I grew up in Bismarck, North Dakota. When I was in 6th grade, elder of my grade school, I remember the day we were all crowded into the gym for a very stern but bright talking-to by a man in a green military jacket. He had a few guys with him wearing pointy sunglasses and these wild brown-colored camouflage suits and helmets that I'd never seen before on our army guys. I was already pretty news-curious, and I had a basic inkling that my country was going to war against a man named Saddam Hussein.
The war was covered in a groundbreaking way by the news, with cockpit cams showing our gun ships ripping through the feeble Iraqi forces every night during supper. The night that reports came in of an Iraqi missile striking one of our military bunkers and killing a number of our troops, I actually felt good about it. I thought the Iraqis, after getting beaten so badly, finally got to score some points against us (I was in 6th grade).
Those guys in brown camouflage suits were out on the playground at recess after the gym speech, passing out samples of MREs, heavily favoring the chocolate. I had no inkling that as a 36-year-old father, my current president would be firing missiles into Syria based on the abominable chain of events touched off by these men. They were just patient, smiling army guys with invisible eyes handing out bitter chocolate to my classmates.
This is the kind of place North Dakota was and still is.
Just a few years later, that war was "won," and I was in middle school. Every morning, in home room, my school forced us to watch a morning "kids" news show called Channel One. Channel One itself was pretty innocuous (it was the first gig of Lisa Ling). But we weren't just watching Channel One. The news program was intercut with a full spate of commercials, just the kind of free market madness you'd expect from my simple, conservative town of origin. They were heavy-weight consumerist commercials too, for things as obvious as Oxy acne pads to things as absolutely wacko as new cars. We had car commercials piped into us in our middle school home rooms.
One morning during Channel One, a brand-new car commercial made its debut. The marketers really wanted us teens to feel the excitement of their product, so they set their slick footage of a car speeding along a deserted road to a fast, thrilling rock song that instantly filled my soul with the light of the very cosmos itself. The car absolutely vaporized from my sight. I had never heard the song before. I had no idea it was "Fire" by the Jimi Hendrix Experience. I didn't know who Jimi Hendrix was.
All I knew was that this song was dazzling almost 100% because of its superhuman drumming. These were drums of a kind of high-flying power I'd never conceived of before. They carried the verses entirely. The guitar and bass only snuck in with a three-note punch once a measure, then just got the hell out of the way for this knotted thicket of snare and kick drum to snarl out over everything. In the chorus, everything just exploded together, and I was in love with the whole thing. But even here, it was really the drummer's song, with fill after fill after hyper fill cartwheeling between the changes.
I was absolutely lost in this song. Things in my brain were actively being rewired for life.
Then something snapped me out of the trance.
Some kid a few rows over was... drumming - on his desk - to the song. Not tapping absently. He was competently mirroring the drum part on the commercial. Unconsciously. Involuntarily. Effortlessly. With just his fingers there on his desk. It was the coolest thing I'd ever beheld.
"I will be this kid," I decided that instant. My hands had never touched any instrument but a clarinet, but I was a drummer now.
There will be plenty of future opportunities for me to talk about Jimi Hendrix, his musicianship, his songcraft, his unique story, and the talents of his bandmates.
For now, I wanted to tell the story about how my conservative hometown messed up, brought me "Fire," and helped me love the drums.