How about the drum solo from Santana Album Moonflower, track is called Head, hands and feet.
This is about the best ever trust me on this.
Edgar Winter Group - Frankenstein, very good one this and innovative in its time using an electronic drum.
Focus - Hocus Pocus this Dutch band is known for this track, justifiably so.
The rhythym track of Sultana’s Titanic, not easy to find but a really good one.
Dear OP Minlokwat
Those should put you on a bit, please take the trouble to find them and comment.
The problem with these surveys is that folk are happy to put up suggestions but they never get any feedback.
I would be really grateful if you could find the time to chase down some of the tracks mentioned and lets all have your opinion on how they compare with your candidates.
…and then give us your winner, after all you will be better informed than any of us.
Rock and Roll drum solo’s? I’m like Ringo, he hated drum solo’s, refused to do them. His longest one is the earlier mentioned Abbey Road 20 sec. solo.
The only kind of drum I enjoy by themselves would be Indian tabla’s.
rande…
Having seen Cream, Hendrix, Iron Butterfly, Zeppelin, The Who (Moon, Jones, Phillips, Starkey), Spirit, Dead and many others, I’d have to say the longest drum solo I’ve seen was at the Northern California Folk Rock Festival in San Jose in May of '69. The show included Poco, The Blues Magoos, Chuck Berry, Santana (before their first album came out and with a dirty trick intro by Bill Graham, but that’s another story), Spirit, Jefferson Airplane and several others I can’t recall right now. There was one guy/band there that night called Pulse. He played the drums, but had them wired up to different color lights placed around the stage. As he hit different drums, different lights would flash creating varying shadows of himself dancing around on the light show screen behind him. He played an amazing set for probably 30-45 minutes (memory hazy) becoming more and more complex. It was spellbinding. As he wound everything up into a climax, the last note he hit there was a blinding flash of light, after which he was just gone. I never saw or heard of him again although I think he did have an album out.
I can’t name any tunes, but I’d have to vote for one by Butch Miles. His are always tasty. And short. An important consideration when deciding if a drum solo can even be considered good, let alone best.
Domingo (“Sonny”) Ortiz from Widespread Panic does a solo at just about all of their shows. I’m sure some of those have stretched out for a while; I’m not enough of a Panic-head to say for sure. He plays mostly hand drums rather than a kit (the other guy does that, can’t think of his name) but he certainly rocks some percussive ass.
One of the most impressive five-minute drum solos I’ve ever seen was by Junior Brown’s drummer, made all the more impressive by the fact that he only had a snare drum.
If you can call what Future Man (of the Flecktones) does a “drum solo”, then the solo bits he does at their shows are worthy of the list.
