Dennis The Drummer

PICTURE CREDIT: The Mighty Hannibal with Atlanta City Council Proclamation about breaking the color barrier with Dennis St. John

Dennis St. John played drums on “Spooky,” a really cool hit song my older sisters had among their vast 45-rpm record collection in 1968. It was sung by Dennis Yost and his band The Classics Four and featured this ending:

“So I proposed, on Halloween.

Love is kinda crazy with a spooky little girl like you…Spooky!”

(It remains up there in my memory like other evocative tunes from that era like, “Time of the Season” by The Zombies.)

When Dennis St. John died at age 70 from cancer, he left money and instructions in his will for his friends to throw him a party. I was lucky enough to attend because my upstairs neighbor Giovanni was his masseur. So here we are on 4^th Street at the Santa Monica Bay Woman’s Club digging live bands, free booze and food courtesy of one of those happening chefs from Montana Avenue covered in tattoos (the chef, not the food).

Dennis was a classic session player in town, who’d said his greatest claim to fame was playing ten nights in a row at the Greek Theatre in 1972 –who does gigs like that anymore? — creating Neil Diamond’s live double album “Hot August Night.” You can also hear his backbeat – musical stylings— on recordings by Linda Ronstadt, Ronnie Millsap and Paul Revere & The Raiders.

At the party they’re playing a mix tape of all his numbers, including one I always loved from 1976 that goes:

I am so into you

I can’t think of nothing else

I am so into you baby

I can’t think of nothing else

That’s right: the big hit by the Atlanta Rhythm Section, “So Into You.”

Dennis’s first band was called St. John and the Cardinals when he was just an army brat in Germany after WWII. He came back to the States and hooked up with Mark Lindsey and Revere’s Raiders, who Dennis said were “considered the American Rolling Stones of their day.”

Yes, we were naïve in the 60s.

But what a show this is! Kicking off with a couple Native American friends of Dennis playing flutes and burning sage. This is followed by an Irish emcee called “The Reverend” Carl Robert who tells us: “I’ve been Dennis’s bartender for over twenty years. I will lead you on a synopsis of the musical life of my friend Dennis St. John. And if I left anybody out, fuck ya’.”

Then Dennis’s voice guides us through a slide show. “The good Lord gave me a good sense of timing,” says the man known as this Timekeeper. He held down the earth for soaring artists like Otis Redding and Roy Orbison. His incredible musical career included Ronnie Millsap and the Bellamy Brothers. Dennis became a mentor, not just for drummers, but for songwriters: Larry Williams says he was a roadie when Dennis gave a song Larry had written to Neil Diamond who passed on it, but the Bellamy Bros turned into their biggest hit.

“There’s a reason for the sunshinin’ sky and there’s a reason why I’m feelin’ so high/

must be the season when that/love light shines all around us….

Just let your love flow like a mountain stream/and let your love grow with the smallest of dreams/It’s the season…Let your love fly like a bird on the wing/And let your love bind you to all livin’ things”

I remember hearing “Let Your Love Flow,” country-rock-with-a-groove, for the entire summer of 1976.  Here in Santa Monica, each time Dennis mentions an artist he backed up, the band plays it:

“In the cool of the evening when everything is gettin’ kinda groovy

I call you up and ask you if you like to go with me and see a movie

First you say no you got some plans for the night

And then you stop and say, all right

Love is kinda crazy with a Spooky little girl like you…”

For Ronstadt, they play “Desperado.” For Orbison we hear Dennis’s driving beat in “Pretty Woman.”  He talks about playing with Otis Redding, how some of their gigs were at prisons. He says there were no rehab centers back then, and musicians arrested for drug use went straight to state prison.  “The Georgia State pen,” says Dennis, “was full of some of the finest musicians in the world.”

Dennis defined the drummer’s gift as how “dynamically” he could go from a whisper introduction to the biggest crescendos you could every play.

And Dennis had other gifts, as the big crescendo of this gathering reveals, when an older, blind gentleman in a pink suit takes the stage: the soul, R& B, funk legend, the Mighty Hannibal. In 1962, Dennis and Hannibal broke the color line by performing together at the Atlanta Civic Center. That event was commemorated in a Proclamation, which Hannibal shows off from the stage. [see picture] Following this, he sings two mighty tunes: one a Hannibal and the Overalls anti-war song banned from radio stations, called “Hymn #5.” A real blues dirge about Vietnam, it was re-recorded by Elton John and Leon Russell in 2010.

“Dennis and I never had a rehearsal,” Hannibal tells us. He’s started a school for young musicians in Atlanta and a Dennis St. John Foundation to provide scholarships. To close the show, the band (including Neil Diamond band members like King Errisson on percussion) blasts out, “Holly Holy,” “I Am I Said” and leads us in a sing-a-long of Diamond’s “Song Sung Blue.” (Dennis was such a great guy he even played with Super Diamond, a tribute band.)

Finally came the 1980 hit, “America.”

“On the boats and on the planes, They’re coming to America/Never looking back again. They’re coming to America/Home, don’t it seem so far away/Oh, we’re traveling light today/In the eye of the storm/Home, to a new and a shiny place/Make our bed, and we’ll say our grace/Freedom’s light burning warm…”

Do Neil Diamond’s words still resonate? Either way, helluva party. Helluva guy. Thanks for the music, Dennis!

For more on Dennis St. John: http://www.drummerworld.com/forums/showthread.php?t=91605