Soundtrack to my Life: The Drums and I, Part Two: A Top Ten Favourite Tracks

How about some actual drums, then? Here's a top ten list of personal favourites. Get back to me tomorrow, though, and it will have changed.

So, what about some favourites, then? Let’s do a quick top ten, in no particular order, with the drummer’s name in brackets, and a little bit about what these songs mean.

I should point out that I’ve had to leave a shedload of brilliant drummers off this list. No place for Charlie Watts, Philly Jo Jones, Bobby Elliott, David Lovering, Stewart Copeland, Neil Peart, Clem Burke, Billy Cobham, Mitch Mitchell, Karen Carpenter, Animal out of The Muppets, Ginger Baker or Dave Grohl. I mean, the list really is almost endless, and I’m aware of the gaping holes in it.

And this is a personal list. I didn’t sit down and think about it. These are the ten that I thought of first, when I sat down to write. On another day it might have been quite different, though I can see about five or six which I’d consider to be just about eternal.

Deep Purple - Highway Star (Ian Paice)

It could just as easily have been the sensational Burn, but then it could be more or less anything by Ian Paice, who was essentially a jazz drummer dropped into one of the heaviest bands of the early 1970s. There’s something so magnificently incongruous about him sitting at the back of this bunch of berks, absolutely unable to play anything without dropping an accent here or a little ghost note somewhere or other. Ian Paice is a jazz man at heart, and he can’t help himself. It’s glorious, and he’s the reason why, no matter how much the rest of them might be a bunch of berks, at least Deep Purple usually always swing.

Steely Dan - Kid Charlemagne (Bernard Purdie)

It is, of course, a rite of passage for middle-aged men to get into Steely Dan, but they hit a particularly raw nerve with me because they hired some of the best studio guys around - Rick Marotta, Jeff Porcaro, Hal Blaine and Steve Gadd, for starters - and their production was always on point, because I was everything was primed for it to sound incredible.

But there’s one track that gets to it like no other, and that’s Kid Charlemagne, from their 1976 album The Royal Scam. Now there’s a lot to love about this song, from the story, loosely based on the 1960s LSD manufacturer Owsley Stanley, to Larry Carlson’s astonishing mid-song guitar solo, but obviously we’re not here to talk about those.

I was already aware of Bernard “Pretty” Purdie - as he’s American, it’s important you pronounce it as he would, ‘Br-naaaard’ - from his extensive soul and funk repertoire throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, but bringing him into this is a sign of the weird brilliance that Walter Becker and Donald Fagan had for picking out the right musician for the job.

Purdies shuffles through this song - he’s best known now for the ‘Purdie shuffle’, a distinctive half-time shuffle heard when he played with them again on their later album Aja - as though the whole thing might fall apart at any moment. Except, of course, it’s all locked in. Every fill played with the minimum of fuss. He creates a mood, and gives the others the space to move around him.

Janet Kay - Silly Games (Drummie Zeb)

You see, it’s all about the accents, those tiny little inflections. Drummie Zeb - also of Aswad - wasn’t supposed to be playing on this record, but his afrobeat-tinged take of the version was preferred to the original and it absolutely lifts it. The production is superb, bringing his snare right up into your ears, while the little tickles that he gives the hi-hats feel like someone bending their finger to usher you in to hear their story. He leads you up a garden path, and it’s lovely.

Gene Krupa - Drum Boogie

This, of course, it where is all began. Once upon a time there were no rock and roll drummers, and they all had to take their influences from somewhere. Gene Krupa was an obvious place to start. He was the first real drumming celebrity, the man who put the type of kit that is still largely played today on the map. He was the virtuoso and the star of the show, the first drummer to truly take centre stage. And more importantly than anything else, he made this weird collection of wood and metal look like it was enormous fun to play. You can’t watch the video below without at least wanting to give it a go.

Santana, featuring Rob Thomas - Smooth (Rodney Holmes)

See, the main job of the drummer is to keep all those other urchins in line. To hold to down the beat and tether everybody else together. Some of you may have heard of the phrase “playing in the pocket”, and that’s where these guys are with Smooth. The “pocket” is where the groove lives. It’s the home of the downbeat that makes you want to move. And when a band is playing in the pocket, they’re locked in together, it’s an almost other-worldly feeling of connectedness.

Calrlos Santana is a mad genius, of course (and he’s married to the magnificent Cindy Blackman, who was the drummer on the video to Are You Gonna Go My Way? by Lenny Kravitz, but the actual track itself), and he’s obviously the star of this song, but at the back there is session player Rodney Holmes just holding it down. Thomas is a spectacularly talented drummer - he’s got a website and everything - but here he’s holding his line, keeping everybody else tethered. He knows when to open up a little, and when to pull back. He is, and this is a critical line for any musician, especially the drummer, playing for the song. Masterful.

Led Zeppelin - Rock & Roll (John Bonham)

Of course, I had to put John Bonham in here somewhere. He is the base model of the rock drummer that we all understand today. There are songs for which he is known. Fool in the Rain or Nobody’s Fault But Mine, for example, are technical tours de force. But I’ve pulled out this one because it was my own personal introduction to Zeppelin, the first song of theirs that I needed to know of theirs to play live.

This isn’t a fantastic version of this song. Indeed, the entirety of the shows recorded for The Song Remains The Same had this stilted air about them, as though they couldn’t quite get out of second gear. But this is a hell a of a way to open a live show, with its intro loosely based on Keep-a-Knockin’ by Little Richard.

But what’s really noticeable about it is how locked down it is. Listen through the slightly muddy mix and you can hear a bass drum that sounds like a big wooden door repeatedly slamming shut. The punctuation is sparse but perfectly placed, sitting on top of guitar and bass lines which presumably had become second nature through constant rehearsal. John Bonham remains probably my favourite drummer, though I do acknowledge that it’s a bit of a cliche to say that, these days. He brought a level of complexity to rock drumming that hadn’t previously existed.

The Who - I Can’t Explain (Keith Moon)

Now, I don’t like Keith Moon, which may surprise one or two of you, considering what I said in the previous episode of this series, so allow me to explain. Moon was my gateway drug into the drums, but I couldn’t stick with him. He was too sloppy, too confusing. In some respects, especially as he reached the early 1970s, he was the guy that you really shouldn’t listen to, if you’re learning to play the drums properly. By the time of the last couple of studio albums with them, he was just plain bad, perpetually out-of-shape.

As I listened to albums such as Tommy and Quadrophenia and then on to The Who by Numbers and Who Are You?, they started to sound sloppier and sloppier, as though he was being indulged by studio engineers as his descent gathered pace. They got the balance with him right on Who’s Next, but that was a sweet spot that hit just before the alcohol and drugs really started to fully consume him. And as anybody who’s read the brilliant biography of him, Dear Boy, he was not a very nice person; a domestic abuser, definitely, and quite likely a very unpleasant racist.

And yet, and yet. At the start of the 1965, Moon was probably the most exciting drummer on the planet. This clip is from the ABC Television show Shindig!, which was recorded in London for broadcast in America, and Moon is absolutely on it here. You can’t take your eyes off him. He was 19 years old when this was recorded and he’s the coolest cat in that room. Such a shame, where it all ended up.

James Brown - Funky Drummer (Clyde Stubblefield)

Sampling has given half-forgotten drum breaks a new lease of life, and few have been sampled quite as much as the eight-bar break from James Brown’s 1970 recording of Funky Drummer. It’s fascinating, to hear this moment build up, and then a five minutes and 31 seconds, there it is. Something you’ve heard so many times before that it’s automatically familiar, as though someone has mashed together two tracks.

Indeed, Brown seems to act throughout the rest of the track as though he was sufficiently impressed by the breakbeat to have decided to name it Funky Drummer there and then. And you have definitely heard this a thousand times before. It’s one of the most-sampled loops in the history of music. Because James Brown was James Brown he had two incredible drummers, with Stubblefield playing alongside the equally great Jabo Starks.

Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers - Moanin’ (Art Blakey)

In the world of jazz, you know when you’ve arrived when you have a band of your own. But the ultimate job of the drummer remains the same. Blakey was one of the great jazz innovators, with a CV that took in some of the all-time greats; Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonius Monk and Charlie Parker, to name but a few.

But it was with the Jazz Messengers that he’d become best known. He was a leader, an aggressive player who carried the music that he played on forward. And he was, to put it mildly, prolific. He recorded 47 studio albums with them. They recorded eight albums in 1957 alone, a year prior to the release of this track. And they said that James Brown was the ‘hardest working man in showbusiness’.

Given the breadth of his back catalogue, it’s difficult to know quite where to start with Art Blakey, but you get a real feel for the drive that he had with Moanin’, from their 1958 album of the same name. It’s there in the swelling, thunderous roll that introduces him into this piece, exactly a minute in, and in this feeling of propulsion, that he’s driving the music forward with every beat.

Jazz is more readily and closely connected with the drums that most other instruments than you’d get in a standard ‘rock’ band. Many drummers are urged to listen to the jazz greats in order to develop a broader feel for our own instrument. Art Blakey might just have been the greatest of them all.

Philip Bailey and Phil Collins - Easy Lover (Phil Collins)

For the final choice, I’ve pulled out my single favourite drum track of all-time. For years, I simply assumed that this would have been played by Chester Thompson, who was the Genesis touring drummer for years after Peter Gabriel quit and Phil Collins stepped out from behind the kit to take over vocal duties. But then I looked it up, and I was wrong. Thompson was nowhere near this track at all. It was the Philmeister rocking my favourite drum track of all-time.

Collins belongs to an elect sub-group of drummers: the southpaws. Drum kits are conventionally set up for the right-handed, with the snare drum and hi-hats to the left of the bass drum, but he simply reversed this, giving him a kit that he was comfortable with playing. Not all of them did. The most famous of them all (and a man who hasn’t otherwise made an appearance in all this screed at all), Ringo Starr, didn’t do this and it gave him a most unusual playing style.

But on this track, he just hits exactly the right note, every time. Those little rolls round the fills, staggering the beat to lurch you into each verse, the washes across the cymbals. It’s all perfectly punctuated. It’s not incredibly difficult. Give me a couple of run-ups, and there’s nothing contained in it that I couldn’t play myself. But that’s not the point. The point is that he had a blank sheet, and these were the notations he put on it. It’s brilliantly effective.

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There are, of course, gaping holes in this list. Most obviously, there are no women in it. This isn’t to say that there aren’t brilliant woman drummers. Viola Smith was a pioneer, playing five times on The Ed Sullivan Show. The same goes for Mo Tucker, whose influence was most obviously seen in Meg White. No lesser luminaries than Rolling Stone magazine voted Sheila E 58th in their 100 Greatest Drummers of All-Time.

(There are many, many more besides. There’ll be another piece about them in this series - and I promise it won’t be as long as this, but I did warn you that I have a lot to say about it.)

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There might easily have been a top 100 going on here. Writing this coda a couple of days after writing the the rest of it, I’m looking down the lost and thinking, “Are you… sure?”. But these ten are fine. And yes, Easy Lover is my favourite drum track of all-time. And apologies to all those who got left out, even you never read any of this.