Different Drummer
Newly retired, Mark Gozonsky has decided it's not too late to live out one of his rock-and-roll fantasies. PLUS, an open thread for sharing about our own later-in-life creative pursuits.
Readers,
Today we have a story from 63-year-old Mark Gozonsky about pursuing his dream of playing the drums after retiring from teaching.
I absolutely love stories about people indulging their creative dreams later in life, and have published many of them. I’m so inspired by these accounts, probably because I’ve got creative interests I’ve been eager for the time (and courage) to delve into: singing and cartooning, for example. And because my husband, at 62, recently released his first solo EP record.
When we’re older and feel the clock ticking, many of us stop putting off the artistic endeavors we’ve been eager to take on. We care less about what others think, shed our insecurities, throw out our perfectionism, and dive right into the dreams we’ve had on hold for so long. It’s nice to realize those dreams haven’t disappeared—they’re right there where we left them while we were busy adulting for decades.
Last year, on Kelly Clarkson’s show, Somebody, Somewhere star Bridget Everett shared a handy bit of philosophy she picked up from rapper L.L. Cool J: Dreams don’t have deadlines, or “DDHD.” I fully subscribe to that philosophy, and I imagine many of you do, too. I also suspect many of you have creative endeavors you’ve taken up later in life, and I want to hear about them.
In the comments please tell me…
How old are you? What’s a creative pursuit you took up or committed to in a more serious way, later in life? (It can be music, drawing, painting, photography, wood-working, stand-up comedy, acting, filmmaking, cooking, poetry, literature, etc.—whatever’s your fancy.) What kept you from seriously going for it before? How old were you when you got started? Have you had any notable achievements in your creative area of interest? What else has pursuing your dream given you?
Below is Mark Gozonsky’s essay…
Different Drummer
Newly retired, Mark Gozonsky has decided it's not too late to live out one of his rock-and-roll fantasies. PLUS, an open thread for sharing about your own later-in-life creative pursuits.
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I have one green drumstick and one black drumstick. They’re not supposed to be mismatched, but I do lots of things wrong with drumming, maybe everything wrong, except for one thing – love.
My life as a drummer began a little over four years ago when I was 59. It was late October, 2020 and my wife and I were driving home to Los Angeles from Moab, where over five days I hadn’t left our rented condo even once to go hiking amid the natural splendor with our friends Mary and Rita because I was too busy teaching high school English remotely during the day and watching the Dodgers win the World Series at night. I was also busy feeling fat because during lockdown I reached my all-time highest weight of 222 pounds, a number that felt like a ball and chain.
On the ride home, hours into passing the Dairy Queen and Trump signs of central Utah on the ride home, I shared this escape plan with my wife: “I want to become a drummer.”
“You would make an excellent drummer,” she said. She believed in me. My Alesis eight-piece all-mesh electronic drumkit arrived soon after we got home to L.A.
The idea of becoming a drummer had occurred to me while listening to a Kinks song, “Strangers,” which was not a hit. It must have made its way to me through sonic pollination, as an unfamiliar song I didn’t skip when an algorithm matched it to my constant yearning for folk rock. “Strangers” starts with a raspy-voiced Dave Davies declaring over slow chunky acoustic guitar chords how weary he is of aimlessness. He is desperate to share a stranger’s altruistic purpose and then, with church organ pealing louder and louder in the mix, he senses fraud and becomes even more disenchanted.
I never really paid any attention to the plot of the song until reading the lyrics in the wake of the 2024 election. What resonated originally was the desperate plea for oneness until the very end, when the instruments and vocal out, leaving only eerie bass drums thumping — one-two-one-two ONE / two, three-four — that beat repeating eight times, in each progressive instance the drums more and more untuned and undone, disturbed and disturbing.
Drumming is a balm to me as a 63-year-old oldster, retired now from teaching, doing squats to ease my barking knees, and reading poetry to fill in the blanks where my vocabulary used to be.
A question bloomed inside me: How did they make that drum sound? And the follow-up question, which became my call to action: Could I make that drum sound, too?
The quick answer is no. My skill as a drummer has so far not proven to involve precise sonic reproduction. My skill as a drummer is no skill at all except for embracing freedom, the freedom to play — by “playing” I don’t mean reproducing the same sounds as Mick Avory on “Strangers” or Ringo on “Come Together” or Gene Krupa on “Sing, Sing, Sing,” but “playing” as in make-believe, pretending to be a drummer, and loving it.
For this joy I am perpetually grateful to my encouraging wife. It took many tries and failures to assemble my drum kit that first week of November 2020. The rye I was drinking while votes were being counted did not enhance my shaky assembly skills. Hats off to the Alesis Corp for humoring my pleas for replacement parts. (I’m sure all the parts were already there in the kit they sent the first time. I was just too discombobulated to put them all together.)
Finally, somehow, I managed to connect pipes, bolts, drumheads, wires, and sold- separately-speaker into a rickety contraption that stood up and sounded like drums and felt like the genesis of a whole new pulse. I had dreamed of becoming a drummer and now here I was, seated upon my drum throne with a book that explained which skin to hit and when, in order to play a great drum song.
One afternoon when I was noodling around on the kit, my wife popped in. “Is that ‘Superstition’?” she asked.
YES! – that genius Stevie Wonder groove is exactly what I was going for – and she heard it. While no one will ever confuse my playing with that of Stevie Wonder on the original track (Jeff Beck played drums on an early version, but Wonder decided to play the drums himself on the final version), it felt like a gift of affirmation that my wife heard me playing and knew the song was “Superstition” from the moment I started.
She has kept giving me that gift of affirmation throughout the stages of my development as a drummer. I got blisters on my fingers from doing the exercises in Stick Control for the Snare Drummer by George Lawrence Stone, a bone-dry instruction book from 1935 with a drab gray cover featuring a Revolutionary War drummer boy. Everyone on the internet insisted this was The Book, so I would rat-a-tat-tat diligently to a metronome until I just couldn’t stand it anymore and had to switch gears and rock out to “Junior’s Farm” by Paul McCartney and Wings, a song of tremendously chunky thumping.
Drumming is a balm to me as a 63-year-old oldster, retired now from teaching, doing squats to ease my barking knees, and reading poetry to fill in the blanks where my vocabulary used to be. Whenever I record videos of myself drumming, I hear a plodding clodhopper but see a guy who just doesn’t care. Snapping my first drumstick was a big turning point. When the shaft shattered, I flipped the stick and kept on pounding. It was a rite of passage; all my life I’d been on the outside of music, and now I was in.
Another breakthrough: I struggled to figure out how to go back and forth between the snappy snare and the toms to get that deep tidal rumbling sound. I could not get the hang of it. The solution was getting an acoustic kit, not electric drums but the real thing like you see at concerts with the band’s name on the kick drum. This set-up is in the loft of my barn in Connecticut, at our home away from our LA home. There is just something about making music in a barn. They say Neil Young mastered Harvest by playing the master tapes back while floating on a raft on a pond between his two speaker-filled barns and calling out to the engineers “More LEFT barn” or “More RIGHT barn.” That is what I call living. The majesty I feel when barn-drumming helped set me free on the toms. Now I can go boom.
Counterintuitively, despite my increased booming and age, drumming seems to have improved my hearing, or at least sharpened my listening. I am more sensitive now to the drums in the songs of my youth, the soundtrack of my inner being. The relentless hi-hats of “Poppa Was a Rolling Stone,” the all-encompassing shimmer of “Mother and Child Reunion” – percussion awareness is a new dimension of my sonic sensitivity. I still can’t play those parts, but I do hear myself making better mistakes. And the point is not for me to be doing flawless re-enactments of music that was masterfully crafted half a century ago. The point is to dig music ever more deeply here in the now — even though my drumming recently hit a wall.
Snapping my first drumstick was a big turning point. When the shaft shattered, I flipped the stick and kept on pounding. It was a rite of passage; all my life I’d been on the outside of music, and now I was in.
We downsized in LA and there is no room for a drum kit in our cozy new place. I thought I was pro-actively problem-solving when I bought a Roland Octapad PAD-8, cutting edge technology of 1985. It sounded great through headphones at a music shop where no salespeople acknowledged my presence (I showed them what’s up by ordering a used, vintage kit online). Once it arrived I tore open the box and beheld my new/old drum machine: elephant gray plastic, as big as a desk calendar, with two rows of four black baseball card-sized rubber pads that have withstood forty years of whacking, plus a side column of mystery buttons like you’d see on a space capsule. I thought, Let’s plug in these cheap headphones and rock! – but then I discovered there was no headphone jack. The kit I’d played at the shop was a later model with a lot of new bells and whistles. Connecting the one I bought to headphones (so only I can hear me play) turns out to be a complicated thing, which as of this writing still eludes me. So far, my efforts to get this thing hooked up go like this: fail, fail, fail, hmmm; fail, fail, fail… That means for now, no kick drum, no crash cymbal, no fun.
It’s good to have challenges, though. Some oldsters do crossword puzzles to keep their wits about them; I watch YouTubes about how to set up drum machines. It’s an opportunity to learn a lesson I thought I’d learned 50 years ago. That was when I used my bar mitzvah money to buy a Zenith Allegro console stereo. I was so excited to make mixtapes of my favorite Paul Simon songs using the integrated cassette recorder/player of my dreams. I tore open the box only to discover the model I bought had an 8-track player. How do you record songs on an 8-track player? The answer is: you don’t. You get the model with a cassette recorder. Whoopsie! My father was so disappointed by my failure to do proper research before making a big consumer purchase that he wouldn’t let me exchange it.
Mark Gozonsky playing his electronic kit before downsizing:
Do your research before making a big consumer purchase was supposed to be a lifetime lesson. If I knew anything, I knew that – except, apparently I didn’t. As consolation, my wife and I have a saying: Live and live. It’s what you do when you don’t live and learn. Live and live remains an option, but I also have an unopened box on my desk. In it is a device I have been assured will do the trick by a reassuring tech guy at a music store specializing in drum machines. Soon I will open the box and dive in. But first I just wanted to take this pause.
One of the most important things I’ve learned in the four years since I took up drumming is that you don’t have to be drumming all the time. Pausing is good. You can hear what’s happening, find out where the beat is, and then — jump back in!
Okay, your turn:
How old are you? What’s a creative pursuit you took up or committed to in a more serious way, later in life? (It can be music, drawing, painting, photography, wood-working, stand-up comedy, acting, filmmaking, cooking, poetry, literature, etc.—whatever’s your fancy.) What kept you from seriously going for it before? How old were you when you got started? Have you had any notable achievements in your creative area of interest? What else has pursuing your dream given you?
With thanks to Mark Gozonsky. And to all of you—the most engaged, thoughtful, kind commenters I have ever encountered on the internet!! And thank you, too, for all your support. 🙏 💝 I couldn’t do this without you.
-Sari
 | A guest post by
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When I was 5, I wanted to be a Motown backup singer. I have a talent to hear the harmoniesand be able to sing them, and I wanted to wear a sparkly dress and sway and sing. We were watching The Supremes on Ed Sullivan, and I said this out loud. My mother and her sisters told me immediately that this was impossible: 1) I was white and 2) I could never be good enough. When I was 8, I wanted to be an author. I was again told I wasn't good enough, only 1 in a million people get a book published. When I was 15, I wanted to be a rock star, and joined a garage band. I had to quit almost immediately, because my mother wouldn't let me "parade around on a stage singing those horrible songs" and because I couldn't possibly be successful in a music career, only 1 in a million, etc.
I believed them. For a long time, I only sang in the car on my commutes, because my first husband told me he wanted to hear the radio, not me. I threw away everything I wrote (because like singing, I wrote all the time) because I knew it wasn't good enough.
At age 35, after my divorce, I met a man who was a professional musician. He encouraged me to go to karaoke to try singing in front of an audience. I won my first trophy ever at a karaoke contest later that year. At age 40, I joined his blues band as a "featured girl singer" and lived the life of a rock star for a few years. At age 50, I wrote my first book (Mama Mary's Rules for Daughters) and self-published. And a few months ago, at age 64, I finished my first full-length documentary film (Follow the Triptik, available for screening on Kinema.) While making the movie, I learned how to put songs together in GarageBand, and composed the music for the film. I'm now doing pre-production work for our next documentary project.
I've been saying "Dreams denied can be dreams deferred," and convinced one of my friends to take up drums at 60. They had always wanted to play drums, and everyone told them "no," so after some life-changing health problems, they agreed with me that our parents didn't know best what was in our hearts, and is proselytizing to all their friends about following your dreams before it's too late.
At 56, I will be celebrating my first book being published, a picture book called Mud to the Rescue! How Animals Use Mud to Thrive and Survive. Having been an on-again, off-again freelance writer for thirty years while raising my three daughters, I dove into writing for children after a friend encouraged me to join her in this endeavor. At the time, little was available for newbies, so I taught myself and joined groups as they formed online, took classes and webinars when they finally became more widely available, and basically stumbled along. When I discovered Mary Oliver's poetry, I knew I had found my ideal writing style of free verse poetry, and that's when my career finally took off (about six years ago). I won a mentorship with a famous children's poet, then found my agent, expanded my career, and finally sold my first book in 2023 (the timeline from sale to publication in children's literature is often two to four years). Today, I'm signing more book contracts and feel I've finally reached a new stage in my life, one which allows me to pursue this career for decades to come.