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Drummer recalls 1968 marathon in Peters Township

By Harry Funk staff Writer hfunk@thealmanac.Net 8 min read
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When you hear about someone setting a record for nonstop drumming, a certain sort of personal question might come to mind.

Based on his own experience, Roy Capenos has an answer.

“I took a cymbal and somebody carried it, and I went to the bathroom one time,” the South Fayette Township resident recalled. “So I’m fortunate, in retrospect, that I didn’t go into renal failure.”

Harry Funk / The Almanac

Harry Funk / The Almanac

Roy Capenos rehearses for the Clementine Paddleford Memorial Public Band’s show at the Peters Township High School Class of 1968 reunion in June.

Fifty years ago this summer, Capenos sat down behind his kit on a Friday at Crossroads Music Center in Peters Township. He finally stopped playing percussion on Sunday, 51 hours and 10 minutes later, without taking a single break.

“Because of the constant motion and muscle use – it was the weirdest experience – my arms shot straight up involuntarily,” he said. “And I think people who were there thought I was kind of going, ‘Ah! Victory!’ No, no.”

Capenos was 17 and a recent graduate of Peters Township High School when he pulled off the feat in July 1968. And that wasn’t even his first go at drumming ’til his arms went skyward: The previous January, he made it through 49 hours, 50 minutes.

The idea came from an episode of Paul Shannon’s “Adventure Time” on WTAE-TV.

“There was a fellow from Charleroi, I believe. I don’t remember his name. He played just a little, and then he said, ‘I am going to break the current world’s record for a drum marathon,'” Capenos recollected. “And of course, that piqued my curiosity.”

At that point, he was drumming with a local rock group appropriately called the Timestoppers.

Timestoppers 45

“The band members wanted me to go ahead and do this. I mentioned it to them, and they said, ‘Oh, this would be great,'” he explained, as they recently had cut a 45-rpm record and were seeking publicity.

As a matter of fact, “I Need Love” backed with “Fickle Frog” turned out to be the final release by Hanna-Barbera Records before the company decided to dump vinyl and stick with cartoons. And so the record didn’t exactly get much in the way of label promotion.

While all that was going on, Capenos started focusing his drumming efforts on playing with his high school buddies in another group, the Clementine Paddleford Memorial Public Band. And he always had the notion of topping his two-days-plus performance.

“You had talked about it and talked about it, and you asked if we would support you,” Tom McMurray, the bass player in the band, told Capenos. “And of course, we all wanted to do that. We couldn’t see you doing it without us all there with you.”

Members of the Clementine Paddleford Memorial Public Band accompany Roy Capenos in 1968: from left, Larry Angus, Bob Pearce and Tom McMurray.

Shortly after graduation for most of the members – keyboard player Larry Angus still had two years to go at Peters Township High School – the drummer went at it again, with the Paddlefords accompanying him at times along the way. Other musicians would drop by to play with him, too, and Crossroads was crowded all weekend with folks stopping by to root for the youngster while grooving to the music.

Area newspapers covered the story, as did a Pittsburgh TV legend.

“Bill Cardille picked up on this,” Capenos said. “Somebody told me that he was tracking this and reporting it on ‘Chiller Theater.'”

Capenos thanks his bandmates, also including vocalist Tom Stuck and guitarist Bob Pearce – they reunited to play at their 50th high school reunion in June – for helping him reach his milestone, along with Pearce’s future wife, Suzanne.

“She was wonderful. She sat beside me and rubbed my back, and basically lent moral support to all this,” Capenos recalled.

Bob Pearce, right, and Tom McMurray support Roy Capenos during his 51-plus hours of drumming.

He also acknowledges the influence of the late Dave Pew, longtime Peters Township School District music director, on his drumming.

“The important thing about Dave is that he taught me: Relax,” he said. “Forget about the rudiments, and play. And play to the music. Enhance it. Don’t just provide a backbeat, but do as much as you can not to showboat, but make it sound fuller, better.”

That had the desired effect for the Clementine Paddleford Memorial Public Band.

“A lot of guys can just drum,” McMurray said. “Roy always knew the backgrounds, how to bring in different techniques, what set different drummers apart. That was always what impressed me with Roy and his playing. He has such a talent for doing that.”

Post-Paddleford, he drummed for the late Vince Lascheid, longtime organist for the Pittsburgh Pirates and Penguins, and performed with such luminaries as guitarists Eric Susoeff, Joe Negri and Larry Coryell, the pioneering fusion player who died in 2017, along with saxophone prodigy Eric Kloss.

And after his 1968 marathon?

“I went over to Larry Angus’ house, and I was preparing to go for a swim,” Capenos said. “And I fell asleep on his sofa. Then after I awoke, I went for a swim. So you can call it sort of a power nap.”

That apparently will suffice when you’re 17.

A drummer’s story

Possessing a sense of rhythm, I studied tap dancing and ballet in my mid-childhood. But then the Beatles came along, and, thanks to Ringo, I became enthralled with drums.

I began drumming to music when I was 12 years old and made my first ‘drum kit,’ which was comprised of coffee cans – manufacturers had just begun using plastic lids – a high hat made of two pie pans mounted atop one of my mother’s old music stands, a spring from my father’s junk box, and a few other household items. And ‘drumsticks’ I had fashioned by shaving the bark off them.

I had nothing to serve as a bass drum, so I merely tapped my right foot. In retrospect, a fairly large cylindrical shipping container could have been my bass drum. Oh, well.

I was thrilled when Mom, a symphonic-grade violinist, scraped up enough money to buy me my first snare drum, a sparkling blue Japanese-crafted Stewart, and a Sears mail-order high hat, including a pair of cheaply made matching cymbals.

Finally, in a great expression of love and encouragement, she purchased an honest-to-goodness pair of drumsticks for me, and then enrolled me in a weekly drum instruction program offered by Ben Reynolds, a music shop in downtown Washington.

And then, again, thanks to my violinist mother, came my lacquer-blue 20-inch Ludwig bass drum, shipped from the Ludwig factory in Chicago to Ben Reynolds. Wow, was I thrilled, for now I had a bare-bones set whose foundation was a Ludwig bass! And I was prepared to play it, because I had a low- cost Ludwig bass drum pedal I had purchased – with my own money, for once – when Mom bought my bass drum.

While that pedal’s performance – that is, speed – was significantly inferior to that of Ludwig’s extremely well-engineered Speed King pedal, which had quickly become a must-have piece of equipment for serious drummers. It was an integral part of the kits of drumming greats Ginger Baker and Joe Morello, for example.

Hey, man! I had blasted off and was rapidly approaching escape velocity. Far out! I was most definitely into the skins!

And finally, the completion of my piece-by-piece kit: After many months of saving every bit of money she could, Mom bought me a 9-by-13-inch Ludwig tom-tom that matched the blue lacquer finish of my bass drum and an inexpensive 18-inch ride cymbal from the good ol’ Sears mail order catalogue.

The tom-tom did not have a bass drum shell mount for the tom-tom, so I jerry-rigged a pad made of an ordinary handkerchief and placed it between the bottom rim of the tom-tom and the left side of the bass drum’s shell. Then, using nothing more than thick shoestrings, I tied the tom-tom to one of the upper tension rods of the bass.

And, voila! I had my first drum kit, assembled over a period of approximately one and a half years. Subsequently, I played that three-piece kit for approximately four years.

Notice that in the previous sentence I wrote ‘played’ rather than practiced. After I had learned some of the most essential drum rudiments and a bit about reading non-melodic sheet music – that is, music notation written for a drummer in an orchestra or a marching band, the Haskell W. Harr method – I ceased taking lessons, tossed aside my beginner’s book about drum technique and simply taught myself by watching and listening closely to many of the great jazz, orchestral and blues drummers. And of course, I learned the mostly 4/4 beats of pop music.

I discovered why Ringo Starr’s drumming had a distinctly different sound from almost all the popular rock drummers of the day: The secret was that Ringo, like me, was a lefty playing on a right-hander’s kit. Why he and I, along with probably a handful (pun intended) of other lefty drummers continued playing on conventional setups – that is, right-handed kits – has always been a mystery to me. One of the few great lefty drummers is Ian Paice, formerly with Deep Purple.

- Roy Capenos, July 2018

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