How the Grinch GAVE Christmas…
Hi, my name is Brian. I am the drummer for Aaron Linkin, the songwriter. We’ve been in this songwriter/drummer dance for over half of each of our lives. This is the dance we are most used to doing.
Yes we have tried other dances, and succeeded, but whenever we say “that was OLD-school!”, we’re usually referring to a rock solid jam we JUST finished, and most likely I was on drums and Aaron was strumming his acoustic guitar, and singing.
These titles of “drummer” and “songwriter”, while we own them naturally, have not been without their challenges. At times feeling like Aaron’s “drummer” has felt like standing in quickly drying cement, and this claustrophobic feeling has in turn caused Aaron his fair share of pain, literally. For instance…
We were once playing loudly at a small restaurant, and the owner told us to turn down. Well, this to a bunch of 19 year olds is an unreasonable request, so we took our frustration out, but on each other. Aaron threw a full cup of cold water directly onto my face, and since I had been angrily hitting drums, when that water hit me it was like throwing it on a big fire. In other words, it didn’t “put me out”, it merely made me more frustrated.
So I proceeded to play Aaron’s bald head, with my drumstick -I just kept playing the same beat, but instead of hitting the cymbal, I hit his bald head. I was able to do this because we were stuffed in a small corner of this restaurant, and he was RIGHT next to me. We were in a sinking ship at the time, which was right around Christmas.
We parted ways shortly after, and we each went onto our own successful music ventures in our own wright. Aaron kept writing masterful songs, and became the best choir director for one of the coolest churches in the USA, and drawing crowds of 1000s for Northern California’s premier Beatles Tribute Band. I went onto tour and open for folks like Yo-yo Ma, Chris Tucker and Bernie Sanders. And our keyboardist, Andre, went onto becoming one of the best players worldwide, performing at countless events including one for for the California region of Twitter, at their annual company party.
With all of our individual successes, nothing quite felt like getting together to play, or merely hang out, which happened rarely and more rarely. But One night near eve of the new decade, we put our differences aside. We stopped seeing each other as “Grinches,” and for one night, one Christmas night, we saw ONLY the good in one another. Just old friends, playing simply for the joy of that one good feeling we together can produce only with each other. We jammed.
We recorded at the church Aaron was choir director at. We played the most high-spirited and good feeling music we could. We chose neutral songs, Christmas songs, songs everybody loved, and songs that can only FEEL like love… And we played them, like there was no tomorrow.
We named our new band, with our new positive purpose and surprisingly good vibe, an appropriate name. Because it was the holidays, and because we’d made an about face from negativity to loving one another, we named the band, “Post Grinch.” And that, my friends, is how the grinch GAVE Christmas, and these are the jolly sounds me made, on that “One Christmas Night.
