11 Hypnotic, Close-Up Minutes Watching Tool’s Legendary Drummer Danny Carey in Action

Like the great prog drum­mers of old—Bill Bru­ford, Neil Peart, Phil Collins—Tool’s Dan­ny Carey is an arti­san. They don’t make drum­ming like that any­more. He says so him­self (sort of) in an inter­view with Music Radar about his side project Leg­end of the Seag­ull­men with Mastadon’s Brent Hinds. Remem­ber­ing how Robert Fripp would stand on the edge of the stage, watch­ing Tool play when King Crim­son opened for the mod­ern prog-met­al giants, Carey remarks, “We weren’t sync­ing to some bull­shit like so many oth­er bands. We were actu­al­ly play­ing live. It’s a sad thing when almost every band you see isn’t doing that. It’s the clicks and back­ing tracks that are keep­ing time. I’ve nev­er played to a click on stage in my life.”

A “click track,” for those who don’t know, is exact­ly what it sounds like: a play­back of clicks (or any per­cus­sive sound) to the desired tem­po, pumped into a musician’s ear­piece to keep them play­ing in time. A use­ful tool of the record­ing stu­dio, many musi­cians, as Carey says, now use it on stage, along with vocal pitch cor­rec­tion soft­ware and pre-record­ed back­ing tracks to make sure every­thing sounds exact­ly like it does on record.

All of this tech­nol­o­gy ruins the feel of live per­for­mance, Carey main­tains. He would know. He’s been play­ing live since the 80s and play­ing with Tool since the band formed thir­ty years ago. He also jams every oth­er month, he says, “with these weird dudes who played with Miles Davis or Mahav­ish­nu Orches­tra.” So… yeah. The dude’s got some clas­sic chops.

But tech­nol­o­gy isn’t all bad in live music, far from it. Being a drum­mer used to mean that hard­ly any­one could see you on a big stage. You might be the most tal­ent­ed, best-look­ing mem­ber of the band, but you were hid­den away behind your kit with the singers and gui­tarists soak­ing up the glo­ry. Even when cer­tain celebri­ty rock drum­mers get their own stages (with their own mini-roller coast­ers), it can be impos­si­ble to see what they’re doing up close. No longer. Thanks to unob­tru­sive cam­eras that can stream video from any­where, no cor­ner of the stage need be obscured. We can watch a Tool show from over Carey’s shoul­der, as in the video of “Pneu­ma,” live in con­cert, at the top, pro­duced by drum equip­ment com­pa­ny Vic Firth to demon­strate Carey’s new sig­na­ture sticks.

It’s bet­ter to let Carey’s play­ing speak for itself, but for ref­er­ence, “Pneu­ma” comes from Tool’s very eager­ly-await­ed 2019 album Fear Inocu­lum, just one of many tracks “filled with twist after turn, con­ven­tion­al song struc­ture be damned,” Ilya Stemkovsky writes at Mod­ern Drum­mer, “with Carey at the cen­ter of the storm, pro­vid­ing the heav­i­est, most mas­sive bot­tom pos­si­ble. He even gets his own solo per­cus­sion track, ‘Choco­late Chip Trip,’ on which he incor­po­rates gongs and bells, among oth­er sounds.” Maybe this live view, and Tool’s well-deserved Gram­my Win for Best Met­al Per­for­mance this year for “7empest,” will inspire more drum­mers to drop the click and bring back what Carey calls the “ded­i­ca­tion to your vibe” from the days of arti­sanal drum­ming.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Neu­ro­science of Drum­ming: Researchers Dis­cov­er the Secrets of Drum­ming & The Human Brain

Wit­ness Rush Drum­mer Neil Peart’s (RIP) Finest Moments On Stage and Screen

What Makes John Bon­ham Such a Good Drum­mer? A New Video Essay Breaks Down His Inim­itable Style

See Why Gin­ger Bak­er (RIP) Was One of the Great­est Drum­mers in Rock & World Music

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness