The Road Drummer: The Man Behind the Bucket

Scott Schwarz, The Road Drummer, yells, “Everybody dance now!” on the corner of the street, beating on paint buckets and metal pieces he’s collected from thrift stores. Most of us learn to keep moving while in the city, but The Road Drummer has made it his mission to help people stop.

However, the joy he brings started in a much darker place. Schwarz struggled with severe alcoholism for 12 years. “I almost died,” he says. Eventually, he chose sobriety and came to Utah to leave his old environment behind him. Coming out of rehab, he felt like he had been given another chance at life. “A man has two lives,” he says. “The second one begins when he realizes he only has one.”

With that, he decided to try something he’d always wanted to do: bucket drumming. But there were a few problems: He had no drum kit, no car and no percussion training. So he improvised. He strapped a bucket onto the front of his bicycle and rode around Orem, practicing as he went.

Then his closest friend from rehab died. After her funeral, Schwarz found himself sitting in a parking lot with a flat tire and grief that had nowhere to go. So he pulled out his bucket and started to play. Then a woman walked up to him and gave him his first $20 tip. “I’ll never forget her,” he says. “I probably scared her with how [excited] I was, like ‘THANK YOU SO MUCH!’”

That $20 mattered, but something even better happened soon after: People stopped, and they danced. During COVID, people would park hundreds of feet away and just listen. Later, some found him online and messaged him to say he was giving them hope during a horrible time. This made him realize that his performance could give people a moment to step out of their ordinary lives, and his goal became to help them “break away from the mundane… and just kind of start dancing in the street.”

“Kids don’t have the social inhibitions adults have”

The man had found his rhythm, but watching others find theirs became the most meaningful part.

“Kids don’t have the social inhibitions adults have,” he says, his voice changing. They dance, and he hands out drumsticks he keeps on him for this exact situation. His favorite sight is kids walking away, still hitting things. “They’re going to ruin their parents’ house,” he jokes, but underneath the laughter is something more meaningful: “I might have created another drummer.” From where I’m standing, he’s offering permission to these little musicians to chase what they love.

He’s now facing a personal reminder of how precious that is. He married his wife in 2023 and was trying to spend time with her in the Philippines when he was diagnosed with wet macular degeneration, an illness that is slowly blinding him. Treatment has helped preserve his vision for more than three years, he shares gratefully, but ongoing treatment is expensive. He’s found himself having to choose between being with his wife or keeping his vision — a choice made harder, he says, because, “The only thing I want to do with my vision while I got it is look at her.” He is currently living in Oregon to access that treatment but hopes to be in Utah to play outside Jazz games again soon.

He came to our beloved state to get sober. He picked up the bucket, found his rhythm and along the way, discovered he loved helping strangers — especially little ones — find theirs. He leaves us with one last piece of advice: “If you want something different, you’ve got to do something you’ve never done.”

Readers who want to check out Schwarz’s bucket drumming journey can find him @theroaddrummer_ on Instagram, or theroaddrummer.com. If you want to contribute to Schwarz’s ongoing treatment, or support his music-making and travel back to Utah, you can find him

@theroaddrummer on Venmo and Cash App.

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