Herb Wasserman: A Different Drummer

Everybody is a drummer. Either a future drummer ("I just bought a drum set for my cellar") or a past drummer ("playing drums put me through law school"). If they don�t play air guitar, today�s kids play air drums...It�s hard to get respect even though some big people have told me how they envy me. I just remind them of the salary differential and they go back to reality.

Herb Wasserman was a "famous unknown" who made an original life for himself, and his memoir gives the reader an inside picture of life in the music industry from the 1940�s through the 1960�s, as well as some contemporary history interspersed with humor and a bit of philosophy. Herb, a member of Local 655 since 1947 and a long-time member of Local 802, chronicles his beginnings in Coney Island through his travels and his many years as part of the New York City musical community.

He tells about playing with Stan Getz before Getz was famous, about playing in clubs while Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, or Charlie Parker were playing next door. Wasserman was the consummate club-date drummer in the heyday of clubs. He played for Lester Young, Tony Bennett, Peggie Lee, Lena Horne, and even declined the offer to be Georgia Brown�s drummer. His singing debut on a recording featured Edie Gorme and Alan Jeffries ("Flying Saucer"), and he was in the first jazz group featured onstage in a first-run Broadway musical ("Me & Juliet", where he got to dance with a chorus girl�in her first show�by the name of Shirley McLaine).

Unfortunately, the man who told Elvis Presley that he played too loud and drummed while Walter Cronkite did a striptease died days before his memoirs arrived from the publisher, but he left behind a colorful record of life as a club-date musician.

A DIFFERENT DRUMMER, Herb Wasserman, Writers Club Press, 2000. 267 pages (trade paperback), $14.95.