You never know how something can boomerang back to you. Erik Kretz is the drummer for Stone Temple Pilots, and I read something in a magazine years ago that said he played a Gretsch drum kit in the studio. This was unusual for a rock drummer, especially in the 90s, when it seemed like most of the major bands’ drummers played Pearl, Tama, or Yamaha drums. Gretsch is an older, well-established company, but they’re arguably more well-known for their guitars, and many of the prominent Gretsch drummers play other styles of music like jazz or funk. For this reason, a connection between Stone Temple Pilots and Gretsch drums planted itself in my brain. (Kretz’s main kit is GMS, not Gretsch, but the mind works in mysterious ways.)

In 2004, I was in a music shop looking for a type of cymbal. Some stores have a drum kit set up in the cymbal room so you can test them out while playing the full instrument instead of in a vacuum. The kit in this room happened to be a Gretsch Catalina Elite, and I fell in love. It was smaller, with an 18” bass drum instead of the standard 22” on a rock kit, and it perfectly suited the jazz music I was just starting to play. It was very reasonably priced, and I made an impulse purchase. I’ve still got it too, even if it’s not set up at the moment:

Most drum sets don’t come with a snare drum, just the toms and bass drum, but this one did. That snare never sounded quite right to me, and I couldn’t get it in tune. It turned out that the wrap on the snare drum was misaligned, so there was no way to get the drum head to sit properly. I had to remove the wrap to get it to sound functional, so I used a blow dryer to melt the glue and peeled it off. Even then, I still didn’t like the sound, so I donated it to a community organization that was running a garage sale to raise money.

About 10 years later, a friend’s band asked me to sub for their main drummer on a few gigs, and they said I could use the kit they had in their practice space. Guess which snare was set up on that kit? A Gretsch Catalina Elite with the wrap peeled off. Since there was probably only one of those in existence, let alone in Central Jersey, I knew exactly where it had come from. One person’s trash is another’s treasure, and so forth.

Programming Note:

It’s only the third issue, but I’ve already broken my strict rule of going alphabetically by album title through my collection with numbers before letters… sort of. The name of the album is “Purple,” but it doesn’t say that name anywhere on the album cover. On the back, it says “12 Gracious Melodies,” and that’s how I’ve always referred to it, rightly or wrongly. Okay, it’s wrongly. Still, the next newsletter is going to feature another early-90s rap album, and I didn’t want that genre to take up two of the first three JCJ issues when it doesn’t represent what most of the newsletter is going to be about.