Topic: Lost

Something has been lost to my soul for a long time and I can’t decide if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. I’m not even sure what to call it. 

While I was growing up my parents always wanted me to become a physician. But I had musical tendencies - I studied piano, then organ from a wizened little old nun of whom I was terrified. It turned out that years and years later some of the exercises she drilled into me were directly responsible for procuring me some very nice gigs as a keyboard/synthesizer player. But that’s another story.

So I was talking these lessons from first through fourth grades. Then band instruments were introduced and I became fascinated with the saxophone. I switched to it for a few years but finally recognized that I wanted to be a drummer more than anything else. This was in 9th grade or so. I was going around the house beating on anything that sounded somewhat percussive and my dad finally bought me a snare drum & said it was ok to quit the sax and start learning drums. 

This was around the time The Jimi Hendrix Experience released their album Are You Experienced. Listening to this under the influence of…certain herbs and other substances, shall we say, burned those tracks deeply into my synapses and I knew Mitch Mitchell was the kind of drummer I wanted to become.

I practiced and practiced every possible waking moment. I had an overwhelming yearning to get in a band and go on the road. But I was sort of like the bass player John Wetton if you’re familiar with him - every band I joined fell apart shortly after I joined just as Wetton seemed to taint King Crimson, Uriah Heep, Asia and so on.

At any rate I eventually got a gig at age 19 playing for an Elvis imitator. I played professionally with him for 3 years. The material was admittedly a far cry from Hendrix but hey, I was playing for a living! Then I learned how difficult it really is to make a living as a musician and I finished school, at first getting a degree in Medical Technology. I played drums for a really fun gospel group while getting that degree. I’m not particularly religious but it was a gig and I still had this overwhelming desire to play in front of people.

My job took me to Saudi Arabia after a couple of years, in 1986. When I arrived there weren’t really any drum sets available to buy but synthesizers were pretty easy to find so I reverted to keyboards and played for a couple of rock bands, ultimately switching back to drums after a few years, when more Western musical equipment was available. We played a lot of big parties for companies like British Aerospace and a lot of parties at the American, Canadian and Australian embassies. 

But then Desert Storm hit. I decided to go to medical school at age 34 because job security in Riyadh suddenly seemed very shaky. In med school I joined a heavy metal band. Our bass player was also the lyricist and he wrote songs like Anal Birth and Dead Girls Don’t Say No. He went on to become a psychiatrist - true story.

After finishing medical school and taking a job in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, I joined a classic rock band. This is when I began losing…it. I was losing the burning need to play out in public. 

This puzzled me immensely, because that need had always been such a hugely important part of my psyche. I began to wonder why that was. I’ve always had self-esteem issues, which worsened when I became a full-blown alcoholic at age 19, around the time I started playing with the Elvis imitator. And since I was considered a pretty good drummer I think performing was my way of saying, “See? I’m not a TOTAL piece of shit, here’s something I can do well.” Then, after becoming a physician I noticed that people (particularly those that didn’t know me!) were treating me with a sort of deference or something. I theorized that I no longer had anything to prove, that I was worthwhile in and of myself.

Lately, however, I’ve begun to suspect that the real reason is actually much more mundane - with age I simply no longer felt like fucking with hauling all that stuff around. So maybe I haven’t lost anything but youth.