The question I always ask is, SUPPOSE the Beatles had replaced Ringo with _____ (fill in your favorite drummer- Keith Moon, John Bonham, Simon Philips, Ginger Baker, Billy Cobham, Gene Krupa, whoever).
Would the Beatles records have been any better? I’d have to say NO!
Richard wasn’t necessarily a virtuoso, but unlike Pete Best, he was capable of learning, of growing, of mastering new and different techniques. Nobody else could have played “Ticket to Ride” better than he did. He was able to give each song what it needed.
That was the part I wondered about: I thought there were at least one or two others where Paul played the drums: “Wild Honey Pie” and “Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?” Wikipedia confirms the former but reports that Ringo did play drums on the latter, though it includes a quote from John that may explain why I thought that one was all Paul.
I suspect that’s something that Neil Peart picked up from Ringo. Peart rarely plays the same beat on every verse of a Rush song.
I’m not even a drummer, but I list Ringo as one of my primary influences as a musician. It’s actually something I only realized relatively recently. I’ve realized he influenced me in two major ways. One was was there all along, the other was something I had to grow into.
I had the good fortune of having two aunts who were teenaged girls in the 1960s, and who had every single Beatles album. So when I picked up the guitar in 1980, at age 14, they were right there introducing me to The Beatles. My entire early training on the guitar (I was self-taught) revolved around strumming an acoustic guitar along with Beatles records. Because I was self-taught, and had no teacher telling me, “No, strum like this”, I developed my own strumming style. And that strumming style attempted to replicate the “full band” experience. Meaning I emphasized the lower strings to incorporate the bass line to some extent, and also incorporated various muting techniques to imply the drum beat. None of this was a conscious decision; the different elements of my strumming technique just sort of naturally evolved.
I describe this “natural evolution”, because, appraising my guitar-playing skills honestly, I’m a barely competent guitarist. By the time I was 19 years old I’d decided that what I really wanted to be was a bass player (the bass spoke to me in a way the guitar never did), and as I became more and more of a bass player, I became less and less of a guitar player. Over the last 20 years, I’ve often gone months without even taking my 1968 Gibson acoustic out of its case. But I’ll take it out every now and then, and use it to accompany myself singing one or two songs in front of an audience, and afterwards I inevitably getting some non-musician approaching me to tell me what an “awesome” guitarist I am. For years this baffled me. When I play my guitar, I don’t do anything “fancy”. I just strum the damned thing while I sing. I don’t insert any kind of “lead guitar” work, or attempt any kind of complex fingerpicking. I just strum.
It was maybe 10 years ago that I finally figured out what was going on. It was that strum that I developed while playing along with Beatles records. A strum that I later adapted, unconsciously, to everything else I played on acoustic guitar. A strum that manages, somehow, to imply an entire backing band when it’s only my voice and my guitar, and puts across just the right “groove” for whatever song I’m singing.
It turns out that Ringo is one of the primary reasons my “strum” fools people into thinking I’m an “awesome” guitarist.
Ringo’s second influence was upon my bass playing. I didn’t want to play bass because of The Beatles/McCartney. I wanted to play bass because a junior high school friend played Rush’s “Freewill” for me, and that insane bass part during the instrumental breakdown on that song was the coolest fucking thing I’d ever heard, and I wanted to do that. But, being 19 when I finally got my own bass, and being inspired by Geddy Lee and, later, Steve Harris of Iron Maiden, my idea of “good bass player” was “play as many notes as possible, as fast as possible”.
And that idea got me fired from the first group I played bass with. Being a dumb kid, I failed to learn my lesson, and blamed my firing on “jealously of my mad skillz”. I eventually learned some restraint, but it still took me a while. I’ve now been playing with the same group of musicians (on the worship team at my church) for 19 years. So, from ages 29 to 48. The first few years, I was still a fairly “busy” bass player. But, somewhere around age 40, it finally sunk in (without anybody telling me) that, often, “less is more”. One of the key things with this group is that we don’t get the “original recording” of the song to learn from. Our pianist/leader learns the songs, and then gives the rest of us a lyric sheet with the chords written in, and we all invent our own parts, cueing off of what she plays on the piano (usually her own arrangement of the song), and how she sings it. And more and more, I’ve learned to listen to what she’s doing, and figure out the most appropriate bass line to play behind her. Sometimes, yeah, it calls for a “busy” bass line. But more often than not, I realize that the appropriate line is something mind-bogglingly simple. And, surprisingly often, I’ve found that the best thing to do at certain points in the song is to stop playing altogether. And all of that is something that, ultimately, I learned from Ringo way back when I was 14-15 years old and just starting out.
The other way Ringo influenced my bass playing was timing. I will credit Ringo with my devotion to timing. The one position in my current group that has never been settled is drums. Over the last 19 years we’ve gone through way too many drummers, of wildly varying levels of skill, from “serious jazz drummer” to “rank beginner” to “this kid who volunteered to try”. And there I sit with my bass, between the pianist and the drummer, and doing my damnedest to maintain a steady, accurate tempo.
My best friend’s uncle was a crack session drummer in the jazz era, and was musical director for Disney World in late 60’s early 70’s. He was a schooled, trained, by-the-book guy.
He spent some time with Ringo once for some DW event. He was very unimpressed with Ringo’s command of rudiments and basic “pro skills”. That’s one point of view and might be related to why Ringo got little respect, and why he was insecure.
But the Beatles didn’t need a trained by-the-book drummer. They needed a Ringo.
I often recreate songs, playing all the parts myself. (I’m not particularly good at it, but it’s fun and I learn a lot.) I start by loading the original in my Digital Audio Workstation and creating a tempo map so the DAW knows where measures & beats are. On modern recordings recorded to a click track, this takes a few minutes, with just a couple “mid-course corrections” due to clock skew.
On recordings without a click track, it takes an hour or two, a lot of judgement and fiddling.
When I did Ticket to Ride, which was recorded on 4-track so no way with a click, I was astounded. The beat was rock solid, like a metronome.
And that’s the least of Ringo’s skills.
He didn’t play the drums like anyone else, and he totally rocked.
Just listen to the drums on “The Ballad of John and Yoko” and you’ll see why Ringo was a great drummer. The drum track (by Paul) is dull and monotonous; Ringo would never play anything so boring.
Thanks for that link, Mister Rik. I really love the snare coming in the “drum solo” just after the guitars come in. That snare and timing–it’s so cool!
Something about the Beatles–they took rock 'n roll and showed everybody how it was done. It’s almost like McCartney telling Chuck Berry, “Oh, you mean you meant to do it like this”! Thanks, Chuck!
Ringo was John’s drummer. You can see it whenever you see John singing lead with the Beatles in a live performance. He keeps pace with John, and they have an unspoken bond.
I love hearing from people who know what they’re talking about. I never realized until now that you can “play” drums in a way that’s more than keeping the beat. Thanks for sharing. (This to the poster WordMan was referring to; I screwed up the reply).
Ringo’s drumming was always in service of the song. He wasn’t some kind of flashy egomaniac. Just look at his Beatles era kit- minimalism at its finest.
