New York City: Music Profile: Chad Hammer, cellist for Lucinda Black Bear
Event Details: Music Profile: Chad Hammer, cellist for Lucinda Black Bear - :
Indie rock band Lucinda Black Bear will be at Mercury Lounge on Sunday night, so I sat down with Chad Hammer, the band’s cellist at Lounge 47 in Queens to talk about music and life and how the two converged to create the best of both worlds.
“I’m so happy with the work that I do.” - Chad Hammer
The New Gay: For a 5-year-old, a cello is a big instrument, so who’s idea was that?
Chad Hammer: They make them in smaller sizes to be proportionate but I was a really small kid anyway, so it was always larger than I was. But both my parents are musicians. They felt like when I was turning five that I was old enough.
They asked me what kind of instrument I wanted to play and I can’t even pinpoint a reason why I said cello, but I did.
I can’t pinpoint what it was that drew me to the cello exactly but that’s what I picked and stuck with it. Sometimes begrudgingly. There’s actually a picture of me the first year I was playing with my tiny little cello, I was sitting there looking up and you can see tear stains on the front of the cello from the times when I was supposed to be practicing and didn’t want to practice, I’d rather be outside. My mother would make me – “Twenty minutes is all you have to do.” I’d be practicing 20 minutes crying the whole time.”
TNG: When you were in high school, were you creatively thinking where the cello could take you?
CH: Growing up I thought teaching students or performing in an orchestra, or teaching in a school was where I’d end up going with it. But I always liked when I was done playing my repertoire just to sit and play. I’d put on albums and listen, play along and make up stuff to go with the songs, just for fun. Thinking – “wouldn’t it be crazy if I actually did this in a band someday.” In college I never thought that the cello could go in a band. Now granted I had played back up for some pretty big artists. I had played with Smokey Robinson. I played with Ray Charles. Which was amazing. And on the classical side of things, I got to play with Pavarotti.
TNG: Why come to New York and live?
CH: Two things happened. During college, I thought that the only way to be in a rock band would be to play the electric bass and I joined a band with a guy I had met in my Physics class. That band ended because of some homophobia. It was while I was with that band that I did an open mic night playing classical music with my cello and another band saw me and said “We really want to do something different and want you to come play with us.” And I said, “But you’ve already got a bass player.” There reply was, “No we want you to play cello.” So we started playing together and we became this band called 3 Foot Hand. When it came time to audition for grad school (SUNY Purchase, NY), they said “we love our home town but why don’t we move to New York with you?” They did. Lived here for a year. Hated it, and moved back to Reno. I stayed, finishing my last year of grad school.
TNG: Had you ever been to New York before?
CH: The first time I came here was for my grad school audition. They liked me, and offered me a scholarship. I was by myself, and I knew one guy who I had been chatting with on the internet, just to talk about New York. After the audition, I went to the city to meet my friend and celebrate. When I first got to Grand Central, before meeting up with him I decided to a friend’s recital. So that was my first New York experience – getting out at Grand Central and making my way, by myself to the Manhattan School of Music up on the Upper West Side – and I fell in love with New York.
TNG: What year was that?
CH: Spring of 1999
TNG: And at that point, were you out?
CH: I’ve been out since I was 17 as a freshman in college. I had come out to two people while I was a senior in high school which they ended up outing me to half of the school. My mother was a teacher at that school so she started hearing rumors, and I was still dating a girl at the time because I was still conflicted with it in my own mind and trying to see if I could change myself. Raised in the south you’re brought up with a mentality about homosexuality so I had a very difficult time with it. So my mother started hearing these rumors and on the first day of school after the summer I had come out, her students confronted her with it and asked “Is Chad gay?” She looks at everybody in the room, and gets real red, and looks at my girlfriend and says “Why don’t you ask her?” My girlfriend had known the truth, I had told her about it when she started hearing the rumors and she was like “We can work through this.” She was very religious at the time, saying “We can work through this with the Bible and God’s help.”
My girlfriend and I started arguing every night on the phone. Screaming matches. And finally, a couple months after the school year had begun I slammed the phone down at 1AM in the morning. And my mother came bursting in to my room. “You’re going to tell me what’s going on and your going to tell me right now.” And I just broke down in tears and told her. She definitely wasn’t angry, she started crying, she had the same reaction, that we can work through this with God’s help. Over the course of three years she came around, but there were a lot of dark times where she was really depressed about it. She wasn’t intentionally trying to make me feel guilty, but she was definitely letting me know how sad she was because of this.
When I told my dad, it was a year after I told my mom and he had, unfortunately, one of the typical reactions which was “You can’t live under my roof.” Which my mother said, “You’re not kicking him out. I’ll be damned if you ever kick my son out of the house.”
He didn’t kick me out, but basically he and I didn’t speak for a year or so.
TNG: What year was that?
CH: 1996
TNG: Think, 1996 is a whole lot different than 2010.
CH: Especially in a place like Reno. Which is still the west and very much a cowboy attitude. But, the thing I was fortunate in is having two artists as parents – eventually they had to sit down and think, they had both been to music schools, they certainly weren’t lacking in having friendships with homosexuals. Note: With time, and work, it got better, a whole lot better. Chad’s parents are now “200% supportive and have been for years.”
TNG: Back to New York. How did your life begin to take shape?
CH: A year after grad school I made up my mind I didn’t want to become a teacher, for that year I did what a lot of artists do – I bartended. After a year of that, I got into a really bad car wreck. My car got totaled, I was fine, but I didn’t have my ride anymore to my shifts up in Westchester so I had to look for work. So I decided I didn’t want to be a bartender every night of the week.
I saw an ad in the paper for a part time teaching position at a community service organization on the upper east side and to be honest, as an artist, the thing that jumped out at me about the add was it said, Health Benefits. I went for the interview, really liked the people, wasn’t sure how I was going to take to teaching but it wasn’t like a public school setting. It was an after school program and teaching two mornings a week with the preschoolers.
Eight years later, I’m still there. After a year in a half of working there, we formed our own visual performing arts department and began teaching, not only to the children, but with all the other branches of our organization. Now in a addition to the eight preschool classrooms, and the after school program, we run a summer camp that’s all art space – so we’ve got musical theater, we’ve got digital arts, animation, photography, music and we’ve even have the 5 year old camp which does a foundation in all the arts. And we run two senior centers and I do music therapy with the Alzheimer’s clients. And we run a women’s homeless shelter for women with mental illness on Park Avenue.
And we have a community theater that I do lighting, sound, and music for, and act in.
TNG: AND, you’re able to be in a rock band.
CH: Well, that’s how I joined the band, was our lead singer’s wife, she was teaching drama with me at the time and said “You really need to meet my husband and play some music with him. You’re a great cellist and he’s a great song writer.” And after months and months of her saying you guys should meet, we finally did and I played some music with him and we just clicked right away. And within a few weeks we formed our first show as Lucinda Black Bear - just me and him at Pete’s Candy Store in Williamsburg.
Chad and his boyfriend Chasson (also manager of LBB) live in Queens, New York.
Lucind Black Bear – led by Christian Gibbs, with Mike Cohen on bass, Kristin Mueller on drums, and Chad on cello, will be performing at Mercury Lounge, Sunday, January 30.
Details and ticket info: Mercury Lounge
Dates for Winter Tour: Show Dates
Join Lucinda Black Bear on FACEBOOK
Listen to Lucinda Black Bear’s single KNIVES
First time here? See what we're all about... Get involved... Send us a tip!...
That’s an awesome story. Awesome band, too.
Leave your response!