FEATURE:
I’m the Greatest
PHOTO CREDIT: Popperfoto
Ringo Starr at Eighty-Five: A Peerless Percussionist
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BECAUSE the master…
that is Ringo Starr turns eighty-five on 7th July, I am putting together a few features about him. This one is a celebration of someone who I think is a peerless drummer. We can put to rest old myths and criticism. I think, before getting to that, I feel that he was the best actor on A Hard Day’s Night. The Beatles’ debut film, I think Starr was the most natural actor of the four. I also think people repeat the line that Starr was not a great drummer. That he was not the best drummer even in The Beatles (a line that was never said by one of the band; it was said by Jasper Carrott in 1983). In my mind, as a quarter of the most important band ever, one who changed popular culture and created the greatest back catalogue in music history, they would not have gained the success and legacy if it were not in part due to Ringo Starr’s drumming! Of course, George Harrison and primary songwriters John Lennon and Paul McCartney were as important. However, Starr was the heartbeat and drive of the band. I will end this feature with a few Beatles tracks that demonstrate his phenomenal drumming. Whilst some celebrate percussionists like Keith Moon, John Bonham or Buddy Rich, I don’t think Starr gets mentioned as often. Nor do the likes of Karen Carpenter. I feel Starr is a more rounded and broader drummer than the so-called ‘greatest’. He would not put himself against others. However, there was this long-running assumption that he was overrated or not great. A lot of this old cliché and falsehood might have come from an assumption that a truly great drummer is one who is powerful and does solo. That they are as intense and loud as possible. Ringo Starr is about technique and intelligence. He was backing a band who were not Rock artists or making hugely heavy music. Because of this, he unfairly got seen as someone lacking the chops to join the greats. Even though this 2017 feature from The Guardian comes to his defence (not that it was ever needed!), they do unfairly claim Starr lacked precision. That is flatly untrue! Also, they shoot at Octopus’s Garden. That is a brilliant song. Someone who deserves nothing but unanimous respect and love:
“His beats may not have had the furious technical clarity of Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham, say, or the phenomenal precision of James Brown’s drummer, Clyde Stubblefield. But what he had was perfect for the Beatles, where Bonham would have been too showy and Stubblefield too tight.
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.
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.
Another criticism of Ringo is that he wasn’t a creative god like the other Beatles. He didn’t write the songs and he wasn’t a studio genius like producer George Martin, who helped to mould Lennon, McCartney and Harrison’s tunes into something spectacular. Again, this is nonsense. Octopus’s Garden may not put Ringo into the songwriters hall of fame, but his drumming helped to shape countless Beatles classics, bringing personality and life to them.
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.
In fact The Sounds of Science, which also borrows Ringo’s strident drum beat from Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band (Reprise), shows just how funky Ringo’s drums could be when recontextualised. One producer who understood this well was Danger Mouse, whose 2004 release The Grey Album married Jay-Z’s The Black Album to the Beatles’ LP The Beatles to wonderful effect. Ringo’s breakbeats are a key tool in making the album fly, whether chopped up for their unique timbre or used straight for their head-down funk”.
Ringo Starr preaches peace and love. This is about positivity. Given how influential The Beatles are and the past few years have seen so many album reissues, documentaries and activity, there is this new wave of appreciation for Ringo Starr. To me, he is the best drummer ever. Many think of The Beatles and focus on Paul McCartney and John Lennon. Sure, their words and musicianship – alongside that of George Harrison – is key. Though I think Starr’s drumming is the real heart of the songs. Bringing to life the greatest songs ever written, I watch clips of The Beatles playing liver and Starr is so exhilarating and intense. Someone who was so gifted and natural. Moments where he was playing extraordinary and complex parts but made it look effortless. On gentler or less complex Beatles songs, he was still doing something interesting and original. So different to other drummers of the 1960s. When the band created an epic and called for something more complicated, he was very much up to the job. Listen to his work on A Day in the Life or Tomorrow Never Knows. The brilliance of Rain. There needs to be more conversations around how Ringo Starr is the greatest. Sure, I can concede that other people might have their own favourite drummers. It seems insane that there was ever a time in history where Starr was seen as this joke almost. To me, The Beatles could have been a far lesser band if they had another drummer (they did at some points but not for most of their time together). It took a monumental talent to be able to provide the beats on a catalogue as broad and eclectic. I know Paul McCartney occasionally drummed, though it was Starr who helped push the band’s sound and experimentation. He turns eighty-five on 7th July and is still performing live and recording music. To end this final birthday feature, I have selected fifteen tracks from The Beatles where Ringo Starr’s drumming is very much essential in the mix. In terms of thinking about the all-time best drummers, in my opinions, there has been…
NOBODY as good as him!