Yeah, that is a lot of fills. Here’s a laff: the 45 is 3:28–a fourth of the song is edited out* :eek:. But, the flip side is Free Ride; some sort of double-hit re-issue platter.
I’m relieved you didn’t spend the whole day cataloging links.
*Someone I knew had a 45 of “Roundabout” that clocked in at just over 4 minutes. 
Matt Sorum on Guns N’ Roses’ “November Rain” uses a fill which he recycles throughout most of the Use Your Illusion Records:
(that is a drum cover). The fill is first placed around 57 seconds in.
Crap, the second one was my choice. Roger Taylor never did a lot of those big long fills but that one takes him all the way through his kit. Amazing long run, there.
This has to be my final final final Bill Bruford fill fix. (indeed, like Chicago once said, he is a hard habit to break)
While it’s common to improvise in live settings, BB takes it to a whole new level, with his jazz leanings. You can tell he’s having all the fun in the world, playing around the beat, all up and down, but then, without fail, he’d always come to the end of every passage, tight and emphatically, with the rest of the band.
Youtube has a lot of “bootleg” 70s King Crimson recordings, and the following, starting around 52:51, showcases a bunch of quick (as well as loping) fills that, for this cub reporter, puts BB in that exalted space alongside Reggie Leach and Hal Ashby.
Not exactly the sound you’d hear from a Bang & Olufsen through Boses, but oh wells.
My Wife by The Who.
I’ve counted arond two dozen fills in that song, and every single one is different.
Keith Moon did that fill that started in 1966 and ended in 1975. 
You mean in '78, when he croaked, or did he do some stylistic changes in their 1975 Who By Numbers album?
Ha! I pulled the dates out of my rear end, but I did have a vague feeling his drumming style changed a bit a few years before he died.
Ooooh! I’ve appeared to have forgotten Dale Crover. If I were to vote in some sort of “Best Drummer Ever” election, it’d have to be for him. If you’ve heard Nirvana’s Bleach, then you’ve heard him play. But he seems to really cut loose with The Melvins.
Sweet Willy Rollbar is 1:31 of pure glory. The opening fill and the fills starting at :55 are pure Dale.
Honey Bucket is a fill-o-rama every time they hit the turnaround.
Skin Horse is a nice, mellow anthem - then Dale gets to blast away fill after fill throughout the whole crescendo. Then, The Melvins get to remind you that they don’t do much the way you expect them to.
And hey, Dave Grohl agrees with me, at least. Lots of drummers these days play in Dale’s style, because Dave is trying to be Dale. Dave’s greatest moment to me is his performance in Queens Of the Stone Age’s No One Knows. Aside from a generally very tasty performance, and a hell of a breakdown; every time through the chorus, he’s all over the kit, and it fits.
Another I’ve been appreciating a lot recently is Jump Into the Fire by Harry Nilsson. Tasty, tight snare fills all over the place in that nice, jammy song. Then the bass player detunes the bass to flappytown and it goes godlike. The end is technically a drum solo, but it’s still tasty and doesn’t ever make you go “ugh, drum solo”. Then they work it smoothly back in to the riff like a band should.
The Sonic’s Psycho opens with a fill, and gives you a great fill every time you run through the chorus. Plus, it totally rocks in every other way.
And for a guy who only had a 3 piece drum set, Nick Knox does tasty fills. In Garbageman you get a nice fill each time through the chorus, and The Mad Daddy is the same way.
asphaltking, welcome to the Dope. Posting links without permission is seen as spam. You should check in with the mods.
A couple fills hit me out of nowhere, so I figured why not do a Fathers Merrin and Karras job on this thread and mention the opening “Burning Down the House” fill, and this absolutely flabbergasting fill from Narada Micheal Walden in “NY3”, off Robert Fripp’s IMO underrated/given short shrift Exposure album.
The beat, to begin with, is a handful to play, let alone chartable (for this hack), but then starting at somewhere around the 1:45 mark, and then somehow resurfacing back again to that kick-ass beat on the ride at the 1:57 mark is, quite possibly, The Craziest Fill Of All Time:
Oh hell, this glorious composition is like one, long extended drum fill - screw cueing it up at 1:45, just keep an eye on it when the fill comes up, then, heh, if you can follow its 12 seconds of crushing beauty:
(or scroll forward to it if no time allowing)
I saw him interviewed (while sitting at his drum kit), and he was laughing at the rock journalists dissecting his “amazing ability to retard his fills”, to delay a beat… when it was really that, being left handed, it really just took him longer to get his left hand around.
He demonstrated it (on those great rolls on “Come Together” I think), and it was beautiful. Sounded like a jazz drummer playing 4D chess, when it was really just a guy being late to the beat.
.
Note: I grew up kind of resenting drummers. The late 60s were the days of the Interminable Drum Solo, when every concert (by Cream, or Floyd, or the Dead, or all those bands that were trying to be Cream, or Floyd, or the Dead) had a couple of songs with lonnnng drum cadenzas, and then…oh, god, here it is again… the obligatory fifteen minute drum solo.
So it’s only lately I’ve come to appreciate those drummers… and their ability to keep a beat* AND throw in cool fills.
*Watch that Pink Floyd clip above… Nick Mason is an absolute metronome. Even when he’s not playing (starting at the 2:30 mark) he’s counting in his head. It almost looks like he’s mouthing “and 3 and 4 and…”)
Well, here’s a lack of fill at 2:30. Ain’t coincidences cool?
This inspired me . . . I’ve always thought that Ringo’s drum fill in “The End” was being paid homage to by Keith Moon and others in some of their iconic solos. So, I put together a short collection of clips of:
The Beatles “The End”
The Who “Won’t Get Fooled Again”
Dire Straits/ “Money for Nothing”
Phil Colins “In The Air Tonight”
First you can hear longer cuts of the solos (except for ‘The End’, because whoever owns The Beatles’ catalogue really don’t want me to dilute their value (gripe for another thread)), and then single measures of each back-to-back, that zeroes in on what, to me, are the most direct, um, moments of tribute to Ringo.
I feel like I have one or two other examples of this same figure from notable drum solos/fills, but I can’t think of them at the moment.
Another fill I love:
Carter Beauford (who in my opinion is the primary reason Dave Matthews got as big as he did) just tears up ‘Ants Marching’. The best moment of the entire song is the drum fill at the end of the instrumental at the end of the song. I linked a few seconds before the moment in question, which is at 4:04.
When this song comes on, I keep listening just to hear that fill. One of the things that make it masterful, in my mind, is that it comes not during the solo, but in the first measure after the solo, once the groove starts again. Like, we’re used to drum fills leading us out of one section of a song and into the next, while this is offset by a bar, not beginning until the next section has already started.
Your four-fill youtube clip was splunge enough for me to leave that comment. Fine correlation, and the condensed addendum - perfect.
Rad.
Yeah, there’s others on the tip of my tongue, too.
Indeed, Mr. Beauford I think has been regarded as the “most watched” member in the DM band sorta thing, and that fill certainly attests to his briliant sharpness.
Heh, gnawing at me what can augment Eonwe’s Ringo tribute, and then remembered some completely unrelated old school deathmetal fills like from Terrorizer’s World Downfall album, where basically the whole thing is a Pete Sandoval clinic. Fill at exactly 23:36.
Hellwitch might go on record for coming up with the only fill that has ever comprised (an albeit short) chorus, with a whole lotta tom and double kick action going on, as in with “Nosferatu”, from 1:37 to 1:50:
Nice jazzy fills here from a very young Slint drummer. Steve Albini’s recordings around this time have so much zip and pop and immediacy, and starting at 25:30 Britt Walford lays down a few cracking salvos, with the odd roll. Sprightly!
Last fall/winter, I took a deep dive into the Police, particularly for Stewart Copeland. They became the soundtrack for my mid-Covid pandemic life. I watched and rewatched one after another live performance – I had only really been familiar with their studio recordings, and just through those, Stewart Copeland cemented himself as one of my favorite all-time rock drummers. His creative beats, displaced accents, fusing of straight-ahead backbeats with Afro-Caribbean rhythms and hi-hat flourishes – nobody sounds like him. Watching him live added yet another layer of appreciation of him to me: the way he hits those drums hard with his modified traditional grip and those side swipes/backhands on the cymbals – he is fun to watch.
It’s hard to me to nominate a single drum track for his fills, as what I appreciate about him most is his entire rhythmic compositional sense: the way he builds a drum part, adding musical interest every loop through the verse and chorus, and keeps his parts original and totally married to the song.
The intro fill to “Spirits in a Material World” is always a good one. Where you expect a crash on the one, there’s nothing. The drum fill rolls into an empty one and the first hi-hat sticks on one-and; through much of the song, the kick is on two and four. The song has a displaced feeling until you hit the chorus, where the familiar back beat appears and the kick on one and 2& and 3 root us back to rock. (The “one drop” – where you don’t play anything on the one – is a well-known rhythmic idiom Jamaican beats.)
A little flashier are all the fills on “Driven To Tears” in the refrain:
I could probably give a whole course on the drum part to this song and everything I love about it and how the beat is built. One of my favorite parts is the build-up to the guitar solo, where Stewart just lays off everything except for the kick and ride cymbal, lays into a rockin’ backbeat, and then as Andy Summers finishes, he plays the sort of fill you expect to end with a really hard crash after a roll on the snare and toms but it just ends at a kick and disappears quietly into the verse.
But with the main fills, I just love all those accents on the 3. All the cymbal and tom flourishes target the 3 (which makes sense, as the 3 is the important beat in reggae, and that is where the pulse of the beat in this song is.) But it still sounds super cool to me, a bit like crashing on the 2 in a normal rock song.
@pulykamell This is great! Gives me a much better appreciation of what we’re listening to.
One drum fill that’s a real earworm for me is the intro to Peter Gabriel’s “Red Rain.” It always seemed so counter-intuitive somehow. I recently looked it up online and learned that the drummer for that part was… Stewart Copeland. And then it all made more sense.
I’m not the biggest fan of this song, but the fill in “Jack & Diane” I think is somewhat famous among drummers. I could be wrong, but I remember it vaguely being pointed out to me and I saw some interview with Kenny Aronoff (drummer) and how he was kind of shitting bricks about figuring out how to segue from a very sparse beat into the “Let It Rock, Let It Roll, Let the Bible Belt come and save my soul” part.
It’s a deceptively simple fill, but it’s a tough little musical space to fill tastefully. Oh, I found the video of Kenny explaining his mental state before playing the part. It’s a fun, short watch:
