In 1981, at the age of 13, I decided to play drums after my mom told me that only "sissies" play guitar and that the drummers were cool! Well, that is all it took to end my deciding on what to play. The other thing that made me DAMN DETERMINED to play the drums was seeing Neil Peart playing on Night Flight. You have to remember, which I am sure all of you do, that Moving Pictures came out in 1981 as well. I saw the videos for Limelight, Vital Signs and Tom Sawyer that night and my mouth was wide open!!! For me, at age 13, it must have been like 1,000,000 other drummers during that time and back in 1964 when 1,000,000 other young kids saw the Beatles play on Ed Sullivan, it must have been like that as well. We all decided that night, we were going to be a drummers.

So, my mom found an ad in the local newspaper for a "like new" drumset for sale. My mom told me to get in the car, we were going to buy that drumset. I was so excited. So we drove about 30mins from our home and we bought the set from an African American family. The boys mother said that it was only used to play a few times at their church and that her son did not want to play it anymore. I think it was her son that carried the set out to our brown Monte Carlo. He did not look too happy, but he said he did not play it anymore and that he hoped I liked it. Well, I was so damn thrilled!

So, on the way home I asked my mom if we could stop at K-Mart and buy the new Rush album. I did not even know that this was Rush 8th album, at 13 I just discovered them. So, of course my mom said yes and we went in and bought the album. I thought the record was so cool looking and until this day that album holds a special place in my heart.

So, I get home, unload the set, set it up as best as I could in the living room next to the HUGE console record player and I put on the Moving Pictures album. The first time ever playing a drumset and out comes Tom Sawyer from the speakers. In a word, looking back on it...PRICELESS!!!

Without further ado, this is the Slingerland set. As you can tell by the pics it is an evolution. I added a blue snare drum, without the snares of course, as a second tom. Then I added a set of bongo drums for concert toms...LOL! And pics 10 and 11 show my Neil Peart "big" drumset phase. After I got over having to haul all those drums around I "dumbed" the kit down. I first covered that beautiful little Slingerland set with dark contact paper. I then decided I wanted to take the bottom heads off and so I took a black can of Krylon and painted the interior of the drums and then recorved the set in light wood contact paper from K-Mart of course.

The time period of these pics are from 1981-1986.

Thanks for reading.

http://gallery.me.com/dfreis#100603

UPDATE

Some of the drums in the Neil Peart inspired drum pics were Slingerland, but not sure if the first few pics are Slingerland...I am sure you will all let me know for sure. When trying to wrack my brain I seem to recall them being some other brand name. Perhaps some of you can tell by the badge.