I'm not a fan of the word 'clinic.' It's too... clinical - 'if something's broken it must be fixed.' I'm not even sure how the word got started in the drum industry. At Sabian and Vic Firth we use the word 'events.'"
Dom Famularo isn't your average professional drummer. Apart from the fact that his technique is utterly ludicrous - ask anyone - his career consists almost exclusively of performing clinics... sorry, events. And he does them exclusively for Sabian and Vic Firth; he actually holds an official position with both companies as Education Director. Rather than pursue a career with a band or as a session player (either of which he would have no trouble with), he prefers to perform solo to the drummers of the world, and believe me when I tell you that this man loves drummers.
In '92 Dom toured the world for six weeks; last year he went several better and took four months.
"I played about three weeks of events throughout the U.S., East to West coast," he says. "Then I left directly for Sydney, Australia and performed at the Australian International Music Show. At each performance there were 1,500 people. It was myself, Will Calhoun, Virgil Donati, and David Jones. It was a great gathering. Then I did two or three international TV appearances in Australia."
After Oz, Dom went to New Zealand for three lectures, Singapore for two days, Malaysia for two days, Hong Kong for two days, and then to the first ever music lecture in mainland China. "It was pretty overwhelming," he enthuses. "55 flights in three months. I'll probably be in the same hotel for the next three nights, which hasn't happened yet. In China I was welcomed by ten to fifteen cars full of people. The owner of the store came, the top official of that city - Kwong Chow - came, there was a military guy that came by. I got the most applause of the whole tour when I talked about the freedom of expression in any art form." Kwong Chow's top drummer was also there, and Dom insisted on going to see him play after the lecture.
"Hundreds of people came to the club, it was jammed with drummers. Because they have no information there, no books or videos or instructors, they set up the drums from the catalogs. The tom toms were facing the other way! Thehi-hat and double bass pedal were like three feet away. And then they called me up to play. I didn't know where to sit! The keyboard player asked me what I wanted to play, so I said, 'let's do a jazz standard.' I'm taking this for granted: jazz and a standard, ha! 'Hello Dolly' was their standard. I said no, we'll do some blues, I'll begin and you guys come in. They were staring at me, I guess they'd never seen anyone play so organized or mature, they'd never seen a lot of the patterns I was playing. There's hundreds of people out there, so I decide, okay, it's solo time. Eventually the bass player realizes he should probably come in at some point. So, in the middle of the solo, when I'm just about at the height of getting people excited, the bass comes in, at which point the guitar player decides to snap out of it and join us. But it would have been nice if the guitar player and the bass player and the keyboard player were playing the same chord changes. All of a sudden, when they realized it wasn't happening, it just kind of formulated into a blues tune. It was great, they wouldn't let me leave, they kept asking me back to play solos."
As a result, Dom's been asked back in May to do three weeks touring throughout China. After China, the tour went back to the States where Dom emceed and performed at the Florida Drum Expo, which he directs and organizes every year. "This year there was myself, Dennis Chambers, Chad Smith, Nick Menza and Will Kennedy. Everybody played individually and then we all played together at the end.
When I do it each year, I try to get a real wide variety of personalities, it's like, leave your ego at the door." The next day Dom left to begin the two month-long European leg of his tour, taking in Belgium, Sweden, Norway, Holland, Switzerland, the UK, Austria, Italy, France, Portugal and then home... "For two days. Then Montreal, Boston, back to Canada and finally home proper. Talk about whirlwind."
As you've probably realized, Dom doesn't get tired very easily. He has that stereotypically American drive that makes him almost exhausting at times - he talks constantly and with boundless enthusiasm for drumming and life in general. "This is the first time a tour like this has ever been put on at this level, to reach tens of thousands of drummers in a short amount of time. It's overwhelming in the fact that every country has a different culture and currency and language. As far as jet-lag, that doesn't happcn to me any more; I get there, change my watch and just go with the energy. Each time I get some place, I just want to have fun and talk and play drums."
Dom hasn't always been an educator; back in the early '80s he was doing sessions and other 'proper' work. It didn't take him long to realize that this sort of career wasn't for him; he didn't see it as artistic enough.
"I didn't want to have to put five pounds of gaffer tape on a snare drum to get a sound the producer liked," he sighs. "Having studied with the likes of Joe Morello, Shelley Manne, Jim Chapin and Al Miller, when I learned the art form, it just felt like I was doing an injustice to what I had learned, doing sessions just to make money." So he dropped the session work and started lecturing. "I live on Long Island, and the Long Island Drum Centre had a wonderful vision to go out and do a lot of these events in schools. They started off with one store and 20 students, and after doing these events, they built it up to five stores with over 1,000 students. The kids got involved and it became a business. There are a lot of Long Island drummers: Liberty DeVitto, Rod Morgenstein, Joe Franco, Roy Haynes, Will Calhoun, Jim Chapin, Al Miller."
After that, the manufacturers got word of what Dom was doing and with their funding the whole thing became national and then international. It's Dom's outlook on education that makes him such a success. He doesn't just stand there, talk, play, talk some more and field questions. His lectures are designed to be informal and humourous as well informative. Hey, it's all about motivation, kids.
"I don't have a desire to be rich and famous, money does not motivate me," he says, seriously. "I started playing when I was 12; I've been playing for 28 years; I've done nothing else in my life but play drums. I've just turned forty and I feel that I'm playing better than I ever have. I have more energy and enthusiasm for the art form. I've been very fortunate in my early age to have met some great instructors. Having seen Buddy up close countless times, having got to know Louis Bellson since 1976, having got to meet all these legends, I had instilled in me from a very young age a great respect for the art form. Buddy's fear on his death bed wasn't that he was going to die, it was that he wouldn't be able to play drums any more; it was interesting to hear that level of playing. Once you take the ego and financial end out of it, you're left with an art form that's passed on much like painting with the Da Vinci students or disciples. They carried on the art form, and, as with many of the great artists, they died penniless. But that was unimportant, what was important was to create and brand a memory of the moment that would be passed on verbally or with the picture. That's pretty much my direction; when I go out and do these tours, for the most part I lose money. If I was at home gigging and doing dates, I could make more money and have an easier life."
So what exactly does a Dom Famularo event entail? "I try to come up with themes that I will use at the event for someone to walk away with. This world tour, I've been asking the audience, 'What's the bottom line in business?' and they all yell out, 'Money!' Exactly. Then I ask them, 'What is the bottom line of an art form?' and sometimes you get, 'Creativity,' sometimes you get 'Feeling,' but I keep going until I get the word 'Expression'. I explain to them that it's not a sport; it's not about how fast you can play or how loud you can hit or how many girls you can pick up... well, that last one's important, but it's not the bottom line. Once they realize that, I tell them that it is the audience that is in control of the artist. If you want more out of a performance, you are in control. I don't play until I have communicated with the audience enough for me to know who they are and them to know who I am. I always have some funny stories to tell, and when they're relaxed I tell them, 'Now I'm ready to play.'"
Now it's the next part that tells you the most about Dom as a person and a performer. After he's played for his audience, he asks them what they think the most important and powerful word in life is. "When you use this word all the time," he emphasizes, "you're guaranteed to have a higher quality life, therefore your artistic expression gets better. The word is 'enthusiasm'."
Okay, this all sounds a bit strange, and very West Coast, but it works. Dom's clin... events are incredibly popular, everyone leaves feeling good about themselves; I've never heard a bad report of one.
"One of my highest goals is to inspire people to aspire. If you can make somebody feel so good about themselves that they walk away saying, 'I want to become better as a person and as a drummer,' there's not enough money that could possibly reward you for that feeling. So people at least remember 'expression', 'enthusiasm' and feel better about themselves. When I leave town, my job is done, it's on to the next one."
As I said, Dom loves drummers - You've probably picked up on this. He feels that drummers are better at communicating and getting together than any other type of musician. "Drummers will share information freely. Give a guitarist tight leather pants, hairspray and a mirror and they're happy." Hmmm, a little general I feel, but, while obviously he's joking, he does genuinely feel that drummers arc more of a solid community. Only in the States, say I.
"Because it's a non-melodic instrument, we're on our own for the most part in a group situation. To play the instrument, there's a certain assertive and aggressive quality that you have to have. In schools, the people that play drums are usually not the brightest students, as 1 wasn't. It's not that it's an easier instrument, but you can get satisfaction out of it quickly. Those are usually the most undisciplined students, they're the ones who always forgot their music and couldn't read music, so what do you do in a band in the early days of schooling? You take the most undisciplined kid, tell them to stand up in the back of the room and give them a pair of sticks and no music. So we create havoc! Of course we bond together, we're all like Robin Hoods, man; we're all just having some fun. We're all of the same ilk."
Given Dom's opinions on drumming being an art form, and the fact that he doesn't consider session work to be fulfilling that art, I asked him whether there was any lower limit to it as an art. For example, would he consider the least technical of drummers to be artists per se? "Absolutely!" he cries. "Not all art is great art. I have seen paintings by artists I know I could paint better than, and I'm not a painter. The point is that when I research more of where the artists came from, I understand more of' his or her expression. If you take the time to analyze the expression, say a drummer's playing four beats to a measure, the simplest beat in the world, what he's creating is feel, and that feels good. That drummer's function as an artist works. I've heard young, unschooled kids play who were so raw and so naturally wonderful, and they had terrible technique but the feel they created within that situation was really wonderful art. Art is just a feeling."
And what of the soloist, such as Dom? I put forward my own opinion here, which is that solo drums aren't generally something that anyone other than drummers would want to listen to and, er... he disagrees. "I disagree 1,000 percent," replies Dom, in a strangely fatherly manner. "Look at what Terry Bozzio's doing. Look at Oscar Peterson, out doing a solo tour and he plays great, you love it. Yes, that's a melodic instrument, but I had a conversation with Terry Bozzio and I told him that if there's one drum set artist that will take drumming into the year 2000, it is him, and that he must accept the responsibility of his talents. At first he was a little bit taken aback by this because he didn't know if he wanted to go out and do this solo thing, he said he didn't enjoy it. I said, it's past whether you enjoy it or not, you are so talented, you must do it. I'm a firm believer that art is not born from 'I can', it's born from 'I must'. I have been blessed with the talent of being able to play a solo, and when people come by and sit and listen to me solo for 40 minutes... The first thing people think is, Oh, a drum solo for 40 minutes, give me a break! But when I can hold an eight year old child and his mother and 600 people in a room and I don't hear a peep out of' them for 40 minutes, then we are on to something. Will it ever be something that will ever be accepted as the norm, as a commercial thing> Maybe not, but I guarantee that if I walk into 90 percent of' homes around the world, you don't see any quality art either, no paintings, no sculptures. People have a tendency to rebel against art generally. Terry's onto something, and I am prodding him like he's never been prodded before." Terry, as you may or may not know, has started doing public solo drum concerts on a large scale.
I have to admit that I was somewhat skeptical about Dom's whole concept before I met him. I'd heard of him, I'd seen him in tons of photos in Sabian catalogues with his huge grin and arms round the world's great drummers and I'd always thought, but this guy doesn't even have a gig; he works for drum companies; how in touch can he be? It seems that he is in touch. He speaks articulately and with conviction about his whole concept (and it is exactly that - a fully realized concept, with bells on) and you can't help but sec the sense in it. Drumming is an art, and Dom is a very good teacher; his teaching goes beyond technique and is therefore valid to everyone. If anyone on this earth is meant to be an ambassador for percussion, then it's certainly Dom.
"Now we have Terry doing what he's doing, we're onto something completely different, and as the year 2000 rolls around, we're going to start seeing drum set as a much more accepted art form by itself. And I think we're going to get back into more drum solos at concerts." Oh, so it's not all good news then. Anyway, the last word is definitely Dom's, and he's got a challenge for you all: "I challenge the people that come to my lectures - and many times it's guitarists and bass players that come along too - I challenge them to dream, I challenge them to feel an expression, to have the enthusiasm to challenge their talents. If somebody comes to a drum lecture, they have musical talent; not everyone has musical talent, it's a gift, it's your responsibility. You must nurture that talent and develop it, take lessons and take it to the furthest level you can. Secondly, you must share it. I challenge everyone to dream, to take their dream with that talent as far as they can. That's how we'll progress, keep the art form alive and pay tribute to our forefathers." His serious expression cracks into that grin, "Say hallelujah! "
Back to the Education Page.