Dave Fender -  Age 39  - Spokane, WA   davidfender@hammerheadrock.com

Current band: Hammer Head - Tacoma WA  
www.hammerheadrock.com

My Slingerland Drum Pictures  http://mydrums.home.attbi.com/

 Long Live the Slingerlands...

I started to play drums and percussion at the age of 4, with a small drum set that Santa brought me one Christmas morning... You know how it goes, I Beat them up until the paper heads were all ripped up! And then flip them over and do the same to the other sides! :-)

At age 8 , I got my first real snare drum and started taking drum lessons from a local music store. RRLLRRLLRRLLRRLL -----------O REALLY LOUD !!!

Every time that I went to my lessons, I would see that Drum Set in the window! Mom would just say "lets see if you can learn the snare first". You See, my mother was a Piano teacher for 20 years, And I wanted to have nothing to do with the piano after hearing it 6 hours a day! But the sound of music has stuck with me forever!!! I can remember that she would send me outside behind the shed to practice. LOL!

The fifth grade came around, and I wanted to play in the band so bad. I took my snare drum and headed off to the first day of music class. When we started music lessons that day, I was told to take the drum home... IT'S TOO LOUD!!! So i learned to play bells, triangles, bongos, and wood blocks. Now in sixth grade, I joined the band again and found that there were a lot of other drummers that wanted to do the same thing that I wanted. BANG THAT SNARE! I swear that we drove that band teacher crazy! The next year he was gone.... One Day I came home and there was a small drum set sitting in my bedroom. It was not as nice as that drum set in the window, but it was given to me by a man from our church. I can't remember his name, but he changed my life, Thanks...

In junior high I had a new band teacher. He taught us that it is not how hard you hit the drum, it's how you play it. Don't listen to the drum beats, listen to the spaces between the beats... There was a day when the band teacher told us that we were going to watch a movie about music. It turned out to be a promo movie about Drum Corps. That was it, I was hooked! I joined the local Drum Corps, Renaissance. I was 12 years old now, and now my life was all about drums. I marched with the drum corps for 5 years. The best show I ever played was at DCI in Birmingham, where we placed 2nd at finals in class A.

I went to Mead High School in Spokane, WA and had a great experience with music throughout the rest of my school years. The Drum Instructor for the Drum Corp worked for the music department at my school! All I ever did at school was Music!

During a metal shop class at school I designed a crude drum harness for a class project. I showed the harness to the band teacher and asked if I could make them for the drum line? He set up a fund from the school's ASB money and I started to make harness's for my school. When we went to the first parade, everyone just looked at our drum line and those drum holders. The next week I got pulled out of a class to take a phone call in the office. It was Ed Brown from the Professional Drum Center. He got a lot of phone calls from other schools wanting to find out how they could buy these drum harness's. I went home and told my dad that I was going to start a business and sell drum harness's to schools thru the drum center! All I need is money...

We sold the drum harness's to schools all over the Northwest, and even went to the Percussive Arts Convention in Dallas, Texas to show our products! I Produced the Lite & Rite Drum Harness's for about 3 years until the major Drum Companies started to produce there own Marching Harness's. Even today after 20+ years, I can still go to parades and see schools using the Drum Harness's that we built so long ago!!

I moved to Bellingham, WA. just to get away from Spokane. There I started to play in a garage band. We rocked the small college town, and we had a great time!

I met a guitar player one day and we talked about starting a new band. We wanted to play our own music, so we started writing and playing together. Along came a couple of brothers to fill out the band. They were the best Heavy Metal musicians that I had ever played with. We called the band Hammer Head. When we took out an add in The Rocket Magazine (a northwest music paper) looking for a singer, we found our singer and we were set.

We played all over the Seattle-Tacoma Area for 4 years and put out a few different demo tapes from our own 16 track studio, before going to Triad Studios in Redmond, WA to create an album titled Rock Forever.

Hammer Head in 1985 - Left to Right:

Tom Cooper (Guitar) - Greg Martin (Guitar) - Dave Fender (Drums) - Pete Mainzer (Lead Vocals) - Don Cooper (Bass Guitar)

I have recently rejoined Hammer Head and we are working on our new album!

Check Out Our Web Page At

www.hammerheadrock.com

I have a son Shane, he is learning music and is playing drums in the Jr. High band!