“Everybody can sing that”: The Beatles song that gave Ringo Starr a career
By the time The Beatles broke up at the end of the 1960s, none of them needed to make any more music if they didn’t want to. They had already left a spotless legacy for everyone to pour over for the rest of time, and even if they went the way of John Lennon’s early ventures and started making avant-garde sound collages for the rest of their lives, people would still consider records like Rubber Soul and Sgt Peppers timeless pieces of art. But out of all the great tunes that were gifted to Ringo Starr over the years, he felt a certain lighthearted ditty was the one that gave him a career.
Granted, Starr has always been a bit too self-deprecating when it comes to his craft. There’s an art to crafting the perfect drumming for any song, and as much as Starr isn’t considered to be the most proficient drummer compared to the Neil Peart school of drumming, being able to play appropriately for the song is a form of genius that can’t be properly taught.
As much as Starr lays back into the groove when he needs to, no one is going to forget the opening drum fill that kicks off ‘Something’, the strange tom-tom groove that he picked up on from Paul McCartney on ‘Ticket to Ride’, or even the slowed down drum hits that play throughout ‘Rain’. In fact, the only hangup tended to be that he didn’t have the greatest voice compared to his bandmates.
While he could carry a tune when the time called for it, Starr was never meant to be playing the frontman role every single night. He left that to his bandmates up front, and even when they threw something his way for his female fans, they made sure to never give him something that was too far out of his range, whether that was a cover or a throwaway tune like ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’.
But there was always a charm with Starr’s personality. Even though he wasn’t as sentimental on record as John Lennon or Paul McCartney, his goofy sense of humour helped endear him to the fans, almost like the bumbling older brother of the group. So when Lennon and McCartney came up with the image of a yellow submarine and the backdrop of a children’s nursery rhyme, Starr was the only one who could have pulled it off.
Looking back, Starr also had to thank Lennon and McCartney for helping him build a reputation out of the tune following its release on Revolver, saying, “That song’s given me a career. Everybody can sing that song. When I’m on tour, it’s all ‘this is one you all know, and if you don’t, you’re in the wrong place.’ Even fetuses know that song.”
While the song also took on a second life as being one of the first songs kids hear by The Beatles, thanks to the movie of the same name, Starr never lost that innocence during his time with the group. His first attempt at songwriting with ‘Don’t Pass Me By’ had that same nursery rhyme quality to it, and when writing ‘Octopus’s Garden’ with George Harrison, a lot of the appeal is about making a song that’s all about having fun away from all of your troubles.
But that universal appeal of ‘Yellow Submarine’ is about more than Starr never having to work again after playing it. It’s about what that music meant to so many people down through the years. Now, with over a half-century to look back on it, The Beatles’ songs felt like they were made for everyone, and even for something as innocent as ‘Yellow Submarine’, it’s easy to have any casual rock fan singing along.
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