Many, many years (eons, really) ago, a group of children found a novel way to express themselves. They found, individually, that beating something REALLY HARD was a good way to talk to the world. There is something fundamentally primal, savage, beautiful, precise and utterly blissful about this. Something that speaks to anyone who has the gumption to pick a couple of wooden sticks and start beating.

I don't know what it is about drummers that makes them special--because at the core of my heart, that's what I still am. It's hard to convey the language in regular English. So I will use the language I was given when I started to learn how to be a drummer:

Digga, digga, dig. Boom boom, blat, boom. Rickita rickita, sta sta stamm. One eee and ah, two eee and ah, three. Digga do, dikka dikka doo doo damn. Stim, sticka sticka, stim. Bim sala bim. Mr. Worley, that thing is an instrument, not a plaything!

But, as usual, my sixth grade band teacher was only half-right. The drum is an instrument, but it's also a plaything, a lover, a fighter and, sometimes, the loudest damn thing on the face of the earth. And back in those formative years, there was nothing better than hitting together stuff as hard as I could. During the Star Spangled Banner, my goal was to make sure that everyone could hear the sonic boom of the huge bass drum, or crisp splash of crash cymbals. You know you're playing the right instrument when its name is "crash."

Once I got to high school, the goal was to break as many pairs of sticks, drum heads, cymbals and anything else I could. A pair of sticks a week (at the least), a drum head every few weeks, a cymbal if I was lucky. This was the point. Because we knew our job was to guide the band. To make them feel the beat they couldn't keep themselves. We were the heartbeat and they were the rest of the body trying to make us look pretty.

And this was, to various degrees, the same with all other drummers. Those who share the magic of rhythm have a common bond and it usually starts with the tapping of feet, the nodding of heads, the controlled flailing of arms and wrists.

Saturday night, another chapter of the Drummer came to a close. My close friend (and ex-roommate) Brian Chavez had his Senior Recital for a Bachelor's Degree in Musical Performance. And it was smoking, delicate, intimate, bombastic, perplexing and powerful. But it proves what all of us other drummers (and there are quite a few, don't fool yourself) already knew, Brian is one hell of a drummer.

Percussionist, really. But I can't call him that, because the initial thought is always "drummer." And no matter where Brian goes from here, he will always be a drummer. As will the rest of us.

The notion of a drummer, by conventional standards, is not the most beautiful picture. Most of the time, the drummer is the first to be thrown overboard when food is scarce. Think of pop music. Pearl Jam, Nirvana, the Smashing Pumpkins, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Guns N' Roses and hundreds of other bands went through a revolving door of drummers. Led Zeppelin and the Who lost theirs and broke up. The writers of "Spinal Tap" masterfully echoed this joke with a laundry list of fatalities that befell their beat keepers. Drummers are easily replaced, because the only people who care about drummers are other drummers.

And maybe that's why I have so many drummer friends.

Aside from hours spent trying to channel the Force just enough to move SOMETHING with our minds, we spent more than equal time trying to tell the world exactly what we thought of it. And it came out something like this:

Boom, bap, ba-boom boom bap. Spaaash, bing, bap, du-doom doom, snap. Rigida rigida rigida rim. Booom booom booom booom. Bish, bip, ditti dak dak, shikita pip pam bam. Dock, dock, dock, dock, BAM BAM BAM BAM...

Matt Worley would interpret the preceding message, but you non-drummers probably still wouldn't understand.