Is Ringo Underrated?
 

For a long time, Ringo has been referred to as the "expendable" Beatle, or considered the one who made little or no contribution to the canon of Beatles' music.

I never really paid much attention to this debate, rather, focusing my attentions on the Lennon-McCartney catalog or George Harrison's growth and emergence a songwriter.

However, lately I have been noticing the drums more (or maybe just appreciating them out from under the veil of Lennon-McCartney dominance).

I think Ringo may have been underrated. While not the most adept or technical at drumming like Neal Pert, Stewart Copeland etc, Ringo added nice touches that rounded out the body of Beatles compositions, especially in the later years starting with Rubber Soul. Not as obvious, but more subtle. That is to say, his own "quirky" style complemented the main writer's visions and added to the overall arrangement.

For example, I enjoy his drumming on Strawberry Fields, Sgt. Pepper's, and some others too.

By people with too much time on their hands.

I've heard this mentioned before, and it annoys me. How does it even come up? The Beatles were a group. None were expendable. Remove any one of the four...and you no longer have the sum of the parts.

OK. Ringo was no Lennon, McCartney or Harrison. But he brought his own talent to The Beatles. All four of the "lads" together, made The Beatles what they were. Not one. Not two, or even three.

Really? I've heard from people who care about this stuff that he was overrated due to his association with the first boy band.

Underrated? Certainly not by himself.

Well when you're in the company of superstars like John Lennon, being underrated comes with the territory. He's a good musician, though nothing too special.

I think Ringo was expendable in some ways. Though he seemed to have a good sense of who he was as he lived just outside of the Lennon-McCartney limelight.

From Wikipedia artlice on John Lennon:
(for some reason, I though Paul had said that)

Ringo flew under the radar. It's hard to imagine he'd be where he is today without the company he kept then.

Ringo had a brilliance all his own. Listen to some of the later stuff--Glass Onion, I Am The Walrus... Those era of tunes wouldn't have been half what they were without Ringo's talent. He underplayed them perfectly.

Agree, Ringo grew quite a bit as the group grew. And that's saying something as I doubt if anyother group grew as much as the Beatles did over the course of their very short career. He never held them back at all. And all the while he didn't let his relative lack of stardom become a problem. That in itself is a feat. He never was the one attracting all the attention. But Ringo was the Beatles. The same as the other three were.

Musically, no. He was totally expendable. Personality wise, he was priceless. They would have broken up much sooner without him.

Ringo's brilliance was in his timing, which was impeccable. He knew how to lay down a backbeat and then get out of the way. The nature of John, Paul, and George REQUIRED them to find a drummer that was reliable yet unobtrusive. Ringo was certainly all that and Pete Best was not. But even George Martin was unconvinced about Ringo's skills when he first met him and he hired a studio drummer to play with The Beatles when they recorded Love Me Do and P.S. I Love You.

I guess it's easy to overlook intangibles.

My favorite Ringo examples are Drive My Car, Ticket to Ride, and Rain. I had a drummer tell me once that Ringo practically invented heavy metal drumming on Ticket to Ride.

And nobody plays a tom solo like Ringo....

Ringo certainly played his part as nobody else could. The Beatles' music is as much about personality of the music as the other bits, and he certainly pulls his weight there :)

Devil's advocate: how much of what Ringo played was dictated by him, and how much by the producer? You may have heard Ringo laying out at certain times, but do you really know it was his choice?

Ringo was Ringo. There were many truly "great" drummers of that era, but very few (Moon, Buddy Rich, Dennis Wilson, maybe one or 2 others) were known for anything but their drumming at that time.

(Mick Avory of the KINKS was known but that was for throwing a cymbal at Dave and nearly decapitating him.... lol).

Ringo allowed drummers to be seen and have a personality and be their own person, not just "band backup" like Charlie Watts, Mick Avory, even Mick Fleetwood at the time, the guy from Moody Blues, the drummer from etc.....

One thing that made the Beatles so great and so popular and loved was that each member was an individual. In order to do that each member had to have a certain charisma, flair, personality and be able to command their own fan base and not overshadow anyone else.... Ringo was one of the very few drummers who could do that...... that alone made him great.

Other than Phil Collins, name a drummer that had as much solo success and the fan support as Ringo. He didn't get all that support just because he was a Beatle.... he got it because he had the charisma and character to do it, being a Beatle brought it out and let it be seen.

(Keith Moon's personality and antics IMHO actually hurt the Who at times taking focus off the music and on to him.... but very few were as great a drummer as he.)

Was his drumming all that good? He wasn't Keith Moon or Buddy rich.

Would he have been as great in any other band.... I don't think any other band would have been able to utilize him as well as the Beatles did and thus noone would have ever seen his charisma and charm.

I don't see George Martin telling Ringo to play trip-hop breaks on Strawberry Fields Forever any more than I see him telling John to strum in triplets on All My Loving. Ringo drums like a maniac on Rain and that kind of drumming can only come from a drummer. Even the simple triplet tom intro to She Loves You is all Ringo.

They certainly had general ideas to toss back and forth with Martin about overall sound, but I just can't picture him getting into instrumental technique specifics.

Pan said exactly what I meant to say with Ringo is Ringo. I frequently challenge my Music Appreciation students to name Elvis' drummer, or Chuck Berry's drummer, or Little Richard's drummer. But they can always name The Beatles' drummer before I ever even start the unit.

Ringo is a great person, and I think a great drummer. I think he is underrated a lot of times because he had such huge powerhouse artists around him. I also think Ringo was more of a team player unlike the other 3 Beatles. Some of his solo stuff since the Beatles is forgettable but some of it is REALLY good. I don't think the Beatles could have been the Beatles without Ringo, it is the some of the whole that makes something what it is. The Beatles wouldn't be what they were no matter if Carmine Appice or any other great drummer was there rather than Ringo, his input and personality also comes through in all of there performances. I can also say I think Ringo is happy with how he is rated and how he will be remembered. I think hes just happy to have had the chance to be... To me thats a sign of a greta person.

I agree that Ringo added a certain quirkiness to the group, both in personality and in the playing. It was something you couldn't replicate. I remember hearing Phil Collins reminisce on the Beatles when they were active. He said that many drummers were into Ringo's playing because it was so unique in it's own casual and often laid-back way. They admired it so much that they would try to copy his style and play like him. But there was a problem: they couldn't do it.

A good portion of the drums on The White Album were played by Paul McCartney. He would re-record them after Ringo had left the studio.

Ringo Starr was a mediocre swing drummer playing bouncy rock music. I see the argument that he was perfect for the Beatles, where a more progressive or "vocal" percussionist would have been overbearing. Still, he deserves to remain underrated, as many other ordinary timekeepers would have sufficed. And I don't care if he held the band together; Ringo's bandmates clearly didn't need the Beatles to produce amazing music. There are too many prodigies of their era to hold the common schmucks on a pedestal.

Complete and utter bullshit.

Unless you have 2 valid cites to back this up, neither of which i will add can be Wikipedia, I advise you to delete/withdraw this.

When the Beatles were playing the clubs in Hamburg and the Cavern in Liverpool Ringo Starr was known to be the best drummer in the area, by a wide margin. The only reason the Beatles had gotten Pete best as drummer was because: 1)They were required by the owner of the club in Hamburg to have one, and 2) Best had a drum kit.

Rinog was a sounding board of sorts for the other Beatles. He'd listen to a song and make a comment about how it sounded better with such and such and the other Beatles may have told him to sod off at the time, but they'd go and change it later.

Technically Paul was a bit better then Ringo, but since none of the Beatles ever learned to read or write music, they didn't place all that much value on technical skill to begin with.

I gotta agree with Walking Shadow on this. We know Paul played on "Back In The USSR" (and it shows, for better or worse). Paul *may* have played on "Why Don't We Do It In The Road" as the sources differ. What other tracks do you have in mind (and evidence) to support the contention that Paul played a "good portion of the drums on The White Album?"

Ringo may not have been a brilliant drummer, but he had the sort of understated style that the Beatles demanded of him. It's not a drum-band, in the end. They never really "jamprovised." They were song-centric, even sometimes single-centric, and ran like a well-oiled machine. Ringo fit in perfectly.

Paul also played drums on The Ballad of John And Yoko. He and John were the only ones at that particular session.

ringo was the perfect drummer for the beatles--a tight, minimal style--no extra elements. it's not easy to play like that. try it, you'll see. and this regardless of the idiom--no extra notes requires *alot* of discipline--and no extra notes requires that you think in terms of the overall sound rather than in terms of self-assertion.

it's particularly difficult for younger players, i think--you know, the cats who play as if they believe that if the shut up at all, they will disappear and not be able to get back into this dimension. i remember seeing vernon reid play guitar with ronald shannon jackson's decoding society a long time ago...and he's a great guitarist--but during that gig, we WOULD NOT SHUT UP and was stepping all over everything because he WOULD NOT SHUT UP and that, folks, was not pretty. it didnt matter that he was doing very complex things technically. all that mattered was that he was stepping all over the band that night.

on the other hand, it was just that night. braxton is right about this: it's stupid to imagine that you understand a player as a whole from a performance, or any number of performances. this is even more true when you aren't talking about performances, but about records.

anyway....beyond a certain point, it seems to me that the main reason one focusses on chops is to enable you as much not to play things at certain moments as it is to enable you to play things at others.

I agree with you there Roach. I believe it can be distilled down to "less is more" or in jazz circles, "kiss" - keep it simple stupid. For me, it's one of the reasons why I really dig the cool jazz era. All that empty space, environement for a minimum of notes to move around. Generally speaking of course.

Perhaps we need to ope up another thread.