My story isn't as grandiose as others here...as a very young boy, I was fascinated with the drum kit my adult cousin had at their house when I visited. he ended up giving me an old kit of his when he upgraded. I banged around on it occasionally, never much, and stored it. In grade school I started on drums in the music program, but they quickly moved me to brass instruments as they had plenty of drummers, and I had an aptitude for being able to play multiple other horns. As I neared the end of school, my best buddy announced that he was going to start taking bass lessons, so I replied "great, I'll learn drums so we can have a band". And we did, had a local garage band in our late teens/early 20's. Minor gigging in the area. I got an offer to get a full-time radio gig locally, so i dropped out of the band. Soon after, I got married, moved on to a retail management career, had kids...
Flash forward to about 11-12 years ago. My wife was volunteering in the kindergarden room my kids had gone to. We were friends with that teacher and her family. Turns out their high school son was planning a big local concert with other highschool folks, as a fund raiser for Katrina hurricane relief. His father had started a band, having discovered that his circle of friends, who were at that time in their 50's, had all played in garage bands in their youth. They were all community movers and shakers (a judge, a bank VP, a surgeon, etc) and they put together their little band to do fund raisers and such, for fun. My friends son wanted his dads band to play at the big relief effort, but their drummer was to be out of town. This was relayed to my wife, who replied "Bruce plays drums".... an hour later I get a call, asking if I really played drums. I replied that I did, 20 years ago...he said "perfect! you'll fit right in!"
We were only gonna do 4 songs, old classic rock standards that I had played way back when, so it went off fairly well. After that, I would get a couple calls a year to fill in with them, which got my juices flowing...
6 years ago, an old friend reconnected with me, and told me about a project they had going on. It was fun hearing about it. After a month or two, their drummer was getting done, so they asked me if i was interested. I relayed that whole story of my history (and lack of playing) but allowed that I'd like to try. Here we are, 6 years later, playing out most weekends in local bars and clubs and such. (Or we were, sigh). I've had a blast, actually getting to gig regularly, something i never got to do as a kid. We have two different bands, one with some country mixed in to the classic rock, and a female lead singer... and the other a trio, where we mix in some original material. We also have an acoustic duo, the guitar player, and me on cajon. So between the three acts, we can usually be as busy as we'd like. Not making a bunch of money, but some extra play money never hurt.
I was joked as a kid that i had a nightmare, waking up middle aged, playing country in a bottle club....well, I'm 57, and one of our acts does have 30-40% country in it, only one bottle club in the area, but we play it! And Eagles/Elks clubs kinda count in that vein, too, right?