Bob Rosengarden, myself and Johnny Carson.
It was around 1963 that I brought a set of my
bongos
-- along with my newly-invented
Vibra-Slap®
-- to The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, broadcast from New York City.
Specs Powell
first introduced me to Bob Rosengarden, the drummer for The Tonight Show band, who became an
important mentor to me. Rosengarden asked me to create an instrument that would replicate the
sound of the traditional horse jawbone with rattling teeth. The result, a contemporary version
of the jawbone called the Vibra-Slap®, became LP®'s first patent. Bobby was kind
enough to take me backstage to meet Johnny Carson, himself an amateur drummer, to show him
what I had just created.
Meeting Johnny Carson was a defining moment for me, a further affirmation that I was on
to something important in building instruments. Within a year, I founded
Latin Percussion.
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