The song ends.

“Drums? Who still plays drums these days?”

I can hear the--male and New Englander from his voice--guitarist asking the question with my directed hearing. It brings back a lot of memories.

He’s right. The 1970s marked something of a beginning of the end for most of the instruments that used to show up in bands. Brass and woodwinds quietly faded from the normal music scene along with the rise of the standard quintet: vocals, guitar, base, keyboard, and percussion.

Between 2000 and 2020, we saw the market for pianos fall apart. It dropped by 75%, and while we had keyboardists, the skill of good two-handed real piano-playing was falling apart. Sure, keyboards were still on sale, but more and more, it wasn’t the richness and heaviness of a real piano that bands were looking for, but just synthesizer sounds. Billy Joel and Elton John were the last two great singer-pianists.

At the same time, in the early 21st century, we were moving away from bands being about building the music. Rap was an art form that emphasized lyrics and presence, but didn’t really focus on the melodic side of things. We had fewer and fewer bands in the teens and twenties that allowed anyone who wasn’t gorgeous in the band. Susan Boyle might have been the last time someone let singing skill trump appearance in female singers. And the male groups weren’t much better.

BTS and the K-Pop wave where band-members were dancers rather than singers hit the US hard in the teens, and then capsized us in the twenties. Even country moved hard away from music, and in the direction of hick-hop, closer to old school talk-country like Johnny Cash or The Charlie Daniels band than the melodies of the '00s. Between DJ mixes and Nightcore and Screamo and Growler Metal and Trance … the entire profession of musicians pretty much faded in the thirties. You had plastic beauties on stage dancing to computer-generated music, with occasional oddballs who picked up a guitar to look pretty with.

I was born in twenty-five. By the time I was old enough to notice, actual musicians in rock bands were a thing of the past. Drum machines and sound engineers handled the music. Except for roots and bluegrass and other weirdos, machines made music, and people sang.

I’d picked up the sticks at thirteen. My dad’s older brother had an old set, and he showed me what he could do with it. I was in awe. Then he played me My Generation by The Who, while I was trying to deal with all the Zoomers talking about us young, undisciplined tweenies. He turned off the drum track, and played Keith Moon's part himself.

I got hooked then, and quickly became obsessed with the old music from before I was born. The good news is: Rock and Roll never forgets on the internet. The bad news is: that was last dimension.

I may have ignored most of high school in order to drum. The US school system never quite recovered from the great plague of 2020 when kids missed six months of school to no measureable effect. Half the people I knew growing up were half-timers in school or less. They all had aunts or uncles who learned to read, write, and calculate outside school, and never quite figured out what school was good for.

School ended up turning into a social club, where folks got to hang out with other folks, because the academics were all handled online. Sports and music and art and vocational education were still useful, but the school day got a lot shorter, and the purpose changed from “teaching” to letting kids have a place to hang out while their parents worked. Even that wasn’t as necessary with all the remote-working arrangements.

Anyhow, even though school got a lot more flexible, I may have stretched the flexibility to the point of breaking. My motto was: Bigger, better beats but less listening to lessons. On the other hand, with no aspiring rock musicians, the old music schools like Juliard didn’t have as many applicants, and especially not percussionists. So when they found me, a ten hours a day kind of drummer, I was admitted in about an hour: the length of my audition.

I went on to my masters in music, and expected to have to sound-engineer for some pop dance group before I met Phuc and the guys. Then we ran into one another and we built a retro band with actual musicians. We’d even started to become popular, selling out stadiums full of retroids before the world ended. Who knows? We might have been able to bring back instruments into popular music, if we’d had another decade.

Who still plays drums these days? Me.

I boost my volume so they can hear clearly: “Hey, I’m Snake, the drummer for Five Guys and Their Schticks. Nice to meet you.”

The three respond by playing our by-far best-known hit: Lightbulb. Lightbulb was a hard-rock ballad with a message somewhere near Pinball Wizard, 2112, Devil went down to Georgia, and the Ballad of John Henry. It referenced the old joke about what communists used for light before candles, and bemoaned the loss of musicianship to machines as the corporate vampires from Disney challenged a kid to outplay a drum machine. The kid won.

I had always loved it, because I wrote it, and it had my drum solos in it, and I was always encouraged to go as fast as I could

The guitarist had a nice voice, if not quite as resonant as JaM’s was, and the other two kept up. When it was time to enter, I did, and played the solos as well as I ever had. I even embellished a bit with my new speed.

At the end, there was quite a bit of cheering from the three of them, and then the bassist called out, “Thank you for playing with us, Snake. We believe you. No one else could drum like that. You’re welcome at our fire, amigo. ”