Peace and Love: The Ringo groove (Ringo Appreciation Thread) | Page 2 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

This appreciation thread was already going. I just updated the title a bit by adding (Ringo Appreciation Thread).

A great thread for feeling the Ringo love is https://www.beatlesbible.com/f…..e-drummer/

Here’s a fun “appreciate” thread : Ringo’s Laugh and Smile

EDIT: I’m taking a look through the Ringo section and came across this thread from 2013 that has great bits from DrBeatle and Zig. There is even a reference to the Ringo biography that just came out (I’m almost through chapter 8 now in mstarr’s book).

Other than being an awesome drummer and great singer…

I like that he is still out there creating new music. He likes doing it. It’s good for him, and it’s good for me. I’m thankful he is still touring so I got a chance to see him in action. I’m glad he got his life cleaned up from that low point and is rocking on.

From the Montreal Gazette http://montrealgazette.com/ent…..ingo-starr

Nobody plays it like Ringo Starr

When John Lennon was recording Double Fantasy in 1980, he had a simple instruction for session drummer Andy Newmark.

Newmark — a man with a CV that included the likes of Sly and the Family Stone, George Benson and David Bowie — liked to experiment, but the former chief Beatle was not interested. “Keep it simple, Andy, and play like Ringo,” he said.

“I prayed daily that Ringo’s spirit would inhabit me,” Newmark is quoted as saying in Ken Sharp’s book Starting Over: The Making of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Double Fantasy .

With Richard Starkey, MBE, “simple” is a deceptive concept. He might have been less drawn to flash than groove and style (he is reputed to have had trouble playing a standard drum roll), but many groundbreaking Beatle records are impossible to imagine without his contributions.

Starr’s big beat on Ticket To Ride alone — said by some to have been suggested by Paul McCartney — has been lifted wholesale by a couple of generations of rock drummers. His incomparable work in Strawberry Fields Forever , Something , Rain and Helter Skelter , among many others, played a serious role in making those recordings perfect. When you think of the opening seconds of Come Together , Starr’s inspired fills are right there in your brain. As the Beatles’ music became more challenging and more wildly inventive over the years, Starr always seemed to find a unique angle to lift the song.

Critics who have dismissed his playing over the years rarely seem to find their opinions supported by actual musicians. Writing for salon.com before Starr was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with the Award for Musical Excellence in April, drummer Patrick Berkery called him “the most important and influential rock drummer ever.”

“There are millions upon millions of us out there who were not only influenced (by), but wanted to be Ringo Starr ,” Max Weinberg of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band and Late Night With Conan O’Brien said in a recently released video featuring several high-profile rock drummers rhapsodizing about Starr’s work.

In the end, if Starr isn’t “better” than Keith Moon or Ginger Baker, who cares? He’s still the only one you’d want to hear on Beatle records.

“I’m an emotional man. An emotional drummer,” Starr explained during a recent interview with the Montreal Gazette. “I play with the song. I don’t want to play drum boogie if the singer’s singing. But I know how to bring a song up. I know how to keep it in time. I know how to settle it down.”

For Starr, feelings and intuition have always trumped technique. “Let’s say at the moment, it seemed like a good place for the fill. Now if we did Take 2, I may not do the fill there. I might do the fill somewhere else because at that moment, it felt better,” he said. “It’s such an emotional thing when I play drums that I do it with the feel of how I think the colour should be changed. But when people have said, ‘Let’s double (track) that fill,’ I cannot double a fill — because it comes from my soul, you know what I mean?”

As long as you know what you mean, Ringo. Just keep doing what you’re doing as long as you can!