“I’m too busy on this”: The Beatles album Ringo Starr said wasn’t his best
The mark of any good drummer is to serve the song before anything else. Anyone can spend their time trying to get their chops up and create the kind of drum fill to end all drum fills, but is anyone going to pay attention if it manages to take away from the rest of the track whenever they play it? Even though drummers have shown their skills, there’s a certain discipline that comes with playing for the song, and Ringo Starr thought he crossed that line working on this classic Beatles album.
Which is strange, considering how well Starr has been about hanging back whenever the time called for it. There are still plenty of instances where he could fly off the handle on tunes like ‘Rain’, but listening back to the Fab Four’s classic tracks, there are hardly any moments where people feel like Starr is showboating or trying to get that spotlight away from the frontline for a second.
In fact, some of his most iconic drum moments have been when he keeps things fairly open. Everyone can remember that iconic drum solo in the middle of ‘The End’, but Starr was the one who could make dead-simple riffs sound iconic, like the slow beginning of ‘Something’ or the little triplet that he puts in the middle of the chorus break on ‘In My Life’.
Once the band finished work on The White Album, though, Starr would have been forgiven if he felt that he had lost his way. No one was slipping during the sessions, but since the camaraderie was at an all-time low, no one could be bothered to put the same emotion into their performances as they did when they were making records like Revolver.
So when Let It Be started shaping up, half of the jams captured in the Get Back documentary felt like the band taking the piss half the time. With George Harrison leaving the band and most of the footage coming from the band playing half-hearted covers, every member seemed to be doing everything they could to hold the songs together rather than letting everything flow naturally.
And while that nervous energy may have come across on the final tape, Starr couldn’t help but be self-deprecating towards his own playing, later recalling, “The crazy thing is, when the Let It Be reissue came out, the remaster, they have this new system, Atmos, and we went to England for it. And Paul [McCartney] and I were in this crowd of people listening, and I said, ‘I’m too busy on this record!’ I told him it was too busy. You know, these are just thoughts that go through my head.”
If this is what Starr sounds like when he’s busy, though, maybe he should have done it more often. He doesn’t leave as much space in the mix as he normally does, but listening back to the track listing, tracks like ‘Get Back’ would never have worked if Starr hadn’t been playing that marching groove throughout the track.
But the fact that Starr was even that critical really shows you the kind of artist that he always was. Most people with his pedigree would spend their time turning into the same lacklustre performances, but Starr is still interested in seeing if he could improve every time he’s presented with a new track.
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