For me it was his high-hat work; Walking on the Moon. He plays Chopin…on the high-hat; he is The Most Interesting Drummer in the World 
Yep, same here. I love his hi-hat flourishes, plus his very tasty and judicious use of snare flams. But, like I said before, probably what jumps out to me most is the way he works his accents, usually on a cymbal of some sort. He loves accenting off beats and throwing crashes on something other than the one. Plus I love how he incorporates atypical (for rock) accent patters like the Jamaican “one drop” into that post punk style of music.
So we’re agreed then? Stewart Copeland can keep playing the drums?
God, I hope so. Listening to “Driven To Tears” as we speak–my favorite Copeland track. (Plus I love the guitar solo in this one.)
Ringo has a great feel that works perfectly with the Beatles. He doesn’t have great technical chops. If you think a “great” drummer must have both feel and chops, then he isn’t a “great” drummer. If you think great feel or great technique is enough by itself, then he is a great drummer.
So I was over at the Acoustic Guitar Forum - I know that sounds shocking for me 
Sure enough, with all the Beatles stuff going on, someone started a “what did Ringo bring to the Beatles?” thread. Sigh…
I cut and pasted my OP from this thread into that thread. Let’s see what happens…
Weirdly enough, I was just rereading this thread today, too, after doing a search for your username and “Ringo.” Your example of “She Said She Said” has become my goto argument for Ringo’s drumming, but I couldn’t remember what your “simplistic” example was.
Hey - cool! Thanks for sharing that. And since Good Day Sunshine is right next to SSSS on Revolver, it can be easier to remember…
I can’t quantify what makes a good drummer. I always thought highly of the drummer(s) who played with Hendrix. they seemed to give extreme nuance to any piece played. Compare this to Buddy Rich who I viscerally hated because it never appeared he was playing to the music in any way.
So if I can’t quantify why I think a drummer is great I agree with you 1000 percent that great drummers play to the music.
I recently purchased the “Beatles for Sale” CD (I had never bothered to get it, having owned “Beatles '65” on cassette since I was nine)…anyway, I discovered the lovely little gem “What You’re Doing.” The first Beatles song to open with two full measures of solo drums. And the drum pattern is very similar to Charlie Watts’ one for the Stones’ “My Obsession,” recorded exactly two years later (from “Between the Buttons,” the other cassette I owned when I was nine.)
Anyway, yet another example of the Stones imitating the Beatles. (Not meant as a put-down of Watts – as others have noted, a jazz-loving, great grooving drummer who fits his band perfectly, as Ringo did his.)
My favourite rock drummer is Keith Moon. I’m not a drummer, nor am I a musician, but Moon has these little filler riffs in between normal beats that just amaze me. He and Ringo did hang out together for a while, and I’d like to think they shared notes.
Zak Starkey is a very good drummer for The Who. He sounds much more like Keith than Kenney Jones.
I’m not sure what my point is: just thinking out loud.
Rereading the thread, I spotted a couple things I neglected to comment upon the first time around:
The thing about covers … There are thousands of really good drummers (and guitarists, and bassists) out there. Just spend some time on YouTube, and you’ll find hundreds of videos of various amateur musicians presenting their covers of well-know artists. And many of them are very good covers. I’ve watched any number of videos of drummers absolutely nailing Neil Peart’s drum parts (seriously, watch that one - your jaw will drop and fall off).
Hell, I consider myself a “competent” bassist, but not a virtuoso, and I can play most of Geddy Lee’s bass lines (and sing his vocal parts at the same time).
But the difference between the people covering those songs (myself included) and the original artists is that the overwhelming majority of those "cover artists would never, in a million years, have come up with those parts on their own. And that’s the thing that separates “original artists” from “cover artists”. I’ve come up with plenty of my own bass lines; I’ve played bass at my church, with the same primary group of musicians, for about 18 years. I have never heard the original versions of 99.9% of the songs we play. Our worship leader (a piano player) picks the songs, and provides the rest of us with, at best, sheet music, but more commonly we get lyrics with the chords scrawled in above them. With that to work with, the synth player, the trumpet player, the drummer, and I listen to our leader sing and play the song on the piano, and we all independently create our own parts that fit with what our leader is playing. While I come up with bass lines that I feel “serve the song”, they don’t resemble in any way the kinds of things that Geddy Lee plays.
Though that’s actually a lesson that took me way too long to learn. The first time I played bass with this particular worship leader, I was a 19-year-old dumbass who thought that “playing my best” meant “playing as many notes as possible”. I got “fired”. 11 years later, I got the opportunity to play again. I was 30, and had wised up considerably. At 30, my playing was still probably “busier” than it really needed to be, but 18 years of playing with this group of outstanding musicians has taught me that, “playing my best” sometimes means knowing when to not play at all.
I recognize Peart from the sound of his snare. So … crisp. The other drummer that I can immediately recognize is Alex Van Halen. I’m not even much of a Van Halen fan, and I’ve always thought it was kind of funny that it’s not the sound of the legendary Eddie Van Halen’s guitar that immediately tells me I’m hearing Van Halen. It’s Alex’s high-hat. For some reason — and I don’t know if this was a conscious decision or not on the part of whoever produces VH albums — but Alex’s high-hat is always front-and-center in the mix. And by the sound, he plays a very loose high-hat. As soon as I hear that on the radio, even if it’s a song I’ve never heard before, I immediately think, “Hey, Van Halen!”
More than one person has mentioned “metronome” drummers. Trust me, “metronome” drummers aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. The drummer in the only “working” band I’ve ever played in was one of these. He was a fine drummer who especially loved jazz, but could also play rock. And he was a rock when it came to keeping time.
The problem was that he was often keeping the wrong time. And as the bassist/lead singer in that band, let me tell you that it was incredibly painful and frustrating when we were performing Billy Idol’s “Rebel Yell” and the drummer set a pace that was quite a few Beats Per Minute slower than the song required. And refused, once he had locked into a tempo, to acknowledge both myself and our guitarist while we tried to subtly (so that the audience wouldn’t notice) indicate to him that, “This is too fucking slow!”. It sucked all of the energy out of the song. Likewise, Eric Clapton’s “Cocaine”. He got it into his head that the song was a ballad, and playing the song at the tempo he set made it sound like a dirge.
ETA: Since several people mentioned The Beatles’ Revolver album, I decided to fire up iTunes and play Revolver while rereading the thread. Imagine my confusion while Love You To was playing. There is a sound that occurs several times in that song that sounds almost exactly like the sound Facebook makes when somebody sends you a message. I kept looking around and thinking, “I don’t even have Facebook open in another tab! Why do I keep hearing that noise?” before finally realizing it was coming from that song.
And too late for ETA2:
ETA2: I just purchased Rubber Soul from the iTunes store. Holy crap, Ringo’s drumming on You Won’t See Me!
ETA3: Man, I’d forgotten that Rubber Soul was my favorite Beatles album. Maybe because the album is so acoustic, and I only had an acoustic guitar when I first played along with it. My parents seemed to think that an electric guitar was just a toy, and considering that I was 14 and they had the money, I kind of had to go along with that at the time. (What Goes On is playing now - Ringo is singing lead, and his kick drum is playing a remarkably complicated rhythm at the same time).
This thread was resurrected at an appropriate time for me. I was born in 1966. In 1966, my Auntie Cathy was 18 years old, and my Auntie Kae was 16. Unsurprisingly, as teenage girls in the 1960s they were both huge Beatles fans (and to my unending envy, they had the good fortune of seeing The Beatles live, twice - once in Seattle, WA, and once in Portland, OR. At one of those concerts, they were involved in a stage rush at the end of the show, and my Aunt Kae picked up a guitar pick from the stage. When I was 15 or 16, she gave me that guitar pick and told me where it came from. I still have that pick, securely ensconced in a plastic container. It’s a Gibson-branded pick, a style still available today, and I have no way to prove where it came from, other than my aunt’s word. And of course there’s no way to know if one of the Beatles used it, given that rock concerts in those days involved something like 23 opening acts). I only just remembered in the last couple of weeks that I may have never picked up the guitar if not for my Aunt Kae. Apparently, she had fooled with learning to play guitar in 1968 or so, but gave it up.
Dammit, I meant to click “Preview Post”, not “Post Quick Reply”!
So Aunt Kae (pronounced “Kay”, but with that odd Korean-looking spelling) had fooled with the guitar in 1968 and then quit, for whatever reason.
She stuck that guitar in her bedroom closet.
In 1980, when I was 14 years old, I found that guitar in that closet at my Grandma’s house. This was at a time when I was learning to play a variety of instruments. I’d started out on the clarinet in 5th grade, and then at the end of 7th grade I’d learned to play the saxophone at the request of my junior high school band director (he needed an alto sax player for the jazz band, because all of his alto players had moved on to high school, and there were no upcoming sax players, and I was the 1st-chair clarinet player. Transitioning from clarinet to sax is a piece of cake - even at 14 it only took me 2 days to learn my way around a saxophone). Then, during my 8th-grade year, I found an odd instrument in the school’s instrument room. I didn’t know what it was, though being a woodwind player already, I recognized it as a woodwind instrument. I asked my band teacher, “What is this?” He said, “That’s a bassoon.” I said, “Oh. Can I learn to play it?” And Mr. Ager’s eyes lit up and he said, “Oh yes!” (Even in 1980, the most basic bassoon still cost close to $3,000, so there weren’t a whole lot of bassoon players feeding into junior high school band programs. There’s a good reason why junior high and high school bands have so many flute, clarinet, and trumpet players: You can buy student versions of those instruments for around $200.
So in 1980, I was learning lots of instruments (I even taught myself the basics of trumpet and trombone.) Guitar was just another instrument on the list - it was something new to my wide-eyed young self.
Once I was out of school in 1984 , and discovered that there wasn’t a lot of demand for clarinet/sax/bassoon players, the guitar became my primary instrument, and eventually I gravitated toward the bass guitar (which has now been my primary instrument for 29 years).
And I probably wouldn’t be here now, as a bassist, if I hadn’t found my Aunt Kae’s old guitar.
My aunt Kae, my dad’s baby sister, passed away last Wednesday, at the age of 63. She developed cancer in her spine and neck (meaning almost completely inoperable) and didn’t respond to chemo.
I hadn’t seen her in many years, but her passing reminded me that I wouldn’t be the musician I am today without her.
Mister Rik, cool stories. I’m sure you’re aware that George got upset when Paul insisted on laying a very busy, melodic bass line over much of his (George’s) song “Something.” (George was right, although it is nice to have Paul’s interesting “solo” right after the first line of the last verse, during what otherwise would be kind of dead space. Just in the last verse – doing the same sort of thing in previous verses would have been too much.)
P.S. Is the “Facebook sound” you hear in Love You To the larger of the two tablas, being played with the palm sort of making a circle on the drum head, giving it that upward-inflected “whoop” sound?
Thanks to those posting in this thread who have mentioned specific songs highlighting Ringo’s drumming. I’ve never made a point of listening carefully to the drumming but it’s quite enlightening doing so now when I know what to look for.
Apropos of this there was something I was wondering about:
I had a listen to Good Day Sunshine just now and noticed that there are quite clearly two full drum tracks which must have been recorded independently. (One in the left, the other in the right.) Was this typical? I know it wasn’t unusual for the Beatles to overdub simple percussion bits like hand claps or tambourines, but both percussion tracks on Good Day Sunshine are complicated enough to require someone at a drum kit playing with both hands (and feet for at least one of the tracks).
Are you sure it’s not artificial double tracking (ADT), with stereo effect?
Never mind –you’re absolutely right. (skip to “Arrangement”).
I don’t need an analysis by Alan Pollock to confirm that I’m hearing a completely different percussion track in each ear. 
Anyway, I don’t think the Beatles ever used ADT on anything other than vocals, did they?