the ground behind his car and he says look in my car and see if there's a way for me to get this drum in the car and that drum ain't going to that car $200 okay I'll take it $200 you know for Jean Krupa's floor tom I can't believe Krupa's floor tom given to Barrett Deems by Jean Krupa oh I feel like Brooks would be all over that what is ever going to be all over that I've got a kid that knows what it is and he's a drummer too so that goes straight to him when I'm gone you know he's that's the great thing about having a collection and a kid who's a drummer that's interested in it because you don't have to get rid of it when you get old because you could just give it to the kid yeah now is this your son who had the complications who you sold the drums yes yes I'm glad he's okay and he's a drummer and now he just finished his first tour with a band out of Nashville and he's about to go to Europe with that same band so it's great you know I'm on the road and I'm fixing to load into a venue somewhere and there's my son calling from the road he's fixing to load into a venue somewhere yeah that's what it's all about yeah that's gonna be successful my other son is a computer guru in Silicon Valley he makes all of us look stupid I was gonna say that's pretty cool too yeah anything else no John I just want to uh I want to thank you for being on the show um where can people find you if they want to like check out your stuff please google John Aldridge or do you have a website for them if you do a google image search for John Aldridge engraved drums you'll find a ton and then if you go to my facebook page there's photos in the photo galleries that you can look through they're all public you can see a lot of the projects I've done there's some folders that have just one drum in them some that have you know 100 drums in them but then recently I've been doing more on Instagram my idea on Instagram is drum scratcher my idea on facebook is just John Aldridge those are the two best ways to reach me because everybody's got those two ways I would suggest messaging me either at drum scratcher at gmail.com or through the facebook website perfect man I didn't realize how affordable really it is for you to to knock out a drum for someone because I would have thought it would have been like two thousand bucks to get a snare engraved one if you you can get it up there if you really want to but most most people don't you know I'd say the the number of $1,500 and up jobs that I've done in the last 20 years is probably I could count them on both hands yeah like a drum set if you see one of the drum sets I've done those are like month-long projects oh yeah for that you're going to have a lot of money but you know for the most part I didn't get into drum engraving to become a drum engraver or to make money I got into drum and engraving because I was a teacher and I had no money and so the only way I was going to get it was to do it myself or find a way to get it done and I tried to find a way but couldn't afford it so learning was the only way well you've done it awesome John well uh I appreciate you being on the show and um hopefully I'll see you around maybe I'll see at the Chicago show coming up um in May well you're in you're in where now Cincinnati Cincinnati we play in Cincinnati quite often really if you see REO coming through this year give me a yell I will come over and we can I can give you the nickel tour I'd love to yeah I don't think I mentioned it but John is on the road with REO Speedwagon um it's the drum tech it's my 15th year with them wow I've been there half as long as the drummer that's awesome cool well you're a good guy John and I appreciate you being on the show and uh I'll see you around and um again thanks for being on and we'll talk to you later well thank you for being interested I appreciate it if you like this podcast find me on social media at drum history and please share rate and leave a review and let me know topics that you would like to learn about in the future until next time keep on learning this is a Gwynn Sound podcast