It’s understandable, yet also a shame, that when you ask someone for a list of who they consider to be the greatest drummers of all time, there’s rarely any deviation from the norm, with lots of people defaulting to reeling off exactly why they love the likes of John Bonham, Keith Moon or Neil Peart.
Don’t get me wrong, these players are, in fact, among the greatest of all time, but it does beg the question as to whether this is all a case of having prior knowledge that these are considered the greatest of all time, and blindly following that assumption.
The thing is, there are countless other drummers who could be considered equally, if not more influential than the trio mentioned above. With the earliest of the three, Keith Moon, having burst into the spotlight in the mid-1960s, this erases anyone from before this time from the conversation, and likewise, with Neil Peart, whose career took off in the mid-1970s, you’re further limiting your choice by not taking into account the players who have emerged in the 50 years post-Peart.
Okay, so the other great drummers aren’t being ‘erased’ as such, but why is it that most of these lists tend to favour the players whose heyday happened within a ten to 20 year period? If we’re being perfectly honest, none of these individuals would have even become drummers had it not been for the innovators before them who inspired them to pick up a set of sticks in the first place, and so with that, you have to owe plenty of consideration to jazz greats such as Buddy Rich, Art Blakey or Max Roach, who were turning heads as far back as the 1930s.
However, if you were to ask the likes of Bonham and Peart themselves, they’d undoubtedly have come back and told you that there was one drummer in particular who influenced them significantly, and who they had to bow down to the supremacy of. In two separate interviews, it was revealed that they both considered jazz legend Gene Krupa as being one of the finest ever drummers to have graced the earth, and one who ultimately shaped jazz, rock and pop music for years to come.
In the case of Bonham, his brother Michael attested on his website that Krupa’s ability as a percussionist first impressed the Led Zeppelin drummer as a child when he first watched The Benny Goodman Story, in which Krupa has a starring role. “John went to see the film with his dad,” Michael explained, and came to the conclusion that John believed that “Gene Krupa was God.”
Not only that, but another film in which Krupa played steam pipes, Beat The Band, was among Bonham’s favourites, and really exposed him to Krupa’s brilliance.
For Peart, he was equally as entranced by Krupa’s style and ability, and claimed in a 2003 interview that his very first inclination to play drums came after watching The Gene Krupa Story before he was even in his teens.
“I started beating on the furniture and my baby sister’s playpen with a pair of chopsticks,” Peart recalled, “And for my 13th birthday, my parents gave me drum lessons, a practice pad, and a pair of sticks.”
Adding, “They said they wouldn’t buy me real drums until I showed that I was going to be serious about it for at least a year, and I used to arrange magazines across my bed to make fantasy arrays of drums and cymbals, then beat the covers off them!”
It’s fair to say that without Krupa, neither of these two icons would have had the urge to become drummers, and with the influence of the jazz master, they were both able to go on and influence generations of future drummers in the years after.