Spencer Dryden ✝

Spencer Dryden (April 7, 1938 – January 11, 2005) was an American musician best known as drummer for Jefferson Airplane and New Riders of the Purple Sage. He also played with The Dinosaurs, and The Ashes (later known as The Peanut Butter Conspiracy).\n', ' Spencer Dryden was born in New York City to Alice Chapple (1911–2005) and George Dryden Wheeler Jr. (1892–1957). Alice Chapple was a ballet dancer with Anna Pavlova\'s dance company, and a member of the Radio City Ballet Company; Dryden was an English-born American actor and director, who was a half-brother of Charlie Chaplin. Dryden carefully concealed his relationship to his world-famous half-uncle, not wanting to be judged on his name.\n', ' While Dryden was an infant, the family moved to Los Angeles and his father went to work as an assistant director for Chaplin. His parents divorced in 1943, but Spencer fondly recalled playing at his famous uncle\'s Hollywood studio as a child. In the late 1940s Dryden became friends with jazz fan Lloyd Miller, also born in 1938, and living down the street on Royal Boulevard in Rossmoyne in Glendale. Miller said they should start a band and encouraged Dryden to play drums. Since Dryden didn\'t have a drum set, Miller fashioned an instrument by thumb-tacking an old inner tube over a wooden barrel with no ends. Miller would pump his player piano, play cornet or clarinet and Dryden would bang out beats on the drum.\n', "