JSngry Posted January 25, 2009 Report Share Posted January 25, 2009 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTGEOc53S5Y...feature=related No, it ain't "hard". But it sure is perfect. Almost Blue Note worthy, this straight-eighth drumming is. Seriously. Check him out behind the guitar solo, and then how he brings (hell, LIFTS) Lennon back in at its end. Whatever else he couldn't do (and lord knows there's more than a little of that...), he could do this, and do it damn well. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jazzbo Posted January 25, 2009 Report Share Posted January 25, 2009 Amen. I'm not really a Beatles fan at all. But I've always liked Ringo's drumming. Sort of like Klook to me, just direct and full of feeling. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mikeweil Posted January 25, 2009 Report Share Posted January 25, 2009 Amen!!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Harold_Z Posted January 25, 2009 Report Share Posted January 25, 2009 Yeah! The right thing at the right time. Nice bass drum kick and the snare sound is terrific. I haven't heard this in a long time. It's good to hear it. When it came out I mentally compared it to Larry Williams and dismissed it. Foolishly. As happens frequently now things I dismissed then sound really fine to me now. The Beatles do a great job of making it into a guitar based thing. On Larry Williams' record the signature lick is on the guitar but an octave higher,double notes and not as prominent. On the Beatle's McCartney hits it when the guitars can't. On Larry Williams' record the bass never plays that lick. I guess it's Earl Palmer on drums. Ringo doesn't suffer in the comparison for all the reasons noted above. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
marcello Posted January 25, 2009 Report Share Posted January 25, 2009 Only George Martin knew if that's really Ringo, although I believe he's a fine entertainer. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mikelz777 Posted January 25, 2009 Report Share Posted January 25, 2009 One song I was really appreciative of his drumming was "A Day In The Life". How in the heck do you drum to that song? He makes it all work. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JSngry Posted January 25, 2009 Author Report Share Posted January 25, 2009 (edited) Yeah! The right thing at the right time. Nice bass drum kick and the snare sound is terrific. I haven't heard this in a long time. It's good to hear it. When it came out I mentally compared it to Larry Williams and dismissed it. Foolishly. As happens frequently now things I dismissed then sound really fine to me now. The Beatles do a great job of making it into a guitar based thing. On Larry Williams' record the signature lick is on the guitar but an octave higher,double notes and not as prominent. On the Beatle's McCartney hits it when the guitars can't. On Larry Williams' record the bass never plays that lick. I guess it's Earl Palmer on drums. Ringo doesn't suffer in the comparison for all the reasons noted above. Only George Martin knew if that's really Ringo, although I believe he's a fine entertainer. The clip linked to above is from the BBC tapes. It was live, and it was definitely Ringo. The studio version was from 1965 and is woefully lackluster imo. People sometimes forget that Ringo was already a well-seasoned club drummer with a good professional reputation when he got hired for The Beatles. It was precisely his professional skills that got him that gig. The guy could play, and play well, at least within the world in which he was functioning. People also sometimes forget that before Beatlemania, the band spend a lot of years functioning as human jukeboxes on a lot of grueling club gigs, notably in Hamburg, where the gig was something like 8 hours a night. If "virtuosity" had evaded them to that point, competency & tightness as a performing unit had not. The BBC tapes are a great example of this, and probably are the closest we'll come to hearing what they sounded like on a latter-day club gig before fame hit. As a performing unit, they did not sound bad at all. As far as the "is it really Ringo?" thing, hey - it's pretty much been established that A) Bernard Purdie's claims to have been called in to overdub Beatles drum parts were for the Tony Sheridan sides (where he would have been overdubbing Pete Best, not Ringo, right?); B) Paul eventually got around to playing drums on some of his own pieces; and C) everything else is most likely Ringo. What did happen with Ringo is that he didn't "keep up" his skills as a player. Seems to me that he realized that he had gotten the break of a lifetime, so why get all into the practicing thing anymore. So yeah, the Ringo Starr of 1973 was not the Ringo Starr of 1963, and it went downhill even more after that. But - the Ringo Starr of 1963 (and up to about 1967-68) was a drummer who had skills. Somewhat highly specific skills, yeah, but skills that I think deserve recognition, and if you feel like it, a little bit of love. Tell you what, if you've ever been on a gig where the drummer fucks up the kick leading back into the vocal on "I Feel Fine", wither through bad timing, an inadequate sense of percussiveness, or just plain ignorance and thinking that it doesn't matter what you play there (or even worse, that there's something "better" to play there...), you know what I mean. Edited January 25, 2009 by JSngry Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shawn Posted January 25, 2009 Report Share Posted January 25, 2009 Simplicity is a beautiful thing and so easy to overlook...but so noticeable when it ain't there. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Soul Stream Posted January 25, 2009 Report Share Posted January 25, 2009 Any band is only as good as the drummer. That's always been my thinking. So, by that standard, Ringo's gotta be pretty damn good. Plus, lot's of different beats happening with the Beatles catalog. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Big Al Posted January 26, 2009 Report Share Posted January 26, 2009 My son and I are big Ringo fans. Yesterday, I played "She Said She Said" for him and told him to listen to the drums. Afterwards he asked me, though he liked the song, what was so special about the drumming? The answer, I told him, is in what Ringo DIDN'T play. IMO, Ringo is the Count Basie of drummers with his use of space and his ability NOT to overplay a song. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chewy-chew-chew-bean-benitez Posted January 26, 2009 Report Share Posted January 26, 2009 coolest post 1970 ringo-related moment (2008): Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
7/4 Posted January 26, 2009 Report Share Posted January 26, 2009 coolest post 1970 ringo-related moment (2008): Good thing he had the drummer from the David Lee Roth band along to keep time! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BruceH Posted January 27, 2009 Report Share Posted January 27, 2009 (edited) I've long thought of Ringo as the Dave Tough of rock'n'roll. And as far as his skills going downhill, well, it must have started after 1970, because just listen to his work on Lennon's first solo album, Plastic Ono Band. Sounds kind of like a career highpoint to me. And yeah, the BBC stuff is great. I was lucky enough to get a couple tapes of most of it in the very early 1980's, quite a few years before anyone thought of bringing it out on CD. Some local radio station broadcast the sessions (I don't know how they got away with it) and a friend taped it for me. Edited January 27, 2009 by BruceH Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
catesta Posted January 28, 2009 Report Share Posted January 28, 2009 (edited) McCartney made a joke on Howard Stern's show that Ringo was now too busy signing Paul's stuff. Edited January 28, 2009 by catesta Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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