Alice Grayson never planned to become a drummer. The Wes Loper Band’s percussionist, who took the stage with the group at this year’s Bayfest, says her childhood was built around classical ballet and piano lessons instead — even though her father was a drummer and the family home was cluttered with his kits. The instruments were everywhere, and the young Grayson wanted nothing to do with them.
“I would stack them up, put blankets over them and make forts out of them, or make obstacle courses for my pet hamster — anything but actually play them,” Grayson said of the drums scattered through the house growing up.
Learning in Secret
It wasn’t until she was about 15 that Grayson sat down and seriously tried to learn. Self-conscious about being a female drummer, she said she taught herself in private, waiting until her parents left the house, then pulling out her father’s cassette-tape collection and trying to imitate what she heard through headphones. The practice sessions were quiet by design: pad work, restrained grooves and a constant ear turned toward the driveway, listening for the family car.
The secrecy had a practical purpose beyond embarrassment. Drumming is one of the least private instruments to learn — loud, physical and impossible to disguise — and for a teenage girl worried that the drum kit already carried an unspoken “not for you” label, an audience of any kind threatened to end the experiment before it started. So she waited, hours at a time, for the house to empty.
“I did this by myself for a long time, until one of my relatives walked in on me playing and got my dad,” Grayson said. The moment of discovery, which might have ended things, instead brought her father into the picture — the household’s one person who understood exactly what she was trying to do behind his back.
She has never had formal training and cannot read sheet music, saying she has always learned entirely by ear — the same way her self-taught father approached the instrument. In that sense, the secret lessons were really a family inheritance passing quietly from one generation to the next, father and daughter learning the same way from the same record collection, neither ever seeing a drum chart.
Getting Her Start on Dauphin Street
Grayson’s public career in Mobile began not long after, when classmates at her high school formed a band and recruited her, largely because she was the only person they knew who owned a drum set. It was the kind of recruitment that happens in a thousand towns a year — opportunity defined by available equipment rather than careful audition — but it put her behind a kit in front of people for the first time, and it stuck.
She started playing Dauphin Street clubs around age 16, with parents chaperoning the shows. The image is a familiar one to anyone who grew up around Mobile’s downtown: a teenage musician hauling gear past the neon, playing original songs and covers to scattered weeknight crowds while a parent sat at a table near the door. Dauphin Street’s entertainment district gave her something no bedroom practice session could — real rooms, real audiences and the quick education that comes from playing to both packed bars and empty ones.
Of all her performances in Mobile over the years, Grayson said playing the city’s Mardi Gras parades stands out as the most memorable. That is a notable distinction in a city that measures its year by Carnival season. Mobile’s Mardi Gras predates New Orleans’, with mystic societies parading through downtown streets since the early 18th century, and for local musicians the parades and ball season represent some of the most visible, most anticipated work on the calendar.
“There’s something about playing for so many different people, and something really exciting about playing in an event that’s just for Mobilians,” she said. The phrase captures a distinction locals make instinctively: Mardi Gras in Mobile is not a tourist attraction first, but a family inheritance — an event the city throws for itself, moon pies and all.
The parades are also unlike any other gig a young drummer plays. The band performs on a moving float, timing that changes with every turn and delay, playing to crowds ten deep on both sides of the street rather than to tables in a club. It demands a different kind of stamina and an unshakable internal clock — a useful quality in a percussionist, and maybe the best rehearsal there is for the counting that holds a touring band together night after night.
Life on the Road
The Wes Loper Band is currently touring in support of its album “Keep on Growing” and working on a live record the group hopes to release within a few months. Capturing the band on stage, rather than in a studio, is a natural move for a group whose reputation rests on its shows — the give-and-take of a working band that plays together week after week.
Grayson said the band tours primarily across the Southeast, with recent stops extending into the Midwest. It is the classic circuit for a Gulf Coast act: club dates strung together between college towns, beach markets and city venues, close enough to home to keep the van schedule sane, far enough out to keep building the audience one market at a time.
“Being on the road with a band every week takes a little getting used to, but once you get into the swing of it, it’s wonderful,” she said, describing her bandmates as close friends she considers family. “We meet a billion new people every week. We work, we play, we goof off and we have a wonderful time.”
Original bands on the Southeastern club circuit also live on merchandise and repeat bookings, which is why a steady release schedule matters. “Keep on Growing” gives the group fresh material to anchor each night’s set, and the planned live record serves the other half of that equation: converting the people who catch a show on a Friday night into listeners who keep streaming the band after the van rolls out of town.
The road grind is real — load-in, soundcheck, the show, load-out, and the drive to the next town — but Grayson’s account of it is closer to delight than complaint. For a drummer who once hid her playing from her own family, the weekly rhythm of playing in front of strangers has become the point of the whole enterprise.
Her Performance at Bayfest
The band’s appearance at this year’s Bayfest placed Grayson on one of the biggest stages Mobile offers. The festival has historically spread dozens of acts across downtown stages each October, mixing national touring artists with the region’s homegrown bands, and local musicians have long treated a Bayfest slot as a marker of arrival — proof that a band built in local clubs belongs alongside the traveling acts on the bill.
For Grayson, the festival slot closed a loop that started with forts made out of drum cases. The girl who made obstacle courses for her hamster played a downtown festival stage in her own city, on a bill with national acts, as the drummer of a working band with an album on the market and another record on the way.
Her proposed drum group would also arrive at a moment when Mobile’s music community has plenty of room for it. The city’s scene runs on a relatively small core of working players who move between cover bands, original projects and Mardi Gras season jobs, and the pipeline of new musicians matters to all of them. A regular gathering built around one instrument, open to beginners, is exactly the kind of mechanism that turns curious players into working ones.
Looking Ahead
Grayson said she hopes to keep touring with the band as long as possible, but she has also been considering starting a drum group in Mobile specifically for female drummers of all ages and skill levels. The idea grows directly out of her own story: a percussionist who learned to play in secret because she believed the instrument belonged to someone else.
“I’d like to encourage any female who has ever thought of getting into drums or percussion to try it out, exchange ideas or just get together and play for fun,” she said. The emphasis on getting together — no auditions, no instruction manuals, no sheet music required — mirrors the way she learned, in living rooms and garages, one borrowed record at a time.
The self-taught path Grayson followed has long been the norm for drummers, an instrument usually picked up at the back of the band room rather than the front of the conservatory. But the visibility of women behind kits has grown steadily across popular music, and the community she wants to build in Mobile would give local players what she never had: a room where the drum kit is already theirs, and nobody has to wait for the house to empty before they sit down and play.