I heard the sound of a hundred bucks breaking the other week. It sounded really damn good.

Among the various side projects I keep that include this blog, I drum for a band called Common Swift. It’s a project that’s required increasing volumes of effort, but I don’t mind so much. It’s a good creative and physical release, and when we’re not intentionally driving each other crazy, the other people involved are actually some of my best friends.

Like so many other fun habits, however, this one’s an expensive one. When all you invest into music is 15 bucks to buy a CD, it gets really easy to gloss over the expenses involved, particularly for a band just starting out without any solid source of income yet. All six of us Swifts have had to bust open our personal piggy banks again and again, and while it has no effect on the inherent nature of our music, there’s no denying that dropping some hefty coin has moved our *sound* in a good direction.

Last spring, Clint dropped hundreds of dollars on a new bass guitar and hasn’t looked back. Parker blew more than a grand for a new PC tower with enough oomph to run NASA, primarily so we could do some really professional-sounding live multi-track recording.

But the blessing and the curse of being a drummer is that, unless you’re scratching your entire set and starting fresh, you seldom have to cut a big (and that’s a relative term) check for equipment. Since I started playing again a year-and-a-half ago, I’ve been gradually replacing my set one piece at a time, which is the blessing. The curse is there are a couple dozen things on the set that can break at any time, and when the fundamental nature of your instrument involves brute, percussive force, they do.

Last Christmas, I treated myself to a pair of custom-picked, high-end Zildjian ZBT crash cymbals to replace the generic, stock tin cans that came with the set a decade ago. I played them hard but treated them well. However, if there’s a moral to this story, it’s this: don’t leave your set up after a basement show where anyone who thinks they’re a drummer can sit down and abuse it during the after party.

I’m telling myself it’s that mistake that lead to the eventual demise of my favorite hundred-dollar crash cymbal within nine months of its purchase. Two small cracks appeared on opposite sides of the cymbal, and over the coming weeks spread slowly toward the middle with further play, creating a diameter that would have eventually split the instrument in two. But up until last week, it still sounded good.

I guess that’s one of the differences between high-end cymbals and generic brands. I’ve destroyed generic cymbals before. The damage is haphazard, unpredictable, spreads quickly, and when that sonuvabitch finally goes off, it sends a spray of metal shrapnel like a grenade going off.

Come to think of it, that’s basically what happened with my last high-hat, but that was due for a replacement. I got it from Strutt after doing in the generic hat that came with the set. I don’t think he knows where he got it. It was tarnished, so much that it was almost impossible to read the lettering on it, but we still managed to make out that it was made in West Germany. West Germany. Freakin’ thing was probably as old as I am.

So I finally caved today, with a gig coming up this weekend and a decent package deal at a store on the west side, and bought a new hat and a couple crashes. But as I was checking out at the store, I couldn’t help but laugh when the clerk (shouting over some dopey 14-year-old abusing one of the display sets) offered me a chance to buy “cymbal insurance.”

Basically, I have 30 days to decide whether to give the store a chunk of cash. If I do, in the event that one of my new cymbals gets wrecked within the next two years, they’ll replace it for free. While the concept of insurance generally leaves a sour taste in my mouth for things like cars and lives, this strikes me as something of a funny deal.

My bandmates are not shy about telling me I play loudly. Nor was my high school band director, who famously voiced during a lecture on dynamic range, “And then there’s Dusty, who tends to be about as subtle as your average act of God.”

A dozen broken sticks laying in the corner, two dead cymbals, the dents in my heads and the blisters on my hands are testament to the fact that my equipment takes a beating. But I can only see a two-year insurance policy on my new cymbals encouraging me to get abusive 11 months from now.

I think I’ll pass on the insurance and try instead to temper my gusto a little.

By the way, Common Swift would love to see you out at Chaser’s Lounge, 6313 24th Avenue in Kenosha. Door’s at 9:00 Saturday night. More shows on the way this fall.