My Career as a Drummer Was Over Before It Began

Guest writer Kevin Alexander grew up wanting to be “the music guy." He is, but not in the way he expected.

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Apr 10, 2024

Hi, it’s me.

I’m home from a delightful seven days on a Pacific Northwest island where I attended a five-day artist retreat and workshop with poets, songwriters, fiction writers, and memoirists. I will share ✨so many things✨ from this experience, but I just got back yesterday so I need a minute to re-enter my life.

(Shout out to my new Write Doe Bay friends who subscribed this week + others who have joined in the last month!)

Yesterday on Orcas Island in Washington, feeling reluctant to leave (2024).

I will be back next week with something new, but in the meantime, I’m excited to introduce you to my Substack friend, Kevin, who is building a lovely community around a shared love of music, playlists, band nostalgia, and exploration of new releases. Please do visit him at On Repeat and hang around in the comments for some fun music-nerd conversations.

Kevin and I have swapped lives. When he was in his 20s, he moved from Portland to Wisconsin, and when I was 19 years old, I moved from Minnesota to Seattle. (Personally, I think I got the better deal out of this life swap because I don’t have to live with snow storms and negative temperatures anymore.) We have kids roughly the same age. We’re moody GenXers.

He doesn’t love The Mountain Goats, but I don’t hold that against him.

Knowing I would need a break this week, and knowing his writing is very music-focused, I reached out to him and asked if there were any Personal Kevin Stories (PKS) he wanted to share with you. And I LOVE this one. I think we can all relate to things like:

trying to figure out who we are
grasping for an identity that may not fit us
wanting to be known for something and it doesn’t work out
staying too long in a space that isn’t healthy for us (this one resonated for me)
finding something surprising and delightful in the grief of letting go

Please welcome Kevin, and I’ll see you below in the comments.

Until next time,

Jen

My Career as a Drummer Was Over Before It Began

Kevin Alexander

I often joke that I quickly learned I was better at writing about music than playing it. That's true, but I rarely share why that came to pass.

I had been drumming since I was a toddler, usually on whatever was in front of me or what I had at hand. Coffee cans, Tupperware, you name it; any hard surface would do. Initially, I played them using only my hands as if they were a set of bongo drums. Eventually, that evolved into using chopsticks in place of drumsticks. To hear my mom tell it, I sometimes tried to get our cat to play along. That ended exactly the way you might think it would.

This is not Toddler Kevin. This is my daughter, Rue, when she was two-ish (2005).

In elementary school, I was what might be best described as a "handful." I was often bored and quickly became a regular in the principal's office. The exception to that rule was music class–sort of. Most of the time, it was business as usual: I went to class and got kicked out about five minutes in. When the percussion unit started, that all stopped. I was all in. Suddenly, it was me telling other kids to stop messing around, and our teacher didn't take long to catch on. She threw everything she could at me about percussion, pushing me just far enough out of my comfort zone to keep my interest but not so far as to overwhelm me. New patterns on a snare? Yes, please! Roto Toms? Absolutely, but only if I behaved in class. For 10-year-old me, those were quite a motivator.

If asked, most people will share an example of a teacher who made a difference in their lives. I'm fortunate to have had a handful. While she's not always the first to come to mind, her influence has lasted the longest.

The dream begins!

A few years later, a U-Haul pulled up to our house. My aunt hopped out, rolled up the truck's back door, and handed me pieces of her drum kit. I was thrilled. She and her then-husband had spent years on the road as musicians, playing bars mainly in Alaska. This kit had spent a lot of long, cold nights cheering up pipeline workers, and now the set was sitting in my driveway, ready for me to set them back up and write their next chapter.

Little did we know that the story would only last another few pages.

Still not Kevin, but my four-year-old daughter (2007).

So I now had a drum set but nobody to play with. That, too, would resolve itself in short order. I managed to find a group of music nerds who quickly became my tribe. We spent time between classes talking about new bands we'd found and passing mixtapes back and forth. Deciding to form a band was a logical outcome.

And so Insidious Youth came to pass. We were a five-piece band bursting with equal parts ambition and talent. Well, almost equal, anyway. Four were highly talented, and one was trying their best. Our guitarist, Ray, could play almost any song after hearing it on the radio. Same with our bassist, Pat. Jed, was a polymath who had never met an instrument he couldn't master; he's still doing that today. Jon, our frontman, would bring the words for our original tracks, and we'd build a song around them. That left me. I could hold a steady rhythm but couldn't read music very well. I was playing by ear and finding it difficult to keep up with everyone else. This should've been a huge red flag, but I ignored it.

With the benefit of hindsight, it's clear that I lacked the self-awareness to bow out gracefully; the writing was on the wall, but I couldn't read that, either. It was the early 90s. I was a music guy! I was going to shows! Of course, I was gonna be in a band! I'm sure, on some level, the other guys felt this. They had to, right? But at age 16 none of us were equipped with the emotional intelligence to handle that gracefully, so we kept going. They continued to improve, and I lagged further behind. Looking back, I was convinced that somehow I'd just will myself into being a player worthy of a spot in this band. Silly me.

Our first 'real' gig was a party thrown by a classmate. We played well, were well-received, and even introduced a couple of new covers into our repertoire. On the outside, everything was going great. On the inside, not so much. Jon had decided we would cover The Beatles’ 'Blackbird.' It doesn’t have drums, but rather than being disappointed that I had to sit a song out, I loved that it allowed me to duck out for fresh air or just take a break. That relief was yet another in what was now a string of red flags, and those became harder and harder to push past.

Still, I persisted.

The beginning of the end

Long before Voodoo Donuts became Portland's most famous tourist trap, there was the X-ray Cafe. The same team that brought you bacon-covered donuts ran this hole-in-the-wall venue right at the west end of the Burnside Bridge. X-ray was the size of your living room and was the kind of place that would host a band like Everclear one night and Spanish language lessons the next. This was Portland before ‘Portlandia.’ They also hosted open mike nights for bands. Our second real gig would be mid-bill on one of those nights. Sounds great, right?

Maybe it should have been, but I wasn’t feeling it. This was how I learned what hives are and what happens when you break out in them. Besides a cold sweat, I was also now burning up, and every square inch of my body itched. Any reasonable person would’ve taken this stage fright as an extremely clear signal that it was time to hang it up, and nobody would’ve blamed me. Despite everything, I kept going.

I was going to will this musician life into existence or die trying.

On stage, I thought I might do just that. Looking back on it now, I think I did die a little bit on stage that day—or at least a part of who I’d convinced myself I was, anyway. This was supposed to be our band's origin story. Instead, it was where it all ended for me.

Not to show up Kevin, but my daughter (L) used to be a multi instrumentalist (2007).

I'd loved looking out over that kit, but I used it as a shield that night. I played the set crouched down as low as I could get. I centered my cymbals so they'd obscure my view—or rather, people's view of me. The hives were still itching. The sweat poured into my eyes. I smoked half a pack between load in & load out. During our set, I must've looked like a skittish Cheap Trick’s Bun E. Carlos, a drummer famous for always having one hanging out of the corner of his mouth.

Once again, we played well as a band. I kept up, and we were generally well-received. It was an open mike night, after all. But…I could no longer ignore what performing was doing to me. I was a mess. I slept for days afterward. We’d played the same stage as some of our favorite bands, and all I felt was…nothing. Mostly, I was happy it was over.

This was the start of a long goodbye to my life as a musician. I'd become good at clearing hurdles, but this anxiety–and its physical manifestation—was next level. And I finally had to accept that I'd run out of runway.

I finally accepted that this dream was over. Being in a band was just not in the cards for me, so I quit.

Epilogue

Throughout all of this, I also began to write. What had started as little blurbs here and there became a basketful of ideas leaping out of my head into notebooks and taking on a more structured form. I would pour over record reviews in places like Flipside and worked hard to synthesize those into my style.

The more I wrote, the more I wanted to write.

I'd spent the last few months wrestling with low-grade angst regarding the drums; none of that existed on the page. Writing didn’t make me sweaty or give me hives. It excited me. I wanted to be there. I knew I could do it and was finally(!) smart enough to figure out that there were no shortcuts. There'd be hard work, but these were reps I was excited to put in.

I'd thought banging out patterns on a snare drum was my therapy. It turns out banging out sentences was.

I thanked my drums for what they'd given me and packed them away. They spent the next several years serving as ballast anytime we moved and an extra charge from the moving company. When it came time to move to Wisconsin, it was at last time to say goodbye. I was leaving everything I knew behind and starting a new chapter, which meant it was time to close this one for good. It ended the same way it began, with them being loaded into a moving van and going home with a friend who had dreamed of being a drummer for years.

It was time for me to be a writer.