Luckily for me Ma soon needed drummers. This was (and is - sorry, reed players, it's my opinion!) infinitely cooler than the bass clarinet! I wouldn't have minded learning more about the woodwind family - especially the sax - but the reeds always really bothered my teeth! Blowing on them got to be the equivalent of nails on a chalkboard for me! It just really hurt my teeth!
So I started learning drums. I caught on pretty quickly - always kinda had a knack for it (as well as learning other instruments - they just kinda came naturally to me). Within a couple of years the rest of the percussion section had graduated and I was the only remaining drummer. This meant that for marching band I literally was the entire drum line! No one else at the time could play any of the percussion, so we recruited a couple of kids that could at least halfway walk in time, and I had one on the right carrying a bass drum, one on the left carrying a couple of cymbals, and I had a set of quads, and I played everything - kinda like a traveling drum set! It was quite interesting to watch, I'm sure!
Around this time (I'm guessing 6th or 7th grade) Ma found an old 70s Slingerland drum set in Exeter (another little bitty-ol' town not too far from Washburn) for a few hundred bucks, so we grabbed that, and I was on my way to super-stardom. Right. Yeah, I didn't even know what to do with all those drums for a good couple of years!
1986. I discovered Metallica via my cousin, Chris. This was by far the coolest discovery of my entire 13 years on Earth! He gave me a copy of "Ride The Lightning", and I just fell in love. To this day it's one of my favorite albums of all time! From that time on, I wanted to learn to play guitar (I had also received an acoustic guitar for Christmas, I believe) and drums and to be a rock star. This obsession just grew and grew, despite the lack of rock musicians (or any musicians, really, outside of band class) in Washburn. A couple of years later, around freshman year, my good friend, Brandon, bought a B.C. Rich Warlock guitar and a little Crate amp, and Chris already had an electric guitar (can't remember the model, but I believe it was a Charvel) and we dug up one or two other kids, Tom Miles and Sam Callison to play (and I use that word very loosely) bass, and occasionally another kid, Freedom Willis, to play another guitar. Of course there were never more than 4 of us in the garage at the same time, and as soon as Randy, my stepdad got home, everyone had to get out.
We actually learned a few songs, including Dokken's "Unchain The Night", Skid Row's "Youth Gone Wild", The Ramones' "Death Of Me", Lynyrd Skynrd's "Simple Man", and a few others. Word got around that we had this "great band", and Mr. Roe, the principal of Southwest High actually held assembly, calling together all of the kids from 7th to 12th, I think (it may have only been 9-12) to the gym to let us put on a concert for them. We played the aforementioned Dokken and Skid Row songs, in addition to Fastway's "Trick Or Treat", KISS' "Lick It Up"(by the way, one of the most re-damn-diculous videos ever!), and a song by a very obscure Swedish hair metal band named Stagedolls, called "Love Cries". We only had vocals on the KISS and Stagedolls songs, sung by me (an octave lower), and only had bass I think on maybe two of the songs because whoever was supposed to learn the bass lines didn't.
Nonetheless, we were a huge hit (well, as much of a huge hit as you can be in a school in southwest Missouri with an entire population of less than 1000 kids from Kindergarten to 12th grade). I remember my girlfriend at the time was really jealous, because all of the "Hot Senior Girls" that were in Office Tech class with me (do they even have a class like that now?) were all up against the stage cheering for me. From that point on, all I wanted to do was to be in a band and be a big rock star.
I didn't get much of another chance while I was in high school - Chris and I got one or two chances to play while in the "Pep Band", playing during basketball games. One time I remember vividly was during a Homecoming game. These games were very heavily attended, and during half time Miss J (Louise Jaramillo, our current band teacher) let us play. We went into an instrumental version of Metallica's "For Whom The Bell Tolls". You'd think that with the massive amount of country fans out there we'd just get lynched for playing something like that, but they loved it!
When I got to college, I kept looking around for people to get into a band with, but it was a totally different atmosphere up here - whereas I was still stuck on my beloved heavy metal, in college there were all of these other kinds of music that I'd never been exposed to. I was able to get together with a few guys here and there to jam - I was introduced to the likes of Fugazi and Prong, as well as the "new movement" (just a revival, really) of ska music, through local bands like MU330 and The Urge, The Bearded Clams, and Life Without Wayne, that my buddy Dwight knew (he was my introduction to the St. Louis music scene, God love him! I guess he's also indirectly the reason I ended up with my lovely wife, since the reason we got together was that she came to check out a band I was in, thanks to Dwight.) We actually got a pseudo-band together (although we never played out) called "Bob Can't Count". I was on drums, Dwight was on bass, Matt Meyer was on guitar and vocals, and there was some dude named Bob (who had a lot of trouble counting on this one song we were practicing, hence the name).
It wasn't until '94 when I actually got into a "real band" - who performed in front of people for money and stuff. That was the band "Shameless" that I told you about a few posts back. Then came Free Dirt. That was my first brush with crowds of any size at all. I had the bug again.
With Rocket Park, I had some really great experiences, including a spot opening for such bands as The Strokes, OK Go, and Jimmy Buffett, not to mention all sorts of "has beens" like Live, The Fixx (twice), K's Choice, Jesus Jones and the Marshall Tucker Band. Of course on the other side of that, we also played to crowds as small as the other band we were playing with and the bartender.
I haven't had a whole lot of other chances to be this rock star I once envisioned. I have been fortunate to play in front of thousands of people at a time. It's very cool, lemme tell ya! I still, however, have a dream to play the main stage at Riverport Ampitheater (Or Verizon Wireless, or whatever corporate name it's taken on as of this week). The closest I got was playing the side stage with Buffett. If I can do that, I'll die a happy man, musically speaking. I mean I'm already a pretty darned happy man as far as life goes. We may be in a rough spot right now, but over all I've had a damn good life. I've pretty much told myself that I'm never going to be the big rock star that I had once thought I would be. I know better. I know the music industry enough to know that they don't want some late-30s pudgy-greying dude on stage, they want an early 20s hot chick. Possibly the ones that were "fawning" over my would-be band 22 years ago. Sad, but true. I still love to play music, though, and as long as I can find people to play and write with me I'll also be a happy man.
I do play now, though, as much as possible. I've got an original rock band, called The Janson Gates, made up of myself, plus a few guys that I also play with at my church, and also I've recently joined a cover band. We'll see where this all takes me. I'm still in search of that big rock star turn, but I ain't counting on it.
I did today's stroke for the name that my old high school band would have gone by, had we made it as huge rock stars: Stilleto! I had it scrawled across my bass drum for a long time. That was just in pencil, but we always wanted it to be in crimson, so there ya have it: a crimson stroke. Rock on, kiddies, rock on. And never forget your dreams. Unless you're a pudgy white-haired, middle-aged dude like me who wants desperately to be the next Justin Bieber, in which case you should just give up right now. Yeah, you would just look plain silly in that haircut, anyway.
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