Originally posted by slowpogo:
adidasman..I tend to agree with you, and I think sometimes people here have the best of intentions, but tend to overstate things out of a desire to support the band.
Peter Jones is a perfectly competent professional drummer, and he certainly didn't *not* fit in well. But he mostly just served his purpose for little while, and then things changed. I have nothing against him but he was a fill-in drummer for the band, and thus, that's probably how he should be remembered.
To elevate him much beyond that seems a bit silly - he's a "good drummer" in the same way that any professional touring drummer at that level is a "good drummer," but there's nothing terribly special about him IMO. There are many hundreds of drummers (if not more) who, while perhaps not as good a match for the band per se in terms of chemistry and style, are at least as skilled on a drum set as Peter Jones.
There's a certain x-factor that's hard to verbalize which really special musicians have. I think Paul Hester definitely had it on the drums. Matt S. is certainly at a higher level than Peter Jones, IMO, but I'm not sure he has that special quality. My comments are less a reflection of a negative opinion of Peter Jones, than an acknowledgment that superlatives get thrown about too easily in general these days, this board and elsewhere, and far fewer people actually deserve them than it would seem. The word "genius" is a good example. Isaac Newton was a genius, Tchaikovsky and Shakespeare were geniuses. Are even 0.1% of the people that are called geniuses in today's world, even remotely close to being at the level of those people? No. Even Neil Finn is, I'm sorry, not a "genius," not if we're also applying that word to Beethoven. He's certainly a wildly talented songwriter/musician, but that's not the same thing at all.
OK, I'm ranting now.
I'll just settle on saying that Peter Jones was a pretty good professional drummer who ably filled in for the band in a time of need. For that, we thank him and wish him well, and I see no reason to go further than that.
(I think more highly of Matt than you do - he's not Paul, but he's very good and a lot of fun to watch. I wish his playing came across as strongly on Intriguer as it does live, but I blame the producer for that. One thing for sure, though; Matt is not nearly as idiosyncratic as Paul was, and that hurts him when compared to the late Mr. Hester. Paul was the closest thing to Ringo I've seen - a true original.)