There’s an inherent mystery to rock-and-roll drummers and the emotional fuel they burn. When they’re happy, they hit the drums hard. When they’re angry, they hit the drums hard. For listeners, this is a loud and generous riddle. When a drummer really knows how to whomp, we can hear whichever feeling we’re feeling, even if we’re feeling both. And that’s life, right? There’s a lot to be happy about and a lot to be angry about.
Taylor Hawkins of Foo Fighters seemed like a happy drummer — or at least that’s how everyone interpreted the smile he perpetually flashed from behind his kit, a crescent of beaming dentition whiter than strobe lights. His playing was extraordinarily bright, too. Buoyant, brash and propulsive onstage, Hawkins hit hard, channeling all the angry-happiness in the room, whether it was 9:30 Club or Wembley Stadium. The vitality of his drumming makes his death — which was announced Friday before a Foo Fighters concert in Bogotá — all the more difficult to compute. Hawkins was 50. No cause of death has been announced.
Basking in his smile always felt easy, but trying to read it was more fun. Hawkins made hard work look like a good time, so we naturally had a good time watching. But what was really happening up there? One hypothesis: The nonstop boom-bash catharsis that kept him grinning was rooted in repeatedly acing his own personal alignment of technique and intuition. In a 2010 interview with Rhythm magazine, Hawkins described drumming as questing toward “a sort of perfection” that can never be realized. “Your heart beats a certain way and you feel music a certain way,” Hawkins said, “so there are always things that you are never going to be able to change.” Which means getting it right requires getting it wrong. Maybe with this kind of drumming, the “angry” is in the effort while the “happy” results from coming deliciously close to something impossible.
That’s all big fun to witness, consciously or subconsciously, but if Hawkins was a crowd-pleaser, it was mostly by default. The person he remained most committed to impressing was Dave Grohl, the former Nirvana drummer who invited Hawkins to join Foo Fighters in 1997. By all accounts, Hawkins instantly became Grohl’s protege, best bud, little brother figure and musical soul mate — one who clearly understood that he was now keeping time for one of the greatest rock drummers alive. I won’t forget seeing Hawkins and Grohl swapping squinty nods during a searing performance of “Monkey Wrench” at 9:30 Club in 2014. It was as if they were confirming full mind-meld outside of their exclusive telepathic channel entirely for the crowd’s benefit. These two weren’t just bandmates. They were synced clocks.
When news of Hawkins’s death spread late Friday night, many noticed a brutal new symmetry in Grohl’s life. A drummer whose bandleader had died too young was now a bandleader whose drummer had died too young. The rhythms of real life can be tumultuously cruel, but sometimes they explode in patterns — not unlike a rock-and-roll drum beat.
