Taylor Hawkins fondly remembered the first time he played drums in what Rolling Stone reports was his final on-camera interview.
“The second I sat on the drums, it was like a bolt of lightning went through my body,” he says in the trailer for a new documentary called Let There Be Drums!. “I’ll never forget that day.”
The film centers around "the world’s greatest drummers reflect[ing] on the art of drumming and how it has shaped their lives," and in addition to Hawkins features the likes of The Beatles' Ringo Starr, The Police's Stewart Copeland, Grateful Dead's Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, Red Hot Chili Peppers' Chad Smith and more.
Kreutzmann's son Justin directed the documentary. “Some might say this was ‘the film I was born to make,’ others might call it therapy,” he told Rolling Stone over the summer. “Since I was young and my dad gave me that first Super-8 camera, filmmaking is all I’ve wanted to do.”
“It started as a fun little film with all the drummers I’ve gotten to know over the years,” he added. “It wasn’t until Taylor Hawkins stopped our interview and said, ‘Maybe this isn’t for this documentary, but what was your home life like?’ I found from then on, I was having a dialogue with these amazing drummers instead of just a Q&A. They were as interested in hearing about my dad, Jerry Garcia, and the Grateful Dead as I was about their bands and their lives. So a really interesting thing happened, the film became more about family, but these families just happened to be drummers.”
The trailer comes nearly seven months after Hawkins' unexpected death at the age of 50. Watch the Let There Be Drums! trailer below.