johnto---actually, I did mention Jim Gordon, in a post a couple of days ago (it reads "Jim’s Gordon and Keltner"---my way of saying Jim Gordon and Jim Keltner). I love his playing, and his cymbals were as good sounding as I’ve ever heard, as were Levon Helm’s. Bonham’s? Uh, not so much. I have one of Jim’s Camco drumsets, acquired in L.A. in the late 90’s. They were left in a storage facility when he was "sent away" (Jim started hearing voices, which one day told him to kill his mother. He did, with a butcher knife.), and I lucked onto them when the building was sold, along with it’s contents.
Jim was not only an unusually musical drummer, but also wrote and played the piano part in the middle of "Layla" (where the song breaks down, and the band stops playing). One of my half-dozen favorite drummers of all-time. I’m going to guess Steve Cham also considers Bonham a more inventive and musical drummer than Jim Gordon. Steve and I obviously have different ideas of what constitutes musicality! And while I can understand why and how one could find the more "obvious" playing of Bonham more inventive than that of Levon Helm (Helm’s creativity is too subtle and refined for some, a little over their heads ;-), the same can not be said of John Paul Jones’ bass playing in comparison with that of Rick Danko. The bass playing on The Band albums is astonishingly great! JPJ’s playing is the very definition of pedestrian. That is NOT a matter of opinion amongst musicians---ask any really good bassist about JPJ and Danko.
The "problem" with Rock (or Pop, or Country, etc.) drummers who overplay, is that they think what they are playing is as important as the song itself---the chord sequences, the melody, harmony, and counterpoint, the arrangement, etc. They think what they are playing IS the song! They have not yet learned the role, the function, of their instrument in the big picture. Let me make a couple of analogies, if over-simplified ones:
1- The script of a movie (a film, if you insist ;-) is analogous to a song, the dialogue to a movie as the chords and melody are to a song. Now, what if there were an actor who thought that the manner in which he delivered his lines, taken out of the context of the movie, were more important than the lines themselves? Have you heard one actor refer to another as generous? Good musicians view and judge each other similarly---whether another is acting (playing) in a way as to draw all the attention to themselves, or to act (play) as part of an ensemble. It takes maturity, wisdom, and selflessness to play as part of an ensemble. THAT is the manner in which Jim Gordon, Levon Helm, and Rick Danko play music.
2- In literature, all the ideas are conveyed in words, unlike a movie. There are the raw words themselves, but they are organized into sentences, paragraphs, and chapters. Each line of words is also organized, the meaning of the words clarified with the use of punctuation. It is my contention that the best Pop (which includes all sub-genres) drummers realize that the role of drums is NOT on the same level of importance as the song itself (chords, melody, etc.), that drums instead provide the definition, clarification, and organization that punctuation and other forms of grammar do in literature. It’s not that black-and-white, but you get the point. Watch Steve Gadd playing with Clapton---that’s exactly what he is doing.
There is much more to it that that---dynamics, color, phrasing, etc. But I’ll again repeat myself---if a drummer is playing parts with the main consideration being how his playing reflects on him rather than on how it effects the song itself---which exists whether or not he is playing at all---then his approach is not musical. It’s just that simple.
