Bill Rieflin did more than just adapt his drumming skills to fit musical settings as vastly different as the Revolting Cocks and Robyn Hitchcock. He used those skills to make significant contributions live and in the studio to three incredibly influential groups in their respective genres. Rieflin provided the metronomic foundation for Ministry as Al Jourgensen’s band flirted with taking industrial music into the mainstream in the late ’80s and early ’90s. The following decade, he’d become an important part of R.E.M.’s third act, playing on several late-era albums by the pioneering alt-indie band, in addition to touring with them all over the globe. And when prog’s wildly adventurous progenitors, King Crimson, out-Crimson’d themselves by unveiling a radical three-drummers-across-the-front lineup in 2014, there was Rieflin in the middle, providing the rhythmic ballast between Pat Mastelotto’s percussive outbursts and Gavin Harrison’s precise shredding. Rieflin, who died in March at age fifty-nine […]

September 2020 Issue