‘My Dreams Are Finally Taking Me Places’ : Culture: Musician escapes South-Central pitfalls with scholarship and NAACP honor.

Behind the double-locked doors of his family’s South-Central Los Angeles home, Tim McDuffy spent hours pounding on a makeshift drum set of old buckets, phone books and couch cushions.

If he hit hard enough, he could drown out the drive-bys. He could numb the sorrow he felt over rarely seeing his father. He could shatter the isolation that engulfed him in a neighborhood where many teen-agers drifted into gangs.

“I was so full of hurt,” McDuffy remembered. “There was so much confusion. . . . I was trying to deal with it.”

He copied the rhythms of his mother’s gospel albums, banging until his ears rang. Eventually, he scrounged together a well-used drum set and began to transform his unstructured pounding into music.

Always, in the back of his mind, there was the hope--a million-to-one shot--that somehow his drumming would lead him away from a place where drug addicts smoked crack in the alley outside his bedroom window.

Now it has.

Ten years after he began playing, the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People has named McDuffy, 18, one of the most talented minority youths in America. What’s more, he has earned a full music scholarship to a small college in Nebraska, where he will attend class this fall.

“I used to always say to Timmy, ‘Reach as high as you can. I don’t think there is anything that is impossible for you, if you really set your sights on it,’ ” recalled his mother, Rose.

McDuffy’s story is the kind that often gets lost amid the tide of crime and poverty in his South-Central neighborhood, less than a mile away from Florence and Normandie, one of the flash points of the 1992 riots. But it is more than a story of one boy’s perseverance against the odds. It is also an example of how a life can be profoundly changed when people care enough to get involved.

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McDuffy was never considered a prodigy.

In junior high school, his teachers believed his quiet demeanor was only a mask that hid a simmering temper. His drumming was dismissed, at first, as just the clangorous noise of an angry boy. But after McDuffy began playing in the school band, few could deny that the youngster was driven by desire, not anger.

“I’d get up on stage and play a lot of fast stuff,” McDuffy explained. “I made them notice me.”

At the suggestion of his eighth-grade band teacher, he tried out for the Hamilton High School Academy of Music--the Los Angeles Unified School District’s prestigious “Fame” school for the arts. McDuffy’s only other option was to attend his neighborhood school, Crenshaw High, where the band program was virtually nonexistent.

When Hamilton officials notified McDuffy that he had been accepted to the highly competitive school, the teen-ager was both stunned and elated. At that moment, when he had expected so little, he had been handed the most important opportunity of his life.

“I took full advantage of it,” he said.

David Sears, a percussion teacher at Hamilton, still remembers McDuffy’s determination. “He came ready to learn,” Sears said. “As musicians would say, he has ‘got a thing.’ ”

Before sunrise every school morning, McDuffy would catch an RTD bus to Hamilton High, about 15 miles from South-Central in a working-class neighborhood off Robertson Boulevard. He would get home late in the evening, after a day packed with hours of study and practice.

As a result, the gangly, soft-spoken youth learned to watch his back as he navigated the streets.

In McDuffy’s neighborhood there is little neutral territory for a young boy who resists the seductive pull of gangs. Those who venture out alone, without the protection of their homeboys, embark on a dangerous journey.

When McDuffy walked home from the bus, he never acted too smart or smug. If gang members asked what “set” he belonged to, he just replied: “I’m not with no set, man. I don’t want no trouble.”

Although he tried to keep his mind on school, it was hard to shut out the darker realities of his life.

Within four years, his family moved five times in a quest for someplace safe and affordable. In the midst of all this, his mother, a school bus driver, suffered a heart attack and then a stroke at age 48, making it impossible for her to work. With welfare as the family’s sole support, they ate only rice and beans some weeks.

McDuffy, the youngest of six children, found little male guidance. He saw his father, a Gardena locksmith, maybe every six months, he said. To cope with his pain, he would lie about their relationship to the other students at school, making up stories about all the things he and his father would do together.

“I was never sure if he loved me or not,” McDuffy said. “It’s something that still hurts.”

While his oldest brother turned to drugs, McDuffy fought the temptation, which was always close at hand. “I had a friend who sold drugs and stuff,” McDuffy said. “He would say to me, ‘Come on, you could make a lot of money.’ ”

But McDuffy’s conscience--and the fear of what his mother would say if he stumbled--would always prevail. “It was like a devil on one side and an angel on the other side,” he said. “The angel told me it wasn’t real cool (to get involved with drugs).”

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For refuge, he sought the safety of Hamilton’s music lab, the one place where he could envelop himself in the sweet sounds of rhythm and blues and jazz. As McDuffy got better on the drums, he taught himself how to play the piano and started writing songs.

To make a few bucks, he would accompany an organist during Sunday services at a South-Central church. The gigs usually brought in $50 a day, enough to help out his mom and buy a few extras for himself. “Don’t tell anyone, but that was a boring job,” McDuffy confided. “But it was a job.”

Most weekend evenings, McDuffy and his best friend from Hamilton would go to the World Stage Performance Gallery, a small storefront near Vernon Avenue and Crenshaw Boulevard where musicians from throughout the area gathered.

The dimly lit alcove, with a church-like atmosphere, was the perfect hangout for McDuffy and Marcus Coleman, a piano student who also came from South-Central.

A piano and drums were already set up on the stage. All the boys had to do was show up and play. The two teen-agers would jam with half a dozen or more other musicians until the early hours of the morning and then return the next evening for more.

“There was a brotherhood there,” McDuffy said. “It was an almost spiritual type of thing.”

Occasionally, Ndugu Chancler, a prominent Los Angeles drummer who has played with music greats such as Miles Davis, Santana and Frank Sinatra, would stop by to check out the scene. He spotted McDuffy immediately.

The shy teen-ager reminded Chancler a little of himself when he was young--a kid who played with heart but who needed direction.

Chancler, 41, gave McDuffy a few tips on how to improve his technique and encouraged him to attend a percussion camp in Charleston, Ill., in the summer of 1992. When McDuffy said he could not afford the air fare, Chancler raised the money.

“At first, I thought he was just being nice by giving me a few tips,” McDuffy said. “Then I started to realize what was going on. When we talked for a while, I found out we had similar backgrounds. We both grew up in the same neighborhood. We both had the same relationships with our parents. We had so much in common.”

Chancler, who was touched by the teen-ager, knew what was needed.

“I really rode him hard, I mean really hard,” Chancler said. “Without music, Tim would probably be dead on the corner or he would be out talking cool, mad at the world with no direction. It’s a cold reality.”

Together with the boy’s mother, Chancler screened McDuffy’s friends and demanded that he keep up his grades. Meanwhile, Chancler spent hours teaching his protege new rhythms, making sure the youngster had good equipment so that nothing could stand in his way.

Finally, McDuffy developed the kind of confidence that sometimes distinguishes the dreamers from the doers.

“Hanging out with Ndugu, I realized that I could actually have a career as a musician, one who writes and produces also,” McDuffy said, adding that he came to realize that the next step for him was college.

McDuffy wanted to go to USC, but his 2.8 grade point average was not good enough. So he applied to Chadron State College in Nebraska, where Chancler had a friend who ran the music program. McDuffy, one of only half a dozen people on his mother’s side of the family to ever go to college, was offered a full scholarship to the 2,000-student school.

“It was probably the proudest time for me when he got his full scholarship,” Chancler said. “I’ve got a nickname for him. I call him ‘Full Ride.’ It’s the name of a cymbal I play, and now it is also synonymous with his full ride to Chadron.”

For one final challenge before leaving for college, McDuffy decided to enter the NAACP’s 1994 Afro-Academic, Cultural, Technological and Scientific Olympics in Chicago in July.

“He didn’t want to go at first,” said his friend Coleman. “I said: ‘Man, there are going to be girls there.’ He said: ‘OK, I’m going.’ ”

The two youths spent an evening at McDuffy’s house writing their pieces for the music composition category of the competition. Using borrowed electronic equipment from Hamilton, they recorded their tunes onto cassette tapes.

McDuffy put together a light jazz song, called “Ebony Eyes,” for a cheerleader he had a crush on. “I guess it was just a product of my emotions more than anything else,” he said.

McDuffy and Coleman each played their tapes for a panel of judges early in the weeklong competition, attended by hundreds of high school students from across the country. The rest of the time, they mingled and partied, never expecting to win.

At the awards ceremony, the announcer had to say McDuffy’s name twice before the teen-ager realized his composition had taken the grand prize.

“They called my name and I didn’t believe it,” McDuffy said. “When you are up against 200 other people from all over the country, you are going to be a little skeptical.”

Along with being touted as one of the most talent minority youths in America, McDuffy also won a computer and $1,000. “Winning told me that I could really do this,” he said. “It made me feel a whole lot better about things.”

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McDuffy came back from the competition last month and started packing for college.

He crammed into a trunk an array of black tennis shoes and baggy shorts--popular Los Angeles street clothes that, admittedly, might look a little out of place in the tiny college town.

He dug out a few sweaters from the back of his closet and promised his mother that he would buy a new coat once the weather turns cold in Nebraska.

Two weeks ago, he left Los Angeles at sunrise for a place he had only seen in pictures. Once he arrived in Chadron, he called home to tell his mother how pretty it was there.

“There’s grass and fields of corn,” he said. “It’s so different than L.A. That’s what I want, for a while anyway.”

Someday, he hopes to return and work in the music industry, writing and producing songs.

“I’ve always had these big dreams, you know?” McDuffy said. “Now my dreams are finally taking me places. This is just the beginning.”