Raymond Levierby Rick Van Horn
(article appeared in Modern Drummer May, 1995)
Photo by Jen Levy
Twenty-five-year-old Raymond Levier began his drumming career as a youngster in much the same way many other kids did. His father had a drumkit in the basement, and Ray started banging on it until his grandmother said "That's enough." Later, a friend who had just started taking lessons introduced Ray to some basic backbeats. By the age of twelve Ray had mastered those beats and was just learning to keep time when he was involved in a terrible accident. While he as sleeping in a wooden clubhouse with his brother and a friend, a candle fell and ignited Ray's sleeping bag. Trapped in the ensuing fire, Ray suffered third degree burns over most of his body including the loss of virtually all of the digits on both hands. "For the first five years after Raymond left the hospital," says his mother, Emily, "Our lives were totally involved with him as a patient, he was not a person. Everything revolved around surgeries and reconstruction procedures."
Yet throughout his ordeal and subsequent recovery. Ray's determination to play the drums remained strong. "Prior to the accident," Ray recalls, "I had gone to a county fair, where I saw a beautiful chrome Slingerland kit. It looked so neat under the lights and sounded so great. I wanted those drums very much. Later, in the hospital after the accident, my dad was trying to cheer me up, He asked me what would make me happy, and I told him I wanted to play the drums, and I wanted a chrome Slingerland set. He told me he'd bring it in as a Christmas present, and set it up right on the floor of my room in the hospital so I could look at it. That made me feel great. I didn't learn until later that when my dad left the room, the nurse took him aside and said, "I know you're trying to make your son feel better, and that's nice but don't fill his head with expectations that can't ever happen. He'll never be able to play the drums." "Of course," says Ray, in a manner characteristic of his quiet determination, "That was someone else's limited view of things."
"My dad was hit pretty hard by my accident," Ray continues, "and by the realization that, according to most expert opinions, I wasn't going to be able to do anything in my life. So after I left the hospital, he just sort of went along with me when I kept saying that I didn't care what anybody said, I was going to play the drums. But he told me later that when he took me out to look at drumkits, and saw me pick up some sticks and try to play, he started crying. He hadn't realized the intensity of my willingness and determination to play."
Once he saw that, he was convinced and I got my first kit. It wasn't the chrome Slingerland set, but I wasn't one to complain. "When I got out of the hospital... Ray says, "I had no muscle tone at all. I'd been sitting in a bed for half a year doing nothing, and I essentially had no hands. Drumming gave me my physical strength back, along with the ability to believe in myself the confidence that if I could play the drums, I could do anything."
Determination to play the drums is one thing; finding a way to make it happen is another. When Ray first returned home from the hospital, his hands were still badly swollen. "'They looked like balloons" Ray recalls. "But I still was eager to figure out how I could play. I could hold the stick with my right hand, because I still had a good grip, But my left hand was more like a mitten that didn't have any digits. So I asked my mom to bandage the sticks to my hands. I played for five minutes and my hands started bleeding all over the place. I got depressed and quit trying for a while. But as my hands got better, I wanted to play again. By this time I was a freshman in high school and I wanted to be in the band."
Desire and necessity can both inspire creativity, and Ray approached his problem creatively. He couldn't grip drumsticks the way other drummers could, so he began to experiment with other gripping methods. "Initially" says Ray. "I carved a stick down so that it would wedge into the grip I had left. It didn't work well, because it caused the stick to lose most of its playability. But I was having fun being able to play at all. Then one day I found a karate practice glove in a parking lot, It had pads on one side and nothing on the other except rings that hold it on the fingers. I thought, '"What if I just duct taped the stick onto the glove and put the glove on my hand?" That worked fairly well, and I was able to gig out and around. The stick was a dead fish it didn't have any rebound at all but I could play backbeats pretty well. And it really strengthened the muscles of my wrist, because I had to go both into and out of the stroke with my wrist instead of relying on the rebound.
Once he had discovered a workable gripping method. Ray wanted to further develop his playing abilities. He started taking lessons from a local teacher named Sol LaRocca, Ray credits LaRocca with being more like a father than a teacher over the past seven years, "When I first started the lessons," says Ray, "this Italian guy came over and said, 'Hey, man how ya doin'?' He took a look at my hands, and said, "Okay, we'll work something out," This was even before I had the glove. "He was open to everything." LaRocca started Rayon the drum rudiments which he didn't enjoy. "I wanted to play rock," says Ray, smiling. "So I discontinued the lessons after a while. But four years later, I called him up and we got started again. I began practicing like a madman. putting four hours a day into rudiments, another three to four hours into books, and another hour into just playing. I' ve been doing that for the past three years. Sal really pointed me in the right direction."
As Ray's playing skills improved, he became more and more dissatisfied with his glove-grip method. So he started to investigate the possibility of a surgical procedure to give him a thumb on his left hand. He approached a reconstructive specialist at Boston's Shriners hospital. "I told him that I wanted to be a professional drummer," says Ray, "and to do that I had to be able to hold a stick. He said, 'We don't get requests like that every day. You've got it!' So they cut the tissue necessary to pull the thumb out of the palm of my hand, held it out through a pinning apparatus, and now I have a thumb. I came home all psyched to play," Ray continues, but I had to be careful because the skin hadn't completely healed over. and a lot of nerves were near the surface. It's no problem today, but at the time it really hurt because I was banging on those nerves with a stick. I found that using ProMark Stick Wrap was a real help, because it not only cushioned that impact but also gave me a sticky grip to help me hold the stick better. That's better than using the rubber bands I had been using to hold the left stick in place, because now I can comp with my left hand and I can put down the sticks.
In order to develop his musical abilities even further, Ray enrolled in the prestigious jazz program at New Jersey's William Paterson College. Why a jazz program for a drummer who "wanted to play rock?" Ray replies, "The more you know the farther you go. I'd go to clinics and see drummers like Smitty Smith, Steve Smith, Dennis Chambers, and Terry Bozzio all guys who can play the heck out of fusion, funk, and rock and I realized that they can also swing their butts off. They grew up on jazz and got where they are today by applying what they learned. That made me realize how important it was to check out the origins of drumming. Tony Williams said a neat thing once, "To really understand the music you have to know where it came from, and only then can you have something to work with Ray studied at William Paterson for three years, but was forced to take a semester off when he developed tendonitis in his wrist. I was in two groups at school and practicing five hours a day," he recalls. I was also playing with a hard rock band and gigging out a lot. And I had started practicing three nights a week with a local band. So I was extremely busy. I didn't stop playing, even though the wrist hurt more and more. But finally it got so bad that I couldn't play for two months, and that was a major downer. So I say to anybody who feels any pain in their wrists: Do yourself a favor back off immediately. Put ice on it or do whatever you have to do. Eat all the healthy stuff, and get better."
Following his break and a recuperative regimen, Ray returned to complete his studies. But he had even greater ambitions for his personal development, including an exploration of the spiritual side of drumming. "I wanted to develop my own thing outside of school," he says. "I wanted to study privately on the drums and to also study composition and writing. That's something I hope to develop somewhere in the future. My spiritual goal is to take drumming to the deepest part of myself, to share that with people, and to somehow channel these powers of the spirit into my drumming. I've been experimenting with some of the Eastern spiritual philosophies. Tai Chi, Karate, Tae Kwan Do...they all believe that all of the power you get is from your spiritual center. It's all about energy and focusing from the very essence of who you are, and not from the outside. I think that the reason I developed my tendonitis problem was that I was playing outside of myself too much."
