The Nice Thriller of Drumming
Full disclosure: I play the drums. I play them each probability I get. Though my drumming profession has served primarily as a gentle schooling in my very own shining mediocrity as a drummer, a reminder that I used to be placed on this Earth for different issues, I really like hitting the goddamn drums. Left foot on the hi-hat pedal, proper foot on the kick-drum pedal, left hand on the snare, proper hand on the experience cymbal. When it begins to movement, you’re like da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man: You’re in a holy circle of equilibrium, blissfully distributed, with consciousness subtle to your extremities.
How do you get higher as a drummer? Effectively, you follow: You do the identical factor time and again, slowly constructing muscle fiber whereas additionally experiencing, in your mind, the painless, clueless ache of a synapse attempting to type. You get higher by being in a band, by getting into music as a part of a risky, multi-person, multi-addiction organism. And also you get higher, lastly, through the drummer’s model of the grace of God—which is the jolt, the volt, the heavenly bolt, the electromotive impulse that flashes out from the enjoying of one other, a lot higher drummer, and claims you.
John Lingan’s very good Backbeats: A Historical past of Rock and Roll in Fifteen Drummers is filled with such moments. Moments of transmission—usually through vinyl, often in efficiency—when the artistic spark zips and snaps throughout the pre-artistic darkness and a few younger drummer someplace realizes that he’s going to have to alter his life. Dave Lombardo, pre-Slayer, listening in awe to Phil “Philthy Animal” Taylor pummeling via a relentless double-kick-drum sample on the title monitor of Motörhead’s Overkill. Jody Stephens, pre–Large Star, within the seventeenth row at a Led Zeppelin present in Memphis: John Bonham was “like a rocket, everybody else was simply holding on.” Tony Thompson, pre-Stylish, watching the Mahavishnu Orchestra: “I noticed Billy Cobham for the primary time—and noticed God … It’s nonetheless embedded in my soul seeing him play like that.”
The drummer James Osterberg, earlier than he turned Iggy Pop, was infatuated with the bluesy enjoying of Sam Lay. (You may hear Lay’s ghostly snare faucets on Howlin’ Wolf’s “Little Pink Rooster”; it’s also possible to hear him, 4 years later, tearing via the anarchic-ironic shuffle of Bob Dylan’s “Freeway 61 Revisited.”) Osterberg made a younger man’s picaresque pilgrimage from Ann Arbor to Lay’s home in Chicago. “His spouse was very stunned that I used to be searching for him,” he tells Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain in Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral Historical past of Punk. “She stated, ‘Effectively, he’s not right here, however would you want some fried hen?’ ”
My very own little drum disaster/awakening got here by the hands (and toes) of Dave Grohl, pre-Nirvana, after I noticed him enjoying with the Washington, D.C., hardcore-punk band Scream. Grohl—skinny, 19 years outdated—was all assault, all emphasis. He drummed in italics. Concurrently, there was one thing subliminal and nearly unspeakable about his enjoying; as devastatingly right because it was, he additionally appeared to be pulling info from a rhythmic grid extra profound, extra capacious, than the mere ticktocking of correct time.
By John Lingan
As a result of that is the nice thriller of drumming: Time. Not simply tempo, not simply retaining the beat—the guitarist and the bassist can try this—however the drummer’s musical relationship to the movement of Time itself. To the passing of all issues, to the universe’s rumble towards infinity. John Bonham’s left foot on the hi-hat pedal—shick–shick–shick—has the cadence of Deep Time. It’s Bonham’s neurological signature: a lilt, an inflection, a swing that microscopically delays or distends the beat whereas additionally fulfilling it. Hearken to “Complete Lotta Love,” round 1:18, the beginning of the freak-out part. Hearken to that hi-hat going up and down, up and down. Bonham, regular as he’s, is just not retaining time. He’s releasing it.
His personal rumble towards infinity was temporary, fiery, and pocked with shadow. Lingan pairs him with the Who’s Keith Moon: “Their drumming was an correct reflection of every of their personalities—they have been loud, they have been harmful, they harm and endangered individuals, and so they each died younger and violently from self-abuse.” Right here I feel I’d respectfully disagree. In each circumstances, the drumming, the artwork, transcended the persona.
Grohl and Bonham get a chapter every in Backbeats, as does—to my nice delight—Earl Hudson from Dangerous Brains, a low-key powerhouse whose enjoying steered the shamanic flights of his brother, the band’s entrance man, H.R., via the ether. The good session man Hal Blaine can also be featured, and Clyde Stubblefield from James Brown’s the J.B.’s, the creator of the “Funky Drummer” beat that’s since been looped via a thousand hip-hop tracks.
To nondrummers, many of those figures can be obscure. (One primary counterexample is Grohl, who made himself an actual rock star because the guitarist-vocalist of Foo Fighters.) That is largely the drummer’s destiny: to be felt however not seen. And that is the ambition of Lingan’s guide—to inform a narrative of rock-and-roll evolution from the again, from the bowels, from the under-realm of the creator-drummers. How have drummers responded to the growing energy and complexity of the music? How have they themselves elevated that energy and complexity? By the point we get to Dave Lombardo and Slayer’s Reign in Blood, we’re in a zone of Darwinian mutation, as Lombardo pulls off feats of velocity and dexterity unimaginable—and doubtless terrifying—to his drumming forebears.
The only real feminine amongst Lingan’s 15 chosen drummers is Moe Tucker, of the Velvet Underground. Self-taught, self-willed—“I consciously, purposely, didn’t study extra about drums as a result of I didn’t wish to sound like anyone else”—Tucker fused steely minimalism with uncooked, repetitive impression. If any rock-and-roll drummer could possibly be stated to have made their drums drone, it’s her. No crashing cymbals for Moe Tucker: not for her, the big-top vulgarity of these metallic exclamation factors. And generally no downbeat—the ferocious shuffle she performs on “Run Run Run” is on the snare alone, its clattering, unmoored momentum working like a propellant on Lou Reed’s storytelling. Ka-chunk-a-CHUNK-a-chunk-a-CHUNK … The addicts are fiending round New York Metropolis, searching for a repair, a drag, a style, something. Possibly this was Tucker’s particular compact with Time—Time as narrative; Time as unfolding drama.
And one very last thing about Time: Of all of the members of the band, it comes for the drummer first. Guitars get heavier as you become older, excessive notes more durable to hit, however the drummer pays a non-public tax to mortality. The drummer’s power goes quicker. Precisely how briskly relies upon, to a level, on the music. Steel drumming is famously punishing, and high-speed punk rock, as Lingan writes, “has at all times survived on heroic drumming. Somebody has to maintain that pulse.” However even the mid-tempo drummer may have their moments of bare endurance. A 2008 examine of Blondie’s Clem Burke revealed that, throughout dwell units, he performed with the stamina of an athlete, burning about 600 energy over the course of an 82-minute present. Many bands, once they re-form for his or her Twentieth- or Thirtieth-anniversary excursions, have a brand new man, youthful and stronger, on drums.
So what’s a jowly outdated superannuated drummer to do? How do you keep on that drum stool and preserve enjoying that funky/punky/heavy/wicky-wacky whatever-it-is? Effectively, you cease thrashing. You progress extra exactly; you breathe extra deeply; you handle your drive extra shrewdly. You measure the dosage of energy in each stroke. You utilize, in a phrase, method. It’s like life.
* Lead-image supply: Kevin Nixon / Basic Rock Journal / Future Publishing / Getty
This text seems within the January 2026 print version with the headline “Respect the Drummer.”
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