5. My first music performance

The story I'm going to write about isn't very funny, interesting or scary, but it impressed me greatly and I want to write about it. My first music performance happened 3 years ago. By that moment I'd been playing drums for 2.5 years and had been playing in a band for 2 years. All that time I'd been waiting and longing for a chance to appear on stage. Well, finally my wish was complied. On one autumn day I heard a call from our neighbour who was going to celebrate his birthday party in a couple of weeks. He turned 42 that year – I will never forget this number! He said that he was planning to make a big party and to rent some restaurant. So, he invited our band to play at this party.

Of course, we accepted his offer, because we desired to perfrom and this party was a great opportunity for that. By that moment we didn't have our own songs, so we've decided to performe a cover for a famous song, which we'd been playing for a long time. This is Deep Purple's "Smoke on the water". I think you now it. Despite the fact that we'd been playing this song for quite a long time, we weren't playing it good enough to perform it. So during 3 days before the performance we were rehersing this song very intensively. It seems to me that all in all we were rehersing it about 10 hours these days, which means that we've played it for about 80 times. And including past rehearsals we've played it about 200 times in total. Believe me, 200 times is enough to hate this song! However tired we were of it, on the last rehersal we managed to play it quite well.

So the Day has begun.  It turned out that this restaueant was quite big, so that there were about a 100 people in it – all the guest of this neighbour. I won't tell you about the awful party we had to bear and go straight to the performance. We were absolutely unfamiliar with the sound stuff on this stage. It was very different from what we were rehersing with and it was very bad. Moreover, the drums I had to play were supplied with some strange sound effects (they were electric), which really distracted us. What's more we hardly had any time to prepare for the performance. Honestly, I was very nervous and excited, because it was my first music performance.

Finally, the time for the concert has come. "Hideaway" is on stage! From the time we began playing I fell into a trance. My mind was somewhere far beyond. I didn't control my arms, I didn't think about anything, I was hearing hardly anything. I was fully involved in the song, in drumming, I was a part of it. I remember that we made a mistake once, because of some awkward  sound effect on my cymbals. Because of that and some other disadvantages I can say that we performed much worse than we played on rehersals. But it didn't matter at all, because the sound was so loud, that our song sounded like something strange, stirring and cool; it was just a wave of bass. And suprisingly everybody liked it! Everyone was cheering and yelling, they were clapping and supporting us. I was extremely happy that day and this the experience I'll never forget!