Review: You love their music, now find out who these musicians are

If you’re a music fan who hasn’t thought much about drumming (I’m guilty on both counts), “Backbeats” will be a revelation.

Amateur drummer John Lingan divides his book into 15 chapters about 15 drummers. They’re not his favorites, he says, but they’re the ones he thinks have had the most impact on rock music. To get this weakness out of the way, the book is very light on female drummers, including just one (Moe Tucker of Velvet Underground) and not even parenthetically mentioning Karen Carpenter.

The Carpenters singer/drummer is a surprising omission not just because she blazed trails but also because Lingan’s generous book beats the drum for so many musicians beyond its 15 stars.

Each chapter has a bit of biographical information about its main character, but Lingan is not didactic about sticking to his subjects, having admitted in his introduction that he could easily have picked different drummers. He’s always willing to follow his passions. Neither Bun E. Carlos nor Keith Moon gets a chapter, for instance, but we learn how much Lingan loves Carlos’ work on the “Cheap Trick at Budokan” album and Lingan devotes a big chunk of the chapter on Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham to the Who’s Moon.

All of these people could maintain a beat, of course, but the revelation in “Backbeats,” subtitled “A History of Rock and Roll in Fifteen Drummers,” is how much more they did to make classic songs endure.

Lingan is adept at describing distinctive sounds. Of Al Jackson Jr.’s playing on Booker T. and the M.G.’s iconic “Green Onions,” Lingan writes that “it’s not the first thing people think of when they think of ‘Green Onions,’ but the drums give the song its danger, too, its military stride.” And Lingan describes how Wrecking Crew drummer Hal Blaine’s unorthodox percussion included “adding a ticking beat to ‘God Only Knows’ that he played on taped-up orange juice bottles and keeping a soft tempo on ‘Caroline, No’ using an upturned water jug and a mallet.” You’ll want to keep a phone or iPad handy while you read, so you can listen along.

Lingan is great on musical phenomena that fans may have noticed but not been able to put their fingers on: how drum sounds on just about every hit record changed in the ‘80s, when drummers stopped recording them in padded studios and switched to wide-open warehouses. How Gene Krupa’s virtuosity on “Sing Sing Sing” assured that it “wasn’t only a fun dance tune; it was the sound of a musician setting his instrument free.” How Clyde Stubblefield created Lingan’s all-time favorite drum part on James Brown’s “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose,” a “monumental” sound in which his “bass drum is like a mammoth’s leg slamming to earth, his snare like Paul Bunyan’s axe.”

Like a talented drummer’s work, Lingan’s writing slides throughout the book, underscoring its themes and occasionally popping out to dazzle us. Like Questlove, who gets a chapter for his work with the Roots and others, he demonstrates that he’s a practitioner who’s also a scholar and a superfan.

Backbeats

By: John Lingan.