Ringo Starr's Best Beatles Tracks
The sublime drumming of a master
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
-Albert Einstein
If you really want to know what other drummers think about Ringo Starr’s performances in the Beatles canon, it doesn’t take long to find some flattering takes:
“Ringo didn’t just pave the road so we could play the way we play today, he went in with a tractor, knocked down the trees, dug up the dirt, laid the foundation, and then paved the road,” says Liberty DeVitto, Billy Joel’s longtime drummer.
“He’s a songwriter’s drummer,” DeVitto said. “Everyone thinks a great drummer is fast and can whip around like crazy. I think a great drummer hears a song and says, ‘I don’t think there should be drums there.’ Ringo listened to what the song was about and played only where it was time to play.”
“He played straight in the groove, but his fills really swung. That’s the distinctive Ringo sound.” - Del Amitri drummer Ash Soan.
“Define ‘best drummer in the world’,” Dave Grohl said in a tribute video for Starr’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame presentation. “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.”
As a lifelong drummer, I feel that when I say that Ringo was one of the best in the biz, I know what I’m talking about. I’ve played along to hundreds of Beatles tracks over the years, and I can say without a doubt that Ringo’s playing was extraordinarily musical. What he played was perfect for each song. George Harrison once said of Ringo that he could hear a song once and know exactly what it needed.
Ringo’s sensibilities came out of the music of the 40s and 50s (he was born in 1940, a few months before John Lennon). As a kid growing up in Liverpool, there was no rock and roll to form your skills. Sure, there was blues, skiffle (which was popular in England for a minute), and, of course, oodles of easy listening and light jazz. Then, in the 60s, American Motown soul greatly influenced young British musicians. By then, the Beatles were off and running. Ringo was perfect for the Beatles. Can you imagine John Bonham (Led Zeppelin), Neil Peart (Rush), Billy Cobham, or some other wildly technically proficient drummer sitting in with John, Paul, and George? It would be a mess. Ringo’s musical sensibilities made it all work.
Just for fun, here’s a list of my Top Ten Fave Ringo Beatles Tracks, with the proviso that tomorrow, I may shuffle one or two out in favor of a couple of others.
Let’s start with Slow Down. The Beatles covered a lot of American rhythm and blues early in their stage, recording, and touring career. Slow Down is a racing track written by Larry Williams that starts with a rising rapid piano intro that immediately sets the stage for the rest of the song. That’s George Martin on the piano, which blows my mind. I’ve tried to play along with the song numerous times, and playing at their tempo is a challenge. In fact, there’s a fill that Ringo does at 1:18 into the song that still baffles me. Ringo throws in a set of triplets that seem to come out of nowhere and fit perfectly, and he doesn’t miss a beat. Another reason I like this song: Slow Down b/w Matchbox (written by Carl Perkins) is the first record I ever bought. I was eight at the time.
A George Harrison song from Revolver, the first album that George had three of his compositions. I love Ringo’s drumming on this because of the stark snare drum sound that Ringo gets throughout. He also has a couple of stunning fills that kick the song back into a groove after a mini-break.
This John Lennon composition is often, rightfully, cited as one of Ringo’s more creative and musical drum tracks, and I definitely agree. His back-and-forth on the hi-hat, drums, and tom-toms make the song what it is. Imagine someone playing this as a straight rock track. It wouldn’t be nearly as iconic. In May 2021, Ringo Starr said it was his favorite Beatles song in an interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
Interestingly, while this is a John Lennon composition, the title never appears in the lyrics. According to Wikipedia, “In a television interview in early 1964, Starr had uttered the phrase "Tomorrow never knows" when laughing off an incident that took place at the British Embassy in Washington, DC, during which one of the guests had cut off a portion of his hair.” I heard this song at the age of eleven, and it changed my life. Ringo’s drum part is…well, let’s go to Musicologist Russell Reising, who writes of the drum part:
Starr's accompaniment throughout the piece consists of a kind of stumbling march, providing a bit of temporal disruption ... [The] first accent of each bar falls on the measure's first beat and the second stress occurs in the second half of the measure's third quarter, double sixteenth notes in stuttering pre-emption of the normal rhythmic emphasis on the second backbeat – hardly a classic rock and roll gesture.
Another George Harrison song, Old Brown Shoe, appears as a B-Side to the Lennon song “The Ballad of John and Yoko.” Ringo’s offbeat drum track moves it along at a brisk pace. At one point, I had a drum-less version of this (some bootleg, I think) and added my own drum take. It took a few run-throughs for me to find a satisfactory take, and the triplets thrown down by Ringo at a couple of points are not for the faint-of-heart drummers.
This great George Harrison song has some odd passages in 11/8, 4/4, and 7/8 time. Ringo has been quoted as saying, “I don’t say, ‘Oh, 16 bars in I’ll do that.’ I have no idea at all what I’m going to do. It just happens.”
Ringo’s drum track, at first listen, sounds exceedingly simple. It’s anything but. Ringo has admitted the track had the “busiest” drums he’d played on recordings up to that point, but along with the brief breaks and his ongoing returns to the groove make the recording one of Ringo’s finest moments.
With John Lennon’s biting, distorted guitar throughout, Ringo needed to play something that lived up to the musical battle, and he came through. During the breaks, Ringo’s pounding on the toms and snare emphasizes the punch that the song delivers.
Years after the Beatles had recorded Strawberry Fields Forever, the story goes that John Lennon remarked to George Martin that he’d love to go back and re-record everything, to, supposedly, improve on the rush job that he viewed much of the Beatles catalog recording sessions.
“Even Strawberry Fields,” Martin responded incredulously.
“Especially Strawberry Fields,” John replied.
It’s been said that Lennon viewed Strawberry Fields as his finest work with the Beatles. In my ears, it’s a stunner, and Ringo’s drum tracks couldn’t be better.
While all of the previous Beatles recordings show Ringo’s talent and skill at making the right musical choices for the song, A Day in the Life is his coup de grace. His drumming is sublime from start to finish. Every note Ringo plays is picture-perfect, as if velvet-encrusted. Ringo literally floats through the music with his sticks.
Here’s a Spotify playlist. Enjoy!