I don’t know that there are any two drummers more different! They weren’t even trying to do the same thing.
Bonzo was all about the groove. He had an almost supernatural command of time, so that you could have all kinds of stopping-and-starting (think “Good Times, Bad Times”), or slipping time signatures (”Black Dog”), or switching entire genres within the course of a single song (”The Ocean” and “Fool In The Rain”).
He was also a master of texture. For all that he hit as hard as anyone, think of a song like “Ramble On” where he used his bare hands, or brushes on “The Rain Song”, and songs like that one and “Stairway” where he might play less than half the song. I don’t think that he gets near enough credit for his subtlety.
Some of this comes from his love for the early Spector “Wall of Sound” recordings that, yes, typically featured two drummers (frequently Earl Palmer and Hal Blaine together), but think about songs like “Be My Baby” and “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling” -- the drama of the drums is highlighted by how often they’re NOT playing. It’s no wonder that Bonzo’s own favorite Led Zeppelin song was “All of My Love.” There’s nothing like a ballad for drama with drums!
One of the places he put a lot of that together was on 1971’s “When The Levee Breaks.” Slow, although not exactly a balance. LOL The whole song is built on his groove. It’s simple, it’s direct, and right there at the beginning, it’s the only thing you hear.
Try counting it, though. Not as easy as you’d think, is it? One reason why is that he’s using his feet AT LEAST as much as his hands to create multiple rhythms. Then he peels it all away before the song shifts into the bridge at 2:27, goes silent for a few bars, then BANG! BANG! go the cymbals and bass drum together. Then he climbs back on top of that groove and rides it like a pony right on out of there.
In fact, it’s fun to compare the return of the same break just after the 5 minute mark. Instead of pausing, he shifts gears straight up and rides the top of the climax for the next two minutes, saving some of his hardest hitting for the very end.
In that sense, you can think of Bonzo’s grooves separately from the songs. He could be the eye of the storm.
Have you heard the isolated drum track for “Fool In The Rain”? It’s another deceptively simple one. With the other instruments stripped away, you can hear how much is going on, including all of the fills and flourishes, but mostly, a rock solid handful of grooves being played at the same time.
None of that has anything to do with Keith Moon, who, rather than the eye of the storm, was more often the storm. LOL
I have a number of drummer friends who don’t care much for Moonie, because he just wasn’t interested in doing what drummers are “supposed” to do, which is keeping time....right? Well, maybe that's not the only thing, or even the main thing. There's no law that says a drummer HAS to care about time.
Keith did have a very specific agenda, and achieved it in stellar fashion, which is why we’re still talking him, and that’s this: he was there to accent the vocal.
Most of the time we talk about drummers, it’s alongside bassists as “the rhythm section,” right? Bonzo and Jonesy, laying down the law. But Who bassist John Entwistle had even less interest in keeping time than Moonie. Enty drove the melody as much as anything else.
The guy keeping time in The Who was guitarist Pete Townshend! He literally invented power chords to keep reminding the so-called “rhythm section” where the actual song was! LOL
The other member of the band that Keith keyed in on was Roger Daltrey! THAT was where Keith drove his beats. It might LOOK like Roger is driving his vocal to the beat -- a natural thing for a vocalist to do, of course -- but in fact, it really is exactly the opposite. Keith would frequently WAIT for Roger to drive, and would swoop in to punch exactly what Roger does.
You can see it in a lot of early Who videos, where Moonie is practically floating out of his chair, barely even holding onto the sticks with his fingertips. He’s not UNDER the song, like Bonzo. He’s floating above it!
It’s really going to help if you turn this up. This is a very staccato vocal, so listen to where Roger is punching the words, and WATCH how hard Keith comes down EXACTLY there. And because young Moonie has this tendency to float out of his seat, you can feel his UP beats as much as his downbeats! How is that possible? Well, it’s not literally possible, since he's not hitting anything, but see for yourself. There's a quantum difference between when he's accenting the hard syllables in the vocal lines and the soft ones.
There is a bit of fun on the unhinged middle eight, which you can contrast with, say, “Whole Lotta Love”, where Bonzo still keeps a straight line running through the chaos. Keith doesn’t come out of the chaos until he has a vocal to lock onto, and once he does, he doesn’t let go.
Totally underrated track by the way, deserving of its own essay, if not an entire book. The thing to note in this context is that it starts with Pete's guitar, which a number of Who tracks do ("Pinball Wizard" is another great example), because Pete is laying down the beat the way that a drummer would in another band. Say, Bonzo in Zeppelin! LOL Plenty of Zeppelin songs start with the drums.
Keith was never going to count in a song the way Bonzo so often did, because there was no expectation on anyone's part, including Keith's, that he was setting the rhythm in any meaningful way.
As with Bonzo, when you want to REALLY hear what Moonie is up to, you have to slow him down. The very clearest example of him driving the drums to Roger’s vocal is on “Behind Blue Eyes”. There was a great TV series from around the turn of the century called “Classic Albums,” playing on Amazon Prime, with quite a few of the episodes and some key clips on YouTube.
This clip from the episode on Who's Next, as a whole, will do wonders to illuminate Keith Moon from the perspective of each of the guys he played with, which is remarkable enough -- they all related to him differently! And not one of them related to him as you’d expect band members to relate to a drummer! Certainly nothing about him being steady or reliable, because he absolutely wasn’t!
Watch the whole clip some other time, though. For now, jump ahead to 1:55, where Roger plays a few measures with just the drums and vocals, during the “If I swallow anything evil” section. He points out that most drummers use the space AFTER the end of the vocal line to add their flourishes, but Keith used his fills to underscore the vocals. When there’s not a vocal, he’s playing straight, waiting for the REAL action to begin when he can play around the vocal again!
Moonie’s problem is that drink was addling his mind and his skills at exactly the time that The Who needed him to get his shit MORE together. Pete’s musical ambitions were such that he found himself wanting to be liberated from carrying the ENTIRE weight of timekeeping, so he started using synthesizers to help with the heavy lifting, and he did it on the two heaviest songs on 1971′s Who’s Next, “Baba O’Riley” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again”. This also meant that time finally had some objective meaning, so Keith had to play to a click track in headphones, both in the studio and on stage.
This bore tremendous fruit in the finale of “Won’t Get Fooled Again” in particular, where Keith knew what was coming, and paced himself before unleashing holy hell, but it also isolated Keith from the vocal, which was not going to work for him in the long run.
I honestly don’t know where he could have gone if he hadn’t drunk himself to death, and I don’t think he did either. This is a conversation for another day, but there was nobody in pop more obsessed with spirituality and reconciling the irreconcilable elements inside himself than Pete Townshend, and there was nobody less interested in finding spiritual balance than Keith Moon. If you can describe a successful band as the balance of egos, what room do you make for someone who has no ego, but is all id?
Me, I think it's useless to argue which of these approaches is better. Neither drummer would have lasted a week in the other band. Each was perfect where he was.
Giving a little bit of extra space and love to Keith Moon in this context is partly as a corrective to the canon in the Tumblr classic rock fandom that Bonzo is the greatest drummer of all time. Outside Tumblr you'll get just as many people saying Neil Peart from Rush as anyone else, I think. My favorite is Ringo, but I've got a long list of drummers that I think are absolutely essential that we can talk about another day.
While I overall prefer Led Zeppelin and Bonzo to The Who and Moonie, I do think Who's Next handily beats Led Zeppelin IV in the battle of the 1971 titans. (For my money, Led Zeppelin started taking in 1973, which is exactly when The Who stopped peaking.)
More than that, it's not really possible to overstate the fondness I have for Keith's wholehearted rejection of anything resembling conventional expectations for the role of drummer that he otherwise so heartily embraced on his own terms. Nobody else's.
I asked a drummer friend of mine about all this once, specifically how he ranked Ringo, Bonzo, and Moonie, and he said, "I love Ringo, but he's not doing anything I'd care to be influenced by. Bonzo is the greatest, has an unmatched groove. I like The Who, but I don't even know what to call what Keith Moon is doing. I just wouldn't call it drumming." LOL I've heard a lot of similar observations from drummer pals over the years and I gotta say, the fact that Keith flummoxes so many other drummers to this very day makes me love him more.
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