Thumper's Live Music Page

According to my parents I was a little drummer boy from a young age. I didn’t get into it officially until middle school when I started taking percussion lessons from one of the U of O college drummers and got into the middle school band and Jazz band. I always enjoyed Jazz band more than concert band, but I did get pretty good at most of the percussion instrumentation available. I got pretty good at playing vibes in Jazz band the first couple years because the other drummer was a year ahead of me and always got first shot at playing the drum set. I usually got tossed the songs he didn’t like or didn’t really know how to play in that style well. That was ultimately good for me because I learned how to be much more diverse on the set that way and I won a few awards for my work on vibes in the process. When I took over as the senior drummer my 8th grade year, I was always much nicer to the other drummer and let him have more songs than I ever got. I still got plenty of playing time and added several awards for my work on the set during that year as well.

When I moved up to high school I continued to play in Jazz band there, also doing a lot of time on vibes and other alternate percussion with the other drummer ahead of me taking a lot of the set time again. I didn’t stop winning awards for vibes and drum set :) I was also introduced to marching band and the drum line as well which was totally awesome. I was the only Freshman to start out on the snare line and actually run as center snare for all 4 years of my time in the line during high school. I learned a lot about myself from drumline and my experiences from that have had a big impact on my demeanor and philosophies on work and life even to this day. I lost more interest in the concert band during the off season, but Jazz band was enough to keep my going until the next marching season.

After high school I basically didn’t do anything with music until my friend Will called me on Superbowl weekend in 2000 and asked if I wanted to get together with him and some of his friends to jam. I figured what the hell and a couple weeks later we hooked up in my parent’s garage and started jamming. We played almost every weekend for months and ended up buying a bunch of recording gear to record some of our stuff. We adopted the name Rusty Pipe for the band and started putting some of our stuff up on mp3.com for others to enjoy.