Billy Corgan has showered Travis Barker with some extravagant praise, calling him “the most influential drummer of the last thirty years”.
Barker was a guest on Corgan’s The Magnificent Others podcast where the pair chatted about drumming, rock music and so on. About a third of the way into the interview, the Smashing Pumpkins man says of his guest: “You have influenced more popular drummers in the last thirty years than any drummer I can think of. When we talk about rock/ alternative, something about the way you played kind of unleashed this different way of playing.
“I guess power pop or rock drums, that comes directly from you because before you people didn’t play like that, and after you, almost everybody plays like you.”
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What can you say to that? Clearly honoured, the Blink drummer replied: “That means so much. Yeah, I mean, I don’t even know what to say,” before going on to talk about his influences.
He described those as “just this weird kind of mixture of everything that I was raised on. I owe it to like Buddy Rich and everyone from Buddy Rich to, like, the Meters drummer was like a huge influence. Cissy Strut – I would sit at home and try to figure out these drum parts, you know.
“Even Tommy Lee, like seeing a drummer in the forefront of the band was… There was just so many great drummers. Jimmy Chamberlin, Dennis Chambers… Animal from the Muppets was my biggest influence as a child.”
Barker also told Corgan about how after his 2008 plane crash, getting back to the drums was an essential part of his recovery. “It was the first thing I did when I got out of the burns centre,” he reveals. “I actually didn’t tell Dr Grossman, my burns doctor… He was a straight shooter and he was like ‘I don’t know if you’re going to play drums again’. No one knew, but both of my hands were numb. And I didn’t want to say anything because I just wanted out of the hospital.”
“So I didn’t tell Dr Grossman and it turned out I had a bunch of nerve damage, but I just couldn’t wait to get home. And they would push me outside, and I would play on a practice pad. My hands were still scabbed. My burns weren’t even completely healed yet. (But) that was (when) I finally felt connected to something.”
