The greatest drummer of all time just died.
That’s right, I said it. No, I’m not just taking advantage of the opportunity to say something inflammatory. I’m not pretending I don’t know that Mitch Mitchell is greasier than a pound of french fries on “Little Miss Lover”, or that Bonzo on “Ramble On” isn’t the auditory equivalent of a pair of testicles dropping, or that Ainsley Dunbar doesn’t sound like he’s literally doing gymnastics on top of a drum kit within the first four seconds of “Transylvania Boogie”.
All very, very impressive indeed, don’t get me wrong.
But the greatest rock drummer of all time….he didn’t just make you wanna punch a hole through a wall, he made you believe there would be another dimension behind it….
I was ten or eleven years old when I heard “White Room” for the very first time. I envy myself in that moment, because never again will I know what it feels like to be that unprepared for a piece of art. My brain had to grow bigger just to contain the song I had just heard. I listened to it again. And again. And again, and again, almost every goddamn day of grade seven. Though not poor at all, you could describe me at the time as someone living a kind of cheap existence, so long story short I did not have headphones. So half the time, I was listening to “White Room” at an extremely low volume while leaning over with my ear almost pressing against my boombox. I could not get over how frighteningly, howlingly intense this song sounded even at the lowest possible volume. How the fuck did these three guys achieve this level of mind-numbing power and brilliance while the sound of noisy, heavy modern rock that was popular in the early-2000s was just….degrees of unpleasantness? How did a musical landscape defined by nu-metal just feel like a grey, featureless backdrop to a skateboarding video, while this song that was so old my Dad was listening to it when he was the same age I was at the time make me actually want to reenact Woodstock ’99 on the highway in rush hour traffic, just for the satisfaction of giving random drivers heart attacks? It was exhilarating. It was mysterious. And those drums….those drums….
I think it’s safe to say that the first thing I ever listened to harder in order to understand better was Ginger Baker’s drumming. I was born with extremely oversensitive hearing which needed to be re-trained by an audiologist when I was four to keep me from panicking and running away to hide somewhere every time, say, a loud vehicle drove by really fast, or an airplane flew low overhead, or loud static came out of the tv or the radio, or…..way too many things. Waaayyyy too many….so for a long time, it never really occurred to me to focus my attention on a sound. With ears like mine, obliviousness was attentiveness. Which….I mean, I suppose that just made me a normal, stir-crazy kid, but zoning in to, rather than out of, most of the sounds I tended to encounter in a day was physical and psychological torture. Oh, sure, I liked music. I just never needed to focus on it. My abnormally high sensitivity to sound did the work for me, and I got to stay really hyperactive and run around hearing it without listening to it. (So yeah, I’m also pretty neurodivergent, but that’s for another post, I wanna get back on track here…)
And then suddenly, for the first time, I needed to know more than what passive listening could tell me. Why do the drums sound like that? Why are they so, like…..thick? I had a few theories: Maybe sometimes he used mallets with soft tips, but also hit harder? I’m sure I’d seen the inside of a music room supply closet at school at some point or another, and I guess I must have noticed that drums have tuning screws, and when they’re loose they make drums go “bwAAAUMMmmm!” instead of “pANNnng!” – I guessed Ginger’s drum set-up probably aimed for the former more than the latter. Guess What? I nailed it! I still remember the moment a clip of a Cream concert confirmed my suspicion. It reminded me that my ears were pretty fucking great. Which is a nice thing to be reminded of.
I don’t play drums, but a drummer played a critical role in shaping my imagination at a formative age. Rest in power, you madman.