The drummer Ginger Baker died last week and everyone was very surprised because we all assumed the drug-addled wild man from Cream and Blind Faith had shuffled off this mortal coil years ago. It’s customary, of course, when someone dies to gloss over their shortcomings and concentrate instead on their work for charity and their heroics in the war. But this is nigh-on impossible with Baker, who was almost certainly the most unpleasant man ever to grace a stage. He pulled a knife on Cream’s bass player, Jack Bruce. He used his fists to settle almost every dispute. He broke the nose of the director who made a documentary about him with his walking stick.
Then, of course, there was the naked 11-year-old girl featured on the cover of Blind Faith’s only album. That’s such a difficult issue these days, none of the obituaries even mentioned it.
Instead, everyone concentrated on Baker’s skills as a musician — but even here people missed the point, because despite what he claimed, he wasn’t the best drummer the world has ever seen. Thanks to Mitch Mitchell, who played with Jimi Hendrix, he was the second best. I’m on Twitter if you want to argue.
Baker, however, could keep perfect time, even when he was full of heroin, which is quite an achievement. And he could maintain four different cross rhythms with each of his limbs. This is like rubbing your tummy, patting your head, pumping up a lilo and playing hopscotch all at the same time.
I have a drum kit. It’s an enormous Pictures of Lily limited edition replica. And after several years of weekly lessons, I developed a profound admiration for drummers, because they’re doing something I can’t do.
We can’t admire people who can do what we can do. I don’t admire anyone who can drive fast while shouting, but when I watch a dry-stone-waller creating a natural barrier using nothing but experience and big, warty hands, I become a statue of wonderment held upright by nothing but the tingling in my hair. That’s what happens when I hear a drum solo.
A columnist last week said that words cannot begin to describe the “unstoppable misery” of the “nightmarish” drum solo. Plainly, he is the sort of man who thinks drummers are like houseflies. That they come, they make an annoying noise and then they die. And I literally could not agree less.
A drum solo allows the audience to marvel at the technical wizardry of the drummer. It allows us to concentrate on his incredible ability to get a whole arm from one side of the kit to the other faster than it takes a Formula One car to change gear. And to do it in perfect time.
It’s been suggested that Ginger Baker invented the drum solo so his bandmates could have a moment to go backstage and top up whatever was missing at that moment from their lives. I doubt this, though. He didn’t really like other musicians that much.
It’s been reported that he called Mick Jagger a “musical moron”. But that’s not true. What he actually said was that the Stones were like “a load of little kids trying to play black blues music and playing it very badly”. It was George Harrison he called a musical moron. And he dismissed Paul McCartney too, because, unlike him, McCartney could not sight-read music. Led Zeppelin? If you even mentioned them in his presence, you’d get a thick lip. He only really liked people we’ve never heard of. Phil Seamen was a hero of his, for example. And Art Blakey.
So no. Baker was on the stage doing his solos simply so we could hear how he’d fused the jazz music of his heroes with an altogether new and busy way of playing. He despised the 4/4 beat of rock and pop music, but it’s possible that, because of what he did with Cream, he’s partly responsible for it.
His solos were often more than 10 minutes long and were mesmerising. And soon drummers everywhere were trying to outdo him. Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham did a 17-minute epic on the track Moby Dick, and then you got — whisper this, because I’m friendly with Nick Mason and Roger Taylor — my favourite drummer, Phil Collins, duetting with Chester Thompson. They started out hitting bar stools and then moved to their kits for a drumming shootout. It’s the best thing on YouTube.
And now? Well, there was the movie Whiplash, which everyone, apart from me, thought was weird — but on stage? In real life? There’s nothing. The drum solo is dead.
I find that odd. There are still bands and some still have drummers, so why don’t these people want the audience to see and hear them doing their thing? Isn’t that like being a goalkeeper who never wants to make a save?
The only explanation is that they actively hide at the back behind the bass and the guitar and the flashy vocals because they’re not that good.
This sort of thing has happened before. Between 1750 and 1820, the world heard from Schubert, Mozart, Beethoven and Haydn, but since then, apart from a couple of little spurts, there’s been nothing of any great consequence. And today? There’s a woman in Iceland who turns drawings of turnips into classical music and there’s Ludovico Einaudi, who provided the soundtrack for many of the Top Gear films I made. But that’s about it.
Could it be that the same thing has happened with drumming? That we as a species were only ever any good at it between 1958 and 1978, and now we have lost the ability, in the same way that penguins have lost the ability to fly?
Luckily, however, we still have the recordings from the days when drumming wasn’t just an electronic nn tss nn tss nn tss nn tss and I’ve been listening to a lot of it all week. That’s why I ended up revisiting Can’t Find My Way Home. You played on that one, Ginger. And now you have.
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