Remo Belli, who pioneered synthetic drumheads and all manner of other percussion equipment and technology, passed away quietly at home in California on April 25 at the age of 88. His products were used by drummers around the world, and his drumheads were considered state of the art since he developed them in 1957 — and particularly after they were seen on Ringo Starr’s kit during the Beatles’ Ed Sullivan Show appearances (the first one, from 1964, sold for $2.1 million at auction).
Among his close friends was Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead and Dead and Company, whose father used to help Belli test his drumheads. Hart remembered Belli and his importance to the music world in the following conversation.
“Remo was really a close buddy, a family friend. I should have a Remo tattoo, you know? I’ve known him for 55 years, so we go back a long way. I’ve seen the arc of Remo. He was a drummer himself, but casual. He just had fun with the drums, kind of semi-pro. He was a good drummer, but he never thought that drumming was going to be it for him. So as soon as he imagined how to create a successful synthetic drumhead, the whole world just blew apart. The future was endless.
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“Remo made the first commercially successful synthetic drumhead. Remo was the one who brought it to the world. He was a good inventor and a good innovator; he took materials that already existed and realized their potential and brought it to the world. For drummers it’s like the invention of the plow. You’ve got to go back to the plow to find an invention more important than the drumhead.
“You have to remember that before that everybody was playing natural calfskin — and it was hell. I had to tune them every day. At night when the heater went on it stretched them and you’re hear ‘pop!’ and I’d wake up in the middle of the night and know I’d lost a drumhead. And that was expensive. I always remember drumming in parades going down the street and it started to rain — the horror. You couldn’t play your drum by the end of the parade. The drumhead was so soaked it was like a wet towel. Or when the sun came out and stretched it back out and all of a sudden, ‘Ping!’ I could tell you hundreds of stories because it was such a horror to work with.
“And Remo started making better heads. He’d say, ‘You need a good drum and a good drumhead to make a good drummer.’ He was very much into the quality and he cared. He made something called the Weather King, and guys didn’t buy it at first. The professionals didn’t buy it; ‘Oh, that doesn’t sound like a real head!’ The marching band guys would go, ‘No, no, it’s got to be calf!’ So it was a giant controversy. But of course the Weather King was the answer to all our dreams and we didn’t realize it at the time. Gradually the whole world turned to synthetic. Calf was out. You rarely find a calf head any more.
“I met Remo in 1960. He was friend of my father’s. My father was a rudimental drummer but a big, powerful drummer, and he used to dent the head. Remo would come up with a head, call my father, he’d give them a whacking and Remo went back to the drawing board or whatever, went back to his shop, trying to make heads you couldn’t break. He explored heads with suede in them, expanded them with layers, things in the middle, which made our world fantastic, the world of the percussionist.
“Remo was quite a guy. Remo was very energetic — in life and his pursuit of the better drum. He was in the right time, the right place. In 1975, that’s when the drum circles started in the Grateful Dead parking lot. I started seeing all these guys with big, heavy drums — they couldn’t play them in the sun. There was a community in need of hand drums for the first time, as opposed to drum sets. I told Remo, ‘The future is in hand drums.’ I took him and I showed him the Grateful Dead parking lot and gave him some of my drums, and he took those and innovated a plastic Acousticon version of them. He was so driven by this idea that hand drums were needed by the new drum community. He thought it was an amazing opportunity, and it was, so he started making hand drums. I had Remo make drums for the opening of the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. He built these giant drums on these big, beautiful creations that moved around the field. It was magnificent.
“Remo got the idea that rhythm held some kind of power, perhaps for health and for medicine and so on. My grandmother had Alzheimer’s and hadn’t spoken my name in years. I played a little drum for her in the car, off the side of the road, and she spoke my name. I shared that with Remo, and he bought into it. He understood what drums and rhythm meant, and that was a major step up for his business. He went from a guy who was selling drumheads to somebody who was looking at this thing in a whole other way — that drums were a tool in medicine and rhythm therapy became very important to him, as it was to me.
“I had a great time with Remo, who was up for anything. He was really game and knew of the primacy of rhythm. He loved music, and he knew that without rhythm there’s nothing. The whole world is based on rhythm, and Remo started looking at other aspects rather than just building drums. My conversations with him were about, ‘What do we really have here?’ It looks like a drum, but it’s a sound tool. It would do things beyond just giving pleasure. You can make a rhythm of your own. You can personalize it. It becomes your best friend.
“I remember one day me and Remo and Walter Cronkite were at the Macy’s Day Parade. Walter had this little place in front of Macy’s, like a lifetime seat, and he took Remo and me there. And the bands start going from right to left, right to left. I looked over and said, ‘Walter, I wonder why all these bands are named Remo.’ He didn’t know about Remo heads, but every band had Remo heads. We should have called it the Remo Day Parade. That’s silly, but Remo was everywhere, as it should be.
“Remo kept a low profile and let the head speak for itself. But when he went around he would always wear his Remo hat, always wore that Remo hat. Even out to dinner he wore the Remo hat. He was a fun character. We used to come out and drum together. We shared those private times a lot. We got to really experience the zone of what he was making. And, y’know, he was 88, and he would get out and walk five miles in the morning. I’d call and be like, ‘Hey Remo, how far you going today?’ ‘Five miles!’ He wasn’t a big liver. He had a couple of places and a lot of resources, but he didn’t live high. He lived normal. He was one of those old school guys; He wouldn’t get anything he didn’t need. He laughed at me all the time for having the things I do. I think I amused him.
“He really didn’t know how important what he did was. He knew it was important, but I don’t think he understood how far-reaching it was, and how far-reaching that legacy is and how many ways it will go on into the future. I consider myself very lucky to have met such a premier drum maker and toolmaker. That’s how I see Remo — he made sound tools. It’s a great loss. It really is.”