What bands had the greatest influence on you as a young musician? I have what we call big ears, meaning from thes- tart I listened to all kinds of stuff. The influences are pretty wide-ranging. When I first started lis- tening to rock n roll and getting my own albums and playing my first set of drums I went through a few different phases in hindsight rather quickly. I remember going through the British rock phase and I was listening to nothing but the Kinks and the Stones and the Who. That kind of stuff and
granted that everybody heard those bands, but as I got older and especially now I’m really realizing a lot of those bands were regional. People outside the south didn’t hear the Atlanta Rhythm Section or Wet Willie and stuff like that so I feel really fortunate that I grew up listening to that stuff be- cause it’s a deep catalog of great music. That stuff was a big influence on me just as music as a whole and the types up drumming I ended up playing
Preston and Aileen at Red Rocks, 2019
then I started getting into jazz, listening to a lot of standard jazz and traditional jazz. Then I got into American bands looking back on it each phase didn’t last very long. But all put together it was the one big umbrella of influences that I had. Something early on that really influenced me was when Electric Light Orchestra’s Out of the Blue came out in 1977 at the same time that I got my first set of drums. That band really caught my ear as a young musician. I got every one of their al- bums and started to build my collection. But, like I said I listened to everything British rock, electric blues rock, Hendrix stuff. All the bands that had great drummers were of course on my list. And because of being here in the south of course it was southern rock. You sort of had your creden- tials if you knew all the Skynyrd songs and all of the Atlanta Rhythm songs, Molly Hatchet, and the Outlaws, the list goes on and on for the south- ern rock bands. Back then we all took it for
I basically taught myself how to play. There weren’t really any drum set teachers other the man that got me my first set of drums that started that little band in our church. He showed me some basics and I took those basics and the little bit of for- mal training I had with that snare drum for that one year. Then I just trained my ear to pick out what the drum set was doing on a song on the radio and I would sit down and try and duplicate what I heard a lot of times. When I go back and look at how I taught myself how to play popular songs the end result was correct, but how I played it was not the exact same way the drummer who recorded it played it. I was going off audio only. We didn’t have
MTV yet or YouTube so there was no way to see unless you saw something on TV or in a concert you didn’t know what a drummer was doing, so you just tried to figure it out yourself. And that’s what I did. I would go home from school everyday and go straight to my room, stack a bunch of al- bums up on my record changer and I would start playing along and I would play along until supper time or if I had a heavy load of homework. After I got my drums, I would usually do my homework after supper. So that was how I taught myself how to play because of that I have sort of a different style. I’m not what they call a schooled drummer. I can’t read music as far as drum music goes. I did learn how to read vocal music charts singing in my mom’s choir at church, so I learned how to read that music, but I never learned how to read drum music. Sometimes I wished I did but it is what it is, and I learned how to play and it got me to where I’m at.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68
