News The drummer John Bonham would “quote” on Led Zeppelin’s ‘Moby Dick’
While John Bonham is often hailed as the greatest drummer of all time by many listeners, like every musical virtuoso, the late Led Zeppelin member was not entirely without influences. When needed, Bonham was unafraid to draw creative inspiration from those who had inspired him.
Bonham has always been a fascinating figure because of the fusion of his influences with natural technique and power. Although his story is inextricable from the proliferation of rock music, much of his earliest inspirations came from the jazz and big band era. Famously, his ultimate drumming hero was composer, bandleader and jazz extraordinaire Gene Krupa, whom he revered as his “God” in his early years.
However, it wasn’t just Krupa that Bonham took his cues from. The likes of Buddy Rich and British rival Ginger Baker, two men who also brought the complexities and grooves of jazz to the masses, made significant marks on him. From ‘Bonzo’s Montreux’ to ‘Achilles Last Stand’, these icons’ dynamism and musical nouse can be found repackaged across Bonham’s eclectic oeuvre.
There was another jazz pioneer who impacted Bonham so significantly that in his most important performance, the Led Zeppelin maestro would musically “quote” him. This was Max Roach, the bebop innovator who worked with the best in the business, including Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, and Charles Mingus, to name but a few. A stalwart of the genre; without Roach, classic works by others such as Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins and Dinah Washington would also have been without their widely influential and, indeed, elaborate rhythms.
This angle makes Bonham such a paradox, as although he birthed much of the rhythmic sensibilities of rock and heavy metal, it was from the somewhat antithetical jazz that he extracted the panache that allowed Led Zeppelin to be such an expansive musical outlet. Highlighting this, his trusted drum tech, Jeff Ocheltree, said: “John listened to Max Roach, Alphonse Mouzon, Elvin Jones, and a lot of fusion and jazz drummers. That’s the thing that gets me about John Bonham – everybody thinks he was into big drums and hitting them real hard. Bonham was into swing and playing with technique.”
Bonham was such a steadfast fan of Max Roach that when it came round to recording his magnum opus, the pulsating ‘Moby Dick’ from Led Zeppelin II, the bearded hero would “quote” Roach’s ‘The Drum Also Waltzes’ in his fills by replicating some of his patterns. That’s as good as paying homage gets.
Listen to ‘Moby Dick’ below.
