Five Drummers Who Artfully Underplay (And Five Drummers Who Just Suck)

I’m not sure why, but while almost all rock writers worth their white-label collections have at least a dinged-up Strat or a thrift-store acoustic leaning against a wall and collecting dust somewhere in their apartments, critic-drummers are kind of a rare breed. I’m only a mediocre drummer at best, but I’m good enough to know the difference between good, simple playing and incompetence. Here are some examples of both I thought of on a long drive from Greeley to Boulder the other night.

The Good

1. Nick Mason Modern kids who are used to the ridiculously computer-perfected, steroid-pumped drums of modern corporate rock records probably recoil the first time they hear Pink Floyd. Founding drummer Nick Mason was never a particularly powerful player, and adding to the confusion, he tends to play slightly behind the beat at all times. Further examination proves that this wasn’t a sign of poor chops but rather a deliberate choice — Mason is able to consistently maintain the same slightly adrift, slightly slack feel that gives Floyd’s high psychedelic work, particularly Meddle and Dark Side of the Moon a lot of its unique, floaty feel. When the Floyd spaceship came back from outer space, Mason’s style became far less complementary — Animals and The Wall in particular could have used a lot more heft and immediacy, one of the reasons the band began to employ studio drummers with increasing frequency as they moved into the 80’s and 90’s. The change in sound wasn’t Mason’s fault, though — you’d have to take that up with Roger Waters.

2. Charlie Watts Watts’ jazz chops are unquestioned — from a musical training perspective, he’s the best instrumentalist in the Rolling Stones — but he’s always had a very clear idea of what the role of the drummer in a rock band is, and he hasn’t varied from it on his records with the Glimmer Twins for 40 years. Despite using essentially the same rhythm pattern on every Stones song from “Jumping Jack Flash” to “Start Me Up,” Watts has a knack for picking his spots (the ratatatatatat fills in “Get Off My Cloud” rank as the best car steering wheel-pounding bits in rock history) and his extramusical importance as the only Stone who’s not either an egomaniac or drug addict or both can’t be understated.

3. Maureen Tucker The classic example of the less-is-more percussionist, Mo’s importance to the Velvet Underground has been described as underrated so many times now that she might even be slightly overrated. Nonetheless, the cowbell pattern on “Some Kinda Love” (clank… clank… clank… clank…) alone justifies her placement on this list. Her pregnancy-enforced absence from the Velvets’ last album, Loaded, is a tragedy, but also allows you to hear by negative example just how vital Tucker’s minimalist approach was to the band’s sound.

4. Chris Frantz Say what you will about his songwriting or, heaven help us, his singing, the Talking Head might never have been much for lightning-speed pyrotechnics, but he began as the cleverest of the first-wave New York punk drummers (just listen to how much Frantz’s shuffle beat adds to “Thank You For Sending Me an Angel”) and evolved into the rock-solid centerpiece of a huge, complicated performing beast. The most difficult thing a drummer has to learn is how to stay rigidly on meter and yet not seem stiff at the same time. Since the film Stop Making Sense was edited together from multiple performances, Frantz had to play each song at the precise same tempo each night and execute changes flawlessly. By all accounts, he nailed it every time.

5. Stephen Morris Joy Division’s Morris had so perfected the mekkanik beat by the time of his first band’s last album that when Joy Division became New Order, Morris transitioned so comfortably from live drummer to electronic drum programmer that many fans didn’t really notice the difference. However his sensibilities as a real live drummer have always kept New Order firmly grounded as a rock band, and back in the day, his Tucker-like playing on “Dead Souls” was simply brilliant.

The Bad

1. Bill Berry Most of the time, when a successful local band starts making the transition to a national act, the members that aren’t really pulling their weight fall away in short order. Ask Pete Best. For whatever reason — perhaps they were mesmerized by his unibrow — Michael Stipe, Peter Buck, and Mike Mills never got around to firing Berry, who continued to drag the band down with his leaden hands well into the 90’s. When he finally retired in 1997 to concentrate on farming (???) , R.E.M. didn’t even bother finding a permanent replacement for Berry, at last indicating the microsopic creative role the drummer had always played in the band. On the plus side, the complete lack of any shading whatsoever in Berry’s beats probably led directly to Mike Mills’ becoming one the most of the most wonderfully fluid bass players since McCartney in his heyday.

2. Janet Bean Sometimes a musician has a value to their band quite apart from what it is they do with their instrument. There were plenty of guitar bands in Chicago in the early 90’s, so would Eleventh Dream Day ever have gotten signed to a major if the lithe, blonde Bean wasn’t their drummer? No going back now. You can’t really hold it against frontman Rick Rizzo for not firing the woman who was at the time his wife, but Eleventh Dream Day’s albums Beet and El Moodio are hugely compromised by Bean’s lean skills, particularly the latter. Just listen to the massive kick the fantastic rocker “That’ s the Point,” for which Rizzo enlisted Matthew Sweet’s bandmember, Ric Menck, has and then imagine what the rest of the E.D.D. songs from the period might have sounded like with a real drummer in the fold. The story does have a happy ending though — Bean proved herself as a mandolin player and harmony vocalist in Catherine Irwin’s Freakwater, and by the time E.D.D. got back together to record for Atavistic and Thrill Jockey in the 00’s, she’d learned a thing or two on the drums, too. “Ice Storm,” from Stalled Parade, has kick-ass drumming.

3. ?uestlove Yes, it’s cool that he’s a live drummer who fronts a hip-hop group, he has great hair, and he’s buddies with Dave Chappelle. But I’ve seen ?uestlove play many times both with the Roots and in support of D’Angelo and I’ve never seen him do anything any nondrummer with even a smattering of music theory couldn’t figure out how to play in about two seconds.

4. Bryan Herweg Poor guy. If Herweg and his bassist brother Larry had joined an emo band or some indie rockers, people would leave him alone. But Pelican are a metal band, or at least they’re sort of connected to a scene with a lot of metalheads in it. Metal fans expect more from their drummers, and Herweg’s untechnical, feel-less playing on the first two Pelican records and particularly on stage has built him a “fanbase” of player-haters way out of proportion with the quality of his band (and really, his drumming, which wasn’t great but had an un-rock squareness to it that worked with what Pelican used to do). Herweg seemed to really be affected by all the criticism heaped upon him by Neurosis and Isis fans, so after The Fire in Our Hearts Will Beckon the Thaw he must have woodshedded and practiced for months on end. Sadly, his emergence as a greatly improved player coincided with a sudden total loss of imagination from the rest of his bandmates — the drumming is in fact the best thing about City of Echoes, which otherwise took Pelican from a completely unique and fascinating anti-song, post-neoclassical group to just another deeply boring instrumental Chicago band.

5. Michael Lenzi An obscure choice indeed, but I never pass up the chance to promote the unjustly forgotten Number One Cup, a trio of midwestern Pavement appreciaters who made two near-classic albums in the mid-nineties. Lenzi, Seth Cohen, and Patrick O’Connell met at a Stereolab show and decided to form a band, but they were all guitarists; Lenzi cheerfully agreed to switch to drums and more or less taught himself to play as the Cup recorded their debut album, Possum Trot Plan. For that album and its follow-up, Wrecked by Lions, Lenzi’s novice status didn’t hurt the sound at all, as the secret to the band’s genius was that they wrote songs that sounded like you could have written them immediately after picking up an instrument for the first time, only you didn’t, they did. Then Seth Cohen got really into Radiohead and the band committed career suicide with the dreadful People People Why Are We Fighting? When the band left lo-fi behind and started filling its songs with synth washes and guitar-army overdubs, Lenzi’s drumming all of a sudden sounded just crappy instead of rogueishly charming as it did on the first two albums. On the plus side, Lenzi was and is one of the best lead-singing drummers I can recall.

So you’re probably wondering why I left Meg White off of the second list. That’s easy: Calling Meg White a drummer is a slap in the face to all those who ply the trade. White isn’t a drummer, she’s an elaborate stage prop.