The Great Secret

1986. Sitting in my office at Lorimar Telepictures. Culver City, L.A. Post Production supervisor; Dallas, Knotts Landing, Falconcrest, Hunter, etc. A good looking woman walks into my office and smiles: “You don’t know who I am.” She says. “I do know who you are.” I said. “You are a film inspector.” She nodded, ‘I am also a spy for the front office. They like you, they don’t want you leave. They know you are planning on quitting. They want to make you a vice president.” She smiled again.

“I have to leave.” I said.

“Why?” She says.

“Cause I just received some bootleg tapes of my drumming with Tim Buckley from his widow, from back in the Seventies and it’s really good.”

Her dark eyes lit up. “You  are a drummer?”

Back then it was dangerous to admit that I was a drummer. People mistrusted the idea of drummers in the high end corporate film industry. “Yeah. I was.”

“We knew you were different. You could dance- when we had the buy-out party from Turner on the lot. Where did you grow up?

“All over, last place was Miami. I played the drumset, congas, ”

“Are you a Congero?

“Si. y Timbalero.”

She smiled “Lets go dancing some time.”

“I’d like that a lot. But I’m still leaving Lorimar. I have to go back to playing the drums- or something connected with music. I don’t know what.”

“Good luck Mr. Helm. I’ll miss you.”

Then the life path grew very steep. It took years to understand what kind of drumming I was supposed to be doing. Because it did not exist back then. There were no shamanic drummers working with communities and groups. There was primarily pop music. And Jazz. That’s it. So I decided to do something foolhardy but necessary, teach groove meditation drumming. It was different than anything else. It was not music. it was more important than that. Creating it out of thin air.

When I realized that was my secret, then everything else got easier.

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