I’m auditioning tomorrow for a rock covers band and there’s something oh so very soothing about it. Being somewhat between jobs, I realized it was maybe time to start earning my keep again as a drummer, so I looked on Craigslist for a band. I found a New Jersey covers outfit comprising middle-aged men who play a handful of shows on weekends around lives with their families and day jobs. Sounds just about my speed. So long as the band is good.
I miss playing competently through a few dozen songs for an audience of half-cut revellers on a Saturday night. It’s fun to play my rubber practice kit in the garage, and it’s fun to hit the recording studio every now and again and to rehearse with an awesome originals band. But there’s something else and differently satisfying about the whole process of gigging, and after doing so for three decades and taking an almost three-year hiatus, I miss it sorely. I miss the driving to and from shows, the filling up at gas stations in the middle of nowhere, the watching the sun rise on the way home from a gig on a Sunday morning, the sneaking back into the house quietly and hoping to be back in bed before our daughter comes in to find us and getting up and blearily making everyone breakfast (or maybe lunch). I miss ending the songs tightly with the bassist. I miss the feeling of stick striking head making sound and feeling fantastic.
I miss the familiarity with the life cycle of my drums, like knowing how much longer till I need to change the snare head or buy a new brick of sticks or replace (part of) a cymbal stand. I miss sound-checking a couple of hours before the show and then re-tuning the kit completely a short while before we go on because the heat or the air conditioning has changed the tension of all the drums. I miss the extended, repeated engagement with my instrument in performance. I miss playing out several nights a week. I REALLY miss the productions where I was playing six to eight shows a week for two hours at a time. I miss how that made me feel like a professional drummer. I mean, I’ll always be one, regardless of how much I’m actually playing (right?!), but I love knowing that I just pulled off a handful of shows over a weekend and there’s two dozen more in the diary and I’m making it work as a drummer.
I love the physical readiness – the lack of stiffness in my arms, back and shoulders when I sit at the kit and the playing just flows because it was only yesterday I was playing the same kit for the same songs and I know exactly how to transition from one tune and one tempo to the next. My callouses are hard, blood blisters are gone, and the half-assed garage rehearsal volume is replaced in my motor memory with full-throttle performance-volume movement and power.
The best way to practise for gigs is to play gigs. The band gets better as a band by performing together as a band. I love congealing with co-performers in songs – the familiar, the surprises, the knowing glances, the coping live with the unexpected. I miss the broken sticks, the dropped sticks, the twiddling of sticks, the hastily picking up spare sticks, the on-the-job maintenance as the cowbell slips and needs tightening while the groove goes on. I love, love, LOVE the sounds of my drums. And I love the immersive feeling of the rest of the band around me and in my monitors. I miss sound-checking and the thrill of hearing the miked bass drum in an empty room. I miss people dancing to my beat.
I miss earning money from playing. It’s satisfying to do the thing I’ve worked at the most for more than 30 years and have people give me folded cash in a parking lot to acknowledge that I did it OK. I like the straightforwardness of that transaction – I play drums in a bar, the band splits the takings after the show. There might even be gas money on top. There’s no peer review, no promotion, no tenure, no APA, no spelling conventions, no theoretical framework, no ethics review and no aspirations to methodological validity. I get there on time, I set up, I play rock and roll, I load the drums back in the car, I get paid, I go home.
There is nothing, nothing at all, like the feeling of being a drummer.
* “Back in the Saddle Again” is a song that I used to play in an Aerosmith tribute band. I love the sentiment in the title and the tempo and the blues-rock riff of the guitars. I loved playing this song. Not so much when I re-joined the band in 2014-2015, but when I was first in the band in 2002-2003 with a guitarist who has since passed away (RIP, Frank). We achieved a wonderfully deep groove on this tune, especially in the chorus where I would sink low into the floor tom for the throbbing eighth-note rhythm. I used to look forward to this every show (despite some persistent anxiety around cocking up listening the guitar intro and getting my entry right). Part of why I want to play covers is a need to revisit that feeling – to get back in the saddle.