Writing about music is a notoriously difficult task, but writing about drummers presents its own set of challenges. For starters, melody and harmony are off the table, and the physical entity of the drum kit is so daunting that it discourages description out of hand. I can rave about
how exquisitely Al Jackson, Jr. lays back on two and four, wonder aloud
how Charlie Watts can groove so hard when he doesn't actually keep time all that well, but what I'm really talking about is something vague and imprecise, something deeply metaphorical like
feel. The best drummers have a mysticism that clings to them; when Yeats famously asked "How can we know the dancer from the dance?" this might have been what he was getting at. Yeats, it should be said, never heard Levon Helm.