The Beatles member Ringo Starr said had no rhythm: “No real sense of timing”
The entire fabric of The Beatles was about all four of them working together.
Even though there was a magic to the way John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote their songs, the idea of them being four corners of a square is the perfect analogy for their entire career. If you took one away, the whole thing would collapse, and that included Ringo Starr laying down a rock steady groove for every song they played, even if it meant covering up some of the mistakes that the rest of his bandmates were making.
Then again, it’s usually easier to point out Starr as being the worst of the best in the band half the time. He never claimed to be as ambitious as a songwriter, and even when the band broke up, he was the one who seemed to have the most fondness for his old mates and would have loved to get back together with them. But if the decision was final, that didn’t mean Starr couldn’t still hang out with his friends now and again.
Compared to the tension between everyone in the group, Starr was the kind of fun-loving guy who was more than happy to be behind the kit playing with his mates. He was there to provide the pulse on Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band, and even when George Harrison came out of the woodwork to play The Concert for Bangladesh, Starr was right there by his side, ready to play his own tunes like ‘It Don’t Come Easy’.
But playing with every Beatle usually means knowing all of their strengths as well. Starr collaborating with Macca would have been a walk in the park, considering how great they fit in as a rhythm section, but it did get a little bit troublesome when he heard something that was outside of the usual musical conventions. He was already thrown for a loop when Harrison brought in ‘Here Comes the Sun’, but Starr felt that Lennon was the one who never really cared for playing in time.
Even though each Beatles song held together, Starr felt that Lennon was the one member who didn’t have the best sense of rhythm, saying, “My drums are really the basis for a lot of those tracks. Paul is the most melodic bass player in the world, and John was a brilliant rhythm guitarist, despite the fact that he didn’t have any real sense of timing. So musically, we were all very important.”
That’s borderline heresy in Beatles circles, but the one person who would probably agree with Starr is Lennon. He was always self-depricating about his own abilities, and he felt that he had a hard time trying to articulate what he was trying to say on guitar whenever explaining it to the rest of the band. But whereas most people would flounder under those conditions, Lennon turned that lack of timing into a musical superpower half the time.
Not all of his songs fit into the traditional 4/4 structure, but that’s what makes all of them interesting to listen to. ‘All You Need is Love’ flips between different time signatures, ‘Don’t Let Me Down’ has an extra beat thrown in on every one of the verses, and ‘Good Morning Good Morning’ is so fluid with its structure that it almost feels like it shouldn’t have any traditional time signature added to it.
That can get incredibly irritating for people who wanted the same danceable 4/4 pulse, but Lennon didn’t want to settle for an “ordinary” beat. He liked the idea of making the most off-the-wall songs that he could, and Starr was more than happy to oblige when it came to playing the right drum fill or just laying down the pulse so that Lennon could tell his story over top of everything.
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