Skip to main content

Watch John Bonham’s Blistering 13-Minute Drum Solo on “Moby Dick,” One of His Finest Moments Live Onstage (1970)

Sometimes I play air drums, when at home before a roaring pair of speakers. No one would know it, but I’m not half bad. Except when it comes to jazz. Then it’s too ridiculous even for solitary goofing off. But I’m just competent enough to fake most basic rock beats… most… that is, but those of the most loudly sung drummers in classic rock: Keith Moon and John Bonham.

In categories all their own, it’s no surprise both drummers loved jazz, especially the hyperkinetic Gene Krupa. (Tragically, they also shared an interest in fatal overindulgence.) They took some common influences, however, in very different directions.



For one thing, Moon hated drum solos, that staple of the jazz drummer’s kit. The one exception to his rule may be Moon’s last appearance onstage in 1977, playing percussion in a cameo on Bonham’s solo on “Moby Dick,” one of the Led Zeppelin drummer’s finest moments. “Bonham was known to solo on this song for up to 30 minutes live!” writes Drum! magazine. It’s even said he “sometimes drew blood performing ‘Moby Dick’ from using his bare hands to beat his snare and tom toms.”

The live version above, clocking in at a mere 15 minutes, comes from a 1970 show at Royal Albert Hall. Robert Plant introduces the drummer with his full name, John Henry Bonham, before he even names the song. Then, after a minute of Page, Bonham, and Jones playing the opening riff together, the solo begins.

Bonham leads us in slowly at first, then, with jaw-dropping skill, puts on display what made him “a very special drummer” indeed, as the site Classic Rock writes: “doing things with a bass pedal that it took two of James Brown’s drummers to try and emulate—and they knew a bit about rhythm.”

His “pioneering use of bass drum triplets” is only a small part of his “important discovery that all drumming is just triplets, or should be,” declares Michael Fowler’s reverently tongue-in-cheek McSweeney’s tribute. “The next step, he saw, was in speeding up the beat without losing the basic triplet pattern… flying around the kit with blinding speed, hitting every drum and cymbal in those negligible spaces.”

Bonham’s ridiculously fast and complex patterns—whether deployed in half-hour solos or five-second drum fills (as above in “Achilles Last Stand” from 1979)—“shouldn’t be humanly possible,” Dave Grohl once said. But they were possible for the great John Bonham, born on May 31st, 1948.

“Let’s face it,” writes Fowler, “no one else does or ever will” sound like Led Zeppelin’s drummer. Celebrate his just-belated birthday by revisiting more of his greatest live moments at Drum! and, just below, hear Robert Plant sing “Happy Birthday” to his celebrated bandmate in 1973.

Related Content:

What Makes John Bonham Such a Good Drummer? A New Video Essay Breaks Down His Inimitable Style

John Bonham’s Isolated Drum Track For Led Zeppelin’s ‘Fool in the Rain’

Keith Moon Plays Drums Onstage with Led Zeppelin in What Would Be His Last Live Performance (1977)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.

Watch John Bonham’s Blistering 13-Minute Drum Solo on “Moby Dick,” One of His Finest Moments Live Onstage (1970) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture http://bit.ly/2JSS431
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music: An Interactive, Encyclopedic Data Visualization of 120 Years of Electronic Music

In a very short span of time, the descriptor “electronic music” has come to sound as overly broad as “classical.” But where what we (often incorrectly) call classical developed over hundreds of years, electronic music proliferated into hundreds of fractal forms in only decades. A far steeper quality curve may have to do with the ease of its creation, but it’s also a factor of this accelerated evolution. Music made by machines has transformed since its early 20th-century beginnings from obscure avant-garde experiments to massively popular genres of global dance and pop. This proliferation, notes Ishkur—designer of Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music —hasn't always been to the good. Take what he calls “trendwhoring,” a phenomenon that spawns dozens of new works and subgenera in short order, though it’s arguable whether many of them should exist. Ishkur, describes this process below in an excerpt from his erudite, sardonic “Frequently Unasked Questions”: If fart noises were sudde...
Post a Comment
Read more

A 10 Billion Pixel Scan of Vermeer’s Masterpiece Girl with a Pearl Earring: Explore It Online

We admire Johannes Vermeer’s  Girl with a Pearl Earring   for many reasons , not least that it looks exactly like a girl with a pearl earring. Or at least it does from a distance, as the master of light himself no doubt stepped back to confirm countless times during the painting process, at any moment of which he would have been more concerned with the brushstrokes constituting only a small part of the image. But even Vermeer himself could have perceived only so much detail of the painting that would become his masterpiece. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKaZYTwmjwU Now, more than 350 years after its completion, we can get a closer view of Girl with a Pearl Earring  than anyone has before through a newly released  10 billion-pixel panorama . At this resolution, writes Petapixel’s Jason Schneider , we can “see the painting down to the level of 4.4-microns per pixel.” Undertaken by Emilien Leonhardt and Vincent Sabatier of 3D microscope maker Hirox Europe ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Drunk History Takes on the Father of Prohibition: The Ban on Alcohol in the U.S. Started 100 Years Ago This Month

There may be plenty of good reasons to restrict sales and limit promotion of alcohol. You can search the stats on traffic fatalities, liver disease, alcohol-related violence, etc. and you’ll find the term “epidemic” come up more than once. Yet even with all the dangers alcohol poses to public health and safety, its total prohibition has seemed “so hostile to Americans’ contemporary sensibilities of personal freedom,” writes Mark Lawrence Schrad at The New York Times , “that we struggle to comprehend how our ancestors could have possibly supported it.” Prohibition in the United States began 1oo years ago-- on January 17, 1920--and lasted through 1933. How did this happen? Demand, of course, persisted, but public support seemed widespread. Despite stories of thousands rushing bars and liquor stores on the evening of January 16, 1920 before the 18th Amendment banning alcohol nationwide went into effect, “the final triumph of prohibition was met with shrugs…. The United States had...
Post a Comment
Read more