what i know about drums is limited to the Amen Break and a handful of big names -- John Bonham, Dave Grohl, Keith Moon, Meg White -- Neil Peart, whose name i had to Google how to spell. anyway, had the privilege of hanging around a couple drummers this week and got to thinking how little i know about this fundamental building block of music. as a kid i always dreamed of drumming, though i suppose every child dreams of hitting stuff with a stick for a living; anyway, i never took it up. and talking to rockers and music professors i learned plenty about "drummer jokes" but, still, not much about drummers themselves. it's not just rhythm which lives in drums, but tone, too, a belt of highs and lows that color your mix, bright and dark, wide and close. drums maketh decades: listening to 80s music or its 21st-century facsimiles, it's that gated reverb snare which anchors us in place and time.
that said, there are sad few songs which i can identify via drum sound. a representative sampler: