Word: drummer
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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They step out of a Warhol movie, this rock and roll band. Pope Ondine and four Chelsea girls, Heavy Metal Kids fleeing the Nova Police. The drummer emerges from beyond a wall of amps, dreamily staring into space, slack-jawed and moronic; the bassist, his pasty skin framed by long dark lifeless hair, is a ringer for Mario Montez. Their new guitarist, the one discovered in a men's room, has powdered his face and lipsticked his already feminine mouth. The lead guitarist is dressed in black mariachi pants and spiky teased hair; there is a gold ring...
...never much on melody, have always relied upon tension and frenzy in their sound. The frenzy comes from the strong assertion of the quintessential rock and roll instruments-drums and bass guitar. Watts hits the snare drum obsessively with a force whose pure violence is unequalled by any other drummer. His elementary patterns are cretinous because the Stones like it that way, not, as detractors would have it, because he can't play any other way, (A high-point of the New York concert was he and Jagger in a between-songs duet; Jagger would yell, "Alright !" and Charlie would...
...remaining members of Led Zeppelin should be mentioned. John Paul Jones is a fluent bassist unseduced by the primordial roar or steadfastness of his instrument. but attracted rather to its opportunities for polyphony. Drummer John Bonham's distinguished use of syncopation unifies, maintains, and elucidates each song. Finally, vocalist Robert Plant provides a fourth instrument which counterpoints and impels the gathering thrust of each song. Plant has a theatrical, coruscating voice capable of a range of tones and speech rhythms equalled only by Paul McCartney. Plant is mainly responsible for raising Led Zeppelin above such groups as Cream, Procol Harum...
...another failure. It will inevitably be compared, probably extremely unfavorably, with Ginger Baker's "Toad," which must be recognized as the finest rock drum solo. Baker's ability to develop rhythmically redefining motives over a beat which is itself reforming is beyond the demonstrated capacities of any other drummer. No drummer has ever carried a bad song with such unfailing strength as Baker did with "White Room." Yet Bonham proceeds primarily by a method of complementary rhythmic motives which, at least in "Good Times Bad Times" and "Ramble On," are the equal of Baker. Bonham's solidity of striking...
...center of Eastlake's brilliantly grotesque fantasy swaggers Captain Clancy. Clancy wears a Roman helmet with the red, white and blue parrot plume. Clancy is prepared to draw his sword and lead a charge at the drop of a paradiddle from his native drummer boy. Clancy is Eastlake's personification of the Viet Nam war. Clancy, in fact, is war. Never asking why, he leads his men up those lonely, death-strewn Viet Nam hills, and as long as Clancy is leading, his troops don't ask why either. But then Clancy imperceptibly cracks...