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For more information on Doug Grant, check out the Diamond Sharp Studio web site, and then click on "Doug's Drum Dungeon" to see Doug's articles on drumming, etc. |
I guess you could say I've played in quite a few bands. Some of them include.....
Psycho
Naked Truth
Omega
Westcoast
Shakey Jake
The Live Wire Band
The Wires
Free Ride
Julie and the Jets
The Kidz
The Ray Roper Band
Agent
The Guy Jones Band
The Edge
Ted Moore and the Border
Locomotive Dream
Rick Tippe
Suzanne Gitzi
Rhodes and Marshall
Doug and the Slugs
Marq DeSouza and the Anti-Vanity Patrol
There are more, believe it or not! Countless numbers of fill ins, recording sessions, jams, etc. Sometimes bands don't stay together for very long. So, it's not like I'm going to list every band or artist that I've ever shared a stage with!
I've been playing drums since I was about 9 or 10. My dad's a drummer, so his Slingerland kit was always set up in the basement. I'd come home from school and bang away for a while. Then I got the bright idea of dragging the family stereo downstairs. It was one of those old cabinet type stereos that you could pile a bunch of records on. The records would drop down one at a time on to the turntable. I'd put on several records from artists like Deep Purple, Santana, Yes, all kinds of stuff. Then I'd plug in the headphones, sit at the kit, and play along for hours.
When I was about 14 or so, a couple of buddies from school who played guitar would come over to my basement and we'd jam. It wasn't long before we were spending more time in the basement than we were at school! By this time, I had bought my own drums with money I had earned gigging on weekends with local country bands. I'd add my kit to dad's, and make a monster drumkit! What I didn't realize at the time was that when my two younger brothers would get home from school, they'd sneak downstairs and hide around the corner from where we were practicing. They were listening to me playing with my friends ,and thinking to themselves "I could do that!"!! Today, they are both professional drummers too!
When I was 16, I started touring around quite a bit in northern B.C. In those days, most gigs were six nighters, so we played every night except sunday. Sundays were spent driving to the next gig. The cabarets were closed in the daytime, so we'd practice all day and do four sets every night.
It took a while, but eventually I decided I'd had enough of northern B.C., and decided to come down to Vancouver. I was doing a house gig in Prince George, and ran into a friend who's band was playing at another hotel. His band was going back to Vancouver, and the drummer was leaving. He asked if I wanted the gig, and I told him I did. I'd tried to live in Vancouver about a year and a half before this, but the band I was with couldn't get enough work to survive, so I ended up heading back up north where I knew I could work. Anyway, this time I managed to gig enough that Vancouver became home.
In the late seventies, the music scene was much different than it is now. There were bands all over the place. Original bands, and cover bands both had places to play. But the cover bands could work six nights a week! We would work on our original material in the day, and play at night as a cover band so we could eat and pay rent on the band house. We worked pretty hard, and it wasn't too long before we had quite a catalogue of original songs. We would add a lot of this material into our shows at night. Sometimes pretending it was from famous recording bands!
There were several dry spells though. Things get tough when there is no work. No food. No place to live. We were about to call it quits one time when, luckily, a management team in Vancouver heard one of our original tunes that they particularly liked. In fact, they liked it so much, that they lent us thirteen grand to pay some bills, and buy some equipment that we needed. They liked us even more when we managed to pay them back the thirteeen grand! They entered us in a battle of the bands. We did pretty well, and won second prize. Twenty five hundred dollars worth of recording time at Ocean Sound Studios. We selected five of our tunes, and went in to record them. Engineering that session was Ray Roper, guitarist and main songwriter with the recording act Stonebolt. We shopped our demo, but didn't get a lot of interest. I did however, become friends with Ray.
Sometime later, when Stonebolt had dissolved, and I was "in between gigs" as they say, Ray called and offered me an audition with his new band. I piled my drums into the back of a friends pickup and went to the audition. I guess I did ok because he called me the next day and said the job was mine.
Since then, I've been working steadily in touring and recording acts. I consider myself lucky in that I get to travel around the country playing my drums. I like to stay busy, so I'm quite often involved with multiple projects at any given time. As well as holding down a "day" job.
To check out my brother Ian, who plays with the band Zuckerbaby, go to their website and have a look. You'll find them at Zucker Baby.To find out a little more about my brother Bob, go to Big Band Trio
Seeya!..............D O U G