BOB

I first encountered Bob Taylor at a farmer’s market where he sat playing his drums. I’m not sure he had a tip jar out.

“So, are you a welder or a musician?” I ask. Not that someone couldn’t be both.

We are in Bob Taylor’s “rust garden” on his family’s property near Welling, Oklahoma, which sits on top of a plateau in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains. The garden consists of unfinished musical metal drums Bob left outside to become part of the landscape. Nearby, old tractor implements play backup.

“Oh, I’m a musician,” he says. “I was born with six fingers.” He holds up both hands to show a right hand with five fingers and a left hand with a thumb and partial index and middle fingers, a cigarette perched between them.

“I’ve always played guitar, some piano, but in 2011 I saw a video about these Hang drums…” pronounced Hong…”out of Switzerland. They were very rare and very expensive, but the people who made these didn’t put a patent on them. They encouraged people to build them. I was one of those people. They warned before we started that this would be an investment in time and energy. And it is. Tuning one of these drums is probably the most difficult thing I’ve ever tried to do.”

The drums are each based on a scale or a mode or a couple of chords. A mode is  a musician’s term for a variation on a scale, because there can be beginnings and endings beyond the DO RE MI FA SO LA TI DO that Julie Andrews taught in The Sound of Music.

After taking a moment to get a term and pronunciation right he picks up a drum and hits the center shape. “These are hyperbolic paraboloids. Think of a Pringle’s potato chip. Or a saddle. You’ve got your whole note here,” -- he hits the center peak – “and nodal lines that can be hit or muted. There is a fifth, and an octave, created with stress and tension.”

That’s a lot for non-musicians. In musical theory, a chord in its most basic form is three notes consisting of the root, which is the base name of the chord, the third note up on the scale, and the fifth note up the scale. In Julie Andrews’ memorable song, DO would be the root and adding MI (the third note) and SO (the fifth note) would make a simple DO chord. But musicians don’t speak the Julie Andrews language. To them, a full C scale is C D E F G A B C, and a C chord consists of the notes C, E, and G. Adding the fifth, or in this case a G to the root C always sounds good. Bob’s drums have that fifth available nearby every note on the drum, along with the higher octave of the root. It’s Julie’s DO, SO, and the higher DO.

The effect is hypnotic and ethereal. There are harmonies flowing everywhere, and vibrations resonate long after the notes are struck.

A large drum can take 300 hours to create. Lacking professional machine tools, Bob turned to another source of production. He began cutting small propane tanks and welding the tops and bottoms together to make a different kind of drum. He cut into a top, making a parallelogram minus the bottom cut, so that the resulting piece of suspended metal would vibrate when struck. By making his cuts the right length he tuned the piece of metal to a note. Then that piece of metal was cut down its middle, essentially making it a tuning fork that vibrates when hit. Once that first note was established, he made similar cuts of different lengths for the other notes of the scale. Because chords are made up of combinations of notes, he put those notes close to one another. A wide hand strike over the right combination of cut pieces creates a chord.

He built and sold a lot of drums, but eventually had to decide - is he a welder or a musician? He’d already answered that. “I built them because I wanted them, not because I wanted a career selling them. It was so hard on my hands that I couldn’t be a builder and a player. I’ll just play what I have.”

When he was young Bob’s older brothers would bring home 8-tracks of 1970s rock such as Boston and Pink Floyd. He would sit with headphones and marvel at the sounds coming through them. His parents had an organ in the house, and although he didn’t play it he would play notes and put his head against the wooden body, feeling the vibrations, learning how harmony and dissonance worked and felt.

I admit to him that while I say I play “at” guitar and can sound passable, I don’t really understand what I’m doing, and that my recent acquisition of a bass has helped me understand music theory in a way that rote memorization did not.

He smiles and says “That’s how it all is. It’s all muscle memory. You’ve got to be playing for hours every day to be able to just think of something and do it. Anything that anyone hears me play I’ve played a thousand times.”

“When I perform with the drums I don’t even like to be on stage or mic’d through a PA. I think these are better acoustic. People have gotten mad at me, but it works for me and the audience if I get off the stage and go amongst them.”

I ask if he doesn’t like attention. “I don’t mind attention, but I don’t like being in a position where I’m trying to get attention.”

It’s a continual struggle for creative people. They are compelled to do what they do, but the culture respects salesmanship and marketability. Those are different skills with different rewards. And practicing them requires an investment in time and energy, just like making a drum or playing a chord progression a thousand times. You must choose what you practice, and saying no to the culture can be difficult.

There is a strong sense of what he is and is not, although, like all of us, he keeps figuring that out. He learned to weld because he had a need for it. He has a sound engineering degree because he was interested in it, but he lives in Welling, not New York or Los Angeles. He makes and records music, but not towards money or fame. “I refuse to market myself. I have three CDs but no place online for anyone to stream them. That’s my social media peeve. Anyone can say, ‘Hey, look at me!’ It’s so vain. I do what I do and if people like it they like it, but I’m not going to try to sell it.”

“I wasn’t trying to create anything to market. I was just trying to…create,” he says, before putting down the cigarette and picking up a drum to play Amazing Grace.

Both photos by Bob Taylor