Same beat thing happened to Ginger Baker once. They called it Sunshine of Your Love. It worked out ok.

That brings up an interesting video on You Tube I watched awhile back.

Watch the timpani player on the right

Click Here

David

That was the Greatest !!!!

One of my biggest drumming fear's happened a few times...I guess it's called experience (or lack of).

I was the house drummer for a weekly jazz jam which was hosted in a dank dirty basements with horrible acoustics.

As a result it was easy to not hear the bass player (the acoustics were really bad, so there was no feeling the bass either.) The horn players that regally sat in would sometimes solo so damn loud that I would completely lose the 1. It really only happened on a song that was at a blistering tempo and/or had a odd arrangement of Swing & Latin sections. That plus my relative lack of experience.

I remember it happened once on "The night has a thousand eyes" . It was the first time I had ever heard the song, let alone played it, and the horn player who called it wanted it done the way Coltrane does on the album "Coltrane's Sound".

All in all I was the youngest guy in the room by a long shot and it was a tremendous learning experience for me. The players I played with were supportive and understanding. And I guess the plus side is that it was really a musicians jam , not really ever any non playing patrons, so there was no crowd to be embarrassed by.

this isn't a fear, but i got you beat, except this one was on purpose. it was one of my old band's last show, and we did the whole bang on everything/make tons of noise ring-out at the end of the last song. the bassist took his bass by the neck, just below the headstock, and started pounding it straight down into the floor. so for fun i had to one-up him and kick over all my drums (don't worry, they weren't vintage). without really thinking about it i grabbed my floor tom, lifted it over my head, and lobbed it as hard as i could into the unsuspecting crowd.

so afterwards i head to the bathroom to get some water and wash the sweat off my face and there's this guy in there cleaning blood off his forehead. i said "oh man! what the hell happened to you?!" he told me he got hit in the head with a drum. being the large crowd he couldn't see me and didn't realize that i was said drum-thrower. i explained to him who i was and said i was sorry about it. surprisingly, he was really excited and shook my hand, told me my band was great, got out his camera, and asked for a photo with him and the whole band. i let him hold the floor tom in the picture.

good times.

Did he use the photo as evidence? I think I would have.

I learned my lesson after throwing a stick into the crowd and it hitting a girl in the head. Why do we drummers always feel the need to throw things at our crowd??