“He’s so advanced as a musician, but he’s just a regular person, too,” says Jim Keltner, the fabled 78-year-old drummer who ranks as one of Mills’s lifelong icons and has become one of his most consistent collaborators. “He’s so good that you can’t forget what it would be like to be his age and be one of his peers — you either have to love the guy, or be very jealous.”
Keltner remembers Mills from one of those early sessions, when they both played parts on a Jakob Dylan album that were never used. (Keltner had played with Dylan’s father for decades.) The drummer was floored then by the eager guitarist, nearly half a century his junior. For Mills, it was “like meeting someone you have met before in dreams.” But Mills felt as though he had flubbed his time with his idol, trying to impress the drummer by incorporating some of the rhythmic tricks he’d learned from old Keltner records. “I kept stepping on his toes by playing like him, by speaking the same language,” remember Mills.
Keltner now talks of Mills with near-parental pride. He brags about the text chain they share (“The M.O.A.T.,” for The Mother of All Threads) with Los Angeles session aces such as Benmont Tench. He wishes Mills were old enough to have played alongside him in the Traveling Wilburys.
