Devin Blakeborough was doing about 130 on the Port Mann bridge - and it was all caught on video.
Luckily, Blakeborough was doing 130 beats per minute and not kilometres per hour, so no speeding laws were broken. In fact, he wasn't travelling across the bridge at all.
Instead, he was seated at a drum set in the middle of the TransCanada Highway. And not a small set, but a full set with toms, a hi-hat, cymbals, and a big bass drum.
"It was unreal," Blakeborough tells V.I.A. "It was very surreal."
The gig was a work perk, in a way; Blakeborough is a GPS surveyor with All Roads Construction. Recently they were the company tasked with paving the highway leading up to the bridge at night. Because of how things line up it meant parts of the bridge had to be closed overnight as well.
"For three nights we shut down the three main lanes," he says.
One night his boss brought out his Corvette to take photos of it on the empty bridge lanes, and Blakeborough thought it was a great idea.
"I said it'd be pretty sweet to do that with drums, knowing it was an impossibility," he says. "'Bring your drums next shift,' he said. 'Not the practice kit, no bring the full kit.'"
So Blakeborough did, setting up two kilometres from where the crew was working.
Playing the Port Mann Bridge
Alone in the middle of one of the biggest bridges in Canada — 10 lanes wide and two kilometres long — he put together the kit, played for about 20 minutes, and took it apart. The short set is probably the first time anyone has played drums there, he believes.
Aside from a couple of flaggers who came up to see him and the traffic flying by in the other lanes (he was separated by concrete barriers from all active lanes), he was essentially alone.
While the backdrop in the video is amazing, he didn't have the most spectacular view, staring at his work truck. At the time it was a fun experience, but he says it really hit him when he watched the footage back later.
"Looking back at the footage I was like 'Oh wow, I guess that is kinda ridiculous,' and after it really kinda hit home," he says. "When I first posted it people were floored by it."
A different sound
Having been introduced to the drums as a kid by his dad, and playing seriously for the past 10 years, Blakeborough is familiar with the sounds he can make with his drums; the bridge setting created a drastic difference he says.
"I've honed it to a certain sound," he says. "And then when I was out there it was so different."
It became "pingy" he adds, with the asphalt providing a lot of reverb from below, but then the open night sky above absorbing every note. The unusual acoustics even caused him to make mistakes sometimes, as things didn't sound like he expected.
"That was one of the coolest things," he says of the acoustics.
The bridge was a unique audio environment Blakeborough says. That's notable since he's played a lot of unusual spots, having lugged drums into the woods and up mountains to play in out-of-the-way locations.
He recognizes how lucky he was for the experience as well, given that it'd be wildly illegal to do that outside of the situation he was in. That said, he'd do it again if given the shot.
