John “Bonzo” Bonham of Led Zeppelin: is he the best drummer of all time?

John Henry Bonham was born in Worcestershire, England. According to Rolling Stone magazine, his merits are indisputable and make him seem from above: he occupies first place in the ranking of the 100 best drummers of all time.

With a career that included several little-known bands (Terry Webb and the Spiders, Blue Star Trio, The Senators and Crawling King Snakes), it was with the last band he played in, Led Zeppelin, that he achieved his ticket to immortality.

In 1968, he joined the quartet led by Jimmy Page with his Crawling King Snakes bandmate Robert Plant, who recommended him. Bonzo fit in perfectly with the rest of the band members and, above all, with the aggressive sound that the guitarist was looking for in the songs.

Although he had no formal musical studies, Bonham began to differentiate himself from the average percussionist. For renowned drum teacher Ricardo Ruiz, what made the difference was “its powerful and solid sound, as well as the dimensions that made up the different elements of his drums”.

The latter reason is because large kits were not that common at that time. In the early days of Led Zeppelin, they used a Slingerland brand drummer with classic dimensions: 22″x14″ bass drum, 14″x5″ Ludwig Supraphonic drums and 13″x9″ and 16″x16″ toms. Already with the group’s first album (Led Zeppelin I, 1969) came to occupy a large Ludwig instrument: bass drum 24″x14″, 18″x16″, 16″x16″, toms 14″x12″ and superphonic snare drum 14″x6.5″. Even in the 1970s, it occupied 26″x14″ drums, a huge size even today.

A virtue that a good drummer should have is that he uses his own musical style, that is, he uses all the resources he knows for the benefit of the songs. Bonham fulfilled this role perfectly, and this is what Ruiz emphasizes: “He used his own language and you can see it in the song good times bad timesthe use of triplets on the bass drum, its versatility in How many more timesor the way to approach the blues like I can’t take you baby“.

The use of triplets is not a random choice, it has to do with the fact that Bonham collected the language of the blues (where this rhythmic figure is used) and brought it to hard rock.

However, beyond the strictly musical, Bonham admitted in an interview that his thing was above all the search for his own sound: “It’s all very well playing a triple paradiddle, but who will know that you’re really doing it? If you pay too much attention to technique, you start to sound like every other drummer. I think being original is what matters. I think being yourself as a drummer is much better than being like anyone else,” he said.

He wanted to be so different from others that he ended up adding instruments such as gongs and symphonic timpani, all of which were large, to his setup.

John Bonham died on September 25, 1980, at the age of 32, from asphyxiation caused by his own vomiting after ingesting a large quantity of vodka. The event caused Led Zeppelin to immediately break up, as they considered him irreplaceable. Ultimately, he had managed to become a different musician.

Currently, any drummer, or aspiring to play this instrument, should pay attention to Bonzo’s performance, especially in his way of accompanying a song, because “he never interfered with the melody and always reserved a space where he showed all his technical ability to enhance the song,” says Ricardo Ruiz.