Ask Nic Brown about his past as a rock musician, and he’ll likely demur.
“I was like a minor league baseball player who got called up to the big leagues and never made it to the World Series,” says Brown, now a novelist and writing professor at Clemson University. “Nobody remembers me, but I had a real career doing it.”
In a new memoir titled “Bang Bang Crash,” Brown writes about his early obsession with drumming while growing up in Greensboro, North Carolina, and how, at age 19, it led to his first major-label record deal with the alt-rock band Athenaeum.
By the time Brown was 22, he had been with the band he formed in middle school for nearly a decade. His tastes had changed. On a whim, he enrolled at Columbia University to study writing and landed a gig as a studio musician for RCA Records, where he worked with singer-songwriter Ben Lee — he even appeared with the artist on “The Tonight Show” — and toured with the indie rock band Longwave.
“It was just so awesome to have class end and then get on a plane and go on a rock tour for spring break,” Brown says. “I just can’t believe I really did that. That was my life.”
A different opportunity presented itself in the summer of 2004 when Brown was offered a fellowship to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, one of the top programs of its kind in the country.
“I was sort of going with the flow, and for me, it felt like another record deal where somebody was paying me to go pursue a new art project,” Brown says.
He figured he’d go to Iowa for two years, write for a bit, then return to New York City to pick up where he left off. Brown never went back.
“The musicians I played with were great, but as soon as I started writing, that shift away from being the side man to being someone who could direct my own artistic project just became so intoxicating,” Brown says.
He kept waiting to miss playing the drums, but it didn’t happen. It still hasn’t happened.
Instead, Brown took up pastimes to fill the void. He played tennis. He tried rapping. He tapped complicated rhythms out with his teeth, to the despair of his dentist.
“I had gotten to this place in my life where I very rarely played the drums, and I very rarely spoke about playing the drums,” Brown says.
In fact, most of the people in Brown’s life didn’t know he played an instrument at all, let alone that he had a successful career doing so. So Brown set out to investigate his own relationship with his past as a musician in writing “Bang Bang Crash.”
“No matter how much I’ve thought that I’ve moved on past my identity as a drummer, I can’t get rid of it. It informs everything that I do,” he says.
Or, as he writes in his memoir: “I’m no longer a drummer. But still, always, I’m drumming.”
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