Masala Grier, Steve "Paco" GRIER: Question. SPEAKER: Uh huh? GRIER: We conga players, we used to play right here on the sidewalks, out there in front of Shombergs, you know, oh yeah. First of all it got so - we created some of the gridlock and the Columbus Police Department didn't exactly go along with the idea so after we got a little crowd there, the Columbus Police Department would break it up but it didn't stop it, we would continue to go up to there, you know. So um... SPEAKER: That's cool. GRIER: Yeah, so that's - there was another point I wanted to make, what was it? Um... SPEAKER: What you were doing at that time? GRIER: Huh? SPEAKER: Like something else about what you were doing at that time? GRIER: No it was something prior to that - I said I'd get back to that, or long story, or something like that? SPEAKER: Oh well you said something about when you were out in California. You kind of told us about that part. GRIER: See at that time I was dodging the draft. SPEAKER: [laughs] Oh really? GRIER: Oh yeah, I was a draft dodger. Oh no, I burnt my draft card and everything, I wasn't going, and it just so happened that when I went out to California, which in my mind wasn't the same thing as Canada cause, first of all I didn't want to go to Canada cause, you know, the situation where you go to Canada, you can't come back. Anyway, I was out there a year. I was right across the street the same day Bobby Kennedy was shot. SPEAKER: Really? GRIER: Yeah, I was playing at a club called Wilshire Boulevard, it was known as Wilshire Boulevard in California and so I was playing with a group called "Asson Alexander Quartet" and I came outside during break and they had the place roped off. I said, "Well, what's going on?" a man said, "Well someone just shot Bobby Kennedy," I said, "what?!" You know, and the thing about it is my cousin at the time was working on a - as a matter of fact I had a gig with my cousin but he had let me sit in with a group called "The Big Four" and he was working on Bobby Kennedy's campaign at the time, you know so. SPEAKER: Wow. GRIER: So that's what I wanted to get back to, that's how all that came about. After a while my father called me and said, "Hey man, you better join the Boy scouts or something," I said, "why?" He says, "The MP's came to the front and back door looking for you." SPEAKER: [laughing] That's why I'm not there! GRIER: [laughing] So I had to make a decision, well I had to tell the group well that I gotta go, you know, so what I did, came back here to Columbus and tried to get into the Air force but the waitlist was too long so I ended up talking to a Navy recruiter... SPEAKER: Uh huh. GRIER: See I know if the Army called me they would have gave me a knife and a loincloth and drop me over there right in the middle of that crap that was going on. SPEAKER: Right. GRIER: So I was fortunate enough to get into the Navy and you know, I told myself well you have a two year, uh, something; you have a two year active and a four year inactive reserve. I said I'll take it because they're not gonna inform you unless you ask questions. I said a lot of people think the Navy is four years, but they had a two year thing so I did my two years and I didn't have to go to Nam or anything like that. SPEAKER: Yeah, I was gonna say Vietnam didn't really have a lot of sea battles. [laughing] GRIER: No, no, we stayed on the heel and [inaudible] [laughing] GRIER: In the Mediterranean so it was ok, you know. SPEAKER: I feel like more people who dodged the draft, if they knew about that there wouldn't have been so likely to go to Canada. GRIER: Yeah, see the thing about it is, what really convinced me of not going over there cause a friend of mine, one of my best friends, we gave him a party - a going away party - he was getting ready to ship over to Nam and he wasn't over there two weeks before he stepped on one of those claymore mines, that's when I said nah. Plus, you know, Ali at the time, I was a fan of Ali and I said well Ali ain't going I'm not going. SPEAKER: [laughing] GRIER: You know so, but yeah. SPEAKER: Aside from a little bit of relaxation time, what did you do in the Navy? GRIER: I was just a deck seaman, you know, getting the lines ready and ship maintenance and that type of thing. Everyone had to take their turn steering the ship, we had to learn navigation procedures and that type of thing. SPEAKER: How did they do that training? GRIER: Well we had to - a lot of the training you got in boot camp anyway - they had these makeshift bridges and stuff like that, instruments and you had to read degrees and stuff like that and so all that came into play. When I was first on the ship, man I was tripping up but I didn't expect - you know I looked up, I looked all the way up, that's how humongous the ship was and I said man it beats dodging bullets. But anyway, the procedure was everybody stood and watches and that type of thing. Everybody had their turn on the bridge and everything. I said the most, that I remember, the most thing that came to mind was I was on the bridge one night and we were going - are you familiar with the Bermuda Triangle? SPEAKER: Ok. GRIER: Yeah, ok, we going through - as a matter of fact the captain informed everybody that we were in range of the Bermuda Triangle; everybody knew about all these disappearances and all this other stuff. SPEAKER: Did everybody freak out? GRIER: Uh huh. We were kind of excited about the whole thing, you know. [laughing] GRIER: I said ok, so, but we did have a problem as we went through the Bermuda Triangle - as a matter of fact I was on the ship steering - I had the helm at the time. SPEAKER: Oh really? GRIER: And I said wait a minute, I told the captain something is wrong with the helm cause see when I - there was no pull in it. It was just like loose, and the ship was going all kinds of ways and so what happened was the propeller just stopped functioning. It just wasn't happening, you couldn't steer the ship or nothing. We had to call another ship to come tow us out of there. So that's the only thing that happened to us in that triangle. SPEAKER: I was gonna say, because that sounds like the beginning of pretty much every story about lost at sea in the Bermuda Triangle. Engine malfunction then they lost contact... GRIER: Right, we had a malfunction but we didn't - luckily we didn't lose contact. SPEAKER: So after you, alright, so you were talking about doing some performance stuff before like when you were high school age, right? GRIER: Uh huh. SPEAKER: And then your trip to California and then your stint in the Navy, what happened after that after you got off active duty? GRIER: Ok, uh, well I would always - after I came back from active duty - was to look for a job. [laughing] That was the main goal but during that time my cousin and I were, we had some music gigs on the side and those type of things. As a matter of fact we played on campus, what's it called where you have all those concerts and stuff, right there on 12th Avenue? SPEAKER: Mershon? No. GRIER: No. SPEAKER #2: The Newport? GRIER: The Newport, yeah. SPEAKER #2: The Newport is the new name, there was a name before that, I can't recall. GRIER: Oh yeah. SPEAKER: #2: Back in the 70's early 80's GRIER: Yeah, back in the 70's, as a matter of fact we opened up - I don't know if you're familiar with Donald Bird and the Black Birds, are you familiar with Donald Bird? SPEAKER: No. [laughing] GRIER: Are you familiar with jazz? [laughing] [laughing] SPEAKER #2: I've heard of him before. GRIER: Donald Bird? Ok, trumpet player, he had a group called "The Black Birds" and my cousin's gig, which I was a member of, we opened up a show for him up there - what was the name of that... God. SPEAKER: #2: I wanted to say it started with an "A" because my parents... GRIER: The Agora, yeah, yeah. SPEAKER: I've heard of that. GRIER: Yeah, it was the Agora then. So you know, after I got out of the service I did little things like that, that was the extent of it. I went to school for occupational therapy, they had occupational therapy assistant two year program with that so I graduated from that and I was the only male in the class, so it was cool for me... SPEAKER: [laughing] Good place to meet girls. GRIER: I got a lot of help. [laughing] GRIER: And, I didn't have any difficulty getting a job because they were waiting for me to graduate because they had a job open for a therapist at the Columbus Psychiatric Hospital on West Broad St. SPEAKER: Ok. GRIER: And as a matter of fact on the other - are you familiar with Judge Yvette Brown, judge Brown? SPEAKER: Is that like on TV? GRIER: Yeah. SPEAKER: Yeah, I think so. GRIER: She was running or I don't know if it was campaigning, but I worked with her husband, her husband was Tony Brown. So he worked primarily with teenagers at the time with emotional problems and stuff like that and I worked with the mainlines like paranoid schizophrenics and people with depression - anything like that sort. And I had music therapy sessions and one of my patients who had about twenty some personalities and they were all fused at that time so what you do is you get them in an environment that they feel comfortable with and perhaps some of the personalities will exhibit themselves so we got him to talk and we had him in a - his name was Billy Milligan was his name - they had a big write up in the paper and everything. One personality was his main personality and he was an artist - as a matter of fact I have one of his paintings in case they come out with a movie that doesn't bling him. [laughing] [laughing] GRIER: I have something I can contribute for a little bit of, you know. [laughing] SPEAKER: Right. GRIER: So anyway, I had him in a session and he was on the drums and stuff, you know, and you wait for certain oddities to come out that would exhibit other personalities but they were so fused at the time that nothing happened. That was one of the interesting things but... SPEAKER: Because you're a percussionist right? GRIER: Right. SPEAKER: So were you playing still with different groups at this time? GRIER: Oh yeah. SPEAKER: Always? GRIER: Always, as a matter of fact I played with a lot of groups during that time, as a matter of fact I had - during a jazz and rib fest - I had eight gigs in eight different groups that whole weekend, you know. And they had a station at WBUI they had a jazz station and I sure do miss them. They had contests and they had blind fold contests where you had to figure out the artist - they would play the music and you would have to figure out who the artist was, the thing about it is that I won it so many times that they stopped having it. [laughing] GRIER: As a matter of fact I would call up to the station and I forget the DJ's name, say, "hey man, hey Paco man, you gonna have to stop calling," I said, "well hey look here, I have no control over what I know..." SPEAKER: Or how little everybody else knows. [laughing] GRIER: I said, "man we're gonna have to close up shop because you're winning," I think I won eight Lawrence Welk albums, a steak dinner, a t-shirt, you know. So I said, "Ok, I'll give you all a break man," so you know, I let him alone. But after a while they stopped and I figured I was the reason they stopped anyway. [laughing] SPEAKER: So was that like they would play a song and ok the first person who calls up with the right identification? GRIER: Right, right, and I was right there [laughing] by the phone, you know. SPEAKER: [laughing] So you were like winning us out of house and home. [laughing] GRIER: Right so they just discontinued the program to just because, you know, of what I did, I did a lot of damage. SPEAKER #2: Sounds like you have a pretty good ear for music. Do you find that when you play do you prefer to hear something by ear and then play it back or would you rather read it off of sheet paper? GRIER: Oh no, no, no, as far as sheet paper you can get the structure of the tune but I rather not confine myself to a music sheet, you know, because a lot of music comes from right here, that's where you fill in. As long as you know the structure of the tune you can go on from there - that's where improvisation comes in, you know. But as far as listening to it, that's how I basically learned how to - that was my first bit of education as far as learning the music was to listen because my parents would play a lot of jazz albums when I was growing up, history and that type of thing. So I got it at an early age because I remember my mother - because I used to beat up her pots and pans, I used to dent her pots and pans... [laughing] GRIER: So what she did, she take two Quaker Oats boxes together and I would be on the middle of the floor and I would be beating on them there and go. But getting back to your question about... SPEAKER #2: That was about, that was it. GRIER: Oh ok. SPEAKER: So like, did you mostly do that with jazz or like all kinds of music, playing from what you heard by ear? GRIER: Um, that's essentially it, listening mostly, more so than reading, the only time I would do any reading per se is like if I were playing with other groups and they had something specific. But all I had to do was, if we had a rehearsal, all I had to do was listen to the tune because [media cuts forward] I played it already anyway with other groups so it wasn't unique, you know. Of course as far as percussions go, they wanted something a little different for me to do but it was more of a listening thing as far as I'm concerned, music to sheet, it kind of took away - it was a primary use for the other instrumentation - not so much percussion. Because I played with a jazz group for ten years, I was their percussion for ten years and they just told me what they wanted and that's what I did. I went on the road - are you familiar with Monty Alexander, the piano player. SPEAKER #2: I haven't heard of him. GRIER: Ok, I was with him on the road for about for about a year. And that's the way he conducted, he never had any rehearsals, like Miles Davis, never had any rehearsals. We just, when it was time - cause I played in the North Sea Jazz Festival with him in Amsterdam and he would be on the stage and say, "tell the bass-player I want this certain time," and he would say, "Paco, you'll feel it, you'll just feel it." [laughing] GRIER: Ok, ok, so that was the totality of you know... SPEAKER: Oh we talked to, was it, Bobby Floyd, we were asking him about this, like when you play in an ensemble, do you practice or do you guys mostly work it out on the stage? GRIER: Oh ok, it varies with different groups and depending on the location like for the rib fest or something like that, we never rehearsed, but my Westside group that - no rehearsal, none. We'd get up there - as a matter of fact, it gives you the opportunity to be a little bit more creative, you don't know what's happening. So as long as you know the basic structure of the tune, you can carry on from there if you have the right type of musicians and I played with Bobby, I don't know if he mentioned it or not but we played [inaudible] for like two or three years. We played at this club called "My Brother's Place" that was the name of the place and it was during the 80's and people would come from Indiana, New York, just to come to hear us play and even musicians who were doing concerts that night would drop by and - Weather Report, you heard of Weather Report? SPEAKER: Wait is this a band? GRIER: The group Weather Report, yeah. SPEAKER: I've never heard of that band. GRIER: Yall need to do some research. [laughing] GRIER: Write that down, Weather Report. [laughing] They used to, we played one weekend and they were doing a concert down at the palace I believe it was and Zazalenie was a piano player at the time, would come up and they would sit in and ask questions like, "where can I get some 'aqua-poco-gous'?" and I can't help you. [laughing] GRIER: I can't help you. [laughing] SPEAKER: So what do you ask for... GRIER: Yeah, yeah, yeah right. But that was everything. SPEAKER #2: Were you ever in, like the high school bands? GRIER: No, I was strictly football. I was strictly into the football, man, I was trying to get me a scholarship at the time but music cut it short because my junior year, was it my junior, yeah my junior year I decided - I was making $60 a week somewhere playing music - and I kind of rationalized a bit, so you know, they're not paying for you to play football so why not just go and stick with the music? So that's what my rationalization was. And then at the time when I stopped going to practices, you know, I told my father and he didn't know that I quit football. And so apparently it got out and he said, "Why didn't you tell me you quit football?" "I'm playing music and I get payed in music and stuff." And so he didn't talk to me for six months. Six whole months, I'd have friends over and we'd watch the football game or something like that and he would say little sarcastic remarks like, "I don't know what you're it for," and just keep walking. You know that type of thing like that but after a while we sat down and talked, had a father and son talk and he finally got over it and stuff he said, "some decisions you have to make decisions and you don't know whether they'll be good or bad, you know, but you made the decision so," everything became cool with us after that. All we had to do was sit down but it was a little tense for a while because like most fathers they live through their sons and so I kind of disappointed him in that way. SPEAKER: That was what I was going to ask, like why was he all about football and not interested, not in to your budding musical career. GRIER: Right, you know, and as a matter of fact he didn't even know a budding musical career. SPEAKER: [laughing] GRIER: You know, he didn't know I was beginning to take it real serious, so you know whatever. SPEAKER #3: So you never took drum lessons? GRIER: Oh I did, yeah, as a matter of fact I did. I used to take drum lessons down on High Street, at a place on High Street I used to learn how to play the drums. My teacher's name was Rags Anderson, you know, and he would play these - he was in this time capsule and he would play this stuff that he'd play in the 30's and 20's, I said this ain't me. SPEAKER: So you wanted to go on to like contemporary stuff. GRIER: Yeah, contemporary, I'm kickin' butt when he's not even there. [laughing] GRIER: So when he gets back in the room he says, "Ok, one paradiddle, left paradiddle," you know this type of thing. I said no this ain't happening for me so I stopped going. So maybe it was a good thing because my father pound my drums anyway, that's what happened to the drums so I decided - on top of that I wasn't able to do the lessons described because I couldn't afford to get the cymbals at the time so I couldn't do the lessons and the teacher let me borrow the cymbals to take home but that kind of played out after a while so, no, later for it. So I got into hand drums and stuff. A friend of mine used to play, not very well, but he played them, he said, "Steve, you interested in buying a conga drum?" I said, "Yeah," so he sold me a conga for thirty-five dollars, so what I did, I used to go in my room, lock the door and pull John Coltrane albums - you familiar with Coltrane? You better be. SPEAKER: I'll play along. [laughing] GRIER: I used to play along with John Coltrane, it would be almost like I was on LSD or something like that cause it was like self-imposed Trane's album, that was a learning experience for me just listening to John Coltrane play. I used to listen to a lot of Mongo Santamaria and that type thing along with that and I would try to duplicate that - you familiar with Mongo? SPEAKER: Mhh hmm. GRIER: And I would try to duplicate what Mongo did on the congas and when I heard him do something I would do the same thing and I would jump up and down from excitement because I did the same thing he did. SPEAKER: So, just because I've been thinking about people I knew when I was in high school, drum players, and part of the reason it was not popular with their family was because it was loud. [Media cuts off]