Ringo Starr says Little Richard’s drummers changed how he listened to music
It’s impossible to think of The Beatles without Ringo Starr leading the charge behind the drum kit.
There might be no end to the amount of jokes being made at his expense for not being the most important member of the group, but if you were to take his drum parts out of all their classic songs, it would never have worked bringing in someone like Pete Best or Andy White behind the kit like everyone else had planned. Starr was the perfect person to drive the band, but he was never exactly a show-off whenever he stepped behind the kit, either.
In fact, Starr is the archetype of what it means to serve the song. Not every one of his fills had to be one of the most intricate feats in the world, but you can practically think of the song by only hearing the drum part. ‘Come Together’ has one of the meanest grooves that he ever hit on, and even when he did nothing but set a tempo, he sounded like a human metronome during the breakdown section of ‘Birthday’ when the entire band drops out.
That’s not to say that he didn’t have some fantastic moments behind the kit, either. His inventiveness whenever he played is what usually made him stand out, and when the time called for it, he could beat the hell out of his kit, whether that was the punk-style drumming in ‘Rain’ or watching him absolutely demolish the end of ‘Long Tall Sally’ when he starts going off the rails in the last chorus.
But a lot of Starr’s greatest inspirations usually came from the right song rather than the drummer in the back. Some of his friends, like Keith Moon and John Bonham, certainly knew how to tear up their kit whenever they started making waves, but even as far back as the golden age of rock and roll, Starr was far more concerned about how someone like Little Richard was able to hold his band together whenever he played.
There had been a lot of great rock stars who knew how to keep time, but Starr had no problem bringing up Richard when talking about his favourite drummers of all time, saying, “Anything Little Richard did — people always feel it’s weird, but I never listened just for the drums. I listened for the whole track. [Another drummer I heard at the time] had a section going where the hi-hat was part of the fill!”
Then again, is it really a shock that Richard had high standards for what the backbeat should be? Aside from telling off Jimi Hendrix for being a little too wild whenever he played, the piano was always his forte, and since that was a percussion instrument on his own, he wasn’t going to settle for any old drummer when working on the intro to ‘Keep A-Knockin’ or trying to keep up with him on ‘Kansas City’.
That’s probably why Starr was also so focused on getting his chops down whenever he played. The fill of every song was normally where he shone the brightest, but he wasn’t going to be able to appreciate any of those moments if he didn’t have the sense of groove that everyone else was looking for. The song might have needed a calm heartbeat or a straight shuffle, but Starr was ready for pretty much anything whenever John Lennon or Paul McCartney came in with a song.
But while every other drummer was studying the likes of Buddy Rich and trying to become one of the fastest percussionists in the world, it was about brute force with Starr. Every musician has their role in a band, and he felt that his duty was best served following the rest of his bandmates whenever they came out with a great song.
