Editor's Note: Drumming Great Rick Porter left us in January 2003. His musicianship was highly respected, and his songwriting abilities transcended the usual "for a drummer" caveat. Read his obituary here, and then enjoy a rare glimpse at Rick's ability to create while incarcerated, as seen through the eyes of prison worker and fellow musician Jeffrey Leppart. Reflections on Rick Porter in Prison
by Jeffrey Leppart

Rick grew up and learned to play drums and piano in ‘40’s, New York. He was also considered to be a great vocal prospect as he had absolute perfect pitch.

Photo by TR Reed

He was adored by the older NY jazz musicians, and they would come to his house, pick him up, bring him to gigs and had him sit in on drums at a very early age.

In the ‘40’s NY, jazz musicians shot heroin like college students smoked marijuana in the ‘60’s. One of the big differences between the two drugs is that you can stop smoking pot. Another is that H wreaks havoc on the organs of your body not to mention your life.

I’m sure that many of Rick’s older friends and role models must have used H. There seemed to be a jazz fraternity at that time that you had to use this insidious drug to be included in. Rick had no idea what the consequences of beginning this habit would be or where it would take him.

Heroin is so addictive and controlling that most addicts will die of an overdose, die from their bodies giving out or go to prison. The lucky ones go to prison. There they will be taught how to live without the drug in substance abuse classes on just the chance that it will work. And they will get older.

In prison, time is a stealthy thief. You must leave huge gaps in your life there, but for a heroin addict, this may be the best part of his life. Living behind steel bars, razor wire, guards in towers with rifles and teams of gnarling German Shepherds gives the recovering addict a certain measure of peace. He knows that he cannot get the drug there and learns to accept that.

Also because he is not using, he does not have the sickness of the disease to deal with. I have been told by heroin addicts that once you really start getting your body accustomed to this drug, using is not about getting high anymore; it is about “keeping the sickness off you” that would happen if you didn’t maintain enough of the drug in your blood stream.



I met Rick at the Jester 3, TDCJ unit just south of Sugarland around ’92 or ’93. It is a medical unit.

He was sent to that unit because he was in his sixties at that time and needed more medical attention. I was a Windham teacher there, teaching GED classes at that time, and Rick had a choice job (for the prison) as a librarian. Because of the lack of space in the prison school house, my class was located in the library, right by where Rick was working. We became fast friends.

Because Rick was so intelligent and capable, he would get the air conditioned jobs such as that. However the typical inmate has an IQ in the 80’s. I asked Rick once what it was like to have to live with them. He said, “It’s mean, Man. It’s mean.” Here’s an example, and I don’t mean to make fun of anyone, but a lot of inmates think that a “100” on an IQ test is a perfect score.

Rick would have made a great politician for he was very apt at getting people on his side such as the warden and the chaplain. Rick set it up to have a band practicing in a storage room in the gym that had electrical outlets to plug equipment in using the chaplain’s equipment. This band would then play for GED graduation ceremonies, certain AA celebrations that included people from the “outside” or just music concerts for inmates.

The original drummer in that band was Rick’s good friend, G. T. Hogan or just “G” as Rick called him. He was on that unit for the same reason Rick was. The chaplain lacked a complete drum set at the time and was trying to put one together to use for his services, but the ride cymbal was, as Rick put it, “like a pot cover.”

My drummer brother who lived in Minnesota sent an old “A” series Zildgin ride cymbal that was from the ‘50’s. He thought that would be a great place for it to end up. When I brought it onto the unit, the warden, who once was a drummer himself, put the crown of the cymbal on the index finger of his left hand and tapped it a little with the fingers of his right hand, and then approved it.



Keith Karnaky contributed a floor tom that was exactly the color of the bass drum we already had. We thought that God might have helped out on that one.

However, just as the drum set was complete, G got transferred to another unit for an intense six weeks of substance abuse training. I’m sure that Rick felt a somewhat empty feeling seeing his good friend go but realized that it meant that G would be going home after this training was completed so he couldn’t feel bad about it. He had to feel good for G. That’s the way it is in prison.

The rest of the equipment must have been purchased by a chaplain in the ‘60’s. There was a Fender Rhodes, 73, electric piano. There was also a Fender “Mustang” bass, an old Fender Stratocaster guitar, a Sure Vocal Master P.A. and a small organ that had a little drum machine in it that played Tango, Rumba and other such rhythms.

In the original plan Rick would play the chords for his tunes on the Rhodes and G would play drums. After G’s departure, Rick played the organ with the drum machine, and so all of his songs were done with a Latin beat. I played the heads on tenor and it really didn’t sound bad that way.

Finally he found another drummer, and there was also someone to play bass and someone to play guitar now. But Rick had to laboriously teach them all what to do.

Rick had, at one time, added great lyrics to his songs. I remember him saying that he wrote “A Summer Rose” when he was “trippin’ on sobriety” one day in the prison.

I also remember complimenting Rick on his lyrics when I heard him sing them once, and he said, “Oh, I just hung some lyrics on these lines so that I could sing them and play the chords at the same time.” But that was some really good “lyric hanging.”



Then we began to performs Rick’s songs with tenor and guitar playing the heads in unison and octaves with Michael Kinney on guitar and me on sax. Rick taught the drummer to play a swing beat on the ride cymbal, and the unisons and octaves brought out Rick’s lines and gave them more power. It sounded better now and closer to what Rick wanted. But what Rick really had in mind was a horn section and a band rather like Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers of the ‘50’s and ‘60’s.

I used to wonder why Rick didn’t change to piano as his first instrument since he had such a great ear, he was fluent in jazz harmony, notation, etc., plus he had a melodic gift for writing great jazz lines and his scatting ability showed that he could have been a very good improviser of extemporaneous jazz lines on the piano if he would shift his attention over to that. It seemed a shame to me.

Then I saw him at Cezanne with his “free world” band and with his horn section. Now he was directing the group from the drummer’s position, and it seemed like Beethoven conducting one of his symphonies. He was involved in directing the solos, everything. It was an epiphany to me.

But regarding Rick in prison, he couldn’t just go down to the gym and play music anytime he wanted to. Those times were scarce, and the prison is not that kind. So he wrote his songs in the dorm with no piano and where he lived with a bunch of screaming 20 year olds and a blasting TV. But, remember, Rick had perfect pitch, and through his composing, even under those cacophonous conditions, he was able to mentally leave the prison for brief periods. It must have been what kept him sane.



Jeffrey Leppart