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Full disclosure:<\/span> I play the drums. I play them every chance I get. Although my drumming career has served mainly as a steady education in my own shining mediocrity as a drummer, a reminder that I was put on this Earth for other things, I love hitting the goddamn drums. Left foot on the hi-hat pedal, right foot on the kick-drum pedal, left hand on the snare, right hand on the ride cymbal. When it starts to flow, you\u2019re like da Vinci\u2019s Vitruvian Man: You\u2019re in a holy circle of equilibrium, blissfully distributed, with consciousness diffused to your extremities.<\/p>\n Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.<\/p>\n View More<\/p>\n How do you get better as a drummer? Well, you practice: You do the same thing over and over, slowly building muscle fiber while also experiencing, in your brain, the painless, clueless ache of a synapse trying to form. You get better by being in a band, by entering music as part of a volatile, multi-person, multi-addiction organism. And you get better, lastly, via the drummer\u2019s version of the grace of God\u2014which is the jolt, the volt, the heavenly bolt, the electromotive impulse that flashes out from the playing of another, much greater drummer, and claims you.<\/p>\n John Lingan\u2019s superb Backbeats: A History of Rock and Roll in Fifteen Drummers is full of such moments. Moments of transmission\u2014often via vinyl, occasionally in performance\u2014when the creative spark zips and snaps across the pre-artistic darkness and some young drummer somewhere realizes that he\u2019s going to have to change his life. Dave Lombardo, pre-Slayer, listening in awe to Phil \u201cPhilthy Animal\u201d Taylor pummeling through a relentless double-kick-drum pattern on the title track of Mot\u00f6rhead\u2019s Overkill. Jody Stephens, pre\u2013Big Star, in the 17th row at a Led Zeppelin show in Memphis: John Bonham was \u201clike a rocket, everyone else was just holding on.\u201d Tony Thompson, pre-Chic, watching the Mahavishnu Orchestra: \u201cI saw Billy Cobham for the first time\u2014and saw God \u2026 It\u2019s still embedded in my soul seeing him play like that.\u201d<\/p>\n The drummer James Osterberg, before he became Iggy Pop, was infatuated with the bluesy playing of Sam Lay. (You can hear Lay\u2019s ghostly snare taps on Howlin\u2019 Wolf\u2019s \u201cLittle Red Rooster\u201d; you can also hear him, four years later, tearing through the anarchic-ironic shuffle of Bob Dylan\u2019s \u201cHighway 61 Revisited.\u201d) Osterberg made a young man\u2019s picaresque pilgrimage from Ann Arbor to Lay\u2019s house in Chicago. \u201cHis wife was very surprised that I was looking for him,\u201d he tells Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain in Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk. \u201cShe said, \u2018Well, he\u2019s not here, but would you like some fried chicken?\u2019\u200a\u201d<\/p>\n My own little drum crisis\/awakening came at the hands (and feet) of Dave Grohl, pre-Nirvana, when I saw him playing with the Washington, D.C., hardcore-punk band Scream. Grohl\u2014skinny, 19 years old\u2014was all attack, all emphasis. He drummed in italics. Simultaneously, there was something subliminal and almost unspeakable about his playing; as devastatingly correct as it was, he also seemed to be pulling information from a rhythmic grid more profound, more capacious, than the mere ticktocking of accurate time.<\/p>\n Backbeats: A History of Rock and Roll in Fifteen Drummers<\/p>\n By John Lingan<\/p>\n Because this is the great mystery of drumming: Time. Not just tempo, not just keeping the beat\u2014the guitarist and the bassist can do that\u2014but the drummer\u2019s musical relationship to the flow of Time itself. To the passing of all things, to the universe\u2019s rumble toward infinity. John Bonham\u2019s left foot on the hi-hat pedal\u2014shick-shick-shick\u2014has the cadence of Deep Time. It\u2019s Bonham\u2019s neurological signature: a lilt, an inflection, a swing that microscopically delays or distends the beat while also fulfilling it. Listen to \u201cWhole Lotta Love,\u201d around 1:18, the start of the freak-out section. Listen to that hi-hat going up and down, up and down. Bonham, steady as he is, is not keeping time. He\u2019s releasing it.<\/p>\n John Bonham and Jimmy Page of the New Yardbirds perform in Denmark in September 1968, a month before the group was reborn as Led Zeppelin. (Jorgen Angel \/ Redferns)<\/p>\n His own rumble toward infinity was brief, fiery, and pocked with shadow. Lingan pairs him with the Who\u2019s Keith Moon: \u201cTheir drumming was an accurate reflection of each of their personalities\u2014they were loud, they were destructive, they hurt and endangered people, and they both died young and violently from self-abuse.\u201d Here I think I might respectfully disagree. In both cases, the drumming, the art, transcended the personality.<\/p>\n Grohl and Bonham get a chapter each in Backbeats, as does\u2014to my great delight\u2014Earl Hudson from Bad Brains, a low-key powerhouse whose playing steered the shamanic flights of his brother, the band\u2019s front man, H.R., through the ether. The great session man Hal Blaine is also featured, and Clyde Stubblefield from James Brown\u2019s the J.B.\u2019s, the author of the \u201cFunky Drummer\u201d beat that\u2019s since been looped through a thousand hip-hop tracks.<\/p>\n To nondrummers, many of these figures will be obscure. (One main counterexample is Grohl, who made himself a real rock star as the guitarist-vocalist of Foo Fighters.) This is largely the drummer\u2019s fate: to be felt but not seen. And this is the ambition of Lingan\u2019s book\u2014to tell a story of rock-and-roll evolution from the back, from the bowels, from the under-realm of the creator-drummers. How have drummers responded to the increasing power and complexity of the music? How have they themselves increased that power and complexity? By the time we get to Dave Lombardo and Slayer\u2019s Reign in Blood, we are in a zone of Darwinian mutation, as Lombardo pulls off feats of speed and dexterity unimaginable\u2014and probably terrifying\u2014to his drumming forebears.<\/p>\n The sole female among Lingan\u2019s 15 selected drummers is Moe Tucker, of the Velvet Underground. Self-taught, self-willed\u2014\u201cI consciously, purposely, didn\u2019t learn more about drums because I didn\u2019t want to sound like anybody else\u201d\u2014Tucker fused steely minimalism with raw, repetitive impact. If any rock-and-roll drummer could be said to have made their drums drone, it\u2019s her. No crashing cymbals for Moe Tucker: not for her, the big-top vulgarity of those metallic exclamation points. And sometimes no downbeat\u2014the ferocious shuffle she plays on \u201cRun Run Run\u201d is on the snare alone, its clattering, unmoored momentum working like a propellant on Lou Reed\u2019s storytelling. Ka-chunk-a-CHUNK-a-chunk-a-CHUNK \u2026 The addicts are fiending around New York City, looking for a fix, a drag, a taste, anything. Maybe this was Tucker\u2019s special compact with Time\u2014Time as narrative; Time as unfolding drama.<\/p>\n Moe Tucker of the Velvet Underground, known for fusing steely minimalism with raw impact to produce her signature drone (Gijsbert Hanekroot \/ Redferns)<\/p>\n And one last thing about Time: Of all the members of the band, it comes for the drummer first. Guitars get heavier as you get older, high notes harder to hit, but the drummer pays a private tax to mortality. The drummer\u2019s strength goes faster. Exactly how fast depends, to a degree, on the music. Metal drumming is famously punishing, and high-speed punk rock, as Lingan writes, \u201chas always survived on heroic drumming. Someone has to sustain that pulse.\u201d But even the mid-tempo drummer will have their moments of naked endurance. A 2008 study of Blondie\u2019s Clem Burke revealed that, during live sets, he played with the stamina of an athlete, burning about 600 calories over the course of an 82-minute show. Many bands, when they re-form for their 20th- or 30th-anniversary tours, have a new man, younger and stronger, on drums.<\/p>\n So what\u2019s a jowly old superannuated drummer to do? How do you stay on that drum stool and keep playing that funky\/punky\/heavy\/wicky-wacky whatever-it-is? Well, you stop thrashing. You move more precisely; you breathe more deeply; you manage your force more shrewdly. You measure the dosage of power in every stroke. You use, in a word, technique. It\u2019s like life.<\/p>\n * Lead-image source: Kevin Nixon \/ <\/em>Classic Rock Magazine \/ Future Publishing \/ Getty<\/em><\/p>\n This article appears in the January 2026 print edition with the headline \u201cRespect the Drummer.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n \u200bWhen you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Full disclosure: I play the drums. I play them every chance I get. Although my drumming career has served mainly as a steady education in my own shining mediocrity as a drummer, a reminder that I was put on this Earth for other things, I love hitting the goddamn drums. Left foot on the hi-hat<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35405,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[19957,15217,1034],"class_list":{"0":"post-35404","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-heroes","9":"tag-overlooked","10":"tag-rock"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35404","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35404"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35404\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/35405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Explore the January 2026 Issue<\/h2>\n