My my my heart like a kick drum.

When I started to go see bands in the early-1990s with my older brother he would always point out the drummer. Initially I thought he was talking about the “fish faces” that Fran Azzarto of The Gefkens was making or the fact that Terry Glynn of The Play Trains played in bare feet.  But now looking back at his album collection that included Rush (Neal Peart), The Police (Stewart Copeland) and U2 (Larry Mullen, Jr.), I now believe he was placing the spotlight on the drummer as the backbone of most bands.  Other musicians in a band rely very heavily on the drummer to provide a strong beat that will keep a song together and in my opinion, a drummer who is off beat, or off tempo, will lead the entire band astray.

In the mid-1990s, I was introduced to the New Orleans, LA-based band Cowboy Mouth featuring maniacal drummer/lead singer Fred LeBlanc.  Cowboy Mouth is the quintessential New Orleans rock band and they put on a great live show.  Of course a lot of that has to do with only having been to so many concerts in which the drummer/lead singer climbs up to the 2^nd floor of the club not using the stairs while the entire time another member of the band keeps the kick-drum going, but that is getting off track.  At this point, I was continuing to learn that you could take the singer, bassist and even the guitarist out of the song and that the song will still have a backbone if you have a good drummer.

Recently my father who is more of a classical and jazz music fan attended a Sammy Hagar show.  So besides commenting on how loud it was and that he did not know/understand any of the songs being sung, he mentioned one highlight of the show was Sammy Hagar’s drummer.   At first, that caught me off guard, was he talking about drummer David Lauser who played on several of Sammy Hagar's solo albums in the 1980s or Hagar’s other band The Waboritas?  Maybe, with all due respect Lauser has paid his dues, but his name does not come up often when talking about influential drummers.   So after doing some research, I realized that the drummer in question for this tour is/was Jason Bonham (son of John Bonham).  Most often, Jason Bonham can be found leading Bonham - The LedZeppelin Experience (B-TLZE), but it has been said that if you close your eyes while listening to B-TLZE you would testify that you are listening to the original Led Zeppelin.  In fact, on December 4, 1980, approximately two months after the tragic death of drummer John Bonham, Led Zeppelin made the difficult decision to break up.  The group had been preparing to go on tour \, but the surviving members decided that it was not right to tamper with their legacy by bringing someone else in to play drums.

As for who I am and have been listening to, there is Questlove, the drummer for the rap group—The Roots.  He and his band surprised the music world when they were confirmed as the house band for Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, and now few fans can question how the drummer has led the band into a new era of exposure and dynamic new music.  There is also drummer Daru Jones who I recently saw in Jack White’s touring band.  At the show at Stage AE in Pittsburgh and as reported by reviewers everywhere from the Bonnaroo Music Festival to the show in Tulsa, OK show – have agreed that Jones was “crushing everything from the hard and gritty rock of the earlier White Stripes material to the brand new, deep country material from ‘Lazaretto’”.

Again this leads me back to a question asked of "Spinal Tap" member David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean): How many "Spinal Tap" drummers have died, in total?  His answer “Well, we've lost count. It got spooky. We decided we were going to make an entire album with no live drumming at all, just a computer program. And you know what happened? The computer crashed. And we said, "Walk away. Walk away."  Or if “Spinal Tap” is not in your wheelhouse, Henry David Thoreau stated, “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”  Drummers of today, please keep the backbeat going. 

Thanks for reading.