My Dream Drum Kit

Once upon a time, I was a musician.  A drummer.  Always wanted to be one.  Despite my parents buying me, not one, not two, but three different guitars.  Not exactly sure what ever led them to believe I wanted a guitar as I would tap and bang on anything I could get my grubby mits on.

Outside of a simple cheesy toy drum set I had gotten for Christmas as a kid many many years ago, that was all I had until I got into 7th grade.  That was when I got detention for something about flushing crackers in a toilet.  Don’t even remember doing it.  But my step dad couldn’t pick me up for another hour after detention, so I managed to sneak into the band room and found the drums and started toying about.  No one even bothered that I wasn’t in band.

After getting into High School, I hung out with others who liked playing music and we started a band called Shady People and we would practice at the music store in town that was upstairs from Der Chocolate Haus.  I was allowed to use the drums they had up there.

A lot of practice later, I managed to coax my mom to come see us play.  She told her friends and one day, a man named Chet pulled up with a drum set in his conversion van.  It wasn’t new, but it was the world to me.  A nice blue metallic finish set of Slingerland drums, in a Jazz setup.  Sure it wasn’t Rock or Metal, but it was mine, and I played and played and annoyed the neighbors something fierce in that tight neighborhood.

Though as many child hood bands go, ours didn’t make it.  We did a mean Peter Schilling’s Major Tom and Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water and a couple of hand fulls of songs we played at the school and parties we hosted.  That was as close as we got to being famous.  Basically not at all.

I gave up my musician dreams in favor of a family.  So I married my high school sweetheart, had two wonderful little boys.  Played my drums in the garage until one day we needed some money and sold my beloved drum kit.  When the marriage broke down, I tried to make a come back in a band called White Steel.  That lasted a few months but having to borrow equipment and our very talented but retarded lead guitarist (who decided to become a Martial Arts specialist – I mean the dude could play like Eddie Van Halen blind folded)…. We broke up.  We did manage to record messing around in a studio in New York.   I say record, but it was recorded, put on a cassette tape, which ran out of room so it’s cut off.  This was also with 3 drummers.  Our bass player George on the Left Channel.  Me on the Center Channel.  And Denise on the Right Channel.  It’s rough and you can hear mistakes during our solos.  Though Denise wiped the floor with Me and George.

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Sadly, my second wife decided my memories weren’t any good for me and had thrown out many pictures of my life before her including ex-girlfriends, my band and a lot of other pictures basically between my life between the age of 12 through 25.  Needless to say, I have next to no pictures of those years unless my kids were in them.  Thus my drum set pictures are history and even the hand painted logo I did on the bass drum is all but visions in my head.  The audio clip is all that’s left of anything I ever did musically.

Of my two sons.  One is an amazing Basketball Player.  The other…  A drummer

He made his old man proud by not only being a drummer but a better drummer than his old man ever was.  Though.  History repeats itself.  He’s now married and works a steady job and his band broke up.  However, I do have video memories of his days of glory.

Chrio Video I

Chrio Video II