FEATURE:
Let It Rain
IN THIS PHOTO: Ringo Starr performs with The Beatles in 1965/PHOTO CREDIT: Michael Ochs Archives/Stringer/Getty Images
The Genius of Ringo Starr
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THIS might not seem timely or…
PHOTO CREDIT: Michael Putland/Getty Images
connected to anything relevant, but I think there are still people out there who doubt the drumming brilliance of Ringo Starr (although he has postponed his All Starr Band tour because of the coronavirus). Whilst Starr (Richard Starkey) has drummed outside of his work with The Beatles on his solo material, I am going to focus on his work with the legendary band as I feel his finest performances were laid down there - apologies if he or any fans feel differently. There are articles that select his top-ten drumming performances but, as I will show in the playlist at the end, one cannot limit Ringo Starr. His genius is evident from some of the earliest Beatles recordings right to the end! Starr turns eighty on 7th July, and I hope he gets a salute and nod from every musician and fan out there. Whilst so much attention, in Beatles terms, is given to Paul McCartney and John Lennon, one cannot underestimate the importance and role Ringo Starr played. I actually (briefly) met Ringo Starr when I was at school. He used to own an estate in Cranleigh, Surrey, a couple of miles away from where I grew up and went to school. I worked after school at a health food shop, Natural Life (which is still there), on Cranleigh high street. It must have been 1999, and in walked Ringo Starr with his wife, Barbara Bach. He had a baseball cap on and they were with their dog – who, rather unfortunately, bit someone (though the man who was bitten didn’t mind; quite a claim to fame!). I digress, of course! I have been listening a lot to a Beatles-related podcast, I am the Eggpod (helmed by Chris Shaw) that studies and dissects Beatles records and solo records from the four members of the band.
I have been listening to a lot of the episodes, but I have recently marvelled listening to Matt Everitt (BBC Radio 6 Music/BBC Radio 2) discuss The Beatles / 1967-1970 (a.k.a., ‘The Blue Album’) - I urge you to listen to part one and two. I previously listened to Shaw and Everitt examining Rubber Soul – back last year – and, on all occasions, Ringo Starr’s drumming excellence was extolled – Everitt is a drummer himself (having been a member of Menswear and The Montrose Avenue) and made me aware of the nuances, techniques and sheer wonder of Ringo Starr. There has been this unfair, long-running joke that Ringo Starr is not a very good drummer, and I am not sure where that comes from! One only needs to listen to songs like Rain, Tomorrow Never Knows, and In My Life to realise that Starr not only can blow you away with his fills and sheer octopus-limbed tenacity and technique…he also does subtle brilliantly; elevating a song with delicacy and tenderness. Back in 2016, Rolling Stone compiled their list of the top one-hundred drummers ever: Ringo Starr came in fourteenth place:
"I remember the moment, standing there and looking at John and then looking at George, and the look on our faces was like, 'Fuck you. What is this?'" said Paul McCartney, looking back on the Beatles' first time playing with Ringo Starr. "And that was the moment, that was the beginning, really, of the Beatles." Though he was often underappreciated during the flamboyant late Sixties that produced Keith Moon and Mitch Mitchell, Ringo didn't just ground the greatest band of all time, he helped give their music shape and focus — listen to the ecstatic rolls that open "She Loves You," the crisp buoyancy of "Ticket to Ride," the slippery cymbal work and languid concision of "Rain," or the way he threw cute, memorable "rhythmic hooks" into many more of the Beatles beloved tunes.
Personally, his good natured geniality made him the band's most approachable member. "John would go up and down and all that," said Yoko Ono, "but Ringo was always just very gentle. And he really believed in peace and love." As a left-handed drummer playing a right-handed kit, Starr came up with his own unique style of creating crisp exuberant "funny fills," and his steady reliability became an early gold standard for no-nonsense rock players, serving each song with feel, swing and unswerving reliability. "Ringo was the the king of feel," Dave Grohl has said. Says Jim Keltner, "He was the guy that we all tried to play like in the studio”.
Whilst I have always preferred the songwriting of Paul McCartney to John Lennon, I have never really given too much thought to the vitalness of Ringo Starr’s drumming when it comes to those classic songs. I love The Beatles’ videos, as Starr always plays the role of the cool jester; the dude that captures your eyes and stays in the mind. From I Feel Fine to Paperback Writer, you cannot stop looking at the drummer. It is hard to really define Starr’s style, as he could shift from the wild and in tense to the composed and emotional. Everyone has their favourite Ringo drumming turn but, to me, it is the B-side to my favourite Beatles song, Paperback Writer: Starr’s performance on Rain is out of this world! I love the fact that Paperback Writer was released as a single in 1966 and not even included on an album – it could have sat on Revolver and made it even better!
Not only that, but Rain was included as a B-side! How many bands release a song as good as Rain as a single?! The track is a Lennon-penned one, but it is Starr’s immense and out-of-this-world drumming that makes it! How did he even manage to make the sounds he did?! It seems a shame that one-quarter of the world’s greatest band does not quite get the respect he deserves. Back in 2017, The Guardian published a great feature that highlighted how, in fact, Ringo Starr is one of the best drummers ever:
“…Most drummers recognise this. “Define ‘best drummer in the world’,” Dave Grohl said in a tribute video for Starr’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame presentation. “Is it someone that’s technically proficient? Or is it someone that sits in the song with their own feel? Ringo was the king of feel.”
What this means is that many of Ringo’s best performances go unnoticed. These are beats designed to enhance the song rather than show off the drummer’s abilities. Take She Loves You, the song that kicked off Beatlemania. Ringo’s brief introductory tom roll is the shot of adrenaline that gets the heart of the song thumping; it is teen mania in sound, and one of the most important drum rolls in recorded music history.
IN THIS PHOTO: Ringo Starr (second from the right) with the rest of The Beatles filming A Hard Day's Night/PHOTO CREDIT: United Artists/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock.com
On Can’t Buy Me Love, Ringo’s drumming is the primal force that drives the song’s hormonal energy, all whipcrack snare and floor-tom bombast, wrapped up in Ringo’s signature sound: a wall-of-sound hi-hat thrash that sounds like five drummers at once. His drumming here is not complicated but – as numerous live versions of the song attest – it is lethally exact with not a note out of place, giving the lie to the notion, repeated by John Lennon in a 1980 Playboy interview, that Ringo was “not technically good” as a drummer.
Consider Tomorrow Never Knows, one of the most influential Beatles songs. How would it sound without Ringo’s beautifully lopsided breakbeat, his unexpected twitching snare pattern emphasising the song’s feel of psychedelic discombobulation? How would Strawberry Fields Forever feel without Ringo’s fantastically weary tom fills, which seems to drag the listener down into Lennon’s nostalgia?
Some people consider Ringo to be a terrible drummer because he doesn’t play solos. But who, apart from other drummers, really enjoys a solo? Ringo knew this and for years resisted all attempts to get him to play them, eventually giving in for the 15-second break on Abbey Road’s The End. It’s not flashy or difficult, but it has an understated funky charm and when it turned up on Beastie Boys’ The Sounds of Science 20 years later, it was hard to resist a smile”.
I think we need to erect a plinth or statue to Ringo Starr when he turns eighty in the summer. Although Starr has said how people only focus on his eight years with The Beatles, he will forgive me for honing in on the band, as I am looking at his drumming and, when putting out his solo stuff, Starr is predominantly at the front - though he is behind the kit quite a bit. It seems bizarre that we almost have to ‘defend’ Starr as a drummer, as he did not do or really like solos (except for the mighty solo on The End from Abbey Road in 1969); he was not a Keith Moon-like figure who was all about intensity and smashing the crap out of the kit! Starr’s drumming is often seen as a bit watered-down or secondary (…or territory) to the combination of Lennon-McCartney and George Harrison’s guitar work.
Apart from Kate Bush (and Macca himself), Ringo Starr is the one musician who I want to interview and get to grips with. Nearly sixty years after Starr joined The Beatles (he replaced Pete Best in 1962), I think Starr’s drumming can be heard in so many sticksmen and women of today. In 2014, the BBC asked whether it was time to re-evaluate Ringo Starr:
“Starkey was a sickly child and a ‘no hoper’ student, in Lewisohn’s telling, but he grew into an accomplished girl magnet and one of the best dancers in Liverpool – a guy who could flip, flop and fly the girls on the dancefloor. He ran with a rough crowd − a gang of Teddy boys – and he could play the drums. At one point, he was playing with as many as three bands a night, so in demand were his skills as a musician who helped bridge the gap between the short-lived skiffle era and rock ‘n’ roll. In 1960, with Ringo Starr on drums, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes were the city’s biggest band. The Beatles coveted Starr’s skills but were somewhat intimidated by him; “he looked the nasty one,” Harrison once said.
“He was the guy the Beatles always wanted,” Lewisohn told me in a recent interview. “He was everything Pete Best wasn’t … He was rock steady, he could play all the styles…. [His style] was sympathetic to everything they did … It brought an extra element to their songs that was in complete tune with what they were thinking.”
Starr’s work on the Beatles recordings is astonishing, even if it didn’t jump out in the way the drumming of other ‘60s icons did – the nonstop fury of The Who’s Keith Moon, the African-inspired virtuosity of Cream’s Ginger Baker, the thunderous swing of Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham. Ringo almost never gets name-checked as an innovator, in part because he didn’t play solos (except for the exquisite drum break on The End from the 1969 Abbey Road album). But consider how he makes the complicated shifts in etier sound effortless on Here Comes the Sun, the rolling, proto-metal tom-tom groove of Rain, the tribal dance thump of Tomorrow Never Knows, the hi-hat work on Come Together, the syncopated propulsion of Ticket to Ride.
Starr gave each song exactly what it needed, but he didn’t call attention to himself while doing it. The only thing flash about Ringo were the rings on his fingers, which inspired his nickname, and the mega-watt grin he wore on stage”.
The fascination with The Beatles will never end and, when Abbey Road’s fiftieth anniversary last year (as a side-note: check out the Abbey Road Studios website) was met with a re-issued/remastered edition of the album (by Giles Martin – son of the late Beatles producer, Sir George Martin – and his team), I picked out the drumming of Starr. I think the remastered version puts the drumming more to the fore, and one is staggered by the sheer range and dazzling genius of the man! Before finishing with a Ringo Starr (Beatles-era) drumming best-of, I want to bring in an interview Starr conducted with GQ last year.
IN THIS PHOTO: Ringo Starr in Los Angeles, 7th July, 2019/PHOTO CREDIT: Scott Dudelson/Getty Images
Why is Starr’s drumming so original and different to anything that has come and ever will come? Is it the fact that, through life, he has been so laid back, full of love and open to what life brings?
“Throughout your career, you could have conveyed any message you’d wanted to. But the message you chose, the one you still promote, is of peace and love.
Well, the other side of that story is “Back off, bugaloo!” [Laughs.]
In a recent interview you said, “This is why I love life, things just arrive.” Do you feel like things are predestined?
In a way, yes. But I also feel that every day is a good day, but I can drag it down. I live a life now that if I’m in a great space and having a good day, I think that it will go on forever. And if I’m on a bummer, I’ll say, “This too shall pass.” I try to be honest through the day. But sometimes, things don't work out. Sometimes something happens and your plan gets changed. Somebody told me, which was great: “It’s great to have plans, but when they change, don’t get upset.” But what about me, I’m going to miss the flight! Okay, so get the next one! All of your cryin’ and moanin’ is not gonna stop the plane from taking off.
It seems like you know what’s truly important to you. Where does that instinct come from?
I think you get it by living life. I feel I’ve always been more of an optimist than a pessimist, and so there’s always a donkey in the room. [Laughs.] You know, you grow old and you go through certain experiences. I think the ‘60s and the introduction of... well now most of them are legal, but medications. And [people like psychedelic drug proponent] Timothy Leary.. things like that open your mind”.
Although The Beatles’ final-record album, Let It Be, does not turn fifty until 8th May – and the Peter Jackson-produced/directed documentary around the album, The Beatles: Get Back, is out on 4th September -, I think we should take this period of lockdown and isolation to dig the awesome beats of one Ringo Starr. Do some exploring and have a listen to the playlist below to realise that, beyond all reasonable doubt, Ringo Starr is one of the greatest and most inspiring drummers…
THE world will ever know