1I gave a series of lectures in physics that the Addison­Wesley Company made into a book, and one time at lunch we were discussing what the cover of the book should look like. I thought that since the lectures were a combination of the real world and mathematics, it would be a good idea to have a picture of a drum, and on top of it some mathematical diagrams ­­ circles and lines for the nodes of the oscillating drumheads, which were discussed in the book.

2The book came out with a plain, red cover, but for some reason, in the preface, there's a picture of me playing a drum. I think they put it in there to satisfy this idea they got that "the author wants a drum somewhere." Anyway, everybody wonders why that picture of me playing drums is in the preface of the Feynman Lectures, because it doesn't have any diagrams on it, or any other things which would make it clear. (It's true that I like drumming, but that's another story.) At Los Alamos things were pretty tense from all the work, and there wasn't any way to amuse yourself: there weren't any movies, or anything like that. But I discovered some drums that the boys' school, which had been there previously, had collected: Los Alamos was in the middle of New Mexico, where there are lots of Indian villages. So I amused myself ­­ sometimes alone, sometimes with another guy ­­ just making noise, playing on these drums. I didn't know any particular rhythm, but the rhythms of the Indians were rather simple, the drums were good, and I had fun.

3Sometimes I would take the drums with me into the woods at some distance, so I wouldn't disturb anybody, and would beat them with a stick, and sing. I remember one night walking around a tree, looking at the moon, and beating the drum, making believe I was an Indian.

4One day a guy came up to me and said, "Around Thanksgiving you weren't out in the woods beating a drum, were you?"

5"Yes, I was," I said.

6"Oh! Then my wife was right!" Then he told me this story: One night he heard some drum music in the distance, and went upstairs to the other guy in the duplex house that they live in, and the other guy heard it too. Remember, all these guys were from the East. They didn't know anything about Indians, and they were very interested: the Indians must have been having some kind of ceremony, or something exciting, and the two men decided to go out to see what it was.

7As they walked along, the music got louder as they came nearer, and they began to get nervous. They realized that the Indians probably had scouts out watching so that nobody would disturb their ceremony. So they got down on their bellies and crawled along the trail until the sound was just over the next hill, apparently. They crawled up over the hill and discovered to their surprise that it was only one Indian, doing the ceremony all by himself ­­ dancing around a tree, beating the drum with a stick, chanting.

8The two guys backed away from him slowly, because they didn't want to disturb him: He was probably setting up some kind of spell, or something.

9They told their wives what they saw, and the wives said, "Oh, it must have been Feynman ­­ he likes to beat drums."

10"Don't be ridiculous!" the men said. "Even Feynman wouldn't be that crazy!" So the next week they set about trying to figure out who the Indian was. There were Indians from the nearby reservation working at Los Alamos, so they asked one Indian, who was a technician in the technical area, who it could be. The Indian asked around, but none of the other Indians knew who it might be, except there was one Indian whom nobody could talk to. He was an Indian who knew his race: He had two big braids down his back and held his head high; whenever he walked anywhere he walked with dignity, alone; and nobody could talk to him. You would be afraid to go up to him and ask him anything; he had too much dignity. He was a furnace man. So nobody ever had the nerve to ask this Indian, and they decided it must have been him. (I was pleased to find that they had discovered such a typical Indian, such a wonderful Indian, that I might have been. It was quite an honor to be mistaken for this man.) So the fella who'd been talking to me was just checking at the last minute ­­ husbands always like to prove their wives wrong ­­ and he found out, as husbands often do, that his wife was quite right.

11I got pretty good at playing the drums, and would play them when we had parties.

12I didn't know what I was doing; I just made rhythms ­­ and I got a reputation: Everybody at Los Alamos knew I liked to play drums.

13When the war was over, and we were going back to "civilization," the people there at Los Alamos teased me that I wouldn't be able to play drums any more because they made too much noise. And since I was trying to become a dignified professor in Ithaca, I sold the drum that I had bought sometime during my stay at Los Alamos.

14The following summer I went back out to New Mexico to work on some report, and when I saw the drums again, I couldn't stand it. I bought myself another drum, and thought, "I'll just bring it back with me this time so I can look at it." That year at Cornell I had a small apartment inside a bigger house. I had the drum in there, just to look at, but one day I couldn't quite resist: I said, "Well, I'll just be very quiet. . ."

15I sat on a chair and put the drum between my legs and played it with my fingers a little bit: hup, bup, bup, huddle hup. Then a little bit louder ­­ after all, it was tempting me! I got a little bit louder and BOOM! ­­ the telephone rang.

16"Hello?"

17"This is your landlady. Are you beating drums down there?" "Yes; I'm sor ­­"

18"It sounds so good. I wonder if I could come down and listen to it more directly?" So from that time on the landlady would always come down when I'd start to drum. That was freedom, all right. I had a very good time from then on, beating the drums.

19Around that time I met a lady from the Belgian Congo who gave me some ethnological records. In those days, records like that were rare, with drum music from the Watusi and other tribes of Africa. I really admired the Watusi drummers very, very much, and I used to try to imitate them ­­ not very accurately, but just to sound something like them ­­ and I developed a larger number of rhythms as a result of that.

20One time I was in the recreation hall, late at night, when there weren't many people, and I picked up a wastebasket and started to beat the back end of it. Some guy from way downstairs came running all the way up and said, "Hey! You play drums!" It turned out he really knew how to play drums, and he taught me how to play bongos.

21There was some guy in the music department who had a collection of African music, and I'd come to his house and play drums. He'd make recordings of me, and then at his parties, he had a game that he called "Africa or Ithaca?" in which he'd play some recordings of drum music, and the idea was to guess whether what you were hearing was manufactured in the continent of Africa, or locally. So I must have been fairly good at imitating African music by that time.

22When I came to Caltech, I used to go down to the Sunset Strip a lot. One time there was a group of drummers led by a big fella from Nigeria called Ukonu, playing this wonderful drum music ­­ just percussion ­­ at one of the nightclubs. The second­in­ command, who was especially nice to me, invited me to come up on the stage with them and play a little. So I got up there with the other guys and played along with them on the drums for a little while.

23I asked the second guy if Ukonu ever gave lessons, and he said yes. So I used to go down to Ukonu's place, near Century Boulevard (where the Watts riots later occurred) to get lessons in drumming. The lessons weren't very efficient: he would stall around, talk to other people, and be interrupted by all kinds of things. But when they worked they were very exciting, and I learned a lot from him.

24At dances near Ukonu's place, there would be only a few whites, but it was much more relaxed than it is today. One time they had a drumming contest, and I didn't do very well: They said my drumming was "too intellectual"; theirs was much more pulsing.

25One day when I was at Caltech I got a very serious telephone call.

26"This is Mr. Trowbridge, Mahster of the Polytechnic School." The Polytechnic School was a small, private school which was across the street diagonally from Caltech.

27Mr. Trowbridge continued in a very formal voice: "I have a friend of yours here, who would like to speak to you."

28"OK."

29"Hello, Dick!" It was Ukonu! It turned out the Master of the Polytechnic School was not as formal as he was making himself out to be, and had a great sense of humor.

30Ukonu was visiting the school to play for the kids, so he invited me to come over and be on the stage with him, and play along. So we played for the kids together: I played bongos (which I had in my office) against his big tumba drum.

31Ukonu had a regular thing: He went to various schools and talked about the African drums and what they meant, and told about the music. He had a terrific personality and a grand smile; he was a very, very nice man. He was just sensational on the drums ­­ he had records out ­­ and was here studying medicine. He went back to Nigeria at the beginning of the war there ­­ or before the war ­­ and I don't know what happened to him.

32After Ukonu left I didn't do very much drumming, except at parties once in a while, entertaining a little bit. One time I was at a dinner party at the Leightons' house, and Bob's son Ralph and a friend asked me if I wanted to drum. Thinking that they were asking me to do a solo, I said no. But then they started drumming on some little wooden tables, and I couldn't resist: I grabbed a table too, and the three of us played on these little wooden tables, which made lots of interesting sounds.

33Ralph and his friend Tom Rutishauser liked playing drums, and we began meeting every week to just ad lib, develop rhythms and work stuff out. These two guys were real musicians: Ralph played piano, and Tom played the cello. All I had done was rhythms, and I didn't know anything about music, which, as far as I could tell, was just drumming with notes. But we worked out a lot of good rhythms and played a few times at some of the schools to entertain the kids. We also played rhythms for a dance class at a local college ­­ something I learned was fun to do when I was working at Brookhaven for a while ­­ and called ourselves The Three Quarks, so you can figure out when that was.

34One time I went to Vancouver to talk to the students there, and they had a party with a real hot rock­type band playing down in the basement. The band was very nice: they had an extra cowbell lying around, and they encouraged me to play it. So I started to play a little bit, and since their music was very rhythmic (and the cowbell is just an accompaniment ­­ you can't screw it up) I really got hot.

35After the party was over, the guy who organized the party told me that the bandleader said, "Geez! Who was that guy who came down and played on the cowbell!

36He can really knock out a rhythm on that thing! And by the way, that big shot this party was supposed to be for ­­ you know, he never came down here; I never did see who it was!"

37Anyhow, at Caltech there's a group that puts on plays. Some of the actors are Caltech students; others are from the outside. When there's a small part, such as a policeman who's supposed to arrest somebody, they get one of the professors to do it. It's always a big joke ­­ the professor comes on and arrests somebody, and goes off again.

38A few years ago the group was doing Guys and Dolls, and there was a scene where the main guy takes the girl to Havana, and they're in a nightclub. The director thought it would be a good idea to have the bongo player on the stage in the nightclub be me.

39I went to the first rehearsal, and the lady directing the show pointed to the orchestra conductor and said, "Jack will show you the music." Well, that petrified me. I don't know how to read music; I thought all I had to do was get up there on the stage and make some noise.

40Jack was sitting by the piano, and he pointed to the music and said, "OK, you start here, you see, and you do this. Then I play plonk, plonk, plonk" ­­ he played a few notes on the piano. He turned the page. "Then you play this, and now we both pause for a speech, you see, here" ­­ and he turned some more pages and said, "Finally, you play this."

41He showed me this "music" that was written in some kind of crazy pattern of little x's in the bars and lines. He kept telling me all this stuff, thinking I was a musician, and it was completely impossible for me to remember any of it.

42Fortunately, I got ill the next day, and couldn't come to the next rehearsal. I asked my friend Ralph to go for me, and since he's a musician, he should know what it's all about. Ralph came back and said, "It's not so bad. First, at the very beginning, you have to do something exactly right because you're starting the rhythm out for the rest of the orchestra, which will mesh in with it. But after the orchestra comes in, it's a matter of ad­ libbing, and there will be times when we have to pause for speeches, but I think we'll be able to figure that out from the cues the orchestra conductor gives." In the meantime I had gotten the director to accept Ralph too, so the two of us would be on the stage. He'd play the tumba and I'd play the bongos ­­ so that made it a helluva lot easier for me.

43So Ralph showed me what the rhythm was. It must have been only about twenty or thirty beats, but it had to be just so. I'd never had to play anything just so, and it was very hard for me to get it right. Ralph would patiently explain, "left hand, and right hand, and two left hands, then right. . ." I worked very hard, and finally, very slowly, I began to get the rhythm just right. It took me a helluva long time ­­ many days ­­ to get it.

44A week later we went to the rehearsal and found there was a new drummer there ­ ­ the regular drummer had quit the band to do something else ­­ and we introduced ourselves to him:

45"Hi. We're the guys who are going to be on stage for the Havana scene." "Oh, hi. Let me find the scene here. . ." and he turned to the page where our scene was, took out his drumming stick, and said, "Oh, you start off the scene with. . ." and with his stick against the side of his drum he goes bing, bong, bang­a­bang, bing­a­bing, bang, bang at full speed, while he was looking at the music! What a shock that was to me. I had worked for four days to try to get that damn rhythm, and he could just patter it right out!

46Anyway, after practicing again and again I finally got it straight and played it in the show. It was pretty successful: Everybody was amused to see the professor on stage playing the bongos, and the music wasn't so bad; but that part at the beginning, that had to be the same: that was hard.

47In the Havana nightclub scene some of the students had to do some sort of dance that had to be choreographed. So the director had gotten the wife of one of the guys at Caltech, who was a choreographer working at that time for Universal Studios, to teach the boys how to dance. She liked our drumming, and when the shows were over, she asked us if we would like to drum in San Francisco for a ballet.

48"WHAT?"

49Yes. She was moving to San Francisco, and was choreographing a ballet for a small ballet school there. She had the idea of creating a ballet in which the music was nothing but percussion. She wanted Ralph and me to come over to her house before she moved and play the different rhythms that we knew, and from those she would make up a story that went with the rhythms.

50Ralph had some misgivings, but I encouraged him to go along with this adventure. I did insist, however, that she not tell anybody there that I was a professor of physics, Nobel­Prize­winner, or any other baloney. I didn't want to do the drumming if I was doing it because, as Samuel Johnson said, If you see a dog walking on his hind legs, it's not so much that he does it well, as that he does it at all. I didn't want to do it if I was a physics professor doing it at all; we were just some musicians she had found in Los Angeles, who were going to come up and play this drum music that they had composed.

51So we went over to her house and played various rhythms we had worked out.

52She took some notes, and soon after, that same night, she got this story cooked up in her mind and said, "OK, I want fifty­two repetitions of this; forty bars of that; whatever of this, that, this, that. . ."

53We went home, and the next night we made a tape at Ralph's house. We played all the rhythms for a few minutes, and then Ralph made some cuts and splices with his tape recorder to get the various lengths right. She took a copy of our tape with her when she moved, and began training the dancers with it in San Francisco.

54Meanwhile we had to practice what was on that tape: fifty­two cycles of this, forty cycles of that, and so on. What we had done spontaneously (and spliced) earlier, we now had to learn exactly. We had to imitate our own damn tape!

55The big problem was counting. I thought Ralph would know how to do that because he's a musician, but we both discovered something funny. The "playing department" in our minds was also the "talking department" for counting ­­ we couldn't play and count at the same time!

56When we got to our first rehearsal in San Francisco, we discovered that by watching the dancers we didn't have to count because the dancers went through certain motions.

57There were a number of things that happened to us because we were supposed to be professional musicians and I wasn't. For example, one of the scenes was about a beggar woman who sifts through the sand on a Caribbean beach where the society ladies, who had come out at the beginning of the ballet, had been. The music that the choreographer had used to create this scene was made on a special drum that Ralph and his father had made rather amateurishly some years before, and out of which we had never had much luck in getting a good tone. But we discovered that if we sat opposite each other on chairs and put this "crazy drum" between us on our knees, with one guy beating bidda­bidda­bidda­bidda­bidda rapidly with his two fingers, constantly, the other fella could push on the drum in different places with his two hands and change the pitch.

58Now it would go booda­booda­booda­bidda­beeda­beeda­beeda­bidda­booda­booda­ booda­badda­bidda­bidda­bidda­badda, creating a lot of interesting sounds.

59Well, the dancer who played the beggar woman wanted the rises and falls to coincide with her dance (our tape had been made arbitrarily for this scene), so she proceeded to explain to us what she was going to do: "First, I do four of these movements this way; then I bend down and sift through the sand this way for eight counts; then I stand and turn this way." I knew damn well I couldn't keep track of this, so I interrupted her:

60"Just go ahead and do the dance, and I'll play along." "But don't you want to know how the dance goes? You see, after I've finished the second sifting part, I go for eight counts over this way." It was no use; I couldn't remember anything, and I wanted to interrupt her again, but then there was this problem: I would look like I was not a real musician!

61Well, Ralph covered for me very smoothly by explaining, "Mr. Feynman has a special technique for this type of situation: He prefers to develop the dynamics directly and intuitively, as he sees you dance. Let's try it once that way, and if you're not satisfied, we can correct it."

62Well, she was a first­rate dancer, and you could anticipate what she was going to do. If she was going to dig into the sand, she would get ready to go down into the sand; every motion was smooth and expected, so it was rather easy to make the bzzzzs and bshshs and boodas and biddas with my hands quite appropriate to what she was doing, and she was very satisfied with it. So we got past that moment where we might have had our cover blown.

63The ballet was kind of a success. Although there weren't many people in the audience, the people who came to see the performances liked it very much.

64Before we went to San Francisco for the rehearsals and the performances, we weren't sure of the whole idea. I mean, we thought the choreographer was insane: first, the ballet has only percussion; second, that we're good enough to make music for a ballet and get paid for it was surely crazy! For me, who had never had any "culture," to end up as a professional musician for a ballet was the height of achievement, as it were.

65We didn't think that she'd be able to find ballet dancers who would be willing to dance to our drum music. (As a matter of fact, there was one prima donna from Brazil, the wife of the Portuguese consul, who decided it was beneath her to dance to it.) But the other dancers seemed to like it very much, and my heart felt good when we played for them for the first time in rehearsal. The delight they felt when they heard how our rhythms really sounded (they had until then been using our tape played on a small cassette recorder) was genuine, and I had much more confidence when I saw how they reacted to our actual playing. And from the comments of the people who had come to the performances, we realized that we were a success.

66The choreographer wanted to do another ballet to our drumming the following spring, so we went through the same procedure. We made a tape of some more rhythms, and she made up another story, this time set in Africa. I talked to Professor Munger at Caltech and got some real African phrases to sing at the beginning (GAwa baNYUma GAwa WO, or something like that), and I practiced them until I had them just so.

67Later, we went up to San Francisco for a few rehearsals. When we first got there, we found they had a problem. They couldn't figure out how to make elephant tusks that looked good on stage. The ones they had made out of papier mache were so bad that some of the dancers were embarrassed to dance in front of them.

68We didn't offer any solution, but rather waited to see what would happen when the performances came the following weekend. Meanwhile, I arranged to visit Werner Erhard, whom I had known from participating in some conferences he had organized. I was sitting in his beautiful home, listening to some philosophy or idea he was trying to explain to me, when all of a sudden I was hypnotized.

69"What's the matter?" he said.

70My eyes popped out as I exclaimed, "Tusks!" Behind him, on the floor, were these enormous, massive, beautiful ivory tusks!

71He lent us the tusks. They looked very good on stage (to the great relief of the dancers): real elephant tusks, super size, courtesy of Werner Erhard.

72The choreographer moved to the East Coast, and put on her Caribbean ballet there. We heard later that she entered that ballet in a contest for choreographers from all over the United States, and she finished first or second. Encouraged by this success, she entered another competition, this time in Paris, for choreographers from all over the world. She brought a high­quality tape we had made in San Francisco and trained some dancers there in France to do a small section of the ballet ­­ that's how she entered the contest.

73She did very well. She got into the final round, where there were only two left ­­ a Latvian group that was doing a standard ballet with their regular dancers to beautiful classical music, and a maverick from America, with only the two dancers that she had trained in France, dancing to a ballet which had nothing but our drum music.

74She was the favorite of the audience, but it wasn't a popularity contest, and the judges decided that the Latvians had won. She went to the judges afterwards to find out the weakness in her ballet.

75"Well, Madame, the music was not really satisfactory. It was not subtle enough.

76Controlled crescendoes were missing. . . " And so we were at last found out: When we came to some really cultured people in Paris, who knew music from drums, we flunked out.