[Editor’s note: On June 7, New York City based musician Miles East released his latest album, Between Lightning and Thunder, which was produced by Blake Morgan. East has been building his own musical legacy after more than a decade as a premier session and touring drummer. Besides East, the album also features Morgan (bass, electric guitars, keyboards, backing vocals) and Justin Goldner (electric guitars, baritone). Today, we’re excited to share an exclusive essay from East, where he looks back at two of his earliest musical influences – his late brother Chip and The Beatles.]
I’ve often argued that my wanting to be a musician began when I first heard The Beatles—I was six years old, playing alone in my room when my mother beckoned me downstairs. She wanted me to hear something. She sat me down in front of the Hi-Fi (you read that right), put on side one of Meet The Beatles, and I spent the rest of the day repeatedly requesting she flip the record. However, I’ve been reminded recently of another facet about the origins of my life in music. It’s about my older brother Chip—one of seven older siblings—who just died after a long struggle with advanced Parkinson’s Disease. Several of my brothers are musically gifted, and music played a huge role in our family, but Chip was the one true-blue musician. After his death I quickly realized something, I believe I’ve always known but have remembered for the first time if you will. I didn’t just want to be a musician. I wanted to be Chip.
Raymond William “Chip” Ellinghaus was born on December 14th, 1953—the fifth of eight children of William and Erlaine who were gifted artistically in their own right though they never pursued it professionally. Our father had a beautiful singing voice and played trumpet. Our mother was a ballet dancer and choreographer who would have gone pro had she not decided to marry our dad. The siblings got our musical abilities from our father but we got our sensibility and appreciation for music from our mother. She had a dancer’s relationship to music and although she was partial to opera she loved music of all genres, with a particular interest in the music that lit up her children. For Chip and our older brother Doug, The Beatles were the game changer of all game changers: guitars were procured and live music began to ring through the house with mom as the informal musical director. In the three decades that followed, the number of players grew and the music never stopped. Chip didn’t know it at the time but when he was thirteen, as our mom went into labor with me, my first and most formidable mentor was hours away from meeting his infant protege.
From as far back as I can remember, Chip was music. A gifted guitarist, keyboardist and singer, he took to it like a bird to flight. And he immersed himself in it. One of my earliest memories is the experience of walking into Chip’s room at the end of the hall just past the bathroom (which I did often and without any apparent objection). There were guitars in every corner (or so it seemed), microphones on stands, music posters on the walls, and glowing blue lights on amplifiers that made strange echoey noises when jostled. I remember the smells. Amps and cases have such a distinct smell. And there was always music playing, either by him or on his record player. Some of it, like Black Sabbath or Led Zeppelin—whom I would grow to love and appreciate in my own teenage years—was a little scary for a child not yet five years old. But mostly it was The Beatles. I was still too young to know or care who was responsible for the music I was hearing. I mostly just remember it as the soundtrack to this enchanted world. But Chip didn’t just immerse himself in music, he dedicated himself to it, and to getting it right. At Chip’s memorial earlier this month, my brother Doug told a story that I’d never heard before. They were in a band together in high school and were about to perform for the first time at a school event. Chip had the best voice in the band so he was the lead singer but he was all of thirteen years old and sounded even younger. One of the songs they were doing was The Beatles “I’m Down,” which was Paul McCartney’s tribute to Little Richard. Thirteen year old Chip knew he couldn’t dishonor this song by singing it in his pristine angel baby voice so about a half hour before they were scheduled to go on he found an empty room, closed the door, and screamed his head off for a solid fifteen minutes so his voice would have the grit the song demanded. He carried that dedication with him through his entire career in music.
Chip was the textbook example of a working class musician. After college he cut his teeth as a bassist in touring lounge acts and musical reviews where his musical sensibility, polymath brain, and knack for catchy melodies made him a somewhat sought after studio musician and arranger. This led to a successful stint as a jingle writer and producer for local and regional businesses along the Lower Eastern shore. For the better part of the 80’s it was rare to be tuned into the radio in Ocean City Maryland or Rehoboth Beach Delaware for more than 15 minutes without hearing at least one of his jingles. This eventually led to opening his own studio “Absolute Pitch Productions” where he composed and produced music for TV and film.
It was during his early stint with lounge acts when he met his equally talented wife Mary. They quickly decided that they could do this themselves so they set off as a duo and began writing their own songs. I didn’t know at the time that Chip had been doing that since he was a teenager. Outside of the faces that adorned my siblings’ extensive record collections Chip and Mary were the only people I knew who wrote their own music. The idea enthralled me. They came back to live at home for about a month while they worked on their act. I was in elementary school at the time and a foray into music was only a secret fantasy. They took over my old room which was just across the hall and I took every opportunity to visit. There was that smell again! The amps, the guitars, the music. I was enchanted anew. But I was lost. The next sibling up from me, Chris, had started playing guitar with some assistance from Chip and he was getting pretty good. I was harboring a double secret fantasy of being a drummer but it just seemed hopelessly out of reach. Asking your parents to facilitate an interest in guitar—or pretty much any instrument you can carry with one hand—is one thing, but drums? I didn’t even entertain the ask. Air drumming and wooden spoons on pillows in the privacy of my own room would have to suffice.
It was Christmas Eve and I was in fifth grade. Chip and Mary had come back a few days before to spend the holidays at home. Any time Chip came to visit was magical and I always felt more alive and seen with him around. The house filled with music and they were the stars of the show, with us (and most of the neighbors) as their willing and eager audience. This Christmas season however, a melancholy had settled over me. I don’t even remember having asked for anything. During the festivities at our oldest sibling Marcia’s house who lived close by, Chip took notice of my mood and said “Hey kid! Enough with the moping. When you wake up tomorrow morning you’re gonna flip out!” On Christmas morning I walked into the living room and into the first day of the rest of my life. For assembled before me was not a train set, Hot Wheels track, or any other example of standard Christmas morning fare but a genuine birch-wood silver sparkle drum set. The real deal. It consisted of a 20” kick drum, a 14” snare drum, a 10” rack tom, a hi-hat stand with cymbals, and a proper drum key. An unrecognizable brand and modest by anyone’s standards but to me it might as well have had The Beatles logo emblazoned on the front of it. With my eyes wide and my jaw agape I sat down behind it, picked up the sticks, and quickly realized that not one of the thousands of hours spent air and pillow drumming had prepared me for this moment.
Chip didn’t miss a beat. He quickly stepped up, ID’d for me the various components and how they worked, then showed me how to play a basic two four back beat. Yes, Chip could also hold his own behind the drum kit. I got the hang of it almost instantly and the rest—if you’ll pardon the cliche—is history. At the time, I was amazed that mom and dad took it upon themselves to do what I had considered the unthinkable. It was only in retrospect, based on Chip’s comment the night before and his stewardship on that fateful day, that he was heavily involved in making my double secret fantasy come true. And as captivated as I was by Chip’s and now Chris’s ability to write their own music, I was more than happy to let them be the family stewards of original song. For the foreseeable future, all things drums would consume my every waking thought. That is until our father’s sixtieth birthday.
The family had gathered for the auspicious occasion at my older brother Rick’s house who lived about an hour away. Spirits were high as they always were at family gatherings but I could tell that this milestone gave my dad slight pause. I noticed in him a vulnerability—indiscernible to the casual observer but one I’d never seen before. Turning sixty carried a lot more weight even a few decades ago than it does today. The only difference between this gathering and any given Christmas Eve was that Chip and Mary, having recently become parents, were unable to attend. In their place and as their gift to Dad, Chip had written and recorded a song called “My Father” to be played at the party. The sound coming from the stereo was just Chip and his guitar—a sweetly picked ballad of reverence, love, and longing:
My father is a most amazing man
A kind and loving teacher
With a firm but gentle hand
But all the years went by so quickly
That I never took the time to understand
My father is a most amazing man
A giant in his circle
And the master of his plan
But all the years went by so quickly
That I never took the time to understand
Now I’m a man
And I’ve come to have a child of my own
And I wonder what he’ll think when he is grown
And my only home is someday I might be
What my father is too me
My father is a most amazing man
A jester on occasion
And the leader of the band
But all the years went by so quickly
That I never took the time to understand
My father is a most amazing man
A soldier with a vision
And the will to make it stand
But all the years went by so quickly
That I never took the time to understand
Now I’m a man
And my child’s eyes are so much like my own
And I wonder what he’ll think when he is grown
But my only hope is someday I might be
What my father is to me
It destroyed everyone. The insufferable—nothing phases me and no one understands me—teenager that I was had to sneak off to a vacant room in the house and cry uncontrollably for twenty minutes. Though unaware in that moment, a spark had been lit. Someday, somehow, I thought, “I will figure out how to write songs that do the same thing.” A decade and a half later saw me as both a drummer and a guitarist working the New York City clubs in original bands where I contributed my own songs. I wasn’t destroying anyone with my songs (by a long shot) but I was on the march. A particular moment that I remember well during this time was a car ride with Chip and one or two of my other siblings during a family visit. I had a cassette of some of the songs I was working on and Chip wanted to hear it. We popped it in. I was still so green, shooting from the hip and missing a lot, but Chip heard something and he said out loud with such casual matter-of-fact certainty “You’re going to be the musician in the family who makes it.”
I am so grateful to have had several mentors in my life. My dear friend and producer Blake Morgan is my present mentor and has been for many years. I owe much of my career as an artist to him. But I own my life as an artist to Chip. Through love, facility, stewardship, example, and by being an inspiring artist and human being worthy of emulation, he set my course when it mattered most. I’m often told by those who knew him well that we bare an uncanny resemblance and not just because we’re brothers. In a startling moment in the Spring of 2023, I understood, and facial hair plays a role. Chip was the first of my bothers to wear a mustache for his entire adult life. About a year before my latest record dropped, I was sporting a full beard, but I wanted a change. So, I shaved everything except the mustache and soul patch. “I dig this”, I thought. While feeling around for stubble my fingers momentarily covered my soul patch revealing in an instant what I would look like with just a mustache. “Oh my god! I’m Chip!” I thought. A bittersweet moment passed, “Of course I am.”
You can follow Miles East at Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and listen to his music on Spotify.
Miles East
Contributor
Miles is a New York City based musician
