Drummage Pre

Going to take Simon up on his request for good drum performances. I used to play drums quite seriously. Don't know if I was any good but I sure did listen a lot. Most of my choices are fairly canonical. But the canons of popular music were assembled in a much more democratic way by people with greater levels of understanding than those of other arts. For better and worse.

I am going to be limiting myself to a maximum of ten performances per decade and one appearance per drummer (with maybe one or two exceptions). I won't be posting any decades prior to the 1960s and nothing from this century. While the drummers of the 1950s and before suffer my lack of recognition due to my ignorance (outside of a few handfuls of jazz records), contemporary drummers suffer my lack of recognition for the opposite reason. I am more likely to play air drums to a programmed Neptune production than to any indie or mainstream rock record that I am aware of*.

1960s to follow almost immediately

1970s and 1980s will take some time

1990s will be easy, but possibly shorter

* It's not as if everyone forgot to play drums... it's just...
There's a recording engineer who calls himself Mixerman who says that "if the song sucks, the mix is irrelevant". I figure, if the song sucks, the musician's performance is irrelevant. For some, this would seem a little backwards. Surely, if the musician's performance sucks, how can a song be good? But since, outside of wholly-improvised music, the song precedes the performance, if the song is no good, then a musician's skill, which is to bring the composition to its full musical impact, cannot be fully utilized.