The drummer Taylor Hawkins called “one of the greatest to walk the Earth”
The art of good drumming has always been kind of a tricky subject. Although many of the uninitiated might think it’s easy just to keep a decent tempo and let the band fill in around you, a decent drummer usually knows how to respond to a song, find out what the rest of the group is looking for, and play exactly what’s needed every time they need to play a fill. Taylor Hawkins may have already had big shoes to fill in Foo Fighters, but he actually thought Matt Cameron was still one of the best drummers to come out of the 1990s.
Then again, was there anyone who was going to argue with Dave Grohl being one of the most famous drummers on the planet? Grohl may be known to downplay his ego every single time he sits behind the kit, but his drumming chops on those early Nirvana albums are half the reason why they work.
Take the intro to ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. Everyone talks about how the song changed rock and roll overnight and how Kurt Cobain wrote the anthem for a generation, but if it didn’t have those amazing drum breaks from Grohl leading into the song, would it have actually had the same impact?
Grohl may have had the best resume possible for a grunge rocker in the early 1990s, but what Cameron has done behind the kit since then can’t really be matched. Outside of being the main man for Soundgarden and performing with Temple of the Dog, Cameron moved on to another famous band once the grunge titans called it a day.
Right after Soundgarden broke up, Cameron got a call to fill in on drums for Pearl Jam and never bothered leaving, remaining a core part of the band for over two decades. While Hawkins may have had his work cut out for him trying to make Grohl’s drumming skills on every Foo Fighters record, he knew Cameron was beyond what most drummers could do.
When talking about Soundgarden, Hawkins said that what Cameron was coming up with was on a completely different level, telling BBC, “They were a great, amazing band – Matt Cameron’s one of the greatest drummers to walk the planet Earth, and Chris Cornell was so powerful and beautiful-looking and -sounding”.
Even though Cameron isn’t always a showman behind the kit, his workhorse mentality whenever he plays a song has been a core part of both Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. While he does have his times to shine, like in the breakdown section of ‘Spoonman’, some of the greatest moments of his career have come when he played just the right fill on tracks like ‘All Night Thing’ from Temple of the Dog or managed to keep a midtempo song interesting on ‘Black Hole Sun’.
And yet, Cameron can do this while a song constantly switches tempo, since many of Soundgarden’s iconic licks were based around a circular groove where you were never quite sure where the one is. Anything beyond the traditional 4/4 may have thrown many drummers for a loop, but Cameron approached every complex drum part like it was second nature.
