[ ]This is Lance Campeau, and he's into cymbals. My kind of guy. He has a YouTube channel where he reworks cracked cymbals and makes his own from stainless-steel blanks, which actually turns out to be a decent metal for cymbal-making. Here he's demonstrating the durability of stainless by smashing the absolute piss out of the poor cymbal with two sticks in his hand, butt-end first. Ouch. It reminded me of something that happened to a drummer buddy of mine from the marching band in high school. His name is John Nuckols, and he's to this day one of the finest drummers in the Southeast.
[ ]It also reminded me of when I first switched from traditional grip to matched grip holding the sticks, Sometimes my left hand would forget which grip it was supposed to be using and it'd get in the way and I'd whack it with my right stick. The pain was immediate. You could feel it from your toes all the way up to your ears. The worst times I'd see stars for a few seconds and my field of vision would almost go blank. That's pain. I wanted to crawl up into the fetal position and sob, but I really couldn't do that on a gig. You can't even stop to rub it. It's a game-changer, and I can relate all the better to john's story. I still have a dent in the bone on top of my wrist from hitting myself so many times.
[ ]Back in high school in marching band we used huge sticks called 3S Marching. They were over 1/2" thick and longer than most sticks on the market. They were meant to get a loud sound that would carry in an outdoor stadium. The bead at the tip of the stick was big as a grape. They were badass. We called them baseball bats. In fact just like in baseball, where the guy in the on-deck circle will often warm-up with a weighted bat, many times if we were going to practice on our drum kits we'd first play for a while with the 3S monsters. After that normal sticks felt like toothpicks and you could fly around the kit. We used to keep a pair in our back pockets all day, everywhere we went and even after school, so that when we found time we could squeeze in a few minutes of practice. Plus we thought it looked cool.
[ ]One day John had to run an errand in a bad part of town. He was walking down the sidewalk when a guy came out from around a corner, pulled a knife and demanded John's wallet. Number one, and this is crucial in any similar situation, John didn't panic. He said the guy was geeked-up, sweating, aggressive and almost certainly high on something, not to mention he was holding a knife in John's face, but still he kept his cool. He had several distinct advantages over the bad guy- the element of surprise, the fact that he was a drummer and so he had very quick reflexes, and he had a pair of 3S Marching sticks in his back pocket
[ ]He first held his hands up and told the guy to stay cool and that he'd comply, to try to calm him down a little and not have him be so much on guard. Slowly he reached for his back pocket and in one move he pulled out the sticks and smote the guy across his arm. WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT FOLLOWS. He said he hadn't meant to hit the guy so hard but his adrenaline was jacked, and the poor fuck went down to his knees, holding his elbow. The impact had broken the bone clean in two, and it was hanging down at a 45-degree angle, held together only by skin and veins. The guy pretty much forgot about John's wallet. John grabbed the knife off the ground and told the guy to have a nice day. He stopped at a phone booth and called paramedics and the cops, so they'd know what went on.
[ ]John felt bad about completely snapping the guy's arm in two but he did what he had to do. If he'd hit him with one-third the force it would've completely disabled him and still probably cracked the bone. I can attest to that from the times I whacked myself with a stick not half as heavy. I'd have to stop myself from screaming out in pain and I'd have to finish the song playing with my right hand only, while my left hand lay lifeless on my leg, wondering what had just happened. I know that fucker was having a bad day after John corrected him. You never know...maybe John did him a favor. Being a drummer has its perks. I've mentioned all the amazing health benefits from drumming, and the health benefit for John that day was that he didn't get stabbed to death. Guy pulls a knife on you? No problem. Again the key was that John didn't panic, which allowed him to come up with a plan, and a good one at that. So for all the would-be perps out there is there a moral to this story? Yes. "Sticks in the pocket take an arm out the sprocket."
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