If you’re a par­ent of young girls, you can’t escape “Let It Go,” the song from Dis­ney’s 2013 ani­mat­ed film, Frozen. Not even Eddie Ved­der (father of daugh­ters born in 2004 and 2008) can shake it. Just wit­ness what hap­pened on Fri­day night when Ved­der per­formed Pearl Jam’s 1993 hit, “Daugh­ter,” live in Milan, Italy. You appar­ent­ly can’t think “Daugh­ter” with­out think­ing “Let It Go.” A longer ver­sion of the Pearl Jam per­for­mance can be viewed here.

via That Eric Alper

Relat­ed Con­tent

Pat­ti Smith’s Cov­er of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spir­it” Strips the Song Down to its Heart

Spring­steen Plays Lorde’s “Roy­als” & AC/DC’s “High­way to Hell” in Down Under Con­certs

Bill Mur­ray Croons a Soul­ful Cov­er of “The House of the Ris­ing Sun”

It’s a tough choice, but I think the moment above may be one of my favorites from the 1978 Mar­tin Scors­ese-filmed farewell con­cert for The Band, The Last Waltz. In this clip from the film, The Band per­forms one of their sig­na­ture songs, “The Weight,” with soul and gospel leg­ends The Sta­ples Singers. Sta­ples patri­arch and gui­tarist Roe­buck sings some lead vocals, as does, of course, the group’s star Mavis. “As the song fin­ish­es up,” writes Elon Green at The New York­er, “Mavis, clos­est to the cam­era, throws her head back, leans toward the mic, and says, almost inaudi­bly, ‘Beau­ti­ful.’” It’s a beau­ti­ful moment, for sure, and a great sto­ry that Mavis tells in full on Green’s “Cul­ture Desk” post (excerpt below).

It was so beau­ti­ful to me. I was sur­prised that was caught on tape, you know, because I thought I was whis­per­ing. It wasn’t rehearsed to go like that. It was just a feel­ing that brought that on. The excite­ment of being with our friends—Levon and Danko and those guys were such good friends of ours—to be singing with them, and know­ing that this is going to be on the big screen, the sil­ver screen, it was just a moment in time for me. You could prob­a­bly, had you been there, you would have heard my heart pound­ing.

Despite its roots in Amer­i­can coun­try and Appalachi­an folk, like so much of The Band’s music—and so much Americana—“The Weight” lends itself equal­ly to soul and R&B inter­pre­ta­tions. The song’s been cov­ered by The Supremes and The Temp­ta­tions (singing togeth­er), Aretha Franklin record­ed a funky, soul­ful ver­sion, and it’s long been a part of Mavis Sta­ples’ live set. “The Weight” is also one of those great songs that brings black and white artists togeth­er; it’s tes­ta­ment to The Band’s keen appre­ci­a­tion for Amer­i­can roots music (which they learned by heart as back­ing band for rock­a­bil­ly star Ron­nie Hawkins and lat­er Bob Dylan). Below, see Wilco, Nick Lowe, and Mavis Sta­ples rehearse the song back­stage at the Civic Opera House in Chica­go in 2011.

via The New York­er

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch The Band Play “The Weight,” “Up On Crip­ple Creek” and More in Rare 1970 Con­cert Footage

Bob Dylan Plays First Live Per­for­mance of “Hur­ri­cane,” His Song Defend­ing Rubin “Hur­ri­cane” Carter (RIP) in 1975

The Queen of Soul Con­quers Europe: Aretha Franklin in Ams­ter­dam, 1968

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Last week we sparked some heat­ed debate (and some typ­i­cal inter­net vit­ri­ol) with a post fea­tur­ing iso­lat­ed drum tracks from six of rock’s best drum­mers. Well, here we go again, this time with iso­lat­ed bass tracks…. Bear in mind that the bassists fea­tured here are some of the top play­ers in rock who actu­al­ly have bass tracks avail­able online. There are many more I’d love to hear out of the mix—and no short­age of jazz, reg­gae, funk, and soul bassists I deeply dig. If you don’t see your favorite play­er here… real­ly, don’t take it per­son­al­ly.

The bass gui­tar tends to be a for­got­ten instru­ment, some­times not even missed when it’s gone (think Black Keys, The Doors), but despite the suc­cess of the rare bass-less band, it’s hard to imag­ine some of the songs rep­re­sent­ed here with­out the fun­da­men­tal thump and groove of well-played basslines. We begin with John Deacon’s bassline for Queen and David Bowie’s “Under Pres­sure,” above. As we men­tioned in a recent post on that song’s evo­lu­tion, Sty­lus named this the #1 bassline of all time.

I don’t know what that acco­lade is worth, but the bassline is at least one of the most rec­og­niz­able, thanks in no small part to Vanil­la Ice. In the con­text of Queen, Deacon’s per­haps best known for the pound­ing stomp of “Anoth­er One Bites the Dust,” one of many songs he wrote for the band. He has very delib­er­ate­ly dis­ap­peared from the spot­light since Fred­die Mercury’s death, but his taste­ful, melod­ic play­ing is in no dan­ger of being for­got­ten.

Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones, on the oth­er hand, refus­es to leave the stage, for which the sev­er­al dozen musi­cians he’s toured and record­ed with since Zeppelin’s demise are all grate­ful. Cur­rent­ly one-third of super­group Them Crooked Vul­tures (with Dave Grohl and Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme), Jones also plays man­dolin (on Zep’s “Going to Cal­i­for­nia,” for exam­ple), lap steel, and this triple-necked mon­ster. For all his con­tin­ued rel­e­vance into the 21st cen­tu­ry, Jones’s some­times smooth, some­times burly basslines for Led Zep­pelin, such as the unfor­get­table “Ram­ble On” riff above, will be his endur­ing lega­cy. One would have to be a hell of a bass play­er to keep up with John Bon­ham, and John Paul Jones is exact­ly that. He got his start play­ing jazz at age 15, and while still a teenag­er, played in a jazz-rock col­lec­tive that includ­ed John McLaugh­lin (whom Jeff Beck has called “the best gui­tarist alive”). Want to learn how Jones does it? Check out this bass les­son with the mas­ter him­self.

When the sub­ject of rock bassists aris­es, Ged­dy Lee’s name will invari­ably come up. Like his band­mate Neil Peart, Lee’s musi­cian­ship astounds, his prog-rock stylings seem inim­itable, except per­haps by Primus’ Les Clay­pool (who Lee names as one of his favorites). Bass mag­a­zine No Tre­ble calls Rush’s “YYZ” (above) “one of the great­est bass lines of all time.” It’s not exact­ly my cup of tea, but I do know at least one bass play­er who left for Berklee Col­lege of Music hat­ing Rush, then came back lis­ten­ing to this song over and over in hushed awe. Not every­one loves Lee’s over-the-top high pitched vocals, but one has to admire the fact that he plays basslines like this while singing some of the most philo­soph­i­cal lyrics in rock, cour­tesy of drum­mer Peart.

The last two bass tracks fea­ture bassists who, like Lee, are also singers. No one pulls that off with more grace and style than Paul McCart­ney. In the bassline to The Bea­t­les “Come Togeth­er” (above), you can hear the deep, res­o­nant tone of McCartney’s semi-hol­low Hofn­er vio­lin bass (many of which have been “nicked” over the years). Of McCartney’s play­ing, John Lennon once said, “Paul was one of the most inno­v­a­tive bass play­ers ever. And half the stuff that is going on now is direct­ly ripped off from his Bea­t­les peri­od.” In my own bass-play­ing days, I cer­tain­ly stole my share of ideas from McCartney—or more prob­a­bly, his basslines were etched into my music brain, and my fin­gers auto­mat­i­cal­ly plucked out McCart­ney-style pat­terns. Music Radar puts “Come Togeth­er” at the top of a list of “Paul McCartney’s 12 great­est Bea­t­les bass per­for­mances,” for the “spooky, sin­u­ous, throb­bing and groovy” track above, “as orig­i­nal as it gets.”

Our iso­lat­ed drum tracks post hap­pened to fea­ture the oth­er rhyth­mic halves of every play­er on this list except John Dea­con, and while this wasn’t exact­ly by design, it’s no sur­prise to me that’s how it worked out. A great rhythm sec­tion works as a close­ly-aligned team, find­ing locked grooves, cre­at­ing empha­sis and punc­tu­a­tion, build­ing struc­tures and spaces for lead play­ers to fill. A drum­mer like the Police’s Stew­art Copeland need­ed a bassist as pre­cise yet pas­sion­ate as Sting. Very few oth­er bands have suc­cess­ful­ly fused punk, jazz, and reg­gae rhythms into a greater whole, a feat accom­plished in part because of Sting’s ver­sa­til­i­ty as a play­er. From the mut­ed “train engine” punk of “Next to You” to the left-field pop of “Mes­sage in a Bot­tle” (above), Sting’s aggres­sive play­ing, often fret­less, most­ly finger-picked—to quote that rep­utable source Uncy­clo­pe­dia—“makes him bet­ter than all oth­er musi­cians com­bined by 12 orders of mag­ni­tude, and that’s a pop fact.”

But seri­ous­ly, he’s good, and so are dozens of oth­er rock bassists who don’t appear above. Name your favorites, and if you find their bass tracks online, share ‘em! Alright, let the bass slugfest begin, and be sure to check out No Tre­ble’s “Iso­lat­ed Bass Track Week” posts, with tracks from undis­put­ed mas­ters of the instru­ment like James Jamer­son and Jaco Pas­to­ri­ous.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Iso­lat­ed Drum Tracks From Six of Rock’s Great­est: Bon­ham, Moon, Peart, Copeland, Grohl & Starr

Paul McCart­ney Offers a Short Tuto­r­i­al on How to Play the Bass Gui­tar

The Sto­ry of the Bass: New Video Gives Us 500 Years of Music His­to­ry in 8 Min­utes

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

My first expo­sure to Pink Floyd’s rock opera The Wall left me feel­ing noth­ing less than aston­ish­ment. And though I nev­er had the chance to see the out­ra­geous stage show, with its very lit­er­al wall and giant inflat­able pig, the film has always struck me as a suit­ably dark piece of psy­chodra­ma. Over a great many sub­se­quent lis­tens, the melo­dra­mat­ic dou­ble-album can still blow my mind, but I’ve come to feel that some of the strongest mate­r­i­al are those songs penned joint­ly by Roger Waters and David Gilmour, and those are rel­a­tive­ly few. (Mark Blake quotes Gilmour as say­ing “things like ‘Com­fort­ably Numb’ were the last embers of mine and Roger’s abil­i­ty to work col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly togeth­er.) The bulk of the album belongs to Waters, its auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal details and per­son­al themes, and the album and film can some­times feel as sti­fled and claus­tro­pho­bic as its pro­tag­o­nist does. This is either a cre­ative fail­ing or a bril­liant meld­ing of form and con­tent.

Inspired by an inci­dent in which an exas­per­at­ed Waters spat on a row­dy fan at a sta­di­um show in Mon­tre­al dur­ing the band’s 1977 “In the Flesh Tour,” The Wall doc­u­ments the painful rise and even more painful fall of a fic­tive rock star named, of course, Pink (played by Bob Geld­of in the film ver­sion), whose life close­ly par­al­lels Waters’, down to the spit­ting. It has always seemed an odd irony that Waters respond­ed to the alien­ation of tour­ing mas­sive sta­di­ums by cre­at­ing a sta­di­um show big­ger than any­thing the band had yet done, but it speaks to the bassist and singer’s grandiose per­son­al­i­ty and obses­sive desire to turn his angst into the­ater. Often­times the results were spec­tac­u­lar, oth­er times bom­bas­tic and con­fus­ing (at least to crit­ics, some of whom are eas­i­ly con­fused). The record­ing of the album, as many well know, strained the band almost to break­ing, and by many accounts, Waters’ impe­ri­ous­ness didn’t help mat­ters, to say the least.

All of the behind-the-scenes dra­ma may or may not eclipse the dra­ma of the album itself, depend­ing on your lev­el of fan­dom and inter­est in Pink Floyd biog­ra­phy. Lovers of Waters’ epic rock dra­matur­gy will find edi­fi­ca­tion at the exten­sive online crit­i­cal com­men­tary Pink Floyd The Wall: A Com­plete Analy­sis, an online work in progress that deliv­ers on its title. For a very brief account of the sto­ry behind the sto­ry, co-pro­duc­er Bob Ezrin’s inter­view with Grammy.com offers per­spec­tive from some­one involved in the project who wasn’t a mem­ber of what came to seem like The Roger Waters’ Band. Ezrin describes The Wall as “Roger’s own project and not a group effort,” and his own role as “a kind of ref­er­ee between him and the rest of the band.”

In the begin­ning we had a very long demo that Roger had writ­ten. We start­ed to sep­a­rate out the pieces, and when we looked at the sto­ry­line we real­ized what we need­ed was a through line, some­thing to get us from start to fin­ish.

Ezrin recounts that he “closed [his] eyes and wrote out the movie that would become The Wall,” hand­ed the script out to the band, and marked songs miss­ing from Waters’ demo as “’TBW’—‘to be writ­ten.’” (Among those songs was “Com­fort­ably Numb.”)

The record­ings at the top of the post—which sur­faced in 2001 with the title Under Con­struc­tion—rep­re­sent a step in The Wall’s evo­lu­tion­ary devel­op­ment between Waters’ rudi­men­ta­ry demos (short excerpts above) and the com­plet­ed album. (See the Youtube page for a com­plete track­list. Con­trary to the upload­er’s descrip­tion, Roger Waters cer­tain­ly does not play all the instru­ments.) While Under Con­struc­tion has gen­er­al­ly been referred to as a “demo,” Rick Karhu of Pink Floyd fanzine Spare Bricks express­es his doubts about the use of a term he takes to denote “a fair­ly pol­ished record­ing”: “Demos are not rough record­ings or works-in-progress […]. I doubt very much that Under Con­struc­tion is a demo of The Wall.”

It’s too rough around the edges—at times shock­ing­ly so—to be strict­ly con­sid­ered a demo record­ing. At points, things are hap­haz­ard­ly edit­ed togeth­er. Songs cut off abrupt­ly, fade unex­pect­ed­ly or drop out entire­ly for a moment as if some­one at the mix­ing desk hit the wrong but­ton at some point. Vocal tracks peak-out, often caus­ing anguish to the lis­ten­er’s ear drums. Some instru­ment lines (most­ly the bass gui­tar) mean­der through the back­ground as if the per­son play­ing is mak­ing up the part as they go. Equal­iza­tion is nonex­is­tent on most tracks. Over­all, most of it sounds like a 4‑track record­ing by a band who has only the vaguest notion of how the equip­ment works.

Lest we take this descrip­tion as dis­par­age­ment, Karhu clar­i­fies: “It is pre­cise­ly for those rea­sons […] that I love them dear­ly and con­sid­er them one of the most valu­able, unau­tho­rized Floyd record­ings to be unearthed. Ever.” Many Youtube com­menters agree, some even argu­ing that these rough sketch­es are supe­ri­or to the final pol­ished prod­uct. It’s a debate I won’t weigh in on, though I will say that like Karhu, I enjoy the lo-fi ragged­ness of this ver­sion of The Wall. It seems to con­vey the emo­tion­al­ly frayed edges of these songs in a way the slick pro­duc­tion of the stu­dio album may not at times. Either as a mere doc­u­ment of the album’s ear­ly his­to­ry or an alter­nate, fragmented—and hence more traumatized—take on The Wall, this unof­fi­cial ver­sion is haunt­ing and strange. Does it per­haps bet­ter rep­re­sent Waters’ desire to make his psy­chic unease into art? We invite you to judge for your­selves. And if, like me, you can lis­ten to “Com­fort­ably Numb” (and that incred­i­ble gui­tar solo) on repeat for hours on end, you may be inter­est­ed to hear David Gilmour dis­cuss the song’s com­po­si­tion in the inter­view below.

Hear more demo tracks on YouTube here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Gilmour & David Bowie Sing “Com­fort­ably Numb” Live (2006)

Watch Doc­u­men­taries on the Mak­ing of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here

Hear Lost Record­ing of Pink Floyd Play­ing with Jazz Vio­lin­ist Stéphane Grap­pel­li on “Wish You Were Here”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

Before “Ice Ice Baby” became the most ubiq­ui­tous ear­worm of 1989, its sam­pled groove drove a song record­ed 8 years ear­li­er, Queen and David Bowie’s bril­liant col­lab­o­ra­tion “Under Pres­sure.” Sty­lus mag­a­zine—who declared Queen bassist John Deacon’s three-note riff the num­ber one bassline of all time—called the song “pos­sessed of under­stat­ed cool […] min­i­mal and pre­cise.” And if some­how you’ve nev­er heard it, have a lis­ten; you’ll sure­ly agree. Bowie and Fred­die Mercury’s trad­ed lines and melod­ic scat­ting build to pow­er­ful crescen­dos then pull back into deeply mov­ing har­monies. Lyri­cal­ly the song com­petes with any­thing writ­ten by either artist. As it turns out, Queen and Bowie wrote the song in a day, or as Bowie has it, “one evening flat.” “Quite a feat,” “for what is actu­al­ly a fair­ly com­pli­cat­ed song,” he wrote in response to a fan’s ques­tion on his offi­cial web­site.

Bowie remem­bers that “the riff had already been writ­ten by Fred­die and the oth­ers” when he joined them in the stu­dio in Mon­treux, Switzer­land. In fact, “Under Pres­sure” evolved out of anoth­er song entire­ly, “Feel Like,” writ­ten by drum­mer Roger Tay­lor, which you can hear above in a very rough demo record­ing. A great many of the ele­ments are there—Brian May’s restrained gui­tar work, Taylor’s midtem­po clock­work drum­ming, and many of the vocal melodies that would end up on “Under Pres­sure.” But that icon­ic bassline is miss­ing, as is, of course, the lat­er song’s oth­er big star. You can see the influ­ence Bowie had on the the­mat­ic direc­tion of the new song. “Feel Like” is a clas­sic Queen lament over lost love, “Under Pres­sure” an apoc­a­lyp­tic cry of both fear and empa­thy.

And that bassline? Every­one recalls that John Dea­con him­self came up with it. But Dea­con, ever mod­est, cred­it­ed it to Bowie in a 1984 inter­view. In either case, Dea­con appar­ent­ly for­got the riff, and May had to remind him of it—a fun­ny moment you can hear above in a record­ing of stu­dio ses­sions for the song. Bri­an May recalls that Bowie lived near the stu­dio and that they “went out for a meal or some drinks or some­thing.” This may well be, but he doesn’t tell us that Bowie orig­i­nal­ly joined the band in the stu­dio to sing back­ing vocals for an even­tu­al­ly scrapped R&B song called “Cool Cat.” An ear­li­er Open Cul­ture post fea­tur­ing the iso­lat­ed vocal tracks from “Under Pres­sure” (below) quotes both Tay­lor and May’s descrip­tions of what was, some­what con­trary to Bowie’s under­state­ment, actu­al­ly a 24-hour-long ses­sion, pow­ered by wine and cocaine.

Their rem­i­nisces, record­ed in Mark Blake’s book Is This the Real Life?: The Untold Sto­ry of Fred­die Mer­cury and Queen, also inform us that Bowie and Mer­cury “swap[ped] vers­es blind, which helped give the song its cut-and-paste feel.” Though the band sounds light­heart­ed enough in the stu­dio ses­sions, the song­writ­ing, May remem­bers, was fraught with ten­sion. “It was very hard,” he said in 2008, “because you already had four pre­co­cious boys and David, who was pre­co­cious enough for all of us.” Bowie, says May, “took over the song lyri­cal­ly” and insist­ed on pre­sid­ing over the final mix ses­sion, which “didn’t go well,” accord­ing to Queen engi­neer Rein­hold Mack. For his part, May has said he would “love to sit down qui­et­ly on my own and re-mix it.”

While he hasn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly fol­lowed through on that desire, May and Roger Tay­lor did con­tribute a dance mix of “Under Pressure”—the so-called “Rah Mix”—to 1999’s Great­est Hits III (hear it above). The remix was a top 20 hit, but I, for one, think it’s impos­si­ble to improve on the orig­i­nal.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lis­ten to Fred­die Mer­cury and David Bowie on the Iso­lat­ed Vocal Track for the Queen Hit ‘Under Pres­sure,’ 1981

Gui­tarist Bri­an May Explains the Mak­ing of Queen’s Clas­sic Song, ‘Bohemi­an Rhap­sody’

The Sto­ry of Zig­gy Star­dust: How David Bowie Cre­at­ed the Char­ac­ter that Made Him Famous

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

“Drums, eh,” says Kei­th Richards in answer to a fan ques­tion on the sub­ject. “With­out it you’re kin­da nowhere.” He’s got a point. An ace drum­mer can be the spine, mus­cle, and even soul of a great band. Pound­ing, swing­ing, and smash­ing away behind showy gui­tarists and flam­boy­ant front­men, drum­mers some­times have prob­lems being seen, but nev­er heard. But while John Bon­ham or Kei­th Moon nev­er got lost in the mix, it’s a rare thing to hear them out of it. The pro­lif­er­a­tion of rock band video games and iso­lat­ed tracks post­ed to Youtube allow us to lis­ten to the nuances of drum grooves we may feel we know by heart, such as Bonham’s dri­ving beat behind Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lot­ta Love.”

In a pre­vi­ous post, we brought you a rough mix of the song and Jim­my Page describ­ing its cre­ation. Page want­ed Bonham’s drum track to “real­ly stand out, so that every stick stroke sound­ed clear and you could real­ly feel them.” It cer­tain­ly does that. The drum track above is all about feel­ing. As a result of the record­ing tech­niques of the time, writes producer/engineer Bob­by Owin­s­ki, drum tracks tend­ed to sound “like a sin­gle instru­ment,” since they were record­ed with only two or three mics cap­tur­ing the space around the kit, rather than the sound of indi­vid­ual pieces. “Still,” Owin­s­ki writes of this track, “there’s plen­ty of pow­er in [Bonham’s] kick and snare, because he played them hard!” In addi­tion to his pow­er, Bon­ham is known for his laid-back groove, due to his ten­den­cy for play­ing slight­ly behind the beat, a qual­i­ty Youtube drum instruc­tor Ter­ry Keat­ing of Bon­zoleum ascribes to “tem­pera­ment.”

Bonham’s style con­sist­ed main­ly of cre­ative uses of triplets, so much so that McSweeny’s had a good laugh about his con­stant use a sim­i­lar pat­tern. One of my favorite drummers—crankiest man in rock Gin­ger Baker—also dis­par­ages Bonham’s play­ing, as well as that of anoth­er alco­holic drum star, Kei­th Moon. But Gin­ger Bak­er doesn’t tend to like any­one, and Moon’s play­ing, while maybe not vir­tu­osic or espe­cial­ly dis­ci­plined, was, like his per­sona, insane. Drum Mag­a­zine describes Moon’s style as “trib­al, prim­i­tive, and impul­sive, with him often stomp­ing the bass drums and pound­ing his wall of toms like a mad­man” (clear­ly Moon inspired the Mup­pets’ Ani­mal). Moon’s many kits often con­sist­ed of dou­ble bass drums and dou­ble rows of toms, and he played them as hard as pos­si­ble almost all the time. Hear him above thrash­ing with aban­don through “Won’t Get Fooled Again.”

Seem­ing­ly miles away from the mad­ness of Kei­th Moon, Rush’s Neil Peart is a high­ly tech­ni­cal drum­mer with impec­ca­ble on-the-beat tim­ing and a drum set­up that has grown so exten­sive and com­pli­cat­ed over the years that he almost dis­ap­pears into its depths. Peart’s play­ing com­bines the pow­er and sta­mi­na of Bon­ham with com­plex pat­terns whose rhyth­mic dynam­ics shift sub­tly sev­er­al times through­out each song. Check out the iso­lat­ed drum track for “Tom Sawyer” above as a clas­sic exam­ple of Peart’s tech­nique and you may see why he’s classed as one of the all-time best rock drum­mers (though I wouldn’t class him as one of rock’s great­est lyri­cists).

Although I’m an admir­er of Neil Peart’s drum­ming, I can’t say I’m much of a Rush fan. Police drum­mer Stew­art Copeland feels the same. In an inter­view with Music Radar, he jokes about “pull[ing] Neil’s chain at every pos­si­ble oppor­tu­ni­ty” for the self-indul­gent excess of drum solos (though Copeland game­ly played one dur­ing David Letterman’s “Drum Solo Week” in 2011). Copeland talks about “a time when bands like Rush were the epit­o­me of what The Police were the­o­ret­i­cal­ly against, which was an overem­pha­sis on musi­cal­i­ty.” Nonethe­less, Copeland is one of the most musi­cal of drum­mers, mak­ing use of odd time sig­na­tures and polyrhyth­mic syn­co­pa­tion to cre­ate a thor­ough­ly unique and instant­ly rec­og­niz­able style (which has even inspired neu­ro­science stud­ies). The drum track above comes from “Next to You,” a song on the band’s debut album, dur­ing their decid­ed­ly anti-Rush phase. While the song itself is uptem­po punk rock, Copeland’s Gene Kru­pa-like drum­ming, heard in iso­la­tion, presages the unusu­al quirks to come as the band stretched out into jazz and reg­gae ter­ri­to­ry.

The sheer num­ber of bands Foo Fight­ers front­man and for­mer Nir­vana drum­mer Dave Grohl has drummed for is impres­sive, and a tes­ta­ment to his machine-like speed and tim­ing. Drum­mer and Port­landia star Fred Armisen may be Grohl’s biggest fan. “Every drum part he does is a mas­ter­piece,” says Armisen, “He’s nev­er just heavy for heavy’s sake or rock for rock’s sake—it’s all so musi­cal, with an incred­i­ble sense of dynam­ics. Every gen­er­a­tion has their drum­ming guy, and Dave is ours.” Even Kurt Cobain, nev­er one to over­praise, once called Grohl “the best drum­mer in the world.” Maybe a bit of hyper­bole, but Grohl’s damned good, even at his most straight­for­ward, as above in his pound­ing drum­beat for “Smells Like Teen Spir­it.” Grohl’s pow­er­house play­ing isn’t the most ver­sa­tile. He had some trou­ble adjust­ing to qui­eter envi­rons, and Cobain near­ly banned him from the band’s leg­endary “Unplugged” per­for­mance for his too-aggres­sive play­ing in rehearsals. Nonethe­less, when it comes to punk, hard­core, and seri­ous rock, Grohl’s the man.

I can’t resist end­ing with the iso­lat­ed track of what maybe be my all-time favorite drum part, Ringo Starr’s wild­ly funky busi­ness at the end of “Straw­ber­ry Fields For­ev­er.” Some of the drums here are over­dubbed, with sev­er­al dif­fer­ent per­cus­sion parts blend­ed with Starr’s full-kit freak out. Starr has tak­en a lot of com­plete­ly unde­served flak for his sup­posed lim­i­ta­tions as a drum­mer, but as Samuel Belkin writes at The Exam­in­er, “his lat­ter day drum pat­terns are […] often sophis­ti­cat­ed, and always idio­syn­crat­ic […] nobody has ever been able to sound quite like Ringo.” Ulti­mate­ly, in my book, what dis­tin­guish­es a tru­ly great drum­mer from thou­sands of tech­ni­cal­ly pro­fi­cient play­ers is a qual­i­ty no one can teach or emu­late: Per­son­al­i­ty.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

7 Female Bass Play­ers Who Helped Shape Mod­ern Music: Kim Gor­don, Tina Wey­mouth, Kim Deal & More

Lis­ten to The John Bon­ham Sto­ry, a Radio Show Host­ed by Dave Grohl

Kei­th Moon’s Final Per­for­mance with The Who (1978)

Hear the Iso­lat­ed Vocal Tracks for The Bea­t­les’ Cli­mac­tic 16-Minute Med­ley on Abbey Road

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.