This is a Tama catalogue from about 1987 or so, and it’s for a line of theirs called Swingstar. But it’s not just any catalogue, to me. This one holds special meaning. I collectively spent many, many hours looking at this thing… and it’s only about 12 pages. Pre-Internet, pre-YouTube, pre-on-demand, kids used to re-read stuff on their shelves, pulling out the same items over and over again, even if it was a drum brochure. At least I did. We had limited stuff to engage with.
Besides the memories from reading through this brochure I have, it holds special meaning to me for two reasons.
For starters, the first “proper” drum kit I got was, indeed, a Tama Swingstar. More about that later.
The second reason was that the advertising message really spoke to me. I was their target audience and they hit the mark in a huge way. The lead in copy says this:
The Dream is Yours…
Being able to afford a great looking, great sounding professional drum set once seemed like just a dream. Now, that dream is a reality with Tama’s newly expanded Swingstar line.
The photo accompanying the spread shows someone who is obviously a teenager—he’s clearly sitting in a bedroom in his parents house with his rock posters on the wall—looking over his drum catalogues while adjacent to him sits an old, weathered, nondescript drum kit with unmatched pieces. The hi-hat appears to have no clutch on it. He’s got a cheap, sparkle red tom-tom with no bottom hoop sitting in a decidedly non-modern looking snare basket. Wing nuts are missing, and the snare drum looks like its head is wrinkled and battered. He’s making due with what he’s got, but he’s dreaming of having a “great looking, great sounding professional drum kit.”
That was me. I have long said that the reason I didn’t become a drummer earlier—and the time I do consider the start of my “being a drummer”—was all related to an equipment quandary. Yeah, I own about 10 kits now, but acquiring drums—of any kind—was a major road block for me back then. No one was going to buy them for me, and they were too expensive to buy myself. And I started modestly, with whatever old, beaten hand me downs I could acquire via donation or on the cheap.
A friend of mine saw the photo in the catalogue a couple years later and remarked, “Check that out! That was you! Sitting there with your shitty drums, wishing and hoping you could get a new set some day!” He was so right. The kid in the photo even kind of looks like me—that’s what my hair looked like back in those days, and he’s dressed like I did with the jeans and open-collared shirt over a t-shirt. My friend saw what was not lost on me from day one. I was the kid in the advert.
And I desperately needed a new drum kit for reasons that had nothing to do with vanity and the appeal of having new gear. Sure, I would have preferred a shiny drum kit that was made during my lifetime, but in practical terms, my very first kits that were cobbled together were so jury-rigged that they really couldn’t be moved. They couldn’t go gigging or be moved to different rehearsal rooms. They were a collection of precariously balanced items hanging off of makeshift hardware. They were affixed with duct tape and scarves that tied together. So besides that it looked like hell because nothing matched and everything was old and damaged, it was a very crudely improvised set-up. There were no proper tom holders—I didn’t have them, and the hardware on the toms themselves was broken, anyway. The structure was a bit of a house of cards. Once I got it set up and secured, I could play it, but move it? Forget it! It would take hours to set up again!
I tuned them up as best I could and put duct tape and muffling tissues on the old heads I had and was satisfied enough to play them, but my idea of the “big time” was having toms that could be adjusted and taken off the rack. And with bands happening and gigs soon to be, it was absolutely necessary I find a way to up my game.
The Tama brand has attached their Swingstar name to different products over the years. In more recent times, they decided to call their “student” model Swingstar, but back in the 1980s, their Swingstar was their “entry level” line… which is different. The “student” line of drums is suited for younger kids taking music lessons and such… but it dances closely to the border that separates “musical instrument” from “toy.” The “entry level” lines—most famously popularized by Pearl drums with their Export kit—are not fancy by high-end artisan standards, but they’re respectable and sort of “semi-professional.” They’re the low end of a proper musical instrument.
As I mentioned, when I did get that first proper drum kit, it was a Tama Swingstar. But it wasn’t one of the ones in this catalogue. It was actually a model from a few years earlier (made around 1982) that I bought used. I bought it used because, despite the advertiser’s claims that the “dream is a reality” with the new Tama lines, it was still a dream for me to be able to afford something new back then.
Entry-level drums have actually come down in price over the years. Even with the 2020 dollar, for about $500 you can get a brand new kit that would have been very satisfactory to my high-school self. That wasn’t the case back then. Nothing new in the entry-level world was that cheap. If you wanted something that cheap, it was student model all the way. So, as a young but burgeoning musician and artist, I had to buy used.
I was constantly scouring the Newsday classified ads to look for used drum kits. Craigslist, LetGo, Reverb, eBay? In my day we had no such luxuries! And get the hell off my lawn!
One day I came across an ad from a guy in Smithtown who was selling some drum kits. I brought a friend with me who was also a drummer. It was a bit farther than I was accustomed to traveling on my own at that age, and I also wanted his opinions on the wares.
The guy who was selling them was an old-school jazz cat. He insulted me for “holding the sticks wrong” because I didn’t play with traditional grip. By this time in history, it was fully accepted that matched grip was a viable and arguably even better way to play, and Ringo (who played matched grip and help popularize it) was already himself a dinosaur from the old days…. but seniors like this guy were still around who just never got down with the “new school.” Things do, indeed, change gradually.
He had a bunch of drum kits around that he was looking to sell. He did refinishing and stuff, and was the kind of guy who would buy stuff he came across and flip it. Sort of like an eBay buy-and-sell guy back in the non-digital age. Most of what he showed us was not too impressive to me. Although they were in better shape than what I had at home, they didn’t look too much newer. They were relics, to me. They looked like shit from the 60s… which today might have a special sort of appeal to me as a classic piece of gear with a certain charm. But to me as a teenager, they just looked old and outdated. Kids tended not to appreciate things like that. I didn’t see any charm in a drum kit with rail-mount tom holder. It didn’t look cool to me, it looked like an 8-track cassette or something—something obsolete and from another era. When I would look at my friend for his reactions, he’d kind of roll his eyes. We were of like mind, apparently.
The guy—initially on the phone and in person that day—kept mentioning that he also had “some Jap kits.” What he meant was drum kits manufactured in Japan. And he kept saying it almost dismissively. It was as though he was implying, Oh, and if you’re interested in some crap, I also have these shitty Japanese kits. With us kind of striking out, I seem to remember asking him if I could see the…. er…. Jap kits. And that’s when he brought me to the Tama.
It was actually a seven-piece drum kit. The five-piece was the standard in a small drum kit in those days, but the rage in popular music was big drum kits with lots of drums. I was willing to settle for a five piece, so to find someone selling a seven-piece in my price range was a major bonus. It’s funny how as kids especially, we’re so influenced by the contemporary marketing and styles. Rock bands were about big drum sets back then. I became a small kit player not too long after and still unquestionably appreciate the intimacy of a small drum set more than a big one, but as they say, “it was the style back then.”
It seemed like the right thing. It seemed like I should pull the trigger on this deal. But I still wasn’t sure, because I was a kid and had no life-experience with spending that much money in one shot. So I looked to my friend and asked what he thought.
He whispered to me, “If you don’t buy this, I’m going to.”
“OK, I’ll take it.”
I seem to recall that I paid $425 for it. That was the big financial hurdle I needed to get over, gearwise. I spent the next couple years of my life buying more drum gear: better hardware, better cymbals, better pedals. I could do each of those for $100 a shot, give or take, so it didn’t have to be all acquired in one lump sum. It’s how we rolled back then as teenagers with part-time, minimum-wage jobs.
I feel like I really lucked out, too. Tama drum kits had great hardware, like their omni-sphere mounts that didn’t penetrate the drum shells. No one else was doing that kind of stuff back then. They offered a lot of drum for an entry-level kit. All the “essential design features that made [them] the most respected name in drums,” as the literature said.
I still have the drum set. It is pretty worn now and looks super old. It itself has now become a relic from a bygone era, too. It’s been long retired from me playing it, but I won’t get rid of it. Maybe I could get a couple hundred dollars for it, but that’s not as valuable as the memories I get from this kit. Not only the memories of all the gigs I did with in in my early bands, but the memory of what it was like to own that used-but-new-to-me drum set, and about how much I appreciated being able to remove or position my toms and have a drum set that didn’t look ghetto because none of the shells matched. It’s hard to believe that that dusty old relic was once my shining pride and joy. But I just have to put myself back in the headspace I was in as a teenager, and the joy comes back.
