Octopus’s Garden may not put Ringo into the songwriters hall of fame, but his drumming helped to shape countless Beatles classics, bringing personality and life to them.The White Album sessions were tense and scattered overall: Yoko Ono's presence in the studio became a distraction for everyone not named John meanwhile, longtime engineer Geoff Emerick, frustrated by the band's squabbling, quit midway through. He didn’t write the songs and he wasn’t a studio genius like producer George Martin, who helped to mould Lennon, McCartney and Harrison’s tunes into something spectacular. His drumming here is not complicated but – as numerous live versions of the song attest – it is lethally exact with not a note out of place, giving the lie to the notion, repeated by John Lennon in a 1980 Playboy interview, that Ringo was “not technically good” as a drummer.Īnother criticism of Ringo is that he wasn’t a creative god like the other Beatles. On Can’t Buy Me Love, Ringo’s drumming is the primal force that drives the song’s hormonal energy, all whipcrack snare and floor-tom bombast, wrapped up in Ringo’s signature sound: a wall-of-sound hi-hat thrash that sounds like five drummers at once. Ringo’s brief introductory tom roll is the shot of adrenaline that gets the heart of the song thumping it is teen mania in sound, and one of the most important drum rolls in recorded music history. Take She Loves You, the song that kicked off Beatlemania. These are beats designed to enhance the song rather than show off the drummer’s abilities. What this means is that many of Ringo’s best performances go unnoticed. “Is it someone that’s technically proficient? Or is it someone that sits in the song with their own feel? Ringo was the king of feel.” “Define ‘best drummer in the world’,” Dave Grohl said in a tribute video for Starr’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame presentation. Photograph: CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images
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