Peace and Love: The Ringo groove (Ringo Appreciation Thread) | Page 5 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

limitlessundyinglove said
Up until today I had only heard a couple of Ringo’s solo songs, but today I bought his Blast From Your Past LP on vinyl.  I really, really liked it!  The only songs I had heard before were It Don’t Come Easy, Photograph, and I’m The Greatest, but I honestly really liked every song on there. You already knew this, but Ringo is awesome!  

Yea, yes, yes. Happy, happy, happy. Ringo has lots of awesome songs. Welcome to the party!

A thumping article on Ringo’s greatness. http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2…..les-lucky/ (written in 2015)

Here’s some of the article

‘He was the most influential Beatle,’ Yoko Ono recently claimed. When Paul and John first spotted him out in Hamburg, in his suit and beard, sitting ‘drinking bourbon and seven’, they were amazed. ‘This was, like, a grown-up musician,’ thought Paul. One night Ringo sat in for their drummer Pete Best . ‘I remember the moment,’ said Paul, ‘standing there and looking at John and then looking at George, and the look on our faces was like …what is this? And that was the moment, that was the beginning, really, of the Beatles.’

It began early. Many might suppose that ‘She Loves You ’ (from mid-1963) opens with just those words, sung in chorus. In fact, it kicks off on a fantastically propulsive Starr tom-tom. Through a revolutionary two minutes 20 seconds he frequently plays off the beat. With thrilling use of hi-hat cymbal he opens dynamics and heightens decibels in a manner hitherto not heard on a Beatles record. Such percussive glee was a band war cry as, from 1964 into 1965, the Beatles shook the world.

It’s one of the astutest points ever made about them. The Lennon–McCartney songwriting machine was well oiled by the supple, moody musicality of George Harrison . But so it was by an unerring Starr. In the past two decades, nerdy concentration on precisely who wrote what (AG sidetrip: or in @HMBeatlesfan’s world who played which guitar on which song), and which Beatle was most important (AG sidetrip 2: or who sang the Ahhhs on A Day In The Life ), has often occluded a more basic truth: the Beatles were great only because of the greatness of four men composing and playing together. Without Starr in the mix, they would have sounded quite different, and probably not as wonderful.

Ringo got subtler the further the band left touring behind and the more experimental, from mid-1966, they became in the studio. Without him, there’d be no Beatles track like ‘Tomorrow Never Knows ’, which ends the album Revolver . With its tape-loop screeches and Lennon’s eerie vocal, the whole is held together by Starr’s astonishing, off-the-beat control on slackened tom-toms. His drumming makes this piece of music shamanic and, still, utterly fresh.

Instances of Ringo’s ingenuity abound: the fills in the first minute and a half of ‘A Day In The Life ’ on Sgt. Pepper ; the relentless ferocity and, again, control on the White Album ’s hard-rock ‘Helter Skelter ’; the svelte jazz tempos of, and cymbal use in, ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’ on Abbey Road ; and at the end — on side two as it once was — of the same album’s valedictory medley is the only drum solo Starr performed. (He didn’t approve of drum solos.)

Lack of close listening has disallowed Ringo from being considered as complete a musician as John, Paul and George. When the Beatles took him on (manager Brian Epstein had to sack Best), Ringo was in fact a highly experienced performer, and had long been better known in Liverpool than the others put together. Thirteen years after MacDonald, another reliable Beatles chronicler, Jonathan Gould, wrote: ‘There is little question that the invitation to join the Beatles was the single luckiest thing that ever happened to Ringo Starr . But Ringo’s acceptance of that invitation was also one of the luckiest things that ever happened to the Beatles.’

Correct. The Beatles needed a fresher, better and more Beatlesy drummer than Best. As he reaches his three-quarter century, this congenial northerner surely deserves universal respect, and many happy returns, for being an essential part of one of Britain’s most fabled contributions to the 20th century.