The one drummer Roger Waters called out of everyone’s league: “Harder than anyone”
Roger Waters always needed to look at the overall picture of every single song he worked on.
He didn’t want to spend his time trying to work out everything if it wasn’t helping the tune, and even when he had the best production that money could buy, sometimes the simple approach was what worked best for any tune that he was working on. But when looking through some of his greatest tunes of all time, he still felt that most of them paled in comparison to what he saw some of his heroes do.
But a lot of the biggest names in prog weren’t always about the kind of approach that Waters did. He was about setting a scene with his words and trying to get everyone invested in whatever story was unfolding on every one of his tunes, but sometimes the best way for people to actually internalise what you have to say is to keep things incredibly simple on their recordings.
And Pink Floyd definitely knew this when they were putting together some of their biggest tunes. Dark Side of the Moon didn’t need to have some of the most technically challenging songs of all time to be amazing, and even when they started to stretch their songs out to gargantuan proportions, everything still revolved around Waters trying to get a message through that meant more than the typical rock and roll songs.
If you’re going to be working on songs that have more punch to them, you need to have a firm foundation, and that comes from the drums before anything else. Waters could be a bit stingy over what the drums were supposed to sound like, but even at his worst, it was probably not a good look to kick Nick Mason off the drummer’s stool so that he could have Jeff Porcaro play the drums on ‘Mother’.
Waters felt he was only trying to move the songs forward, but a lot of his standards were almost impossible. He was looking at the same heights that some of their contemporaries were used to in the late 1960s, and no matter how hard Mason hit the drums, he was never going to be able to hit them with as much fury as someone like Ginger Baker could whenever he got behind the kit on Cream songs.
Baker was a wild animal with a technical brain, and even looking back on some of their old tunes, Waters felt that there was no one who could possibly get into the same league as what Baker did, saying, “I remember Ginger Baker was insane back then. He hit the drums harder than anyone I’ve ever seen, with the possible exception of Keith Moon. And Ginger hit them in a rhythmic style all his own that was extraordinary.”
And if we’re being completely honest, are we sure that Baker isn’t actually responsible for some of the first progressive drumming ever laid down on tape? No one was throwing in strange time signatures like he did on some of Cream’s best songs, and when you look past the massive showmanship he had on every song, it was all very calculated in the same way that you would see out of a band like Yes or King Crimson years later.
No one else would have thought to play the drums in that manner, and everyone from Keith Moon to John Bonham would only hope to keep up with what Baker could do most of the time. It wasn’t easy for Waters to find that same punch out there in the wild, but he could at least admire the fact that there was someone who could actually manage to play like that at all during his lifetime.
