For the Recorder

The recorder: the cheapest instrument a parent can buy. Also, the lamest. It almost ended my musical career before it began.

My parents didn’t like my leanings toward pop and rock music when I was a wee lad. To get me to focus on my academics, and to further discourage me from a musical lifestyle, they made a pretense of support by purchasing a recorder and enrolling me in recorder lessons.

That mamby-pamby baroque clarinet-like plastic tooting device was a chastity belt for my adolescent life. I wish my parents had been more musically inclined, so that it could have been cultivated in the home, as opposed to driven from it. Just because I didn’t like recorder lessons didn’t mean that I didn’t want to try something else, you know? I just didn’t think that playing "When the Saints Go Marching In" over and over again was of any use to me later in life.

High school boys are plagued by a variety of ailments, but by far, the worst, is their virginity. And that bloody plastic tooter was a padlock on mine. I whined for a real instrument, a sexy instrument, an instrument that would make all the girls lose their minds and their pants, in no particular order. Since I couldn’t sing, and since everyone else in the world played guitar, it was inevitable that I settled on drums.