Friday, June 21, 2013

Why I Became a Drummer

In my awesome discussion yesterday with the stranger in the waiting room, I talked about why I became a drummer. It made me want to find the following videos as I tell people that these two songs were what made me want to play drums. It wasn't the Beatles or Van Halen or even AC/DC. It was a song about "living in sin / at the Holiday Inn" and a song about a "tunnel of love" that I heard as an impressionable youngster.

I distinctly remember hearing the songs below. This was on a 8 track player in the basement of the first house I lived in on Red Bud Road in Cedar Rapids. This was back when I thought there was a band inside the stereo and I'd lift up the flap that went up when the 8 track was inserted to see if I could see the band that was playing the songs. I had no concept of how music was stored or written on the tape.

It was these songs and, honestly, listening to them over and over, and playing along to them the best that I could on the makeshift drumset I had created that helped me decide that I wanted to be a drummer. This was in spite of being very young and not really having parents 'into' music. I recalled yesterday that when I was very young, my parents bought a pair of drumsticks - one for me, one for my brother - because we were supposed to "share." How do you share a pair of drumsticks? The worst part about it was that the sticks were way too big for the makeshift drumset I had created. 

The makeshift drumset was a a black iron stove. I assembled a drumset, more or less, with a small red Indian drum, a canister of Lincoln Logs, and a canister of Tinker Toys. The Indian drum was my "snare" while the Lincoln Logs canister, with its green plastic lid, was my tom. The canister of Tinker Toys had a metal lid so that was, essentially, a cymbal. I used the purple sticks that had come in the Tinker Toy canister as my drum sticks. The purple ones were preferred because they were the longest available. The green sticks were next longest and I quickly began to use them because I broke the purple sticks because I was slamming away on this "drum set" and there was no 'give' for the metal.

Listening to these songs now makes me smile.

Living in Sin


Tunnel of Love

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