[TAYLOR HAWKINS, 1972-2022] The Heartbeat of the Foos

He was one of the 21st century's most beloved drummers and a flag bearer for the spirit of rock & roll. Then it all ended, way too soon

- BRIAN HIATT

In the mid-Eighties, when Taylor Hawkins was a teenager in Laguna Beach, California, he’d drum along to his favorite records in his parents’ garage so loudly that local kids got used to hearing him during soccer practice on a nearby field. Hawkins played some baseball, at the urging of a brother who “willed him” to be good at it, and surfed a bit, though not as much as his central-casting California-dude looks and lifelong fondness for going around shirtless and barefoot in board shorts would suggest. “I was never that great,” he said. “Because I was always in the garage, smoking cigarettes and playing drums.” He played in his high school’s jazz band for a while, until they threw him out for being “too loud, too fast.”

So it all came back to that garage and those records, an obsession that began when he saw a Queen concert at age 10. “My rudimental training was Rush’s Exit . . . Stage Left and the Police’s Zenyattà Mondatta,” he once told Modern Drummer. In upscale Laguna Beach, the preppy kids were into reggae, so Hawkins would keep his unfashionable Van Halen and Queen records to himself. He never got much into punk rock, either. “I went to a hardcore show in Huntington when I was 12 or 13 and hated it,” he said. “It was just really rough, and there were no girls there.”