It's usually during the really bad sit-coms on slow weeknights when I jump on my throne and start wailing away at my 15-year-old drum set. At the moment, I'm in a minimalist set up. A bass drum, floor tom, snare, hi-hat, ride/crash cymbal & one smaller tom stuck to the top of the bass drum. Shuffle beats--that's what I'm good for these days. Occasionally I can throw down something fierce, but mostly I'm flailing in a semi-controlled state of mania. Not conducive for coherent beats. But I usually feel much better afterwards.
Because I was in my high school drum line, I got used to the company of drummers (I'm sorry, percussionists). Maybe because of this, I don't always find the stereotypical jokes about drummers as funny--because when you're mentally impaired in a rhythmic way, it's not a laughing matter. One of the drummers I met in college had his senior recital on Saturday afternoon. And he ripped through snare, marimba, multi-instrument percussion (or as I like to call it--junkyard music--not disparaging, just a description), and ensemble pieces. It was the culmination of years of work. It was about overcoming the mind set of can't and becoming the can. And it was about rhythm.
Lucas is a percussionist.
I am not.
When I first started playing drums, I took weekly classes with a guy a lot like Lucas. He was in college, working on his bachelor's and teaching kids like me for extra cash. During the end of my series of classes, my teacher (I don't remember his name) had a recital. I saw him up there with tons of equipment, and I wondered how all of that evolved from learning the essential 26 rudiments of percussion. I knew there was a long road ahead and even then I wondered, did I have it in me?
It turns out I didn't. I went in a different path, trying to describe the world with my words instead of my rhythm. But when I saw Lucas up onstage, beaming from the pride of an incredible performance, I could trace the path from a nine-year-old almost too small to hold the drum sticks to a twenty-something college student working his groove thing.
There is an arc of development in every line of work. It starts at zero and ends sometime later (usually higher than zero). There are a lot of things I don't do much anymore, and the level of my learning arc is quite low. I took piano lessons for about three years as a child. Today, I can find middle C, and if I work at it, I can find all the notes on a piece--but I can't play it without thinking. Nothing is automatic on a piano, except my experimental rhythms. Musically, I am only good at rhythms. Finding the right notes? Not my cup of tea. There's a reason I like Sonic Youth. Dissonance is nice.
So here I am thinking about my friend Lucas, who has reached a very high point in his percussion arc, and I have to wonder if someday I'll only be able to do one or two things well. Is that why we learn the basics in school, so we can choose what to follow? Are we really only supposed to do a couple things well, with the rest of it on par with the occasional game of chess?
Maybe so. The amount of work involved in becoming the musician Lucas and many other friends of mine are is huge. Nights, days, weeks spent living in practice rooms. Ignoring the rest of the world while the nuances of a particularly sticky marimba piece are worked out. Hearing the notes between the notes. Talking in fifths.
And I think back to those summers spent typing out strange stories on my Smith Corona, which changed to a computer later in college. Stories of unrequited love, vampires, death, life, rock concerts, driving 65 mph up a mountain road five sheets to the wind--everything. Hours spent reading, analyzing, and cataloguing useless information. More hours spent disseminating it all. And finally, when it all comes out in a controlled stream of word babble, it is understood by at least one or two people other than myself. If I do it right.
I had the feeling while standing and applauding after the final piece of Lucas' recital that I hadn't accomplished anything in my life. Or, at the very least, anything as important as what I had just witnessed.
But I've got a little bit of time to get there.
Matt Worley replicated a beat he had been thinking about in his head for about three minutes while playing drums a few weeks ago. He hasn't been able to do it again.