“The only guy who could ever pull it off”: Billy Bob Thornton names music’s one good singing drummer
A man who literally and frequently wears two hats at once suggesting that in the entirety of music history, there’s only one person who’s ever been good at playing the drums and singing at the same time might scan as ironic, but it’s a tiny little hill that Billy Bob Thornton is willing to die on.
Plenty of musicians have worn multiple hats in the figurative sense, but tub-thumping and vocals are one of the rarer dual threats in the industry. It’s something several legends have mastered, or at least attempted, but the Academy Award-winning screenwriter only gives a fuck about one of them.
He knows a thing or two about the sticks, though, with Thornton having been drumming since childhood, and he usually handles the in-studio work for his band, the Boxmasters, before handing those duties over to someone else when they play live, and he’s also an experienced guitarist, although he’s only ever usually the group’s frontman on stage.
Still, narrowing it down to one person having ever been able to master the two fronts at once seems like it’s tailor-made to incite debate, looking at the names he’s ignoring. It’s not Don Henley, it’s not Karen Carpenter, and it’s not even Phil Collins, even if his signature style of dad-rock and synth doesn’t sound as if it would be up Thornton’s street anyway.
Despite being a lifelong Beatles superfan, it’s not Ringo Starr, either, even if you can’t classify him as a leading vocalist. He’s omitting some of the greats, but as far as the actor and filmmaker is concerned, there’s but a solitary figure who he believes has turned simultaneous singing and drumming into an art form of its own.
“I never played drums and sang at the same time; I always thought that looked weird when the drummer was the singer,” Thornton offered. “The only guy who could ever pull it off, I thought, was Levon Helm with The Band, but I started out playing drums as a little kid. And, you know, when I saw Ringo Star, when I saw The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, that was it for me.”
While it’s accurate to call Helm one of the greatest singing drummers that music has ever seen, because that’s exactly what he is, calling him the only worthwhile singing drummer that music has ever seen is an entirely different matter, and one that’s sure to leave Henley, Collins, and Carpenter fans up in arms.
Of course, he played many more instruments than that, but sitting behind the kit for The Band cemented him in rock and roll history, where he shared vocal duties with Rick Danko, and Richard Manuel. Thornton grew up as a drummer, and he enjoyed singing, but at no point did he ever consider doing them both at once.
That’s fair enough, but narrowing down the entire list of people who’ve been able to successfully pull it off to a single name doesn’t hold much water when there’s so much evidence to the contrary, even if that person is the legendary Helm.
