The Recruiter
I have a hunch that this is a role or job that fundamentally resides in everyone. “Hey, lets go eat at this new restaurant!” would be a fundamental recruiter function. Getting others into what you’re into. Those closest to me know that I’m a master at this. I’m not saying its all a good thing. I have my own business, so by necessity, I’ve had to recruit other human beings into my company to work for me. My company drives rock bands around in nice tour buses, so it’s a cool thing to be a recruiter for. “Hey, come drive rockstars around” Of course, when you’re recruiting, you’re fundamentally recruiting someone into an idea. “Work for me and it’ll be great” This puts you in a weird category of being some kind of leader. But thats another chapter. As I look over my long life as a recruiter, I realized a fundamental skill I have and Im not sure where it comes from. But its the ability to get someone else excited about something. My fake wife (we call each other fake wife and fake husband because we recruited each other into a full time marriage without actually getting married) she comments on this every time I’ve got some new crazy idea. ” “Here we go again” But it reminded me of a story of probably the first time I fully used my recruiter power. I think I was around 8-10 years old. Every summer my dad would take my brother and I up to Midland Ontario, a beach cabin type community where my grandparents lived. My Aunt Nancy and Uncle Blake lived maybe 1/2 a mile from my grandparents house. My Uncle Blake would build boats. He was a school teacher by day, but parked in their driveway was the hull of a massive sailboat that he built from the ground up. They lived basically right on the beach. The house was a few hundred yards from the water, inside the forest. Just beyond the backyard forest was the beach. Scattered in the backyard were a bunch of old boats. A couple of canoes sat there that we would drag out to the water and paddle around in. But the best was this 2 seated wooden boat that we called, The Pumpkin Seed. It looked like a race boat without a huge engine on the back. In my mind it did anyways. It had a big hole in the bottom, where it had hit a rock long ago and was out of commission. Around this same time I had found my uncles stash of Popular Mechanics magazines. These...
Things We Lose. Analog Books
Hopefully this will be the start of a series. Things we lose. Maybe it could be called the Get Off My Lawn series, but I don’t have a lawn. The flavor is definitely one of a guy getting older and wondering about the past and future. Its Christmas morning 2018. I’m at moms. Mom and I have this ritual when i come for a few days. We both love to read. And mom is a reliable source for new material or new authors. I love her excitement when telling me about a new author she’s found. Its the closest she comes to being a sales person. Another thing we have in common is we both have iPads. Mom is pretty high tech for 75 years old. Maybe all 75 year olds are jamming along on their Kindles or iPads. But when I visit, mom always ends up passing me Analog books. The ones that use actual paper. Hard cover and soft. Like passing on a mix-tape. Or a burned CD of your favorite record. Mom passes on books and its these rare times at moms, between tours, that I get to hold and read Analog Books. I like cops and robbers. Murder mysteries. Business books and nuts and bolts spiritual books (a category I hope to invent one day) Since I tour, I’m constantly having to consider the implications of space. Since I drive rock bands through the night I also listen to books on tape. Although theres no tape involved. I can’t really bring myself to use the term “audio books” I burn through at least a book a week. And since I tour non stop, we’ll say i read at least 52 books a year. Or consume I should say, since the audio books are part of that consumption. So, Ive got to consider how much room 52 books takes up in my life. Theres no question the iPad is handy. But as mom passes a handful of books and I dive in, i realize what is missed with digital books. The BEGINNING and The END. The experience of these. When you have an analog book thats 2 inches thick in hardback form, you have a concept of how long you’re going to be stuck in this thing. You may have to talk yourself into it a bit. Mom has passed Greg Iles, The Devils Punchbowl on, in hardcover. Its a hefty one. It took me a few minutes of handling it, while mom did her sales pitch, to even crack it. I slowly read page one and now I’m hooked. But now I’m stuck carrying this...
Drums and Reading Glasses
I just watched this new HBO documentary on surfing called Generation Momentum Super great doc. Still digesting the implications. As I’ve just started writing articles without any real update on whats happened in my life since the last chapter in the evolution of this website, I’d like to start filling some of that in. Over the past 4 years I’ve built a pretty great business. Towards the middle of about 2013 (I think) I started feeling kind of basically old. I started wearing reading glasses. And as simple and insignificant as that may seem, it sort of set things in motion. It was the first time in my life where I actually started to realize that our bodies DO age. I had basically completely ignored this idea up to this point. But it was kind of unavoidable.I couldn’t read things. For a few months I was sure I had a tumor. Not sure if it was better or worse to just settle into the fact that I was getting older and needed readers. So this started me thinking and kind of worrying about the future. Probably for the first time in my life. Like, how was I going to survive if i eventually got to crusty to work. I’ve always been a hard working guy. Pretty much to the point where most people think I’m totally crazy with how many things i juggle. But things had never fully clicked and here I was playing drums in a moderately successful band and all of a sudden I had to start with these reading glasses. Long story short. (I’ll continue to fill in gaps in the story) I had the idea to buy a tour bus. This way, the touring costs of the band would stay in house. Or more specifically, I would lease the bus to the band and keep those costs in my pocket. Id charge the band a discount rate, so it’d be a win/win for both of us. Also, when we weren’t touring, I could take other bands out on tour in the bus. Thats the basic sketch. The reason for this was to start to build a future for myself and my love. Something beyond wearing a wig and playing in a Led Zeppelin tribute band. As fun as that was, I felt the end of that chapter was on the horizon for me. It was hugely rewarding and fun. But i felt the end was near for me, so I set in motion this next chapter. Now that chapter is in full swing. I have 5 buses and have been touring non stop for the...
Touring and Texting and Touring and Texting and Texting
When you tour, you get lonely. Its weird to play in front of 1000 people. To have people respond to you playing drums is pretty weird. I beat the fuck out of drums and people cheer. Its a thing I don’t thing has been very well understood. I don’t know of any studies on it. I read once that Keith Richards said his drug use was from when the tour stopped. While he was on tour, it never got out of control because he had the excitement of the shows as a drug high. Makes sense. But that thing sticks with me pretty hard. Theres a lot of angles to it that I often think about. I don’t really like drugs. I did them and now i don’t. I think they have a place. Not the point of this article. What happened is I was texting my wife here in my hotel and we had the most insignificant difference. She was excited to help me with my social media and i changed a password. About that level of serious. But i got super upset. Like actually started crying. Pretty dumb for sure. But, I think its all part of this same phenomena. On the one hand technology allows for us to be in contact with one another. I run my whole business through my phone. I get texts from drivers 24/7. I do all my quotes and sales through email and my accounting through the quickbooks app. But there is a down side to this. I think a massive one. The spiritual connection you get with someone is one of the things that Im always thinking in the back of my mind. Or the front of it. Its always there. But I’m in love. I truly have a person i love to the core. Many people don’t. So its super lucky and rare. But my point is that the method by which we communicate, through these little sequential texts, these instagram posts, these emails. They seem to be breaking down something. The best way I can explain it goes back to Steve Albini and his love for tape and analog recording. He’s pretty well known as the guy who carried the torch for analog. This is the best analogy, although its a fairly abstract one. When you record on tape, you get a continuous magnetic wave form transferred from the source (microphone or plugged in instrument) Its a continuous energy transfer. Compare that to digital recording. A computer hard drive takes 1000’s of pictures of you singing a continuous note and converts it into 1’s and 0’s and stores...
Today On Tour. Fan Clutchs and Friends
Since my last entry into TheBestDrummerInTheWorld.com, a lot has changed. I started a tour bus /tour support company. It has completely consumed my every waking moment. The business has expanded super fast and has given me a massive pile of inspiration to write from. To simplify, for the purpose of just getting back into it. I drive bands around in a big tour bus. I have 5 buses, which means 5 guys plus who drive for me. Over the past few days I had a fan clutch go bad. Remember, I’m still basically a drummer. Rule one of touring is always GET TO THE SHOW. or Make the show happen. Long story short. It took me 10 hours in the engine bay of the bus to pull out the old fan clutch. This began as soon as i parked after driving 7 hours through the night to Madison Wisconsin. It was about 20 degrees out. After spending $500 to have the $1400 new fan clutch overnighted to my hotel, I spent another 9 hours putting this new one in. Slept of 6 hours and drove another 7 hours to Detroit, where I now sit writing this. The juice of the story however is the fights I had with my friends and loved ones while all of this was going on. We have this situation where we have the potential for instant communication with everyone in our lives. My wife is on a different tour and she was texting me for a play by play. My best friend lives in the bay area and we got in a girlfriend type of fight because I wasn’t really engaged in our conversation. Today, on the other side, It really hits me that the pace of these things is way out of whack. Instant communication is a blessing and also a huge curse. But a curse, because its out of synch with the actual pace of life. For 19 hours, literally every second of my life was completely consumed with the logistics of swapping out a fan clutch. Something I had never done before. 2 Ubers to Harbor Freight to get tools I kind of figured I needed. I couldn’t get this bolt off. I stripped 3 of the bolt. I had to cut them off with an angle grinder. There was no room to fit an angle grinder in between the fan and the radiator. On and on, in my mind non stop for 19 hours. All the while, I have no room to bail out. Blow it off. Take a step back. Relax, it’ll work out fine. None of that. If...
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