Rolling Stone made a list of the top 100 drummers of all time. The magazine’s choices were based on “one important caveat: we used rock and pop as our rubric, so a drummer’s work needed to directly impact that world to make the list”. The second best drummer of all time is Keith Moon of The Who, and he is followed by Cream’s Ginger Baker and Rush’s Neal Peart.
Of course, John Bohnam of Led Zeppelin has topped the list! According to Rolling Stone, John Bonham “changed rock drumming forever on Led Zeppelin’s first record (“I”)”, and the magazine adds: “Jimmy Page was still amused by the disorienting impact that Good Times Bad Times, with its jaw-dropping bass-drum hiccups, had on listeners: ‘Everyone was laying bets that Bonzo was using two bass drums, but he only had one.’ Heavy, lively, virtuosic and deliberate, that performance laid out the terrain Bonham’s artful clobbering would conquer before his untimely death in 1980″.
“At his most brutally paleolithic he never bludgeoned dully, at his most rhythmically dumbfounding he never stooped to unnecessary wankery, and every night on tour he dodged both pitfalls with his glorious stampede through Moby Dick“.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFj0rxyNCtc
