Great Drum Fills, Pt. 5

It's been three years since I last posted one of these. Damned if I know why I stopped, but now that I'm playing drums semi-regularly I feel like being semi-geeky and talking about shit that I actually like--like drums! In case anyone is interested, I've done minor updates to previous entries so that you can now actually listen to the drum fills on the post pages (thanks, YouTube!). All "Great Drum Fills" posts (past, present, and future) can be found here.

[Image Source; and is that a bitchin' looking drum kit, or what?]

Back in my youthful, playin'-the-drums-for-a-livin' days, ZZ Top were among a handful of bands who, as far as I was concerned, ruled the world. In fact, if you ask any old fart rock-pig about his favorite bands, ZZ Top will likely be high on the list. They played the blues. They boogied. And they rocked. Sometimes all at the same time. They had probably the thickest, most razor-sharp sound of any three-piece unit I've ever heard. And they were mean players who avoided the kind of over-the-top, mindless boogie that was common to many 70's arena rock acts. Yeah, they were good...

In this installment of Great Drum Fills:

Drummer: Frank Beard
Group: ZZ Top
Album: Tres Hombres
Great Drum Fill: Tres Hombres was ZZ Top's first smash album. And no wonder, with classic cuts like "Waitin' for the Bus" and "Jesus Just Left Chicago." For our great drum fill I'd like to direct your attention to "Lagrange," a hard-driving blues/boogie number that is basically a hybrid of John Lee Hooker's "Boogie Chillen" and Slim Harpo's "Shake Your Hips." (You may recall the Stones' cover of "Shake Your Hips" on Exile on Main Street.) "Lagrange" is a fast blues shuffle with very John Lee Hooker-ish picking on the guitar. During the intro Beard is just doing a very trad clicking of the sticks to keep time. When the band kicks in (at around the 35 second mark in the clip below) could easily have been today's great drum fill, but it's the second "jump" (at the 1:10 mark in the clip below) leading into the guitar solo that has always knocked me out.

As is usual for these posts, there's nothing earth-shatteringly  technical about this particular fill. As usual, its simply a matter of playing exactly the right thing at just the right moment. If there were such a thing as the perfect performance of a perfect song, it would be nothing more (or less!) than a continuous series of such moments. As it is, I'll take them when I can find them...

[Warning: Technical Shit--As a drummer I'm not even sure what the proper notation for this fill is. It sounds like a simple bar of triplets with the snare (flam) and bass drum (single note), but if I try counting it as triplets when I play it, it doesn't seem to work. I've found that it works better as "slurred" (i.e. "sloppy"!) triplets, if that makes any sense. Any thoughts, O Brothers of the Stick?]



Yeah.

Great Drum Fills, Pt. 4

After a three-month hiatus, we return with a new installment of Great Drum Fills.

There's not much to be said about Led Zeppelin that hasn't already been said elsewhere, so I'm not really going to try. (Although I am fighting the temptation to expound upon one of my pet theories, which I call "The bifurcation of the stream of heavy metal at the nexus of Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin", in which I posit (here in a very truncated form) that, post-Sabbath/Zeppelin, heavy metal developed in two distinct directions, each heavily influenced by one or the other of Sabbath and Zeppelin. One stream, influenced primarily (but not exclusively) by Zeppelin, saw the rise of what I call "classico-hair/prog metal". The other stream, with Sabbath as the primary (but not exclusive) influence, gave rise to what I call "alterno-death/doom/prog metal". Although I've thought about little else since graduating university, now is perhaps not the time for such deep philosophical musings...)

I am of the opinion that Led Zeppelin's fourth album (untitled, but generally referred to as IV) presented the band at the pinnacle of its musical creativity (although, certainly, there are many who would disagree with me). I don't necessarily dislike later albums, but it seems to me that later efforts began to sound a bit "plodding" (the main culprit being, in my estimation, production techniques in the studio). By now everyone has heard the song "Stairway to Heaven" (probably about a half million times), a song that continues to be rated among "the greatest rock tunes of all-time". Whatever you may think of that particular song now, there's a very good chance that you at least used to like it and the album from whence it came. This leads us to our great drum fill:

Drummer: John Bonham
Group: Led Zeppelin
Album: Led Zeppelin IV
Great Drum Fill: "Misty Mountain Hop"; If you've been paying attention to the items in this series (and I have serious doubts about this), you've probably noticed that I'm not overly interested in technical virtuosity in deciding what constitutes a "great drum fill". Rather, I'm interested in the "right lick in the right place" (so to speak). There's no doubting, however, that John Bonham had a pretty mean set of "chops". "Misty Mountain Hop" reminds me of Joni Mitchell on steroids and acid. It has a straight-forward, driving rock beat, made slightly funky by some clever keyboards and the train-like chug-a-chug of Bonham's high-hats. At about the 3 minute 55 second mark, just coming off the bridge, Bonham gives us a brief press roll followed by an almost laughably simple bar and a half of straight 8's on the snare and toms, and back into the song. I almost fall out of my chair every time I hear it. The right lick in the right place...

Yeah.

[Updated 10/4/13: You'll find the drum fill at the 3:55 mark of the clip below.]

Great Drum Fills, Pt. 3

I've written here before about my love for the Rolling Stones. Perhaps one of the truly neglected drummers in rock, Charlie Watts was my personal hero for many years. To my mind Charlie has always been the embodiment of the unspoken/unwritten "rule" that it's the drummer's job to make everybody else sound good. Certainly nobody would ever accuse Charlie Watts of being a show-off. No, Charlie has instead, for the past 40+ years with the Rolling Stones, simply just "laid it down". Fact is, Charlie lays it down better than anybody. So well, in fact, that the rare "flashy" moments often go un-noticed. Well, no more!

Exile on Main St. is, arguably, the Stones' best album. There is no question that this album was Charlie's finest hour. He plays with an abandon that is transcendent. Simply, he fuckin' rocks the joint. He is the star of this, one of the greatest albums in rock 'n' roll history, performed by it's greatest band. It's a bit odd, really, because it's not as though Charlie turned into Neal Peart or something for this album. No, he just did what he usually does, only this time a bit more ...loosely. Anyway, this brings me to tonight's Great Drum Fill:

Drummer: Charlie Watts
Group: The Rolling Stones
Album: Exile on Main St.
Great Drum Fill: "Tumbling Dice"; surely the Stones' best single and possibly the best song to grace commercial radio ever. You really have to listen to the whole song to get the point of this drum fill (it may surprise some people that, yes, there is a point to everything in a good song). At about the 2:20 mark of the song the band "drops out" a bit and then begins to build up to the song's climax. As this is happening Charlie is there, providing minimal backing but building in volume and intensity until at, about the 3:02 mark, the tension releases with a classic drum fill, followed by several more until the end of the song.

Yeah.

[Updated 10/4/13: You'll find the drum fill at the 3:00 mark in the clip below.]

Great Drum Fills, Pt. 2

There's really not much out there these days for guys like me who long for new bands with that "classic" rock sound. The last really good classic rock band to come along were Black Crowes. I've heard flashes of brilliance elsewhere, but only momentarily. It's not that I've got anything against what they call "rock" music these days, mind you. Nirvana and the whole "alt rock" thing have done a lot literally keeping rock music alive during the reign of rap/hip hop (a genre that, when it's good, is very good, but which these days seems to be suffering a worse case of bloat than rock did in the pre-punk days). What has always been lacking, to my mind, with the newer generation of rockers, is a certain flashiness, the strut that makes rock rock. Why the hell don't these guys play like whether or not they get laid tonight depends upon it? For fuck's sake, can anybody play a guitar solo anymore? Yeah, I know I sound like an old fart, and I am, but mark my words (sorry, I couldn't resist), this "pretend" rock 'n' roll will lead to the end of barroom brawls and teenage pregnancy... er, whatever.

I was very pleased a couple of weeks ago to discover the band Army of Anyone. A "supergroup" in the same way as Audioslave (except a lot less annoying), Army of Anyone consists of former members of Stone Temple Pilots and Filter, with a very special ingredient: drummer Ray Luzier, who's perhaps best known for his work with David Lee Roth (of Van Halen fame). Whoa! These guys ain't kids, kids! They play rock like men(you can take that however you like, I don't really care). Ray Luzier plays drums like there is no tomorrow! If anything I've said here makes any sense to you, please check these guys out. Tonight's great drum fill:

Drummer: Ray Luzier
Group: Army of Anyone
Album: Army of Anyone
Great Drum Fill: In the song "Goodbye", at about the 3 minute 10 second mark, Luzier launches into what is really a series of drum fills, the likes of which I haven't heard on a rock album for a long time. You'll hear other, more technically proficient stuff. You'll here other, more popular stuff. You won't hear anything better.

Yeah.

[Updated 10/4/13: You'll find the drum fill at the 3:15 mark of the clip below.]

Great Drum Fills, Pt.1

Few (if any) of you know that I used to enjoy the lofty status of a rock drummer. That's right, I wasn't always a lowly university "professor" (someday I'll explain those quotes). I once had a job that was at least tangentially related to human happiness.
In the spirit of celebrating the rock drummer, I give you (in no particular order) Great Drum Fills, Pt.1:

Drummer: Keith Moon
Group: The Who
Album: Who's Next
Great Drum Fill: (It's Keith fucking Moon, do you need a fucking list?!?!) In "Baba O' Riley", after the lines "Don't cry, don't raise your eye, it's only teenage wasteland", Keith Moon (official Kyklops-sanctioned rock "god") blats out a drum fill that will live forever in the annals of rock.

Yeah.

[Updated 10/4/13: You'll find the drum fill at the 2:30 mark of the clip below.]