A Hodgepodge of thoughts from Lynn festival drummer

LYNN ? In what seemed like the first year that a rainstorm wasn’t looming overhead, ready to open up on the fifth annual Hodgepodge Music Fest, a familiar feeling of anxiety still loomed all the same in my stomach as I lifted my drum kit piece by piece up onto the stage.For my band, The Informers, Hodgepodge doesn’t begin on the stage, but rather in the days leading up to it. A few days before, all five of us came together, as we have done every year prior, to create and practice the set list we would be playing. We settled on a six-song set with just two days left until the performance, and the good news was that we only had to learn two of them from scratch.It had been two years since I had played in Hodgepodge with The Informers, and nerves were running a bit high in all of us but not as high as our confidence. A recent string of shows at colleges throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island had roused us from a bit of a slump, and we had hopes that this year’s performance would spring us into a buzz of productivity to record shortly after. Hodgepodge had always been something for us to look forward to and prepare for, so every year we try to up the ante.The entire, five-piece kit was lugged up onto the stage and put together before even one of the guitars was even tuned or plugged in, as usual, so I decided to use the five minutes or so that was left of their prep time to make sure everything was just as it should be. The only way to do that is to play it ? a quick roll across the tom-toms with a few cymbal crashes bled into a beat and through the feel it did reveal exactly what needed to be adjusted. Pull the floor-tom just slightly to the left, tilt the crash cymbal back a bit and with a quick tightening of that loose double bass pedal, my kit, Bruce Jr. (yes, I named it), was ready to go. Great, now only four minutes or so until those ever-ready guitarists had their equipment together and we could start the show.One of our favorite stage hobbies in The Informers is to speak with British accents, so that we can fool some audience members into thinking that we truly did “come all the bloody way across the pond from Liverpool just to be here, mates,” so I made sure that the front of my bass drum sported a Union Jack to help further that cause.Just as we were ready to begin, right after our on-stage stretching routine to prevent pulled muscles, one of Hodgepodge’s founders, Dean Albert, came up onto the stage to address the audience. Now, as a member of The Informers, we like to make sure everyone is having a good time at our show, or as we might say on stage in a terrible accent, “Gettin’ right and properly ?turnt,'” so I figured the best course of action would be to give Albert a little high-hat roll while he spoke. He turned out not to like this and asked that I calm down. One of the stagehands next to me pointed out that asking a drummer to calm down probably wouldn’t be so effective, and I laughed in agreement, but, in hindsight, Albert had a good point, so I remained quiet until he was done.So, now having been properly introduced, it was time to begin “Informing” the crowd. This was the first year we decided to open with an original instead of a recognizable cover. We burst right away in “I’m So Rich,” one of our older songs known to a few followers. Once we got everyone’s attention, we went right into a recognizable cover with our own interpretation of Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love,” which seemed to be popular with the crowd.Drums are a very physical instrument, and after the first two songs, the heat really began to set in, especially for me. It was around this time I began to worry about dropping a stick, a problem that has plagued me in almost every show we have played. The important thing to remember is to not tense up and keep everything from your fingers to your toes as loose as possible. The pre-gig stretch we did before actually ended up being a big help because I managed to make it through the whole set with