Deep in Northwestern Wisconsin, you will find the tiny town of Webster. Just outside of Webster, there is a 40-acre chunk of woods, and in those woods, there is a house. In the basement of this house (consuming a sizable chuck of floor space) is a five-piece set of drums, well worn from hours of fevered thrashing, now covered by a dusty old sheet my parents probably got as a wedding gift.

If my parents didn’t constantly remind me that they’re down there, in their basement, I might just forget about them altogether. But how did they arrive at this location, to sit there, next to the unused exercise bike and the leftover partial cans of paint? Well, it was a wild ride, man.

My musical journey could have taken a much different path. In the eighth grade, I played the saxophone for a few months in my school’s concert band. But I got sick of lugging that (HUGE!) alto sax on and off the school bus and opted for a pair of drum sticks I could just toss into my Batman backpack (Michael Keaton era). That decision would later bite me in the ass when I found myself heaving around giant, percussive objects with no flat edges or handles.

I could have gone for the bass guitar and spent my time layin’ down the foundations to well-built Rock Mansions. Or, heck, I could’ve picked up the regular guitar. My solos could have screamed through the black midnight air like Hendrix reincarnated as a solid gold fighter jet. Or if guitar strings proved too hard for me, I could have played the computer. (I downloaded some looping software one time and was really easy!)

But no matter. I eventually grew to love the drums. I was my high school’s best drummer. Well, definitely top three, anyway. OK, there were three drummers in my little high school band, and I was definitely one of them. In my senior year, I was diggin’ the drums so much that I used a huge chunk of the money I’d made at a summer job to buy the mythic drum set described in the first paragraph. I wasn’t in any kind of band outside of school, but I only had one friend who played an instrument, and all he wanted to do was cover XTC songs (on bass), so I didn’t have many options.

    Lucky for you, the story continues. By the spring semester of my freshman year in college, I was a student in UW-Eau Claire’s award winning Jazz program. Yep, I was in one of the program’s prestigious big bands. If memory serves me, I played in Jazz Ensemble XXVIII. Now, the department may claim to have only five big bands, but there’s no way I could have been good enough to play drums in one of UWEC’s top five jazz bands. That there’s crazy talk.

As a collegiate big band jazz drummer, it was my job to keep the rhythm section going a) slightly slower or b) considerably faster than the band’s conductor and the music’s composer intended. My job performance was absolutely fantastic. Off the charts. And off the beat.

The casual listener may have foolishly assumed that I possessed little if any sense of time, rhythm, or bodily coordination. Silly casual listener. I’m sure the true jazz enthusiast (and my bandmates) appreciated, nay, respected, nay, revered my bold experiments with the concept of “keeping time.” Time, after all, is just an illusion we humans created to mark our actions (and epic progressive rock songs). The wild animal we call “jazz” has no concept of time.

Unfortunately for the world of modern music, I abandoned my jazz career after one semester and applied the healing salve of my creative juices to other artistic animals.

And now, after a series of storage space issues, my drums are under an old sheet in my parent’s basement, waiting patiently to rock once more. If I’m not the one rocking them, maybe it’ll be one of my (no doubt) musically gifted children. Or maybe my retired dad will get bored one day and realize his inner Neil Peart. Whatever happens, I had a lot of fun in all those various school bands, and I’m so glad to have played with all those great kids and teachers. With those drums, I learned so much about teamwork and gathered up so much self-esteem that I can honestly say band changed my life.

You might be aware of the Eau Claire School District’s recent decision to shuffle around some local band teachers. A mixture of budget cuts, employee seniority, and student interest has cooked up a bitter casserole of discontent most teachers and students (and, of course, parents) don’t want to eat. Food metaphors, ho!

In the reshuffling, long-standing, successful programs are losing their leaders, and programs in the midst of rebuilding are losing their rebuilders. However. Despite these setbacks and the hard feelings they might cause, it looks like the district’s band kids will still be getting a pretty damn good education in music. And that’s something at which you cannot shake a stick.

Get it? Like drum sticks? Yeah, you probably got it.