I was tapping on the dashboard of my mom’s Chevelle with “Jerimiah was a bullfrog” blasting through the Alpine stereo, somewhere around 1979. Mom looked over at me, with an amused smile on her face, and asked “So, you like the drums?”

I don’t recall if i took her seriously, or just assumed she was humoring my annoying behavior, but I do remember my possibly spiteful, and definitely adamant response, of “YEA!”

A few months later, on Christmas morning, I woke up to a four-piece set of Slingerland, gold-sparkle drums, with a Royce crash cymbal, ride cymbal and hi-hats. It was the most beautiful sight I had ever seen. In hind-sight, I wish I’d never let go of that kit. But teenagers aren’t synonymous with wisdom.

The Slingerlands were used, of course, and were obtained through some type of friend-of-a-friend barter transaction, my mom somehow pulled of. We weren’t dirt poor, but even a used drum set wasn’t in the family budget. Consequently, drum lessons weren’t in the budget either, so I spent the next few years with wired headphones plugged into a record player, or a boom box with a cassette deck.

“Frampton Comes Alive” was the first record I ever got. However, the first record i ever BOUGHT was “Kiss Alive II”… So my practice sessions usually consisted of playing through one side of a record, multiple time. When I started using cassettes, I’d play through the entire “album”. In the early days, the vinyl was KISS, AC/DC, Van Halen, Rush and, of course, Led Zeppelin. As the years passed, and I switched between vinyl and cassettes, the practice sessions expanded to Iron Maiden, Motley Cru, Vandeburg, Dokken, and a lot of Dio and Black Sabbath.

By grade-school crew was just an average group of guys, all with different musical influences. One good friend had taken piano lessons for years and could play a little guitar. Another was a Randy Rhoads fanatic, who was a guitarist. Another was into the same type of music as me, and had a vintage Les Paul, with a Marshall head and these two humongous cabinets that basically filled his VW mini-van. And my best friend’s brother played guitar, so I talk him into buying a bass and learning. It was a good time. We did the usual high-school parties where you play for free, or with unlimited access to the whichever keg was tapped!

To be continued (the post-high-school years)