Prevailing In Spite of…
I use to have a friend that
loved to blame everyone else for his life failures and disappointments: most
notably he would blame his parents.
His history was that of a fellow drummer that played in several bands
with little or no success until he finally quit, got a day job, became married
and started a family. All of this,
mind you, he claims is his father’s fault. He shared a story from his childhood that was pretty much
identical to not just my own, but many of my drummer friends. To disprove his theory, I told him the
below story.
When I was five years, I fell
in love with the sound of drums. I
knew right away that I wanted to be a drummer. I rushed to my father and begged him to put me into a class
for drummers or find me a drum instructor. My father was a musician himself and would often brag in
front of his friends that he knew the best drum instructor in St. Louis and
would enroll me into this instructor’s class.
Long story shortened, my father came up with plenty of excuses and false
promises, but he never put me into a class with this amazing drum instructor
that he was so keen to brag about while drunk with his friends. Once my father made it clear to me that
he was “the guy that sells Wolf tickets”, roughly translating to “all bark, no
bite” (as my Blues friends used to say) I immediately sought other avenues of
drumming education.
I can think of at least ten
fellow drummers that can tell you the above story verbatim about their own
childhood efforts to become a drummer.
I say this to exaggerate the point that my story is not unique. I have no doubt that I would be a much
better drummer if I had received the education I begged for in my youth, but
this hiccup in my beginnings as a drummer isn’t something I refer to when I
experience any kind of missteps during my drumming efforts. I think that if you love something you
find a way to do it. You find a
way to prevail in spite of your anti-education parent or guardian. Being a blamer, my friend disagreed and
we pretty much haven’t been as close since.
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