“Changed me forever”: The drummer who transformed Josh Freese
Let’s be real here, first and foremost, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a really good museum. The actual ceremony isn’t much cop for anything other than that kick-ass Prince guitar solo over ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ and precisely one award category among all the self-satisfied industry backslapping. You see, tucked away during the ceremony, there’s the ‘Award for Musical Excellence’ handed to the greatest sidemen and session musicians of their time, which should be going to Josh Freese soon.
This is an inspired idea because session musicians and sidemen are the unsung heroes of the entire music industry. Especially today, where bands have been old hat for 20 years and everyone and their dog has a solo project on the go. The need for reliable, talented musicians willing to put their ego to one side and play the music of others is now greater than ever. If that’s not enough, you can always point to the CV of session drummer Josh Freese and say to them, “Would that suit you?”
I’ll level with you, dear reader. If my career in music included playing for (deep breath) Nine Inch Nails, Paramore, Lana Del Rey, Guns N’ Roses, Weezer, 100 gecs, Sting and Bruce bloody Springsteen, I could handle not being the centre of attention. Especially when you account for how that’s only about half of Freese’s career roster and doesn’t even include his highest profile gig to date, which is joining the Foo Fighters as the inheritor of the dearly departed Taylor Hawkins’ drum stool.
That may be a story that doesn’t have the fairy-tale ending it deserves, as has been covered elsewhere, but the man more than deserves recognition. Which makes sense, as you don’t play for that many world-conquering artists without having world-conquering skills to match, and Freese is absolutely the equal of any other sticksman he’s been near. So, who inspires a player like that?
Which drummers inspired Josh Freese?
As you can imagine, a talent like his was captivated by the best of the best from a very early age. We know this for sure thanks to an interview Freese gave to Drum! magazine, where he detailed his top five drummers. With a charming amount of unaffected enthusiasm, Freese talked through the great sticksmen of his lifetime, beginning by marking himself out as the envy of jazzheads everywhere by saying he saw Buddy Rich multiple times when he was “very, very young”.
One assumes that would change any young drum obsessive for life, but for Freese, it was just number one on his list. He also talks about being a die-hard fan of Alex Van Halen as a youngster, which is actually pretty heartwarming, since Alex’s brother, Eddie, tended to grab the headlines in their band. Steve Gadd and the incomparable Vinnie Colaiuta also get namechecked on his list, but two seemed to stand out above all.
Frank Zappa and Missing Persons legend, Terry Bozzio, are two names Josh Freese saves the greatest amounts of praise for. Additionally, he went into great detail about how seeing Bozzio play “blew me away and set me on a path that I’m still continuing on. He was totally aggressive, yet played with a finesse and musicality that I’d never seen or heard before. It had a profound effect on me and changed me forever.”
The last thing he has to say on Bozzio’s drumming is something that I’m sure more than a few budding drummers have felt when watching Josh Freese himself at work: “I would not be the drummer I am today had I not discovered Terry Bozzio when I was 11.”
