“I wouldn’t be here”: The drummer Nick Mason credits for his career
Any musician doesn’t wake up one morning deciding that they are going to be the greatest person to play guitar or sing into a microphone. The best artists have those moments where things start to happen gradually, from being slightly intrigued by music to becoming an avid fan to realising that the whole thing is becoming their new religion. And although Nick Mason was never shy about playing a supportive role in Pink Floyd, he did admit that a few drummers helped him see the power of what could be done with two sticks.
But when Pink Floyd first debuted, it wasn’t clear how much of their music was indebted to everything else besides rock and roll. Syd Barrett certainly had the chops to create great tunes, but some of their more avant-garde pieces felt like they were trying to make raw noise half the time, especially when Barrett left, and they were left floundering on albums like Ummagumma.
While the songs weren’t always there, Mason did have those few moments where things began falling into place. ‘Set the Controls For The Heart of the Sun’ was one of his first times getting to use mallets and spread out throughout the course of a song, but when it came to his heroes, he was more interested in brute force in some respects.
Even though everyone from Mason’s generation looked up to people like Keith Moon as one of the greatest to ever step behind a drumkit, there always had to be a method behind the madness for him. And as much as ‘Moon the Loon’ could turn Pete Townshend’s songs inside out when playing them, Ginger Baker was the perfect balance of finesse and insanity when he got behind the kit.
Because even in a band that was known to go as hard as Cream did, Baker was always a drum student before anything else. He was far more interested in genres like jazz, and while a song like ‘Toad’ might sound like sheer performance madness throughout the course of its runtime, there was always a swing to it every time it came on as if Baker was teaching a clinic on how to keep a groove going during a solo.
As far as Mason was concerned, hearing Baker was the turning point for his career, saying, “Most of my icons are the people that were my heroes when I was kicking off. I wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for Ginger Baker. When the curtain opened at the Regent Street Polytechnic in 1966, and there was Ginger, Eric and Jack, I thought, that’s what I’d like to be, and that was it.”
Then again, Mason did manage to take his technique to new heights that Baker may not have gone down. Hearing his work with drum machines on A Momentary Lapse of Reason was a touch disheartening for some of the purists in the audience, but seeing him abuse his kit during Floyd’s famous performance in Pompeii is still one of the most powerful moments of their career due to his performance on tunes like ‘One Of These Days.’
Despite Pink Floyd going down in history as one of the truly revolutionary progressive rock bands, Baker deserves a cursory mention for helping pioneer the genre. He may have only sat behind a kit, but what he did for the drums had the same mentality of helping rock and roll move forward from its typical bluesy structures.
