The Devil With Drumsticks

Ginger Baker, who just died at the age of eighty, was called "the devil with drumsticks" by rock journalist Lillian Roxon, and the description fit him well.  While previous rock drummers such as Ringo Starr and Charlie Watts were merely part of the show from their respective bands, Baker, no matter what band he was in, was the show, even more than the Who's Keith Moon. 

Baker first cut his teeth in the mid-sixties in the Graham Bond Organisation, a jazz-blues outfit that also included future Cream bassist Jack Bruce (Bond, the keyboard-playing lead singer, and Dick Heckstall-Smith on saxophone rounded out the group), where he brought a jazz sensibility and a knack for jazz-like improvisation to his playing. He brought that unique style to Cream and Blind Faith, with his heavy fills and masterful timekeeping and his spellbinding, crashing cymbals, all anchored by a double-bass drum kit.  

Baker's greatest strengths were his bands' weaknesses, though, and the early dissolutions of those bands (Blind Faith continued briefly without Eric Clapton under a new name, Air Force) showed just what a strong-willed musician he was.  He was a drummer but also a leader, and he worked in a musical form where drummers are expected to follow.  Baker wouldn't follow anyone, and even though the drummer remains the follower in the group, Baker was an inspiration to future rock drummers who realize that they matter more than their frontmen realize.  RIP.  

Sour Cream

Ginger Baker turns seventy today.

Baker, the greatest British progressive rock/blues drummer whose name isn't Rob Townsend, is best known as the drummer for Cream and Blind Faith, as well as the Graham Bond Organisation. In the seventies, he founded Air Force, a band that included Blind Faithers Steve Winwood and Ric Grech, and followed that up with a band he founded with Adrian Gurvitz, the Baker-Gurvitz Army.

As Groucho Marx would have said, thank goodness we had no Navy.

There's an article about Baker in the current issue of Rolling Stone, but I have yet to read it.

From what I understand, he's still an irascible type, having hit three score and ten. He currently lives in South Africa, having been forced out of other countries due to tax evasion, among other charges.