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Dr Watso - Drumming like he has never done before
Identifier
027873
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Drummer's forum - http://www.drummerworld.com/forums/
Back when I was a kid. It was literally one of my very first shows that people were paying to get into and I was the band they were hearing.
Looking back on that time now with the experience I have, I can confidently say I wasn't very good as a drummer at the time. Adequate enough for this band of grade school friends who grew up playing together, but I digress. I wasn't "bad" at playing music, but I had no "tricks" in my bag. No fancy fills, or advanced techniques, just decent time and meat/potatoes style following the guitar and bass lines.
Anyhoo, we were playing along, night was going okay, dance floor was full, and basically, I forgot to end a song, when everyone else in the band did in fact end on time.
My split-second decision was to pretend I was supposed to do that. Being our first performance nobody in the audience is going to know a thing. I kept going with the beat, and after one bar, thought what the hell, and I started playing a sort of amateur solo around the beat of the song that just ended.
Dunno if it was nerves, or excitement, or what, but I killed it out of nowhere. I had a very disconnected feeling like I wasn't really in control and I was doing things that I could not do. I know how hokey it sounds, but I clearly remember my right hand doing some crazy perfectly-spaced 5 or 6 note one handed roll on the floor tom that I couldn't do even today on command, more than 15 years later. I looked over at my hand thinking "what the hell was that?!?" to me, it felt like and probably was an accident due to my poor technique, but it sounded amazing and was in perfect time to the beat.
To my shock, the crowd was going nuts. And of course, I felt like a damned king. I played that up like I meant to do all of it, shook lots of hands being showered with praise by the adoring crowd, and generally had a great rest of the night.
Since then I've had a few other experiences where things all of a sudden feel effortless and like you can't make a mistake. Being in "the zone" let's say... But nothing has matched up to that one experience. Very surreal looking down at my hand and wondering if that really just happened.