That head has been on the 16" floor tom on my champagne sparkle '64 Slingerland kit for just about 10 years. I know that for sure because I started writing things on it in sharpie during the first recording session I ever did for a "real" label, that was in early 1999. I'm not talking about Warner Bros or Sony or Atlantic or anything like that, but it was a real label owned by someone that I didn't know personally that had real distribution and a small advertising budget and paid people a little bit of money to come record. Anyway, I remember changing the heads out on the kit because I had just bought it and besides the bass drum, it had all pinstripes on it or something. It was a jazz-ish session. Lots of written tunes with rhythms and sections that popped in and out in a avant garde-ish kind of way, music I amazingly still like. During a frustrating take I kept on thinking over and over, "Don't let your concept of what you think should happen get in the way of what's already happening.", so I wrote it down. In later years, it was followed with "Listen" and "don't forget to breath". All things I like to take to heart, but somehow find it so easy to forget about when I'm in the middle of creating something.
So, I'm not one of those guys who likes or feels the need to change out new heads all the time. I don't hit that hard so there's rarely a shitload of pitting going on, and I generally like the sound of well broken in heads (strings too, but that's a different story). I don't think it's an absolute, like "you should never use new heads on a recording", but I find that I keep the heads on until they don't sound good to me any more. That's what works for me.
Now, the amount of time it takes for me too fully kill a drum head varies, but for some reason, year after year, this floor tom head just kept sounding great, better even as it got older. It wasn't just me either. Other drummer and musicians commented on it often. They'd be playing the kit and they'd hit the floor tom and all of a sudden they'd look up at me as their face lit up with that half buck-toothed smile and head nodding that is musical sign language for "fuck yeah". It sounded awesome recorded, it sounded great on gigs, any type of hall or club.
The only way it went downhill was, after a while, it stopped working so well on ringier, more open jazz sounding stuff where it was tuned higher. I wasn't too concerned since I've got plenty of drums and enough floor toms to cover that need, and it still was like a motherfucking CANNON for rock. Just the right balance of tone and thump. A variety of tape went on and came off over the following years. At a certain point I discovered that it only sounded good in one very specific tuning. If I tried to tune it up or down in any way AT ALL, it would either become a nasty overtone feeding frenzy or a wet paper bag. I still didn't have the heart to change the head because nothing else I had or heard of anybody else's came close to repeating what this drum and this head gave me, so I left it alone, never even touching the tuning and it continued giving out it's best for a long time afterwards.
Shoot to a couple years ago. My wife and I move out west. I bring most of my drums with me but decide to leave a kit in storage in NYC so that I have something I really like to play when I come out to do gigs or what have you. I probably used the kit 5 times over 2 years. A shame, really, that it was so few, but totally worth it when I had it. The last time I headed out to NYC and used the kit was April 2008, since then it has been sitting in storage....
...until this tour I'm on now. I only had a short period of time to pull it out of the storage locker and just make sure I had the basics of everything I needed for the tour. All the hardware, cymbals, drums, parts whatever, then I had to load it into the van for heading out to the midwest, so I didn't get to try out how the drums actually sounded. Well, a year and a half in storage finally put the nail in the coffin on that head (as well as the rest of them). The life is almost completely gone. It can still thump a little bit, but just barely, and I need the kit to be melodic for the kind of music we're playing. I bit the bullet and went to the local weird strip mall instrument shop here and got the only normal not specifically-rock heads I could find (they had 1 only left in each of the snare and tom sizes, nothing for 20" Kick besides pinstripes, powerstrokes, and funky evans thingies). As I peeled (literally peeled) the old floor tom head off, I thought that, as cheesy as it sounds to say it, this is the end of an era. (And, of course, the start of a new one.)
I have to say the kit looks a bit alien to me now:
It sounds really nice. I can do things with this drum set I haven't really been able to do right for a while. We'll be in the studio recording on friday and I'm glad to know that I can count on this all working right and being flexible if need be, but there was some serious magic in that old floor tom head. It went a CRAZY amount of places with me, geographically and mentally and metaphysically. I don't think the new heads will ever have that. I'm in a different part of my life now, doing different things mostly, much tamer things. I'm in a very good place these days and soooooo glad to be done with a bunch of the stuff I never really cared for in the first place but did because I was young and I could, but when I think about all that old drum head did with me it makes me smile a bit.
Not sure what I'll do with it. Putting it on a wall seems a bit adolescent to me. Burning it seems like a bit of a forced "MAN-ceremony!!!!"for my taste. Maybe I'll just keep it in the garage and pull it out to show my sons in 15 years or so, that seems weird and mid-life crisis-y depressing though. I should probably just allow it to be what it was always meant to be, an accessory, and just throw it away. Just thought I'd give it's story here once before returning it to the ether whence it came.
