Distant Drummer

    The Robson Valley always surprises me.  It is so isolated, rural, and low in population, that you don’t really expect to come upon too many extraordinary things, but the people that do choose to live here are a pretty rare breed, who bring with them a lot of hidden talents.  This was reconfirmed to me yesterday when I went to do another music jam.

    At the end of our previous jam, Bob, the guy who was playing the dobro, most of the time, mentioned that what he really liked to do was play drums.  That sounded great to me because, I really wanted to play electric guitar.  So we decided to have the next jam at his place.  

    Yesterday, when I walked into his living room, ready to do some music, I noticed a red drum kit, all set up at one side of the room.  It looked like the typical drum set that you would see at any garage type band, so I just assumed that it was the set that Bob would play.  When the four of us started playing I was a bit surprised that Bob didn’t go over and play the drums, but instead played dobro and mandolin. 

    Later, in the session, some one mentioned the red drum set, and he said he was hoping to sell it.  He then added that the drum kit he liked to play was in a room upstairs, and offered to show it to us.   I wasn’t overly excited about looking at a drum set, because, not being a drummer, all drum sets looked pretty much the same to me, but I climbed the stairs following the other guys as Bob led us into the far room.

    I was gobsmacked.

    I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.  Sometimes, on one of those big giant auditorium concerts, I have seen the drummers literally surrounded with drums, cymbals, tom toms and such, and that is what I saw filling this room, the whole room, that Bob was showing us.  There was only space for us to squeeze around the edges.  Bob somehow got behind the drums, sat down, and began to hammer away.  He looked like a pilot in some enormous airplane, surrounded by the massive control panel of the cockpit.

    My camera, which is a high definition video camera, shoots a wider than normal photo, but, I could not get the whole drum set into a shot, so some of his kit can not be seen in the photo.   Even now, as I write this, I am smiling as I think of all those drums in a little room in an isolated house situated below a mountain.

    When we went back down stairs, and resumed our jam session, Bob was back playing the mandolin.  It seemed somehow sacrilegious, for him to be playing a mandolin, when he had all that tremendous drum equipment upstairs.  We did have a good afternoon of playing music, and we are planning to do it again in a couple of days.

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