Justin Spencer and his group, Recycled Percussion, have made the American dream a reality. They started from nothing back in 1995 in rural New Hampshire and slowly built throughout the years, always sticking with their vision. After years of shows they finally hit it big. Now they’ve traveled the world, played almost everywhere, starred on primetime television, and have their own headliner show on a nightly basis on the Las Vegas strip. They’ve literally come from playing on upside down trashcans, to playing on upside down trashcans on a multimillion dollar set. Not bad… Are you done searching through your closet for that old guitar yet?
You guys got started in a high school talent show. Were you always into music and can you tell us a little bit about that, the beginnings? Yeah. The band or the group started in 1995 at a high school talent show in New Hampshire, a small town in New Hampshire and it was just basically… I’ve always had a love affair with drums. My dad was a drummer and I was looking for a way to oneup my performance from the year before. I had seen a kid in New York City performing on some five-gallon buckets. This is way back in the day before these Stomps and YouTube brought the recycled drumming to the mainstream.
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It was being popularized by the urban kids in the subways, really. I took their idea and just embellished it for a high school talent show with the thought of only doing this one-time performance. Somebody in the audience saw the per-
formance and thought it’d be a really cool idea for us to go perform at their local elementary school in the State of New Hampshire, so we did that. Then another school saw us, and as you can imagine, we started performing more and more shows as time went on. The first couple of years were really predicated around performing at the high schools and things around New England. What started as a joke, turned into, as a high school kid, a way to make some money. Wow. Now you guys obviously