John Bonham’s Isolated Drum Track For Led Zeppelin’s ‘Fool in the Rain’

His play­ing was as loud as thun­der and as fast as light­ning. John Bon­ham of Led Zep­pelin was arguably the great­est of rock-and-roll drum­mers. When Rolling Stone asked its read­ers in 2011 to name the great­est drum­mer of all time, Bon­ham won by a land­slide. Drum­mer­world says of his play­ing:

Imi­ta­tors are usu­al­ly left frus­trat­ed, since Bon­ham made it look so easy–not only in his play­ing but also in the incred­i­ble drum sound he achieved. His leg­endary right foot (on his bass ped­al) and light­ning-fast triplets were his instant trade­mark. He lat­er refined his style from the hard skin-bash­ing approach to a more del­i­cate wrist-con­trolled one–which pro­duced an even more pow­er­ful and loud­er sound with less effort.

Bon­ham’s lat­er play­ing is on dis­play in this iso­lat­ed drum track (above) from “Fool in the Rain,” a sin­gle from the 1979 album In Through the Out Door, the last album released by Zep­pelin before Bon­ham’s death in 1980. The record­ing above includes about one-third of the entire drum track, end­ing just before the sam­ba-style break­down in the mid­dle.

Bon­ham is play­ing a vari­ant of the half-time Pur­die Shuf­fle, a pat­tern devel­oped by the leg­endary ses­sion drum­mer Bernard Pur­die, who began play­ing it when he was a young­ster try­ing to imi­tate the dynam­ics of a train. “The way a loco­mo­tive kind of push­es and pulls,” Pur­die said in a 2011 Mus­i­cRadar inter­view, “that’s what I was feel­ing.”

Vari­a­tions of the Pur­die Shuf­fle can be heard across pop­u­lar music. Pur­die him­self played it on Steely Dan’s “Home at Last.” More recent­ly, Death Cab for Cutie’s Jason McGerr played it on “Grapevine Fires.” Per­haps the most famous vari­a­tion is the so-called “Rosan­na Shuf­fle” played by the late Jeff Por­caro of Toto on the sin­gle “Rosan­na,” which blend­ed ele­ments of Pur­die’s orig­i­nal shuf­fle, Bon­ham’s “Fool in the Rain” pat­tern and the Bo Did­dley Beat.

For more on Bernard Pur­die and his trade­mark shuf­fle, see the 2009 video below from the New York Times. In the accom­pa­ny­ing arti­cle, David Segal writes: “Cre­at­ed with six bass, high-hat and snare tones, the Pur­die Shuf­fle is a groove that seems to spin in con­cen­tric cir­cles as it lopes for­ward. The result is a Tilt-a-Whirl of sound, and if you can lis­ten with­out shak­ing your hips, you should prob­a­bly see a doc­tor.”

via That Eric Alper

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