“I just played amazing”: The Beatles drum beat Ringo Starr is proudest of
There is a myth that goes around that Ringo Starr wasn’t a great drummer, and that is no small tragedy.
The true cost of this falsehood is that it perpetuates a massive fallacy about the art of drumming in general. This malignant misunderstanding has underpinned a great deal of sticksmith folly in subsequent generations, as drummers seem desperate not to succumb to the comic ‘not even the best drummer in The Beatles’ misquote that condemned poor old Ringo to a far few misguided hatchets over the years.
The brilliance of Ringo was that he was a reliable engine. No flashy. Just a servant to the songs, with enough input to keep the melodic journey grooving along. As Paul McCartney said himself when recalling the Liverpudlian’s first audition, “The first few minutes that Ringo is playing, I look to the left at George and to the right to John, and we didn’t say a word, but I remember thinking, ‘S**t, this is amazing’.”
His simplicity was a soaring strength that let the band gel, evidenced by the 23 chart topping songs he’s played on. As ‘Macca’ later appraised, “Look, I love Led Zeppelin, but you watch them playing and you can see them looking back at John Bonham, like, ‘What the hell are you doing? This is the beat. You could turn your back on Ringo and never have to worry. He both gave you security, and you knew he was going to nail it.” He nailed it time and time again by ”playing with the song, with the singer”.
But on one occasion, he had to capture a mood that only the drum kit could offer. It was a rarity, but within the Fab Four’s experimental oeuvre, they did once turn to percussion to take the sonic lead. That track was ‘Rain’.
“I don’t wish I’d played differently on any of them,” he said when reflecting on The Beatles’ discography with Drummerworld. “But ‘Rain’ I played differently. I was trying to be the rain.” This led to a more aggressive pitta-patta on the skin than we’re used to from the laidback rhythm man.
“I don’t do that sort of drumming,” he reflects, “but I did for ‘Rain’. You got what I could give you then”. What he could give is a reflection of the way that The Beatles saw music in general. An idea had to be fulfilled with sincerity and to the fullest. If they were delving into stormy disillusionment, then the music itself had to follow suit. Thus, it seems almost fitting that Ringo’s drumming wasn’t only rainy, but he was also outside of his own comfort zone.
That typifies what made The Beatles the greatest band of all time, so it’s little wonder that Ringo’s highest point of drumming pride falls in line with that ethos.
His uncharacteristic snare work gives the song a dense and adrenalised atmosphere. Ringo was most certainly pleased with the result. “I think I just played amazing,” he told Barry Miles. “I was into the snare and the hi-hat. I think it was the first time I used this trick of starting a break by hitting the hi-hat first instead of going directly to a drum off the hi-hat.”
A lot of his accents fall between the main beats, creating a stirring syncopation that gives the track a unique, lopsided psychedelic feel. The conversational tom-led tone even seems to jostle with the fact that the song was slowed with varispeed, rendering it utterly unique. As Dave Grohl said in praise of his drumming hero. “I think that the sign of a great drummer is knowing who that drummer is within eight bars of the song.”
The result of Ringo’s characterful experimentalism is a record that signposted the expanding scope of the band. The moodiness and psychological focus were not only a complete severance from their hand-holding days, but on top of Ringo’s innovative playing, you also had backmasked lyrics and burgeoning experimentalism.
The track remains a stoner anthem for the ages, and Ringo’s playing is no small part of that as he perfectly gave the idea the splashing rhythm it deserved.
