Who beat the beat the best? In my opinion, there are two that rise above the rest. John Bonham and Keith Moon, Brits by birth and drum royalty by any other measure, took the beat and revved it up way past the red line, forcing the rest of their stellar bandmates to keep up. Watch Jimmy Page in concert footage and you will see that he spends a lot of his time by John Bonham's drums, watching what was going on. He used Bonham's frenetic progressions as a guide to a lot of his riffs, thereby creating a whole new genre of rock. Likewise, Keith Moon was so good, so fast, so much a genius with drumsticks that he made The Who a band to remember. Both men were eerily similar in lifestyle and temperament. Both died tragically young from the excesses in the name of fun. These mortals had something special, something otherwordly to give to the musical world. They were the hammers of the gods.