Roger Taylor reveals the secret to drumming: “The most important thing”
Drummers normally pull the short straw whenever there are outstanding personalities in a band. There are a lot of skinsmen that are known to leather the crap out of their instruments whenever they play, but when you really break it down, it’s hard to really start a conversation about your work by talking about how you bang on things for a living and get paid millions of dollars. There’s more to drumming than just hitting the drums, though, and Roger Taylor believes the song comes before anything else.
Then again, Taylor’s experience behind the scenes as a songwriter probably drove him to be one of the best drummers of his generation. Instead of just looking at the power that he could get out of every hit, he was just as interested in singing and making the melody jump every time he threw a drum fill together.
Whenever a great rock and roll drummer steps behind the kit, they already need to have a certain sense of rhythm regarding what the piece needs. Despite being one of the greatest drummers to ever walk the Earth, the idea of getting John Bonham on a track that sounds like a laid-back stroll through the meadow is going to cause disaster the minute that he starts playing the song.
For Taylor, it’s about knowing your place within the track, telling Express, “As drummers, we drive the band, and I think the most important thing we can all do is play for the song. It’s not about showing off on your instrument. It’s about being aware of the whole song – not just the drum part.”
It’s easy to see how Taylor puts his mouth where his money is whenever Queen hit the studio, too. There are definitely moments where he gets to showboat, like the massive fill in ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’, but some of the most celebrated songs in Queen’s canon include him hanging back and getting into the groove, including ‘We Will Rock You’, where his only job is to just stomp and clap.
Being able to be that kind of drummer almost means learning one thing no one wants to do: knowing when to shut the hell up. Rock and roll is just as much about listening as it is about playing, and if you aren’t paying attention to what the rest of the musicians are doing, things are going to end up falling apart once you attempt to put together the song.
It’s not like Taylor is the first person to know this lesson, either. Throughout The Beatles’ best moments, Ringo Starr was known for always playing the piece, hating the idea of being self-indulgent and usually more than happy to just play the song the way he thought that it should go.
Even bands with less experience, like Green Day, have seen the importance of serving the song. Once Tre Cool joined the group, his first lesson revolved around learning the track rather than the instrument, leading to him going for broke in short, controlled bursts whenever he flew off the handle on Dookie. Any drummer’s job might seem easy, but the real challenge for any drummer is making it look like the most simple task in the world.
