The Beat of My Own Drum

The Grammy Award-nominated music artist traces four decades of Latin and pop music, sharing intimate details from her tours with fellow artists and her solo career while revealing how her faith has helped her work through her painful experiences with sexual abuse. 75,000 first printing.

Autorentext
Sheila E. with Wendy Holden

Klappentext
A moving memoir from Grammy Award nominee Sheila E. about the healing power of music inspired by five decades of life and love on the stage.

Zusammenfassung
From the Grammy-nominated singer, drummer, and percussionist who is world renowned for her contributions throughout the music industry, a moving memoir about the healing power of music and spiritual growth inspired by five decades of life and love on the stage.

She was born Sheila Escovedo in 1957, but the world knows her as Sheila E. She first picked up the drumsticks and started making music at the precocious age of three, taught by her legendary father, percussionist Pete Escovedo. As the goddaughter of Tito Puente, music was the heartbeat of her family, and despite Sheila's impoverished childhood in Oakland, California, her family stayed strong, inspired by the music they played nightly in their living room. When she was only five, Sheila delivered her first solo performance to a live audience. By nineteen, she had fallen in love with Carlos Santana. By twenty-one, she met Prince at one of her concerts. Sheila E. and Prince would eventually join forces and collaborate for more than two decades, creating hits that catapulted Sheila to her own pop superstardom.

The Beat of My Own Drum is both a walk through four decades of Latin and pop music—from her tours with Marvin Gaye, Lionel Richie, Prince, and Ringo Starr to her own solo career. At the same time, it’s also a heartbreaking, ultimately redemptive look at how the sanctity of music can save a person’s life. Having repeatedly endured sexual abuse as a child, Sheila credits her parents, music, and God with giving her the will to carry on and to build a lasting legacy.

Rich in musical detail, pop, and Latin music history, this is a fascinating walk through some of the biggest moments in music from the ’70s and ’80s. But as Sheila’s personal story, this memoir is a unique glimpse into a world-famous drummer’s singular life—a treat for both new and longtime fans of Sheila E. And above all, The Beat of My Own Drum is a testament to how the positive power of music has fueled Sheila’s heart and soul—and how it can transform your life as well.

Leseprobe
The Beat of My Own Drum 1. Crescendo The loudest point reached in a gradually increasing sound
You came into my life

In time

That moment I knew

We would share our dreams

And so it seems

That dreams do come true

“NINA”

THE E FAMILY (WRITTEN BY PETE ESCOVEDO)

I could hear the beat as I approached the stage. The connection between the music and me felt like it was in my DNA. The cymbals vibrated through my body and the timbales shook my bones. My father’s conga playing touched me somewhere deep within my soul.

“You were kicking in time to the percussion inside your mom’s belly!” he’d tell me with a chuckle. “After you were born I took you to clubs in a bassinet and hid you behind the bar!”

It was no wonder that the pounding of his drums felt like the heartbeat of my life.

The preparations for my first live performance that night in 1962 had taken more than an hour at my grandparents’ house on Thirty-third and Market Street in West Oakland, California. Some of my older cousins had gathered around to watch, curious, as Moms dressed me up.

I was five years old.

When she helped me into a new white dress with a frilly lace hem, I knew that it had to be a special occasion. I only ever wore dresses for fancy events like birthday parties or going to church on Sundays.

Mama—my Creole grandmother, who was what they called “light skin,” with dyed black hair, stockings rolled to the knee, and never without her apron, sat rocking in her chair with a grin as Moms fixed my hair and tied a white ribbon into my almost shoulder-length curls.

The prettier she made me look, the more my cousins complained. “This isn’t fair,” they whined. “How come Sheila gets to go and we can’t?”

My mother told them they weren’t old enough to go to a nightclub. They must have been between six and ten years old.

“But she’s younger than us!” they protested in unison.

“Yes,” Moms countered quickly. “But this is a special night—Sheila’s going to go perform with her father.”

I looked up into her face, wide-eyed. “I’m gonna play with Daddy?”

She nodded.

I smiled. I didn’t feel fazed by the news at all. I played with Pops all the time at home, stepping up to his congas (with the help of a chair) and hammering out a rhythm with my tiny hands.

Even when he wasn’t around, I’d create music from any thing—beating on pots and pans, a window, a wall, a table, or my chest. Moms and Pops said that each time a Jiffy peanut-butter commercial came on TV, I’d run to the old Zenith set (that looked like something from a spaceship) and tap on the screen in time to the rhythm. The tune had a melody and beat that captured my attention.

Eventually, my persistence wore down the grown-ups. Pops and his friends would laughingly concede and let me join in one of their daily jamming sessions.

“Come and play, Sheila,” they’d say. I had no idea that many of them were famous musicians—they were just Pops’s friends—and they didn’t need to ask me twice. Sitting on the congas opposite my father, I’d mimic his hand movements as if I was looking in a mirror. I’d watch him practice, and I’d practice along with him. I guess he’d decided I was ready to go public.

Moms folded over the ruffled lining of my white socks and slipped me into shiny patent leather shoes with silver buckles. They were uncomfortably new. I arched my feet to test their flexibility and winced a little when they pinched.

“I’ll get ready and then we’ll go,” she told me, stroking my cheek with the back of her hand.

I loved all the attention she was paying me.

I loved that I was going to play with Pops.

I loved that I didn’t hurt anymore.

Everything was still very muddled in my head, but that night she was getting me ready can’t have been long after the Bad Thing happened.

The thing nobody talked about.

The thing that made me so sick inside.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but letting me play with Pops and his Escovedo Brothers Latin Jazz Sextet must have been some kind of reward.

Not that my parents chose to see it that way. “You were a natural real young,” they’d say firmly. “We just thought it would be fun for you to show everyone what you could do.” Even now, more than fifty years later, they find what happened back then almost impossible to talk about.

No matter what the reason for my first performance that night, it is true that a day never passed in our house without music being played. The words “I want to be a musician” never came from my mouth, thoug…

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