Seeing Bob's Drums

 Here is a blog I wrote back in 2013:

           Even with its small and sparse population, the Robson Valley always surprises me.  It is so isolated, rural, and low in residents, 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 drove out to the hamlet of Dunster for another music jam.

            At the end of our previous jam, Bob, the guy who was playing the dobr, 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 he 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 Bob and the other guys, to the far room.

            When I walked through the doorway, 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 had led us to.  There was only space for us to squeeze around the edges.  Bob somehow got behind the drums, sat down, and began to hammer away on the drums.  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 Bob’s whole drum set into a shot, so some of his kit can not be seen in the photo above.   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 downstairs, and resumed our jam session, Bob once again began 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. 

Take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca