Like a lot of other people growing up in this topsy-turvy world, I used to have dreams of being a rock star.
Alas, I settled for being in a jam band with three friends for a few years, playing mainly cover songs but flirting with our own original material. It was some of the most fun I remember having as a teenager, and funnily enough, a lot of times it wasn’t really about the music we played.
I was 14 years old when I decided that I wanted to take up the drums, having been in a Long & McQuade music store around that time, so I thought that adding it to the very top of my Christmas list was the sure-fire way to get a set. Hey, what can I say? I was a teenage, red-blooded male full of hormones and not a care in the world – I just wanted to hit something and make noise. If that noise happened to add some rhythm and beats to my life, that was the cherry on top.
Christmas arrived and it just so happened that Santa Cl- er, I mean Mom and Dad pulled through on my desire, so now I had a drum set. Sure, setting it up in my modestly sized bedroom ate away at the little space I had, but screw it, I was young and happy. For months, I banged and clanged away on the drums, often throwing on a pair of headphones and cranking up some Metallica, AC/DC or Nirvana while doing my best to emulate and learn from who I considered the masters.
But sooner or later, a drummer needs riffs and chords to play off, and that came in the form of my friend Kevin, who played guitar. Well, if we want to go a little deeper here, Kevin’s family – like mine – was a very musical one, with his parents and other family members having been in a local rock n’ roll band for decades, The Versatiles. Suffice to say, I was in good company when Kevin invited me out to the family farm to jam for a weekend back in March of 2000. I even got to play on Marilyn’s drum set, which was a hell of an honor because I knew how good she was, and this was a PROFESSIONAL set-up, my friends. The only thing I brought was my own pair of sticks, though over time, I would eventually lug out my own snare drum.
Those first few jam sessions were a lot of fun, Kevin and I harmonizing on the music we both grew up on, and even some odd choice tunes that we knew by heart, like the theme from the animated show ‘King of the Hill’, for instance. I knew by the end of the weekend that we had something there, but I just couldn’t put my finger on it yet.
It wasn’t long before we both knew what we needed to do – form an actual band. Soon enough, my friends Jared and Barrett, who lent some vocals and additional guitar work to the equation, were roped into this wild idea. Dude, we had a band! Now we needed a name. I wish I could tell you that I remember the other candidates we came up with, but twenty years and an evening or ten of some adult beverages have a way of killing those little factoids that used to take up space in one’s brain. In the end, we knew who we were: we were Drift. I think we actually thought about Driftwood, but someone suggested knocking the ‘wood’ off (did I just make a Dad joke?) and lo and behold, Drift was our moniker.
So, what was Drift as far as musical influences or style? Well, Drift couldn’t really be pigeon-holed as one type of music because while the four of us all liked a lot of the same bands, we also had some other tastes and our jam sessions could produce a wide array of tunes to echo up from the Guillet or Ruttle basements. We were grunge rock (Nirvana, Soundgarden), we were classic rock (AC/DC), and we were heavy metal (Metallica). But then you’d catch us on nights where we were feeling “whimsy” and we’d dole out some much lighter fare, like funk rock from the 70’s or even some classics from the 60’s. I think there may have even been the odd country song here or there.
We were four guys who loved music and loved playing music, but it wasn’t just about music. We all became closer as friends and we enjoyed things that teenagers growing up at the boom of the new millennium enjoying doing. Yeah, we went out and raised a little hell to blow off steam, or we’d stay up through all hours of the night to watch a stack of movies, or we’d just sit up and talk about, well, anything. Life, girls, you know – all those things a teenage boy knows nothing about at that age.
At one point, the music teacher at Outlook High School gave us the band room carte blanche for the noon hour every Friday. A large group would continually stand outside in the hallway and some would beg to be let in to watch us, but it was invite-only. We didn’t play to be seen, we played to be heard.
We had all come together over our love of music, but it was through everything else on top of it that brought us closer together as kids just trying to make sense of a world that we were still a little blind to at that point in our lives.
The years have certainly passed, and I still cherish the memories. I think I’ll always miss the boys in the band.
For this week, that’s been the Ruttle Report.
