Ahhh, to be 17 again~

What you see is a photo of me at age 17 playing my drums in the bedroom... note the yellow box I drew and take a good look at what is in it.

That folks, was what was called a portable record player! Which of course meant it was small and could be easily moved room to room, unlike the huge "furniture style" record player that was cranked to play a record. (my mother had one of those Victrola's.. boy would I like to have that now!)

In the photo the top of the record player is up and I obviously taped a band photo to the inside of the top. Though it was small those record players played both 45 rpm and LP's. It was a pretty cool thing back in its day, and cheap too! (had to be or I wouldn't have had one ) I tried to zoom in on a scan of the record player to see who's photo was there but it just wouldn't come clear enough to determine, ah well probably a local band anyway.

Among the old pictures I actually found two different shots of me playing my drums ( remember using one earlier on in my journal), oh by the way they were Slingerland drums, real skins (vs. plastic) which meant I had to adjust the sound all the time, tighten or loosen the skin according to the weather, heh..not so much fun. Eventually I did get a good snare drum that had the plastic skin and boy was that a nice one!

Anyway, below is the second shot I found, which I took creative liberty of animating slightly so you could get the idea of what it looked like when I practiced. Lucky for you, you don't need the earplugs the neighbors needed!


One of my favorite songs to play was called "South Street".. it became a favorite because I lived on South Street ..heh.. a few words went like this: Meet me on South Street, the heppest street in town"... lol.. well my South Street may not have been the heppest street in town, but it was a nice small town and a good place to grow up in.