With all due respect to the world's great drummers - it ain't brain surgery.
I had some proper training, but that was only on snare drum. Learning all the techniques in marching bands and realizing how important it is to play tight set a standard for me for when I did get into a band.
If drummers are 'anti-solo,' that's up to them. They're musicians, and they can play whatever they want. But my inspirations early on were people like Buddy Rich, seeing him on 'The Tonight Show', or Gene Krupa.
The drums are about gravity. Your hand naturally falls down on the drums as you hit them.
One that really caught me was Joe Morello. He was the first drummer I ever saw that could do a roll with one hand. He would turn his hand over and use his fingertips to get the stick bouncing. He could sit there with his right hand doing stuff on the cymbals and tom-toms while he was doing a roll with his left on the snare drum.
We would work up a tune that would make me learn a drum pattern I hadn't played before. In the early stages, the pattern wouldn't just fall into place, and I would start thinking about it. And the more I thought about it, the worse it would get.
Tommy Aldridge is the guy that made me wanna play double kick, man.
For singers and drummers, you've really gotta have your chops together just to do a rehearsal.
Mahavishnu's drummer Billy Cobham was the best I'd ever heard. Not loud, that's not the secret - powerful as hell when he wanted to be - but 90 per cent of the time, he was just dancing with the drums, you know? Just like a butterfly, all over them.
