My Vintage Joe Morello Dynasonic Snare

For those of us who had the privilege of studying with Joe Morello, many of us knew him as not only a very warm individual and a great teacher but also as a very entertaining storyteller.  While studying with Joe, my lessons would be scheduled at the end of the day so I could drive him home, but never directly home.  We would always stop at one of his favorite establishments for a drink and storytelling where I would get the inside scoop on not only the likes of Buddy, Gene and Louie but also bandleaders like Benny Goodman and many others connected to the music industry.  Additionally, Joe loved to talk snare drums and repeatedly alluded to this silver sparkle Dyna-Sonic which I acquired from Joe in the mid-nineties.
 
Joe on the snare:

This snare drum is a 5” x 14” silver sparkle Dyna-Sonic with bread and butter lug casings.  Its Serial number is 1662:

Here is a transcription (from audio tape done with his permission) of Joe retelling the story behind this Silver Sparkle Rogers Dyna-Sonic snare drum.  He discusses how his relationship with Rogers came to be, and recounts conversations with Buddy Rich and Henry Grossman.  I make an effort to transcribe the tape as accurately as possible and leave in all of the conversation unless otherwise noted, so the reader will feel as though Joe is telling them the story.  Where Joe quotes conversations with Buddy (BR) and Henry (HG), I notated it by using initials for clarity.
THE AUDIO:
http://www.soundclick.com/player/single_player.cfm?songid=12350282&q=hi&newref=1
 
Note - I used a small Radio Shack micro cassette voice recorder at the time.  As a result the tape hiss is omnipresent ... I tried eq and multiband compression to clean it up a bit but it is still a challenge to hear what he is saying.
 
THE TRANSCRIPTION:
“So what happened is I walked into Birdland one night when Buddy was playing, and he gets off the stand

BR    Come on back, back stage I want to show you something
JM    What’s that?
BR    I want to show you a drum that gonna’ end all drums
JM    Yea, what’s that?

He said

BR    I’m going with Rogers
JM    That’s great ya’ know

So, he’s like

BR    Here’s the drum

He showed me the drum; it had that track (inaudible, referring to the snare frame) so he said

BR    What I’d like to do, we’ll get you, Louie and myself

He said

BR    That’s all we want, we’ll all join Rogers, we’ll do all kinds of publicity (inaudible)
JM    Well, Buddy, I’ve been with Ludwig for a while, they’ve been good to me and I don’t know if I want to do that
BR    Well it’s up to you

So anyway, he did do it, and it didn’t last that long probably six months or a year, something went wrong.  For a while, he made the rounds to every drum company.  Rogers got very upset with him because they put his picture on a catalog and he … uh, so they printed something like three hundred or four hundred thousand catalogs but, anyway, that’s a different story.

So now we’re doing the NAMM show in Chicago and (pause) so Remo Belli was there and Joe uh, Henry Grossman was the head guy at Rogers, he owns it, out of Cleveland.  And Grossman said to me … I was going around to the different companies, they all knew who I was I guess … and he said

HG    We’d like to take you for dinner, no pressures, I’d just like to take you to dinner, we’ll sit down I’d like to have you meet my engineer

… who was Joe Thompson at the time who invented the Swiv-o-Matic and the snare stand and all that.  So, Remo was there, it was Henry Grossman, Joe Thompson, Remo Belli, myself and some, one of the salesmen, so, we had dinner.  Ludwig was at the other table over there, this was at the big room you know ballroom where they had all the tables and big dinner for all the different people.  So Ludwig’s one guy goes over at Grossman, stealing my (inaudible, laughs).

HG    I know we can’t do what Ludwig is doing for you right now; we’re just getting it together but, we’d like to make you a snare drum for you.
JM    That’s very nice of you.
HG    What do you want, what color, do you want a metal drum?

I said

JM    No, I’m using sparkle silver

That was my trademark.  I did that because of my first teacher, he had, for some reason, he just (inaudible) everyone was using marine pearl so I wanted sparkle silver.  It became Ludwig’s third, second, second best seller about two years after I joined the company, two or three years, especially when I went with Brubeck, then it kicked off.  But anyway, so I told him what I wanted and thanked him.

About two weeks later I get this thing in the mail and it’s this beautiful drum, I played it a little bit but, I didn’t play it that much because I was still endorsing Ludwig so, it would be totally unfair to him.  One time they gave me a Gretsch drum when I was playing with Marian.  I played it one night, I got a phone call the next day, he said what are you doing with a Gretsch?  Who the hell put a call into Ludwig! (laughs).  Well, this is how it happened anyway.  So, I kept it and never really played it that much as you see it’s as clean as hell.  I take care of my instrument I don’t throw them around like some people and ah you know the company since went defunct and so that brought the price of the drum (inaudible) and everybody wanted the drum you know.”

.

Bump

Coolest story in the CH evah Dave.
 

bapu
Coolest story in the CH evah Dave.
 

Thanks Ed