The drummer who taught Mick Fleetwood how to play: “The first guy that I listened to”
Even the best have got to start somewhere. Music’s best players were once just beginners, mere kids with a loose fancy to learn a particular instrument or maybe to just be in a band in some way someday. Mick Fleetwood was like that, starting out as a kid jumping around different schools in a family that moved a lot, failing his classes but looking to different teachers than the ones at the front of the room.
As the son of an Air Force pilot, Fleetwood’s younger years involved a lot of moving around. It meant that he could never really settle anywhere with solid friends or start to make any sort of plan for his future all that music. It also contributed to his failing miserably in school. When his parents realised that his passion lay elsewhere, they gave in and let him follow that instead.
That passion was the drums. Since his teenage years, when he was bought his first kit and began sitting on the stool that would soon change his life, he was obsessed. He had the gear, and he had the dreams, but what he didn’t have was a teacher. “I was self-taught. I just taught myself in my attic, playing along to records,” he said, crediting his learning to play largely to his own determination.
But amongst the records he played along to, certain names stood out as key ones. “I can’t always remember the names of the drummers I used to listen to because I’m not great at remembering names,” he said, adding, “But they must have been the people who played with Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers.”
It was classic rock and roll stuff. Still, a world away from the blues band Fleetwood Mac would first emerge as, with Fleetwood’s epic playing powering them, these early influences taught him the basics. They taught him how to hold down a rock rhythm, how to follow a band, and how to hold down the timing and balance while standing out and not drowning everyone else out. Slowly, once he had that down, he could start to learn how to have flair. That’s where his biggest influence came in.
“The first drummer I really listened to a hell of a lot, and learned from, was the English drummer who used to play with the Shadows – Tony Meehan. He would basically be the first guy that I listened to the stuff he did,” Fleetwood said, celebrating Meehan as an essential part of his musical education and a formative discovery.
Meehan served as a kind of perfect bridge between bands like the Everly Brothers and the music Fleetwood would come to make. It was more interesting, bolder, funner for sure, but Meehan was also a stickler for skill and especially for taking care of the drum kit and understanding how the instrument works in order to be able to master it.
On both sides, they were lessons Fleetwood carried with him, both looking to Meehan as an early teacher showing him how to make his then basic playing more exciting, but also following the prompt to better understand exactly what he was doing, with those more technical lessons serving him later down the line as his deeper awareness of the capabilities of his kit provided some of his band’s most interesting drum lines.
