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May
20, 1998
the spirit's wings
I began my day today feeling extremely depressed. I must confess that reliving the account of my experiences in college really caused those emotions to resurface again, and let me tell you they feel awful, I don't wish this on anybody, but I kind of wonder whether others have had similar experiences. Yesterday I wrote in my journal about my failures in college, and how my experience with a sadistic music department director really caused me much grief. I now am performing in possibly one of the most successful swing bands in California, and the future looks bright. My success as a drummer now is very apparent, and yet I still must deal with the past. I mentioned yesterday that I'm now using my bad experiences to feed the flame of success currently in my drumming. I do about two to three drum solos a night, about eighteen to twenty-two nights a month. It's a lot of opportunity for a drummer to express himself. I mean, most drummers that play in a band just keep time, and that's OK. In today's music, there's not much of a demand for a drummer to be performing solos all over the place. That's why I love swing music. Drummers like Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich paved the way as far as drum solos go. And in swing music, especially with Big Time Operator, the music demands it. It was all a part of the big band sound, and drummers in those days I'm sure tried their best to "show each other up" in a friendly, competitive sort of way. I'm sure all the band leaders of that era expected their drummers to be able to solo. Well, I do love to solo on the drums. It's one of the most exhilarating experiences in music, at least from my perspective. I do receive lots of warm applause from the audience when I solo on such swing classics as Sing, Sing, Sing. But, my ties are still to my failures of the past. I feel that what I must do now is to immerse myself in the spirit of drumming, now to worry about my experiences in the past, and to use those experiences to prove to myself that I can succeed and will. My mission now is to see this all the way through, and I think by now, with the success with Big Time Operator, I feel some closure in my connections to the past. The future remains to be seen, but I feel a lot stronger now that I only treat failures as small obstacles on my way to success...
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