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who confirmed her participation in marching band would count toward a physical education credit. Karen also succeeded in opting out of geometry class in favor of joining the school choir.
    Gifford presented Karen with a glockenspiel and a set of mallets and put her right to work in his marching band, where she marched in the percussion section alongside the drums. Karen quickly found the glockenspiel cumbersome. Additionally, the tone of the instrument began to bother her. She detected that it played a quarter-step sharp in relation to the rest of the band.
    Rehearsing with the percussion section, Karen became increasingly intrigued by what classmate Frankie Chavez and the other drummers were doing. As in the Carpenter home, in the Chavez residence music was part of daily life. “ He’d been playing the drums since he was three,” Karen said, calling him “a Buddy Rich freak. He even ate the same food as Buddy Rich!” But Chavez denies this allegation. “No,” he says, “I didn’t eat the same foods as Buddy,” but he admits that Buddy Rich certainly influenced his playing.
    Karen marched with the glockenspiel for about two months, by which time it became evident to her that Chavez was the only drummer in the band who had a real passion for his music. “ I used to march downthe street playing these stupid bells, watching Frankie play his tail off on the drums,” she later said. “It hit me that I could play drums as good as nine-tenths of those boys in the drum line, outside of Frankie.”
    Meeting with band director Gifford, Karen informed him of her desire to switch instruments. She wanted to join the drum line. “ I finally had to talk him into it,” she recalled. “At that time, no girl anywhere was in the drum line of a marching band in any school.” This was met with a tepid response from Gifford, to say the least. “Girls don’t play drums,” he told her. “That’s not really normal.”
    â€œ All I ever heard was ‘girls don’t play drums,’” Karen later recalled. “That is such an overused line, but I started anyway. I picked up a pair of sticks, and it was the most natural-feeling thing I’ve ever done.”
    Karen saw Gifford’s cynicism as a challenge. “Well, let me try,” she told Gifford.
    Although the director was doubtful, he agreed to let Karen transition to the drums. First he assigned her to play a pair of cymbals, which was not her goal but did bring her closer to Frankie and the other drummers. Chavez was in charge of writing and developing drum cadences for the group, and his goal was to have fun and encourage listeners to move or dance. “They were funky and syncopated and kind of infectious,” he says. “We were having such a great time that Karen wanted to play the cadences with the drum line, so she left the cymbals and started playing tenor drum.” Never one to settle short of her goal, Karen aspired to play the snare drum during parades and the halftime shows at football games. According to Chavez, “the most interesting parts were assigned to the snare drums, so that’s where she ultimately ended up. That was the conduit to playing drums.”
    Immediately at ease with the snare drum, Karen spent countless hours rehearsing before and after school. At home she assembled the kitchen barstools and even a few pots and pans to simulate a drum kit. Her father’s chopsticks served as drumsticks. Karen began playing along to LPs like the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s
Time Out
and
Time Further Out
, which were filled with difficult time signatures like 9/8 and 5/4. “They liked to play jazz,” Chavez recalls. “Richard was a huge Dave Brubeck fan, and Karen and I both loved Joe Morello. They liked everything from Brubeck to Beatles. I remember being at their houseand the Beatles’
Rubber Soul
had just come out. I remember sitting