The people who slag Ringo off are the people who think a “good” drummer needs to sound like the dude from Whiplash or fucking Neal Peart. Ringo locked in perfectly with the Beatles, played tastefully, didn’t overshadow the melody, and always knew when to come in with the right fills and dynamic variations. Anyone who can listen to Cry Baby Cry and not think Ringo is the man, can take their ears and jam them right up their ass.
Here is an article in Billboard about all of the artists Ed Sheeran has written songs for: Ed Sheeran: Songs He Wrote for Other People (That He Also Sang On) | Billboard
He is at the same level of hitmaker as folks like Pharrell and Max Martin. Again, the littlest amount of Googling will point this out. I am not saying that to be snarky - I am saying that because Sheeran has built a fascinating and incredibly diverse career that happens to be packaged in the form of a Ginger Hobbit Boy Singer. He is far more formidable. To be clear, I find his stuff okay for the most part. But I get where he is on the music landscape.
I have shared my love of Ringo on the SDMB before: A Tip of the Hat - to Ringo Starr's drumming - Cafe Society - Straight Dope Message Board
He wasn’t insulting Hendix’s playing abilities, it was about his confidence to play alongside scary talent.
I think we should all remember that while there’s some “crazy old dude don’t give a fuck” in there the article does note
So there’s every possibility that Jones softened some of his criticism but that didn’t make the cut.
He is a music snob which you would expect of a serious musician. He was asked about the Beatles, Hendrix, and Micheal Jackson, he did not bring them up to slag them. When he first heard the Beatles McCartney had only been playing bass three years or so. Ronnie Verrell who he said was so much better than Ringo had been playing professionally in big bands for almost 20 years at that point.
Stephen Colbert riffed on the interview last night on his show: Colbert Can’t Pick the Biggest Quincy Jones Bombshell
Me neither, but the opening of Pryor’s infamous set during the Star Spangled Night for Rights at the Hollywood Bowl in 1977, concerned a sexual relationship he supposedly had with a young man in 1952. This 2015 article from the Guardian goes into more detail.
Neat story, and I’d never heard of it til it was mentioned in the wake of the Jones interview brouhaha.
The bit on Smith and Sheeran makes me wonder whether they’re affiliated with any projects or companies that Jones is affiliated with. But jeez, who am I to tell Quincy Jones that his opinion on modern music is flawed? EDIT: Especially when I had never heard of “Giant Steps” until reading about it in the interview. Though I’m glad that I did. Albeit listening to it, I feel a lot like an ape reading Nietzsche; I’m amazed, but I certainly don’t understand why.
He met the beatles in 1964 and he thought they couldn’t play. Not news to me. He was right, for QJs perspective. He knows they got better. He was just telling anecdotes about the early days.
He said this about modern music:
“Hell no. It’s just loops, beats, rhymes and hooks. What is there for me to learn from that? There ain’t no fucking songs. The song is the power; the singer is the messenger. The greatest singer in the world cannot save a bad song. I learned that 50 years ago, and it’s the single greatest lesson I ever learned as a producer. If you don’t have a great song, it doesn’t matter what else you put around it.”
Sounds sharp as a tack to me.
I never liked Quincy Jones’ work; everything he does sounds horribly over-produced to me.
Compare early blues and R&B recordings of Dinah Washington, backed by smokin’ hot jazz combos, with the toned-down, sedate crap she did under the Jones baton.
Yeah, maybe he knew Bird and Diz, but THEY probably thought he was a dork, too.
Fuck his opinions; he greatest talent was outliving all the better musicians.
He did say Ringo was a great guy though. I thought it was a fun story, Quincy dgaf.
No, Quincy’s always been like that. He’s not senile at all.
You can go back and look at other things he’s done over the years and while he has not always been THIS candid, he’s always talked like that. And yes, it’s because he can fucking back it up.
Just before his interview with Vulture, he spoke to GQ, more of the same.
Saying that Lauper tried to change the direction of that terrible maudlin shitheap song sounds like it should be a gold star in her book.
Mostly he seems to think that Michael was a master appropriator … he only stole from the best! There’s not a unique thing Michael Jackson did, he just stole great bits from everyone else and packaged them all together and performed them VERY WELL. But not original to him, no.
My teacher hung with Jimi Hendrix when the Gil Evans Orchestra prepared to do an album of Jimi Hendrix compositions … Jimi was also supposed to participate but he died before it could all be worked out. The Gil Evans Orchestra STILL plays a lot of those arrangements today. Anyway, he says Jimi was on the shy side … he was definitely impressed with the high caliber of musicians he was going to be working with and yeah, I could see how he would be a little intimidated. But Gil and the rest of the Orchestra all dug what he was doing and wanted to work with him. My teacher says Jimi told him about being a baritone horn player in his high school band, among other things … he knew from brass.
In a way, Jimi Hendrix presaged the coming of Hiram Bullock, who was Gil’s gonzo guitar player for a lot of years. Like this … probably the greatest guiltar/tuba duel ever.
Most of the people Q talks about are dead and cannot sue him. Cosby can.
I thought he joked about incidents similar to this in one of those older Friars Club Roasts.
So, Quince… you say Michael Jackson ripped off songs from other musicians? That’s AWFUL!
So, what did you do about it? Did you order Michael to give them credit and pay them for their work? Or did you help those musicians get then royalties they deserved?
You didn’t? Why not?
Doesn’t that make you an enabler? Doesn’t that make YOU a conniving piece of crap, too?
That was a really interesting story that I’m still thinking about a couple of hours later. Thanks for sharing it.
I do note Quincy Jones sued the Michael Jackson estate for credit not listed and for unpaid royalties. And won, nearly 10 millions dollars worth of win. So he can speak to at least one other instance where the business wasn’t right.
So at some point in this he couldn’t even do right for himself. Should he have fought harder for himself, for other people? Yeah. Why didn’t he do it? I would guess most of all he wanted to work with Michael Jackson again. If Q had made waves that door would have slammed pretty hard. Does not speak well of the man but most anyone can see how it might have happened. I’m saying this as a reason, not as an excuse.
You’d like to think that people would do better in this world – you’d like to think that people would look out for one another, especially fellow musicians. I’m here to tell you that’s not always the case. FWIW, the truly great people/musicians are not like this at all, they treat the artists that work and collaborate with them fairly and give credit where credit is due. (One example that comes to mind: I’ve heard Stevie Ray Vaughn shared credit and royalties with everyone he worked with.) But not everyone does that. (Looking at YOU, Robbie Robertson.) There’s venal people in every walk of life and maybe even more so in the arts because it’s so easy to take advantage of others.
It seems a particularly funny refutation of a couple of Jones’s opinions that, when Miles Davis and Tony Williams were planning to record with Hendrix, they tried to get Paul McCartney to play bass. Jimi Hendrix Sought Paul McCartney for Supergroup with Miles Davis. I wonder how he felt about Hendrix being voted into the DownBeat Jazz Hall of Fame in 1970?
Miles wasn’t above putting people on his records to sell some more of them. He had sting on a record. He was covetous of rock stardom.