Greatest Rock Drummers

I’ll go with "favorite" rather than" best" and "pop" rather than "rock" and "rhythm section" rather than drummer. This band has my favorite rhythm section ever and is just one huge, organic rhythm machine:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jeCeoMCMn84

Ironically (per Shadorne’s issues re: one drop), the featured drummer is Winston Grennan, who is generally credited as the originator of one drop.

A lot of older non-musicians think of John Bonham as the gold-standard in Rock drumming (younger ones Neil Peart ;-). For instance, this woman I’m seeing now; she has drug me out to see two Led Zeppelin tribute bands (tb are huge in the NW, for some reason) recently (the latest just last night), both not half-bad. But the drummer in neither could come close to replicating Bonham’s style. He is unquestionably the most influential, imitated Rock drummer of them all, for better or worse.

Ginger Baker for me and also Keith Moon and Jim Keltner. Someone current you all will probably dismiss and/or sneer at John Fishman.

I saw Jason Bonham recently and he does a really great job of replicating the feel of his father while also having his own style (slightly more modern feel being more on the beat). I agree that the feel of John Bonham is hard to replicate - he really does deliberately hit late (behind the beat) quite often and the feeling is like it is about to fall apart but always catching up -this gives the music a lot of movement - and, of course, the “1” is always where it is supposed to be (he knew what he was doing).

https://youtu.be/jz0XbcaO4xk

Speaking of famous drummers with famous drummer dads---Zak Starkey, while no Keith Moon (who is?!), is doing a great job in The Who.