If Mister Rik’s posts haven’t helped, you might start a thread. I like the explanation offered in one of his quotes: a groove is a “sense of motion in the context of a song.”
The drummer, bassist and other rhythm parts establish the groove - sure, it is the rhythm, but there are two other factors that speak to teamwork: a) are the rhythm players working together effectively?; and b) are the melody players “accepting” that groove and working within it? It’s ultimately about teamwork - do the musicians sound like they are working together, regardless of the metronome speed.
So - if the drummer is playing “boom, splat, boom-boom splat” (those are kick and snare drum sounds, by the way ;)), and the bassist is playing “note, note, note, note” - i.e., straight-up quarter notes - they could be playing at the same metronome speed, but they wouldn’t sound sync’d up. They aren’t playing the same groove.
Hope that helps - if not, again, perhaps a different thread would be in order. I know we’ve discussed groove in threads before, but can’t recall if it has had its own thread…
Have you ever listened to recordings of Pete Best with the pre-Ringo Beatles? I’m just curious if they exist and how they stack up against each other. Also curious about how his drumming skills were judged during the remainder of his career.
As for Ringo, I sure never had a problem with his contribution, nothing ever stood out to me as that’s the weak link. Collectively it all worked and that astonishing level of success is pretty hard to argue against.
You’ve got me curious now, WordMan. Got to pull out some of these songs tonight and listen to them with new ears.
On the Anthology Vol 1, you can hear Best drumming along to “Love Me Do”. It seems to me that he sort of loses it during the bridge (“Some one to love, some one that’s new…”). This is probably the performance that convinced George Martin to have an uncomfortable chat with Epstein and to bring in a session drummer for the next recording session.
For the most part, Best’s musical career was based on the hook of his being an “Ex-Beatle”. For a while, he was “Best of the Beatles”. He was a good looking guy and I guess personable too, so he did have a following among the girls at the Cavern, but I suspect if the Beatles didn’t need him as a drummer to go to Hamburg that first time, nobody would ever have heard of him.
Somewhere on Youtube there is a Beatles tribute band that strives to create live what The Beatles did in the studio. I can’t recall their name right now, and can’t access Youtube at the moment.
All you have to do is watch the Ringo guy play the medley on side two of Abbey Road to realize just how talented Ringo was. This band nails every single note, apart from the vocals. They don’t pretend to be a cover band.
Damned. What’s that bands name again? There was a thread about them a year or so ago.
If Ringo was so good then why was he replaced by a studio drummer on the last two Beatle albums?
I’m not bashing the guy. I know nothing about drumming other than they set the beat. I always wondered what happened with Ringo. Was he just too distracted with the drugs and fame in the later Beatle years?
I prefer the early Beatle albums. Love Me Do, Please Mr Postman, She Loves you, songs from their first three albums are my favorites. Ringo played on those and sounded fine to my ears.
Not true at all. He missed a few recording sessions due to the fact that all of them were bickering by that point. But he certainly played on Let it Be and Abbey Road.
Ringo played drums on the single version of “Love Me Do” (that’s the one without the tambourine.) The album version of the song has Andy White drumming, with Ringo on tambourine. (Some stories have this backwards, but it’s Ringo on the single without the tambourine, and Andy on the album version with the tambourine.)
Multi track recording can be a problem because it is so easy to switch out a band musician’s track for a studio pro. Supposedly they did that to Ringo in the later years. I can’t find a cite but it’s mentioned frequently in Beatle documentaries. Its hard to say for sure which songs. Obviously Ringo isn’t going to point out specific songs and say he was replaced. I’d guess that other drummers know Ringo’s style and can tell when its someone else.
I liked his playing. He’s maintained a respectable solo touring career for forty years since the breakup. He’s doing something right.
The only ones I could think of him not playing drums are “Back in the USSR,” “Dear Prudence,” “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” (all played by Paul McCartney) and the album version of “Love Me Do” mentioned.
Ringo has a distinct, quirky style to his drumming, so I doubt his drum parts were swapped out at any point.
The first Beatles live concert in the US (at The Coliseum in Wash DC) is easily findable on youtube and watching Ringo live provides ample proof of how good he was.
Re: the 2009 Mono remasters that WordMan mentioned in the OP… I picked up a few of them earlier this year (Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper) and from the first spin of Rubber Soul thought to myself: “Man, hearing these in mono really makes Ringo’s drumming shine!” With the somewhat disjointed stereo drum mix that had been the only way I’d ever heard these songs previously, it’s nowhere near as clear how much the drums are interacting with every aspect of what the other instruments and voices are doing. The groove and overall service-to-the-song feel is still there in the stereo mixes, sure–and that was always good enough for me to be in the pro-Ringo camp–but in mono, it just becomes crystal clear that all the subtleties and idiosyncrasies in his playing are both extremely deliberate and absolutely perfect for the song.
Even Paul’s bass playing got a bump in my esteem from hearing these. Not that it really needed a bump, mind you…
Reminds me that I’ve gotta find more of these (Newbury Comics in Boston was selling them individually for a while, but alas no more). Help! for sure.
And replacing Ringo on Let It Be is made more difficult by the fact that the record sessions were filmed, and you can see him doing the drumming.
In The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, Mark Lewinsohn addresses this, noting that Ringo’s voice is nearly always present during the sessions (with some exceptions noted above) and he didn’t hear any session drummers. And the dude listened to every take of everything. He also noted that a take very rarely breaks down because Ringo screws up, which makes me like him even more.
Just for the record, once a good rhythm track (drums, bass, rhythm guitar, guide vocal) was laid down, it might not be necessary for a drummer to attend further recording sessions for that particular song.
I grew up listening to the Beatles, didn’t really love 'em but my older brother always hogged the stereo and he played them incessantly. Ringo was the first drummer I really noticed. He was pretty good.
But when I started playing the drums the guys I looked up to were Keith Moon for sheer aggro and Stewart Copeland, the human metronome.
Copeland actually has a tendency to speed up as he plays. Apparently him and Sting had quite a row about it back in the day. He even admits it in an interview reproduced here:
So he’s not quite a metronome. (Regardless, he’s one of my favorite, if not my favorite drummer. Love his accents.) I can’t remember what magazine did this, but apparently in the 80s some drum magazine took the drum tracks of Bonham, Copeland, Phil Collins (and some others) and found the most on-the-center-of-the-beat drummer was Phil. Bonham had a tendency to drag the beat (giving it its bluesy swagger) and Copeland had a tendency to push the beat (giving it is forward propulsion.)
