Taken from “Surely You're Joking, Mr.
Feynman!” Adventures of a Curious Character by Richard Phillips Feynman as told to Ralph Leighton edited by
Edward Hutchings
I
gave a series of lectures in physics that the Addison-Wesley 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.
The
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.
Sometimes
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.
One
day a guy came up to me and said, “Around Thanksgiving you weren’t out in the
woods beating a drum, were you?”
“Yes,
I was,” I said.
“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 lived 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.
As
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. The 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.
They
told their wives what they saw, and the wives said, “Oh, it must have been
Feynman—he likes to beat drums.”
“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.
I
got pretty good at playing the drums, and would play them when we had parties.
I 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.
When
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.
The
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 …”
I
sat on a chair and put the drum between my legs and played it with my fingers a
little bit: bup, bup, bup,
buddle bup. Then a little bit louder—after all, it was tempting me!
I got a little bit louder and BOOM!—the telephone rang.
“Hello?”
“This
is your landlady. Are you beating drums down there?”
“Yes;
I’m sor—”
“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.
Around
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.
One
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.
There
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.
When
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
second-in-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.
I
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.
At
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.
One
day when I was at Caltech I got a very serious telephone call.
“Hello?”
“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. Mr. Trowbridge continued in a very formal voice: “I have a friend of
yours here, who would like to speak to you.”
“OK.”
“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.
Ukonu 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.
Ukonu
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.
After
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.
Ralph
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 Torn 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.
One
time I went to Vancouver to talk to the students there, and they had a party
with a real hot rock-type 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.
After
the party was over, the guy who organized the party told me that the band
leader said, “Geez! Who was that guy who came down and played on the cowbell!
He 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!”
Anyhow,
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.
A
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.
I
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.
Jack
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.”
He
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.
Fortunately,
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.
So 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.
A
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:
“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, ban g-a-bang,
bing-a-bing, 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!
Anyway,
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.
In
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.
“WHAT?”
Yes.
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.
Ralph
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, Nobel Prize-winner, 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.
So
we went over to her house and played various rhythms we had worked out. She
took some notes, and soon after, that same night, she got this story cooked up
in her mind and said, “OK, I want fifty-two repetitions of this; forty bars of
that; whatever of this, that, this, that …”
We
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.
Meanwhile
we had to practice what was on that tape: fifty-two 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!
The
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!
When
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.
There
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 bidda-bidda-bidda-bidda-bidda 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. Now it would go booda– booda– booda– bidda– beeda–
beeda– beeda– bidda– booda-booda-booda-badda-bidda-bidda-bidda-badda,
creating a lot of interesting sounds.
Well,
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:
“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!
Well,
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.”
Well,
she was a first-rate 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.
The
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.
Before
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.
We
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.
The
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.
Later,
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 m^ach'e were so
bad that some of the dancers were embarrassed to dance in front of them.
We
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.
“What’s
the matter?” he said.
My
eyes popped out as I exclaimed, “Tusks!”
Behind him, on the floor, were these enormous,
massive, beautiful ivory tusks!
He
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.
The
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 high-quality 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.
She
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.
She
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.
“Well,
Madame, the music was not really satisfactory. It was not subtle enough.
Controlled 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.