Last year at the 2010 Winnipeg Folk Festival, my 7 year vision for a fire-breathing drum tower came to life. 

I partnered with my cohort Joey who is a fire dancer and a welder.  I gave him all of the extra drums that I had lying around and we worked tirelessly to make it happen.  And by we, I mean he.  I’m prone to thinking and adverse to working so I spent my time phoning the other people necessary to make this happen and sat through meeting after meeting.  It all came together perfectly at the last minute. 

Another friend was kind enough to loan us the propane system that his company uses at rock concerts and thus completed the vision for shooting 2 metre fire balls out of the top of the tower.  I had it rigged to a foot switch so that I could play it like a drum and rhythmically time the blasts. 

 We did this for two reasons: 

1.  Why talk about cool stuff when you can just do cool stuff? 

2.  Folk fest was becoming boring (same thing every year) and the performance needed to be taken up a notch. 

Our one goals was to blow people’s minds.  As it turns out, that’s a pretty easy task to accomplish when everyone is high and drunk.

That was a proud moment for me.  Every drum set should have fire shoot out of it in my opinion.