There was a thread a while back extoling the virtues of Ringo’s drumming, but the fact is he can’t keep a simple beat.
extoling=extolling
Slight hijack: I recently bought the super extended DVD edition of the Monterey Pop Festival. In the liner notes somewhere the director notes that he had a limited supply of film, and so a great many bands only had one song filmed, with many great performances lost because of his limited supply of film.
But for some reason only known to Og, he devoted something like 30 minutes of film to Tiny f*#@$ing Tim. Arrrrrrrr!!!
Well, I strongly disagree on this point.
I regret that the greatest anti-drug slogan has been left behind in favor of frying eggs and “Just say no.” Nothing gets the message across like:
Why do you think they call it dope?
As do I. It is unclear whether he can do any really complex drumming (at least I have never heard it on any Beatles stuff, and no, Rain is not complex), but he certainly can keep basic beat, and does it very well in my opinion.
Ringo is, in fact, superb at keeping a simple beat.
Incidentally, the drummer on the song you named yourself after once claimed to have played as a session man on all of the Beatles’ early records. He was full of it, of course, but that suggests that at least Ringo’s beat was good enough for Bernard Purdie to have claimed it.
Bernard Purdie did in fact play on some Beatles records.
He overdubbed on top of Pete Best on several of the tracks they recorded for Polydor, for their release in the US on MGM and other labels not affiliated with EMI. So while it is true that he did play with them, and he does have bragging rights, the songs sucked and almost no one has ever heard the versions with him playing.
An interesting note regarding this is that in the DVD of Steely Dan’s “The Making Of Aja”, he has a segment where he’s reeling off all the names of artists he’s played with. When he gets to The Beatles, they’ve very cleverly faded down the volume and brought in other sound so you might miss him saying their name.