That's interesting. With me, there was never a time when I liked Powell's drum style. I thought he was a handsome man and had a cool image, but I've always identified heavy-handed drumming with skill-less drumming (this will have the Bonham brigade up in arms, I know, but you all know by now that his drumming does nothing for me). I always found that Cozy Powell sounded like Mick Tucker, the likewise heavy-handed drummer of The Sweet.
I would even go as far as to say that Powell's drum style reminded me in sound and obnoxious simplicity of Glam Rock drums per se. Overly loud and heavy-handed drums were a key component of Glam Rock after all. When I heard that he was joining Rainbow I was flabbergasted, what is the Na Na Na guy doing with someone who played with Ian Paice before?
Now I do like like Glam Rock, but the drumming on those records isn't exactly Billy Cobham, is it?
And when Rainbow Rising came out, I found the drumming on it outright clumsy while everybody else seemed to love it.
"I'm like a freight train"-Cozy alright:
For me, the definition of good rock drumming is whether you match or better what Ian Paice does here. In my experience, not many drummers can:
Are you fast, inventive, elegant and can you swing? That is what determines a good rock drummer for me. Or let's just say "my taste of what good rock drumming should be", because I always feel I'm in a minority on this.
I'm an Ian Paice, Stewart Copeland, Simon Phillips, Mark Nauseef, Phil Collins, Les Binks, Michael Shrieve, Ginger Baker, Pick Withers, Jeff Porcaro, Peter Criss, Scott Travis, Chris Slade, Levon Helm, Ringo Starr, Bill Ward kind of guy, to name but a few, people that don't pound the music to death, yet still make you watch and listen. The "galley slave pounders" never really impressed me though it seems to me that come the 80ies their style of drumming had won out and became omnipresent. Possibly, I'm more a fan of percussionists than of pure drummers. And I dig it if there is something playful in their style that other people might consider "overdrumming". And if they do not just provide the foundation of the music, but also have the ability to "skip along with and sometimes even over it". A (s)light Jazz touch perhaps?
Cozy Powell's popularity as a drummer in various bands was largely based on the fact that people found his sheer energy exciting and physically stimulating when playing with him. He was a force of nature. But I don't think that anyone would have mistaken him as being a great technician on drums or a groove monster. Unless you find barbarians pounding at the gate groovy.
