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selenak“The great thing about Ringo”, Brian Epstein once told his friend Nat Weiss, “is that he’s the least talented, but never uptight about it.” It was said in confidence and thus far less diplomatic than Brian usually expressed himself. There is some truth in it – Ringo certainly never had the songwriting talent of the other three, or the vocal range, he knew that, it didn’t bother him, and one memorable occasion in 1968 aside, he never complained about lack of attention or not being taken seriously enough – but it still misses out something essential: without Ringo, they would not have been the Fab Four. That’s another thing different about the Beatles in comparison to other bands – from the time Ringo joined, you couldn’t have taken any of the four out without destroying the group.
Pete Best, of course, would beg to differ. Pete has been called the unluckiest guy in the music business, just as Ringo has been called the luckiest. Pete had joined the Beatles in 1960, when the group, eternally short of a drummer ever since they were the Quarrymen and their first drummer quit (there was a succession of replacements, none of them staying very long), got their first Hamburg gig, had literally joined them at the last minute, and had remained with them for the next two years, solidly drumming away, aquiring his own fans, but never quite clicking with the rest of the gang. Meanwhile, one of the musicians they were hanging out a lot with in Hamburg was the drummer of Rory Storm and the Hurricans, one Ringo Starr (aka Richard Starkey; this stage name was the only preposterous thing about him). Who occasionally filled in if Pete was otherwise engaged. He should have seen the signs on the wall, but he didn’t. When they finally got the audition with George Martin at EMI, and George Martin said he was willing to put them under contract but they would need a studio drummer as he didn’t consider Pete Best good enough (though he thought they’d keep him for live performances, which wasn’t that unusual with groups), Pete’s days were numbered. Philip Norman, the most McCartney-hostile of Beatles biographers, claims this was all Paul’s idea in Shout and it’s been reprinted ever since, but both John and George, both of them in an anti-Paul mood in the early 70s and thus definitely not inclined to cover for him, said otherwise.
John: This myth built up over the years that he was great and Paul was jealous of him because he was pretty and all that crap. They didn't hang out that much together, but it was partly because Pete was a bit slow. He was a harmless guy, but he was not quick. All of us had quick minds but he never picked that up. The reason he got into group in the first place was because we had to have a drummer to get to Hamburg. We were always going to dump him when we could find a decent drummer, but by the time we were back from Germany we'd trained him to keep a stick going up and down (four-in-the-bar, he couldn't do much else) and he looked nice and the girls liked him, so it was all right. We were cowards when we sacked him. We made Brian do it. But if we'd told him to his face, that would have been much nastier. It would probably have ended in a fight.
George: To me it was apparent: Pete kept being sick and not showing up for gigs so we would get Ringo to sit in with the band instead, and every time Ringo sat in, it seemed like 'this is it'. Eventually we realised, 'We should get Ringo in the band full time.' I was quite responsible for stirring things up. I conspired to get Ringo in for good; I talked to Paul and John until they came round to the idea. I remember going to his house. He wasn't in so I sat and had some tea with his mother and I said, 'We'd like Ringo to be in our band.' She said, 'Well, he's in Butlins holiday camp with Rory at the moment, but when he rings me I'll get him to phone you,' and I gave her our number. We weren't very good at telling Pete he had to go. But when it comes down to it, how do you tell somebody? Although Pete had not been with us all that long - two years in terms of a lifetime isn't very long - when you're young it's not a nice thing to be kicked out of a band and there's no nice way of doing it. Brian Epstein was the manager so it was his job, and I don't think he could do it very well either. But that's the way it was and the way it is.
The whole “how Pete got fired and Ringo got hired” tale is retold in Anthology by George, Paul, Ringo and George Martin as well, along with how Ringo’s first session went:
If you didn’t have the time to watch the clip (in which case you missed the tale of how George got a black eye in Ringo’s defense); the recording of “Love me do” was notorious because George Martin, not wanting to take any risks after Pete Best, had gone ahead and booked a studio drummer anyway, Andy White, which is why there are two versions of Love Me Do in existence, one with Andy White (the single) and one with Ringo (the one on the Please Please Me album. Poor Ringo, who had just left his job with Hurricanes for this (and shaved his beard of, and cut his hair Beatles-style), was dejected.
Paul: Horror of horrors! (…) Ringo got blown off the first record. George did the, 'Can I see you for a moment, boys?' -'Yeah?' - 'Um... without Ringo.' He said, 'I would like to bring in another drummer for this record.' It was very hard for us to accept that decision. We said, 'Ringo has to be the drummer; we wouldn't want to lose him as the drummer.' But George got his way and Ringo didn't drum on the first single. He only played tambourine. I don't think Ringo ever got over that. He had to go back up to Liverpool and everyone asked, 'How did it go in the Smoke?' We'd say, 'B side's good,' but Ringo couldn't admit to liking the A side, not being on it.
Ringo: I was devastated that George Martin had his doubts about me. I came down ready to roll and heard, 'We've got a professional drummer.' He has apologised several times since, has old George, but it was devastating - I hated the bugger for years; I still don't let him off the hook!
Luckily, Ringo got his shot once the single sold and they got a contract for an entire album. In the meantime, via a lot of life performances, it had turned out that the new drummer really added that magical something which had been missing. Not simply with his drumming. He was, as the other three were, a born comedian, joining the verbal interplay that was quintessential to the group which Pete Best had never done.
Paul: When Ringo joins us we get a bit more kick, a few more imaginative breaks, and the band settles. So the new combination was perfect: Ringo with his very solid beat, laconic wit and Buster Keaton-like charm; John with his sharp wit and his rock'n'rolliness, but also his other, quite soft side; George, with his great instrumental ability and who could sing some good rock'n'roll. And then I could do a bit of singing and playing, some rock'n'roll and some softer numbers.
As for the drumming:
Ringo: The drummer always sets the feel and I think that was the way that I played, and then with Paul on bass - he is an amazing bass-player; to this day he is the most melodic bass-player - we would work at putting the bass and bass-drum together. As long as they're together, you can put anything on top. I only have one rule and that is to play with the singer. If the singer's singing, you don't really have to do anything, just hold it together. If you listen to my playing, I try to become an instrument; play the mood of the song. For example, 'Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire,' - boom ba bom. I try to show that; the disenchanting mood. The drum fills are part of it. The other thing is, I couldn't do the same drum sequence twice. Whatever beat I would put down, I could never repeat identically, because I play with my soul more than my head. My head knows to play the rhythms - rock'n'roll, swing, whatever - but it comes out as whatever the feeling is at that moment. The interesting thing about The Beatles was that we seemed to have telepathy. Without thinking, we'd all be up or bringing it down - together. It was magic, and that was one of the forces of The Beatles, the telepathy. (And, of course, the love of music, the great songs...) I've never had anything like that before or since.
There is an urban legend that John, asked whether Ringo was the best drummer there was, said “he’s not even the best drummer within the Beatles”, but nobody has ever been able to track down the interview in which he supposedly said this. Whereas you have plenty of traceable John quotes praising Ringo’s drumming, like this 1980 one from the Playboy interview:
Ringo's a damn good drummer. He was always a good drummer. (…)I think Ringo's drumming is underrated the same way as Paul's bass-playing is underrated. Paul is one of the most innovative bass-players that ever played, and half the stuff that's going on now is directly ripped off from his Beatles period. He is coy about his bass-playing. He's an egomaniac about everything else, but his bass-playing he was always a bit coy about. He is a great musician who plays the bass like few other people could play it. If you compare his bass-playing with Rolling Stones's bass-playing, and you compare Ringo's drumming with Charlie Watts's drumming, they are equal to them, if not better. I always objected to the fact that because Charlie came on a little more 'arty' than Ringo and knew jazz and did cartoons, that he got credit. I think that Charlie's a damn good drummer, and the other guy a good bass-player, but I think Paul and Ringo stand up anywhere, with any of the rock musicians. Not technically great. None of us were technical musicians. None of us could read music. None of us can write it. But as pure musicians, as humans inspired to make noise, they''e as good as anybody.
Of course, hanging out together occasionally and being full time in a group are two different things. John, Paul and George had known each other and played with each other full time for seven years now, and the Beatles, as both the Pete Best example and much later events *coughYokocough* showed, were notoriously bad at accepting outsiders on an emotional level. So the fact that Ringo became a part of them so quickly, that they went from JohnPaulGeorge and the drummer of the day to JohnPaulGeorgeRingo was by no means a guarantee. The fact that they were on tour constantly, and when not on tour, recording, helped, undoubtedly. They were hardly ever not in each other’s company, and then you either come hate each other or you click.
Ringo: We'd have two rooms; sharing two and two, and it could be any two. At the beginning it always used to be Paul with me, because I was the new boy and the other two didn't really want to deal with my sleeping habits, whatever they may have been. Maybe I snored, maybe my feet stank; maybe theirs did, but they knew each other. They'd been through a lot of life, I still had to get into it with them.
George: Doubling up rooms on the tours, after Pete Best left, I used to pair with John because I felt I'd been instrumental in talking them into getting Ringo into the band. I thought that rather than me hang out with Ringo, it would be best if he shared with one of them because that would integrate him better.
He also wasn’t shy about contributing musically:
Paul: We were all very interested in American music, much more so than in British. Ringo arrived in the band knowing more blues music. Coming from the Dingle, by the river, he'd known plenty of blokes in the Merchant Navy (that was a way for kids to get out of Liverpool, to places like New Orleans and New York) who would pick up a lot of blues records. It was Ringo who introduced us to old country-and-western; Jimmie Rodgers and those kind of people. Ringo had quite a good collection of that.
Then there was Beatlemania, which isolated the four from pretty much the rest of the world, including their families.
Ringo: In 1963 the attitude of my whole family changed. They treated me like a different person. One absolutely clear vision I had was round at my auntie's, where I'd been a thousand times before. We were having a cup of tea one night and somebody knocked the coffee table and my tea split into my saucer. Everyone's reaction was, 'He can't have that. We have to tidy up.' That would never have happened before. I thought then, 'Things are changing.' It was absolutely an arrow in the brain. Suddenly I was ‘one of those’, even within my family, and it was very difficult to get used to. I’d grown up and lived with these people and now I found myself in weirdland. Home and family were the two things I didn't want to change, because it had all changed 'out there' and we were no longer really sure who our friends were, unless we'd had them before the fame. The guys and the girls I used to hang about with I could trust. But once we'd become big and famous, we soon learnt that people were with us only because of the vague notoriety of being 'a Beatle'. And when this happened in the family, it was quite a blow. I didn't know what to do about it; I couldn't stand up and say, 'Treat me like you used to,' because that would be acting 'big time'.
It’s hardly a unique experience if you look at the stories of other celebrities (whether in music or film or even literature) who hit the big time, of course. But many respond to this change of relationships with assholery. Ringo did not just by befriending the three other people who were stuck in weirdland with him but by becoming the one who kept them grounded and, in later times, the glue that kept them together. Via inexhaustible good humour and lack of temper tantrums. Also, they loved his malapropisms, which found their way in many a song lyric. The most famous examples are A Hard Day’s Night and Tomorrow Never Knows.
George: I remember when we were driving back to Liverpool from Luton up the M1 motorway in Ringo's Zephyr, and the car's bonnet hadn't been latched properly. The wind got under it and blew it up in front of the windscreen. We were all shouting, 'Aaaargh!' and Ringo calmly said, 'Don't worry, I'll soon have you back in your safely-beds.'
Ringo: I used to, while I was saying one thing, have another thing come into my brain and move down fast. Once when we were working all day and then into the night, I came out thinking it was still day and said, 'It's been a hard day,' and looked round and noticing it was dark, '...'s night!' 'Tomorrow Never Knows' was something I said, God knows where it came from. 'Slight bread' was another: 'Slight bread, thank you.' John used to like them most. He always used to write them down.
A Hard Day’s Night, the film, not the song, revealed something else, to wit, that Ringo had the most screen presence and acting ability.
Ringo: It was a lot of fun. It was incredible for me, the idea that we were making a movie. I loved the movies as a kid. I used to go to a hell of a lot, in the Beresford and Gaumont cinemas in Liverpool. I have great memories from Saturday-morning pictures. I'd be into whatever was showing: if it was a pirate movie, I would be a pirate, and if it was a Western I would be a cowboy; or I'd come out as D'Artagnan and fence all the way home. It was a great fantasy land for me, the movies, and suddenly we were in one. It was all so romantic, with the lights and coming to work in the limo. I think because I loved films I was less embarrassed that the others to be in one; John really got into the movie, too. I felt a lot of the time that George didn't want to be there. It was something he was doing because we were doing it.
His most famous scene in the film is this one:
Though Ringo denies there was much acting involved: I had come directly to work from a nightclub (very unprofessional) and was a little hungover, to say the least. Dick Lester had all his people there, and the kid that I was supposed to be doing the scene with, but I had no brain. I'd gone. We tried it several ways. They tried it with the kid doing his lines and someone off camera shouting mine. Then they had me doing the lines of the kid and the kid going 'blah blah blah'. Or me saying, 'And another thing, little guy...' I was so out of it, they said, 'Well' let's do anything.' I said, 'Let me just walk around and you film me,' and that's what we did. And why I look so cold and dejected is because I felt like shit. There's no acting going on; I felt that bad.
A Hard Day’s Night was generally well reviewed, with Ringo frequently singled out for praise, sometimes even including Chaplin comparisons. Now given that nobody has ever accused John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison of lacking ego, you’d think they could have felt slightly miffed. Not so. Instead, John and Paul began to write specifically Ringo-tailored songs to showcase him. (He’d done covers before.) More on that in a moment. First, another phenomenon. You’d think that being stuck on tour all the time, they’d use the opportunity to spend what holidays they had apart. However, to quote Ringo:
Paul and I went to the Virgin Islands. It was great. The funny part was that we'd been given John's and George's passports, and they'd been given ours. It was still: 'Oh, it's just one of them, give them any passport; they're all the same.' Somehow we got to Lisbon and were checking into hotel; Paul was wearing a disguise and the guy at reception said, 'Who's that?' looking at the passport suspiciously, 'That's not you.' We had a 30-foot motor boat that we'd rented. It came with a captain and his wife, and a deck-hand. It was nothing palatial, but we cruised around having a great time. I was with Maureen, and Paul was with Jane Asher. Jane couldn't go in the sun and Paul got sunburnt one day and was screaming all night. Our bedrooms were either side of the passageway with only curtains dividing them, so you could hear everything. We'd been already with Paul and Jane to Greece. And Maureen and I went with John and Cynthia to Trinidad and Tobago in 1966. I never really went on holiday with George.
In 1964 Ringo got tonsillitis just when the world tour started. This led to Brian Epstein quickly hiring a stand-in, Jimmy Nicol, until Ringo was recovered (he rejoined the band in Australia). Considering the Pete Best backstory, Ringo had a sudden attack of doubts. What if he’d been kidding himself about being part of the team?
Ringo: My illness was a real big event. It was miserable. I remember it really well: my throat was so sore, and I was trying to live on jelly and ice-cream. I was a smoker in those days, too. That was pretty rough, being hooked on the weed. It was very strange, them going off without me. They'd taken Jimmy Nicol and I thought they didn't love me any more - all that stuff went through my head.
George: Of course, with all respect to Jimmy, we shouldn't have done it. The point was, it was the Fabs. Can you imagine The Rolling Stones going on tour: 'Oh, sorry. Mick can't come.' - 'All right, we'll just get somebody else to replace him for two weeks.' It was silly, and I couldn't understand it. I really despised the way we couldn't make a decision for ourselves then. It was just: 'Off you go.' - 'But Ringo must come with us.' - 'No, sorry, you'll get a new drummer.' As we grew older, I suppose, we would have turned round and said we wouldn't go; but in those days it was the blind leading the blind.
George Martin: They nearly didn't do the Australia tour. George is a very loyal person, and he said, 'If Ringo's not part of the group, it's not The Beatles. I don't see why we should do it, and I'm not going to.' It took all of Brian's and my persuasion to tell George that if he didn't do it he was letting everybody down. Jimmy Nicol was a very good drummer, who came along and learnt Ringo's parts well. Obviously, he had to rehearse with the guys. They came and worked through all the songs at Abbey Road so he got to know them. He did the job excellently, and faded into obscurity immediately afterwards.
Ringo: I hated to leave the other three. I followed them out to Australia and there were people at the airport, but I was on my own and just automatically I looked round for the others. I couldn't stand it. I met up with them in Melbourne. The flight was horrendous. It still is - they may have shaved a couple of hours off the flight, but it's still a hell of a long way. I remember the plane felt like a disaster area to me. It was fabulous in Australia, and of course, it was great to be back in the band - that was a really nice moment. And they'd all bought me presents in Hong Kong.
He was the second Beatle to marry; Maureen Cox, his wife, had been an early Beatle fan from the Cavern days who’d kissed Paul on a dare from her friends but was really interested in Ringo; when she whispered this into Paul’s ear, he laughed and introduced them. The marriage with Maureen feel apart in the mid-Seventies for a variety of factors; he had affairs; she had one with, of all the people, George Harrison (who when asked why his friend’s wife and why her after knowing her for all these years shrugged and said “incest”), and he drank a lot at that point. However, Ringo was the only one of the Beatles who managed to have a post-divorce friendly relationship with his ex wife, which benefited their three children. He was at Maureen’s side when she died in the 90s, of cancer. Paul wrote the song Litlte Willow as a tribute to her and a comfort for her and Ringo’s children. This vid of it shows the story of Maureen and Ringo in pictures:
But back to the 60s, and the songs John and Paul wrote for Ringo. The two most famous ones are Yellow Submarine (by now we can call it safely a folk song; I’ve even seen it sung in Latin!) and With a little help from my friends. They were very much inspired by Ringo’s personality, and you can’t imagine them being written for anyone else.
Paul: I was laying in bed in the Ashers' garret, and there's a nice twilight zone just as you're drifting into sleep and as you wake from it; I always find it quite a comfortable zone, you're almost asleep, you've laid your burdens down for the day and there's this little limbo-land just before you slip into sleep. I remember thinking that a children's song would be quite a good idea and I thought of images, and the colour yellow came to me, and a submarine came to me, and I thought, Well, that's kind of nice, like a toy, very childish yellow submarine. I was thinking of it as a song for Ringo, which it eventually turned out to be, so I wrote it as not too rangey in the vocal. I just made up a little tune in my head, then started making a story, sort of an ancient mariner, telling the young kids where he'd lived and how there'd been a place where he had a yellow submarine. It's pretty much my song as I recall, written for Ringo in that little twilight moment. I think John helped out; the lyrics get more and more obscure as it goes on but the chorus, melody and verses are mine. There were funny little grammatical jokes we used to play. It should have been 'Everyone of us has all he needs' but Ringo turned it into 'everyone of us has all we need.' So that became the lyric. It's wrong, but it's great. We used to love that.
John: ‘Yellow Submarine' is Paul's baby. I helped with the lyrics too. We virtually made the track come alive in the studio, but based on Paul's inspiration. Paul's idea. Paul's title, written for Ringo.
The Yellow Submarine recording session must have been something else again. Geoff Emerick, the balance engineer, describes it vividly in his memoirs:
Paul had conceived Yellow Submarine as a singalong, and so a few of the band’s friends and significant others had been invited along for the evening’s session. By then, everyone was distinctly in a party mood. Though we hadn’t tried pot ourselves, Phil and I had been around enough musicians to know what it was, and we were sometimes aware of the funny smell in the studio after the Beatles and their roadies snuck a joint off in the corner, though I doubt very much the straightlaced George Martin knew what was going on. (…) Following a long dinner break (during which we suspected more than food was being ingested), a raucous group began filtering in, including Mick Jagger and Brian Jones, along with Jagger’s girlfriend Marianne Faithfull and George Harrison’s wife, Pattie. They were all dressed in their finest Carnaby Street outfits, the women in miniskirts and flowing blouses, the men in purple bell bottoms and fur jackets. Phil and I put up a few ambient microphones around the studio, and I decided to also give everyone a handheld mic on a long lead so they could move around freely – there was no way I was going to try to contain that lot!
The two Rolling Stones and Marianne Faithfull basically acted as if I didn’t exist; to them, I guess I was just one of the invisible ‘little people’. Pattie was more gracious, going out of her way to say hello to me. She seemed shy but also very charming. The whole marijuana-influenced scene that evening was completely zany, straight out of a Marx Brothers movie. The entire EMI collection of percussion instruments and sound effects boxes were strewn all over the studio, with people grabbing bells and whistles and gongs at random. To simulate the sound of a submarine submerging, John grabbed a straw and began blowing bubbles into a glass – fortunately, I was able to move a mic nearby in time to record it for posterity. Inspired, Lennon wanted to take things to the next level and have me record him actually singing underwater. First, he tried singing while gargling. When that failed (he nearly choked), he began lobbying for a tank to be brought in so he could be submerged!
While George Martin worked on dissuading him, I began thinking of an alternative. Why not instead have John sing into a mic that was immersed in water? We had several ‘spot’ microphones at hand, and if one of them could be wrapped in some kind of waterproofing, perhaps it would work. George looked at me as if I were crazy, but with John imploring him to let us try it, he finally gave his begrudging approval. Neil was duly dispatched to fetch a glass milk bottle from the canteen and fill it with water, while Phil was sent to the mic cabinet to select the smallest microphone he could find. I was trying to figure out how to waterproof it when John called out to Mal and said, ‘What have you got that will work for this?” (…) With a wink and a sly grin, the burly roadie reached into the bag, fished around for a moment, and cheerfully waved a condom aloft. ‘Well done, Malcom!’ John proclaimed as the others burst into laughter. ‘After all, we don’t want the microphone to get in the family way, do we?’
Fighting an attack of the giggles myself, I wrapped the mic carefully and lowered it into the milk bottle, then placed it on top of one of the keyboards as Lennon pulled up a chair, prepared to sing into it. Then it dawned on me: My God, if the studio manager sees this, I’ll be fired on the spot! Just then the door swung open and none other than Mr. E.H. Fowler appeared. Fortunately for me, he was a bit nearsighted. BY the time he got close enough to see what we were actually doing, John had bolted from his chair, grabbed the offending milk bottle, and hit it behind his back. My heart started pounding as Fowler came closer.
“Everything all right, lads?” he asked
“Yes, sir, Mr. Studio Manager, sir, absolutely smashing, sir,” Lennon replied somberly, standing stiffly to attention. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the others stifling their laughter – even George Martin. “Very well, then,” Fowler replied. “Carry on.” And with that, he turned on his heels and marched out of the room, satisfied that everything was under control. When the peals of laughter finally died down, we continued our sonic experiment, but the results were disappointing. Maybe it was just that the walls of the milk bottle were too thick – or perhaps the condoms of the day weren’t up to to the taks! – but the signal was so muffled and weak as to be unusable, and the idea was abandoned. To my relief. The microphone was unharmed. I wasn’t until many years later that I realized with horror that the microphone we were using was phantom powered – meaning it was actually a live electrical object. It conjunction with the 240 volt system used in England, any of us, including Lennon, could easily have been electrocuted, and I would have gone down in history as the first recording engineer to kill a client in the studio. At the time, though, we were blissful in our ignorance. The party resumed. People began clinking wineglasses and shouting out at random; those background screams during the second verse came from Patti Harrison, which was always ironic to me, considering how quiet she usually was. As we neared midnight, Mal Evans began marching around the studio wearing a huge bass drum on his chest, everyone else in line behind him conga-style singing along to the chorus. It was utter madness. When John ran back into the echo chamber and ad-libbed his ‘Captain, captain’ routine to the sound of clanking bells and chains, we were all doubled over with laughter. The ambience around his voice was just perfect, and that was the way all those bits happened. Although the record sounds quite produced, it was actually spur of the moment – John and the others were just out there having a good time. Somehow it worked, though, despite the chaos.
And here’s the song. Imagining four Beatles, two Rolling Stones, Marianne Faithfull, Pattie Harrison, roadies Mal and Neil and the EMI recording staff conga-dancing while singing it is optional. *g*
Then there was the song which became in a way the ultimate Ringo signature tune (he’s still singing it), and at the same time one of the most widely covered ones; Paul and John wrote it for the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band album.
Paul: This was written out at John's house in Weybridge for Ringo; we always liked to do one for him and it had to be not too much like our style. I think that was probably the best of the songs we wrote for Ringo actually. He was to be a character in this operetta, this whole thing that we were doing, so this gave him a good intro, wherever he came in the album; in fact it was the second track. It was a nice place for him, but wherever it came, it gave us an intro. Again, because it was the pot era, we had to slip in a little reference: 'I get high!' It was pretty much co-written, John and I doing a work song for Ringo, a little craft job. I always saw those as the equivalent of writing a James Bond film theme. It was a challenge, it was something out of the ordinary for us because we actually had to write in a key for Ringo and you had to be a little tongue in cheek. Ringo liked kids a lot, he was very good with kids so we knew 'Yellow Submarine' would be a good thing for Ringo to sing. In this case, it was a slightly more mature song, which I always liked very much. I remember giggling with John as we wrote the lines 'What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know it's mine. (…) Denny Cordell gave me a ring and said, 'We love that song that Ringo sings but we've got this treatment of it that we really think would be great, singing it very bluesy, very crazy, slow it right down.' I said, 'Well, great, try it, and let me hear what you do with it.' He came over to see us at Apple studios at Savile Row and played it and I said, 'Wow, fantastic!' They'd done a really radical treatment of it and it's been Joe (Cocker)'s staple diet for many a year. Then it was taken on by John Belushi, who used to do a Cocker impression, and so taken even further by Belushi, so it has good memories, that song. It became the theme tune to the very good American series about growing up in the sixties called The Wonder Years, so it's been picked up and used a lot, that song, but it really started just as a co-written song crafted for Ringo.
Regarding the recording of the song, Geoff Emerick writes:
We now getting very near the end (of the Sgt. Pepper sessions), but there was still no song for Ringo to sing. Paul and John set out to remedy that, giving their drummer a true showcase: With a Little Help From My Friends. There was an unusually late start for that night’s session because the Beatles had spent the afternoon and early evening overseeing preparations for the upcoming album cover photo shoot. Despite the late hour, all four Beatles were wide awake, excited by the events of the day; I remember them animatedly discussing the set that Peter Blake had built for them and talking about how much they loved their satin Pepper costumes. After hurredily consuming cops of tea, we finally got to work. The backing track for the new song – initially called ‘Bad Finger Boogie’ for some reason – had a real spark to it, and an inspired Ringo was really smacking his tom-toms, so I decided to take the bottom skins off again – something I hadn’t done since ‘A Day in the Life’. Ten takes were required to get a ‘keeper’; it was nearly dawn by that time. Richard and I watched an exhausted Ringo begin to trudge up the stairs. That was our signal, as usual, that the session was over, and we began to relax. He was at the halfway point when we heard Paul’s voice call out.
“Where are you going, Ring?” he said.
Ringo looked surprised. “Home, to bed.”
“Nah, let’s do the vocal now.”
Ringo looked to the others for support. “But I’m knackered,” he protested. To his dismay, both John and George Harrison were taking Paul’s side. “No, come on back here and do some singing for us,” John said with a grin. It was always a group decision as to when a session would end, and obviously Ringo had jumped the gun a bit. Reluctantly, he headed back down the steps. “Oh no”, groaned Richard, “Are we still going to be here when tomorrow’s session is due to start?”
Fortunately for all of us, Ringo got his lead vocal done relatively quickly: perhaps the shock tactic of having him sing when he was least expecting it took the nervousness away, or perhaps it was just how supportive everyone was being. All three of his compatriots gathered around him, inches behind the microphone, silently conducting and cheering him on as he gamely tackled his vocal duties. The only problem was the song’s last nigh note, which Ringo had a bit of trouble hitting spot-on. For a while he lobbied to have the tape slowed down just for that one drop-in, and we tried it, but even though it allowed him to sing on pitch, it didn’t match tonally to the rest of the vocal – he sounded a bit silly, almost like one of the Goons. “No, Ritch, you’ve got to do it properly,” Paul finally concluded. “It’s okay; just put your mind to it. You can do it.” Even John added some helpful – if decidedly untechnical – advice: “Just throw yer heard back and let ‘er rip!”
It took a few tries, but Ringo finally hit the note – and held it – without too much wavering. Amdit the cheers of his bandmates and a Scotch-and-Coke toast, the ssion finally ended. Outside, the spring air was frish with dew and the birds were already chirping. It looked to be a lovely, sunny day and I would get to enjoy none of it. We were all due back in the studio in less than twelve hours. Later that night, Paul and John added their counterpoint backing vocals with ease – they had obviously rehearsed the parts quite a bit, and their voices blended so naturally, always – and then George Harrison added a guitar lick or two. Ringo sat up in the control room with us for most of that session, beaming like a proud papa. This was his song, and he was quite interested in its progress, listening intently to every new overdub. But there was still no bass on it because Paul had played piano during the backing track. So around three in the morning, John, George Harrison, and Ringo finally headed home, accompanied by George Martin. Richard and I again hunkered down for what we knew was going to be a long night. We were right – it was a marathon, not a sprint – but it was worth every second of it. By this time, I knew exactly the kind of sound Paul was after, and I didn’t do anything differently than on other Pepper tracks, but I do think there’s something unique about the bass sound in ‘With a little help from my friends’. Perhaps it’s because Paul deviated from the usual routine in that he decided to sit up in the control room with us while he played; to accommodate his wishes, Richard ran an extra-long lead down to the bass amp. Brow furrowed in deep concentration, Paul instructed Richard to drop in and out again and again. ‘Determined to get every single note and phrase as perfect as it could possibly be, that night he was like a man possessed. Sitting side by side with the ultra-focused McCartney in that cramped control room in the middle of the night, shouting out encouragement every time he’d nail a section, Richard and I felt truly privileged to be there. We knew that the work we were doing was important, though we could hardly guess at the seismic impact it would have on popular culture when Pepper was finally released a few months later.
And here’s the song. First in the Beatles’ version:
Then, because it’s the cutest thing ever, as sung by Sean Lennon while his father sounds ever so proud in the background. This also amuses me because John in his 1980 interviews is all about how Sean doesn’t know Daddy was ever a Beatle. Here, Sean doesn’t only have a favourite Beatle song but evidently knows who Paul and Ringo are in addition to Dad. Oh John, you fibber:
And lastly, “With a little help from my friends” sung by Ringo and Paul last year:
Ringo did try his hand in song writing, though not often. The first time it was just a contribution to “What goes on”; but near the end of the Beatles, he managed, with some support from George, to compose one of the band’s very much beloved songs, Octopussy’s Garden. He started to work on it during the Let It Be sessions:
The finished song from Abbey Road:
And because it’s cute and Ringo loved it, the Sesame Street cover:
The last to join, Ringo was also the first Beatle to walk. Just for a week, during the tension-ridden White Album sessions. (He wasn’t the only one. Geoff Emerick walked away as well, because he couldn’t stand the breaking down of relationships and the suddenly hostile atmosphere; he and George Martin thus were not there during the Let it Be sessions and were only cajoled back by promises of everyone being on their best behaviour by Paul for Abbey Road.) In retrospect, it was a warning sign. If the eternally good natured Ringo does a walkout, times have irrevocably changed.
Ringo:Yoko being in the studio a lot was a new thing. It was all new. We’re very Northern: the wives stayed at home and we went to work – we dug coal and they cooked dinner. It was one of those flat-cap attitudes which we were losing by then. I think if Maureen came to the studio five or six times that would be about it, and in all the years Pattie came several times at the most. I don’t remember Cynthia coming much when she was married to John. It was just something that didn’t happen. And suddenly we had Yoko in bed in the studio. All the time. It created tension because most of the time the four of us were very close, and very possessive of each other in a way; we didn’t like strangers coming in too much. And that’s what Yoko was (not to John, but to the three of us). That was where we were together, and that’s why we worked so well. We were all trying to be cool and not mention it, but inside we were all feeling it.
George Martin: I think they were all feeling a little paranoid. When you have a rift between people – if you go to a party and the husband and wife have been having a row – there’s a tension, an atmosphere. And you wonder whether you are making things worse by being there. I think that was the kind of situation we found with Ringo. He was probably feeling a little bit odd because of the mental strangeness with John and Yoko and Paul, and none of them having quite the buddiness they used to have. He might have said to himself, ‘Am I the cause?’
Ringo: I left because I felt two things: I felt I wasn’t playing great, and I also felt that the other three were really happy and I was an outsider. I went to see John, who had been living in my apartment in Montagu Square with Yoko since he moved out of Kenwood. I said, ‘I’m Leaving the group because I’m not playing well and I feel unloved and out of it, and you three are really close.’ And John said, ‘I thought it was you three!’
So then I went over to Paul’s and knocked on his door. I said the same thing: ‘I’m leaving the band. I feel you three guys are really close and I’m out of it.’ And Paul said, ‘I thought it was you three!’
I didn’t even bother going to George then. I said, ‘I’m going on holiday.’ I took the kids and we went to Sardinia.
George: I can’t remember exactly why Ringo left. Suddenly one day somebody said, ‘Oh, Ringo’s gone on holiday.’ Then we found out that he thought that the three of us all got on so well and he didn’t. It was just one of those things. Everybody felt the same, we were all getting cheesed off. I felt: ‘What’s the point in me being around here? They all seem so cool and groovy and I just don’t fit.’ And I actually left on the next album.
Paul: I think Ringo was always paranoid that he wasn’t a great drummer because he never used to solo. He hated those guys who went on and on, incessantly banging while the band goes off and has a cup of tea or something. Until Abbey Road, there was never a drum solo in The Beatles’ act, and consequently other drummers would say that although they liked his style, Ringo wasn’t technically a very good drummer. It was a bit condescending and I think we let it go too far.
I think his feel and soul and the way he was rock solid with his tempo was a great attribute. I always say if you can leave a drummer and turn your back on him, then you’re very lucky. You could just tell Ringo how it went and leave him – there was always this great noise and very steady tempo coming from behind you. Rock’n’roll is all about feel really, and sound. So at that time we had to reassure him that we did think he was great.
That’s what it’s like in life. You go through life and you never stop and say: ‘Hey, you know what? I think you’re great.’ You don’t always tell your favourite drummer that he’s your favourite. Ringo felt insecure and he left, so we told him, ‘Look, man, you are the best drummer in the world for us.’ (I still think that.) He said ‘thank you’, and I think he was pleased to hear it. We ordered millions of flowers and there was a big celebration to welcome him back to the studio.
Ringo: I got a telegram saying, ‘You’re the best rock’n’roll drummer in the world. Come on home, we love you.’ And so I came back. We all needed that little shake-up. When I got back to the studio I found they had it decked out with flowers – there were flowers everywhere. I felt good about myself again, we’d got through that little crisis and it was great.
This time, the cracks in the wall were papered over – or should that be flowered over? - but everyone knew they were there, and it was the beginning of the end. During the 70s, Ringo managed the not so minor miracle of being on good terms with all three of his former bandmates at the same time and have all of them contribute to his solo albums (though not on the same time). Ringo’s albums were as close as the Beatles ever came to a reunion. Because they loved him, and honestly – how could you not?
As two last demonstrations of that, here’s the end of the Anthology, aka the documentation the three surviving Beatles worked on in the 90s:
When he turned 70 earlier this year, there was, of course, a concert in his honour. The number everyone thought was the conclusion was With a little help from my friends, but there was an encore in store; Paul playing Birthday for and with him. Birthday was a number from the White Album, the tension album, long after they had stopped touring and so it was in fact the first time they ever played it live, and together:
Pete Best, of course, would beg to differ. Pete has been called the unluckiest guy in the music business, just as Ringo has been called the luckiest. Pete had joined the Beatles in 1960, when the group, eternally short of a drummer ever since they were the Quarrymen and their first drummer quit (there was a succession of replacements, none of them staying very long), got their first Hamburg gig, had literally joined them at the last minute, and had remained with them for the next two years, solidly drumming away, aquiring his own fans, but never quite clicking with the rest of the gang. Meanwhile, one of the musicians they were hanging out a lot with in Hamburg was the drummer of Rory Storm and the Hurricans, one Ringo Starr (aka Richard Starkey; this stage name was the only preposterous thing about him). Who occasionally filled in if Pete was otherwise engaged. He should have seen the signs on the wall, but he didn’t. When they finally got the audition with George Martin at EMI, and George Martin said he was willing to put them under contract but they would need a studio drummer as he didn’t consider Pete Best good enough (though he thought they’d keep him for live performances, which wasn’t that unusual with groups), Pete’s days were numbered. Philip Norman, the most McCartney-hostile of Beatles biographers, claims this was all Paul’s idea in Shout and it’s been reprinted ever since, but both John and George, both of them in an anti-Paul mood in the early 70s and thus definitely not inclined to cover for him, said otherwise.
John: This myth built up over the years that he was great and Paul was jealous of him because he was pretty and all that crap. They didn't hang out that much together, but it was partly because Pete was a bit slow. He was a harmless guy, but he was not quick. All of us had quick minds but he never picked that up. The reason he got into group in the first place was because we had to have a drummer to get to Hamburg. We were always going to dump him when we could find a decent drummer, but by the time we were back from Germany we'd trained him to keep a stick going up and down (four-in-the-bar, he couldn't do much else) and he looked nice and the girls liked him, so it was all right. We were cowards when we sacked him. We made Brian do it. But if we'd told him to his face, that would have been much nastier. It would probably have ended in a fight.
George: To me it was apparent: Pete kept being sick and not showing up for gigs so we would get Ringo to sit in with the band instead, and every time Ringo sat in, it seemed like 'this is it'. Eventually we realised, 'We should get Ringo in the band full time.' I was quite responsible for stirring things up. I conspired to get Ringo in for good; I talked to Paul and John until they came round to the idea. I remember going to his house. He wasn't in so I sat and had some tea with his mother and I said, 'We'd like Ringo to be in our band.' She said, 'Well, he's in Butlins holiday camp with Rory at the moment, but when he rings me I'll get him to phone you,' and I gave her our number. We weren't very good at telling Pete he had to go. But when it comes down to it, how do you tell somebody? Although Pete had not been with us all that long - two years in terms of a lifetime isn't very long - when you're young it's not a nice thing to be kicked out of a band and there's no nice way of doing it. Brian Epstein was the manager so it was his job, and I don't think he could do it very well either. But that's the way it was and the way it is.
The whole “how Pete got fired and Ringo got hired” tale is retold in Anthology by George, Paul, Ringo and George Martin as well, along with how Ringo’s first session went:
If you didn’t have the time to watch the clip (in which case you missed the tale of how George got a black eye in Ringo’s defense); the recording of “Love me do” was notorious because George Martin, not wanting to take any risks after Pete Best, had gone ahead and booked a studio drummer anyway, Andy White, which is why there are two versions of Love Me Do in existence, one with Andy White (the single) and one with Ringo (the one on the Please Please Me album. Poor Ringo, who had just left his job with Hurricanes for this (and shaved his beard of, and cut his hair Beatles-style), was dejected.
Paul: Horror of horrors! (…) Ringo got blown off the first record. George did the, 'Can I see you for a moment, boys?' -'Yeah?' - 'Um... without Ringo.' He said, 'I would like to bring in another drummer for this record.' It was very hard for us to accept that decision. We said, 'Ringo has to be the drummer; we wouldn't want to lose him as the drummer.' But George got his way and Ringo didn't drum on the first single. He only played tambourine. I don't think Ringo ever got over that. He had to go back up to Liverpool and everyone asked, 'How did it go in the Smoke?' We'd say, 'B side's good,' but Ringo couldn't admit to liking the A side, not being on it.
Ringo: I was devastated that George Martin had his doubts about me. I came down ready to roll and heard, 'We've got a professional drummer.' He has apologised several times since, has old George, but it was devastating - I hated the bugger for years; I still don't let him off the hook!
Luckily, Ringo got his shot once the single sold and they got a contract for an entire album. In the meantime, via a lot of life performances, it had turned out that the new drummer really added that magical something which had been missing. Not simply with his drumming. He was, as the other three were, a born comedian, joining the verbal interplay that was quintessential to the group which Pete Best had never done.
Paul: When Ringo joins us we get a bit more kick, a few more imaginative breaks, and the band settles. So the new combination was perfect: Ringo with his very solid beat, laconic wit and Buster Keaton-like charm; John with his sharp wit and his rock'n'rolliness, but also his other, quite soft side; George, with his great instrumental ability and who could sing some good rock'n'roll. And then I could do a bit of singing and playing, some rock'n'roll and some softer numbers.
As for the drumming:
Ringo: The drummer always sets the feel and I think that was the way that I played, and then with Paul on bass - he is an amazing bass-player; to this day he is the most melodic bass-player - we would work at putting the bass and bass-drum together. As long as they're together, you can put anything on top. I only have one rule and that is to play with the singer. If the singer's singing, you don't really have to do anything, just hold it together. If you listen to my playing, I try to become an instrument; play the mood of the song. For example, 'Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire,' - boom ba bom. I try to show that; the disenchanting mood. The drum fills are part of it. The other thing is, I couldn't do the same drum sequence twice. Whatever beat I would put down, I could never repeat identically, because I play with my soul more than my head. My head knows to play the rhythms - rock'n'roll, swing, whatever - but it comes out as whatever the feeling is at that moment. The interesting thing about The Beatles was that we seemed to have telepathy. Without thinking, we'd all be up or bringing it down - together. It was magic, and that was one of the forces of The Beatles, the telepathy. (And, of course, the love of music, the great songs...) I've never had anything like that before or since.
There is an urban legend that John, asked whether Ringo was the best drummer there was, said “he’s not even the best drummer within the Beatles”, but nobody has ever been able to track down the interview in which he supposedly said this. Whereas you have plenty of traceable John quotes praising Ringo’s drumming, like this 1980 one from the Playboy interview:
Ringo's a damn good drummer. He was always a good drummer. (…)I think Ringo's drumming is underrated the same way as Paul's bass-playing is underrated. Paul is one of the most innovative bass-players that ever played, and half the stuff that's going on now is directly ripped off from his Beatles period. He is coy about his bass-playing. He's an egomaniac about everything else, but his bass-playing he was always a bit coy about. He is a great musician who plays the bass like few other people could play it. If you compare his bass-playing with Rolling Stones's bass-playing, and you compare Ringo's drumming with Charlie Watts's drumming, they are equal to them, if not better. I always objected to the fact that because Charlie came on a little more 'arty' than Ringo and knew jazz and did cartoons, that he got credit. I think that Charlie's a damn good drummer, and the other guy a good bass-player, but I think Paul and Ringo stand up anywhere, with any of the rock musicians. Not technically great. None of us were technical musicians. None of us could read music. None of us can write it. But as pure musicians, as humans inspired to make noise, they''e as good as anybody.
Of course, hanging out together occasionally and being full time in a group are two different things. John, Paul and George had known each other and played with each other full time for seven years now, and the Beatles, as both the Pete Best example and much later events *coughYokocough* showed, were notoriously bad at accepting outsiders on an emotional level. So the fact that Ringo became a part of them so quickly, that they went from JohnPaulGeorge and the drummer of the day to JohnPaulGeorgeRingo was by no means a guarantee. The fact that they were on tour constantly, and when not on tour, recording, helped, undoubtedly. They were hardly ever not in each other’s company, and then you either come hate each other or you click.
Ringo: We'd have two rooms; sharing two and two, and it could be any two. At the beginning it always used to be Paul with me, because I was the new boy and the other two didn't really want to deal with my sleeping habits, whatever they may have been. Maybe I snored, maybe my feet stank; maybe theirs did, but they knew each other. They'd been through a lot of life, I still had to get into it with them.
George: Doubling up rooms on the tours, after Pete Best left, I used to pair with John because I felt I'd been instrumental in talking them into getting Ringo into the band. I thought that rather than me hang out with Ringo, it would be best if he shared with one of them because that would integrate him better.
He also wasn’t shy about contributing musically:
Paul: We were all very interested in American music, much more so than in British. Ringo arrived in the band knowing more blues music. Coming from the Dingle, by the river, he'd known plenty of blokes in the Merchant Navy (that was a way for kids to get out of Liverpool, to places like New Orleans and New York) who would pick up a lot of blues records. It was Ringo who introduced us to old country-and-western; Jimmie Rodgers and those kind of people. Ringo had quite a good collection of that.
Then there was Beatlemania, which isolated the four from pretty much the rest of the world, including their families.
Ringo: In 1963 the attitude of my whole family changed. They treated me like a different person. One absolutely clear vision I had was round at my auntie's, where I'd been a thousand times before. We were having a cup of tea one night and somebody knocked the coffee table and my tea split into my saucer. Everyone's reaction was, 'He can't have that. We have to tidy up.' That would never have happened before. I thought then, 'Things are changing.' It was absolutely an arrow in the brain. Suddenly I was ‘one of those’, even within my family, and it was very difficult to get used to. I’d grown up and lived with these people and now I found myself in weirdland. Home and family were the two things I didn't want to change, because it had all changed 'out there' and we were no longer really sure who our friends were, unless we'd had them before the fame. The guys and the girls I used to hang about with I could trust. But once we'd become big and famous, we soon learnt that people were with us only because of the vague notoriety of being 'a Beatle'. And when this happened in the family, it was quite a blow. I didn't know what to do about it; I couldn't stand up and say, 'Treat me like you used to,' because that would be acting 'big time'.
It’s hardly a unique experience if you look at the stories of other celebrities (whether in music or film or even literature) who hit the big time, of course. But many respond to this change of relationships with assholery. Ringo did not just by befriending the three other people who were stuck in weirdland with him but by becoming the one who kept them grounded and, in later times, the glue that kept them together. Via inexhaustible good humour and lack of temper tantrums. Also, they loved his malapropisms, which found their way in many a song lyric. The most famous examples are A Hard Day’s Night and Tomorrow Never Knows.
George: I remember when we were driving back to Liverpool from Luton up the M1 motorway in Ringo's Zephyr, and the car's bonnet hadn't been latched properly. The wind got under it and blew it up in front of the windscreen. We were all shouting, 'Aaaargh!' and Ringo calmly said, 'Don't worry, I'll soon have you back in your safely-beds.'
Ringo: I used to, while I was saying one thing, have another thing come into my brain and move down fast. Once when we were working all day and then into the night, I came out thinking it was still day and said, 'It's been a hard day,' and looked round and noticing it was dark, '...'s night!' 'Tomorrow Never Knows' was something I said, God knows where it came from. 'Slight bread' was another: 'Slight bread, thank you.' John used to like them most. He always used to write them down.
A Hard Day’s Night, the film, not the song, revealed something else, to wit, that Ringo had the most screen presence and acting ability.
Ringo: It was a lot of fun. It was incredible for me, the idea that we were making a movie. I loved the movies as a kid. I used to go to a hell of a lot, in the Beresford and Gaumont cinemas in Liverpool. I have great memories from Saturday-morning pictures. I'd be into whatever was showing: if it was a pirate movie, I would be a pirate, and if it was a Western I would be a cowboy; or I'd come out as D'Artagnan and fence all the way home. It was a great fantasy land for me, the movies, and suddenly we were in one. It was all so romantic, with the lights and coming to work in the limo. I think because I loved films I was less embarrassed that the others to be in one; John really got into the movie, too. I felt a lot of the time that George didn't want to be there. It was something he was doing because we were doing it.
His most famous scene in the film is this one:
Though Ringo denies there was much acting involved: I had come directly to work from a nightclub (very unprofessional) and was a little hungover, to say the least. Dick Lester had all his people there, and the kid that I was supposed to be doing the scene with, but I had no brain. I'd gone. We tried it several ways. They tried it with the kid doing his lines and someone off camera shouting mine. Then they had me doing the lines of the kid and the kid going 'blah blah blah'. Or me saying, 'And another thing, little guy...' I was so out of it, they said, 'Well' let's do anything.' I said, 'Let me just walk around and you film me,' and that's what we did. And why I look so cold and dejected is because I felt like shit. There's no acting going on; I felt that bad.
A Hard Day’s Night was generally well reviewed, with Ringo frequently singled out for praise, sometimes even including Chaplin comparisons. Now given that nobody has ever accused John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison of lacking ego, you’d think they could have felt slightly miffed. Not so. Instead, John and Paul began to write specifically Ringo-tailored songs to showcase him. (He’d done covers before.) More on that in a moment. First, another phenomenon. You’d think that being stuck on tour all the time, they’d use the opportunity to spend what holidays they had apart. However, to quote Ringo:
Paul and I went to the Virgin Islands. It was great. The funny part was that we'd been given John's and George's passports, and they'd been given ours. It was still: 'Oh, it's just one of them, give them any passport; they're all the same.' Somehow we got to Lisbon and were checking into hotel; Paul was wearing a disguise and the guy at reception said, 'Who's that?' looking at the passport suspiciously, 'That's not you.' We had a 30-foot motor boat that we'd rented. It came with a captain and his wife, and a deck-hand. It was nothing palatial, but we cruised around having a great time. I was with Maureen, and Paul was with Jane Asher. Jane couldn't go in the sun and Paul got sunburnt one day and was screaming all night. Our bedrooms were either side of the passageway with only curtains dividing them, so you could hear everything. We'd been already with Paul and Jane to Greece. And Maureen and I went with John and Cynthia to Trinidad and Tobago in 1966. I never really went on holiday with George.
In 1964 Ringo got tonsillitis just when the world tour started. This led to Brian Epstein quickly hiring a stand-in, Jimmy Nicol, until Ringo was recovered (he rejoined the band in Australia). Considering the Pete Best backstory, Ringo had a sudden attack of doubts. What if he’d been kidding himself about being part of the team?
Ringo: My illness was a real big event. It was miserable. I remember it really well: my throat was so sore, and I was trying to live on jelly and ice-cream. I was a smoker in those days, too. That was pretty rough, being hooked on the weed. It was very strange, them going off without me. They'd taken Jimmy Nicol and I thought they didn't love me any more - all that stuff went through my head.
George: Of course, with all respect to Jimmy, we shouldn't have done it. The point was, it was the Fabs. Can you imagine The Rolling Stones going on tour: 'Oh, sorry. Mick can't come.' - 'All right, we'll just get somebody else to replace him for two weeks.' It was silly, and I couldn't understand it. I really despised the way we couldn't make a decision for ourselves then. It was just: 'Off you go.' - 'But Ringo must come with us.' - 'No, sorry, you'll get a new drummer.' As we grew older, I suppose, we would have turned round and said we wouldn't go; but in those days it was the blind leading the blind.
George Martin: They nearly didn't do the Australia tour. George is a very loyal person, and he said, 'If Ringo's not part of the group, it's not The Beatles. I don't see why we should do it, and I'm not going to.' It took all of Brian's and my persuasion to tell George that if he didn't do it he was letting everybody down. Jimmy Nicol was a very good drummer, who came along and learnt Ringo's parts well. Obviously, he had to rehearse with the guys. They came and worked through all the songs at Abbey Road so he got to know them. He did the job excellently, and faded into obscurity immediately afterwards.
Ringo: I hated to leave the other three. I followed them out to Australia and there were people at the airport, but I was on my own and just automatically I looked round for the others. I couldn't stand it. I met up with them in Melbourne. The flight was horrendous. It still is - they may have shaved a couple of hours off the flight, but it's still a hell of a long way. I remember the plane felt like a disaster area to me. It was fabulous in Australia, and of course, it was great to be back in the band - that was a really nice moment. And they'd all bought me presents in Hong Kong.
He was the second Beatle to marry; Maureen Cox, his wife, had been an early Beatle fan from the Cavern days who’d kissed Paul on a dare from her friends but was really interested in Ringo; when she whispered this into Paul’s ear, he laughed and introduced them. The marriage with Maureen feel apart in the mid-Seventies for a variety of factors; he had affairs; she had one with, of all the people, George Harrison (who when asked why his friend’s wife and why her after knowing her for all these years shrugged and said “incest”), and he drank a lot at that point. However, Ringo was the only one of the Beatles who managed to have a post-divorce friendly relationship with his ex wife, which benefited their three children. He was at Maureen’s side when she died in the 90s, of cancer. Paul wrote the song Litlte Willow as a tribute to her and a comfort for her and Ringo’s children. This vid of it shows the story of Maureen and Ringo in pictures:
But back to the 60s, and the songs John and Paul wrote for Ringo. The two most famous ones are Yellow Submarine (by now we can call it safely a folk song; I’ve even seen it sung in Latin!) and With a little help from my friends. They were very much inspired by Ringo’s personality, and you can’t imagine them being written for anyone else.
Paul: I was laying in bed in the Ashers' garret, and there's a nice twilight zone just as you're drifting into sleep and as you wake from it; I always find it quite a comfortable zone, you're almost asleep, you've laid your burdens down for the day and there's this little limbo-land just before you slip into sleep. I remember thinking that a children's song would be quite a good idea and I thought of images, and the colour yellow came to me, and a submarine came to me, and I thought, Well, that's kind of nice, like a toy, very childish yellow submarine. I was thinking of it as a song for Ringo, which it eventually turned out to be, so I wrote it as not too rangey in the vocal. I just made up a little tune in my head, then started making a story, sort of an ancient mariner, telling the young kids where he'd lived and how there'd been a place where he had a yellow submarine. It's pretty much my song as I recall, written for Ringo in that little twilight moment. I think John helped out; the lyrics get more and more obscure as it goes on but the chorus, melody and verses are mine. There were funny little grammatical jokes we used to play. It should have been 'Everyone of us has all he needs' but Ringo turned it into 'everyone of us has all we need.' So that became the lyric. It's wrong, but it's great. We used to love that.
John: ‘Yellow Submarine' is Paul's baby. I helped with the lyrics too. We virtually made the track come alive in the studio, but based on Paul's inspiration. Paul's idea. Paul's title, written for Ringo.
The Yellow Submarine recording session must have been something else again. Geoff Emerick, the balance engineer, describes it vividly in his memoirs:
Paul had conceived Yellow Submarine as a singalong, and so a few of the band’s friends and significant others had been invited along for the evening’s session. By then, everyone was distinctly in a party mood. Though we hadn’t tried pot ourselves, Phil and I had been around enough musicians to know what it was, and we were sometimes aware of the funny smell in the studio after the Beatles and their roadies snuck a joint off in the corner, though I doubt very much the straightlaced George Martin knew what was going on. (…) Following a long dinner break (during which we suspected more than food was being ingested), a raucous group began filtering in, including Mick Jagger and Brian Jones, along with Jagger’s girlfriend Marianne Faithfull and George Harrison’s wife, Pattie. They were all dressed in their finest Carnaby Street outfits, the women in miniskirts and flowing blouses, the men in purple bell bottoms and fur jackets. Phil and I put up a few ambient microphones around the studio, and I decided to also give everyone a handheld mic on a long lead so they could move around freely – there was no way I was going to try to contain that lot!
The two Rolling Stones and Marianne Faithfull basically acted as if I didn’t exist; to them, I guess I was just one of the invisible ‘little people’. Pattie was more gracious, going out of her way to say hello to me. She seemed shy but also very charming. The whole marijuana-influenced scene that evening was completely zany, straight out of a Marx Brothers movie. The entire EMI collection of percussion instruments and sound effects boxes were strewn all over the studio, with people grabbing bells and whistles and gongs at random. To simulate the sound of a submarine submerging, John grabbed a straw and began blowing bubbles into a glass – fortunately, I was able to move a mic nearby in time to record it for posterity. Inspired, Lennon wanted to take things to the next level and have me record him actually singing underwater. First, he tried singing while gargling. When that failed (he nearly choked), he began lobbying for a tank to be brought in so he could be submerged!
While George Martin worked on dissuading him, I began thinking of an alternative. Why not instead have John sing into a mic that was immersed in water? We had several ‘spot’ microphones at hand, and if one of them could be wrapped in some kind of waterproofing, perhaps it would work. George looked at me as if I were crazy, but with John imploring him to let us try it, he finally gave his begrudging approval. Neil was duly dispatched to fetch a glass milk bottle from the canteen and fill it with water, while Phil was sent to the mic cabinet to select the smallest microphone he could find. I was trying to figure out how to waterproof it when John called out to Mal and said, ‘What have you got that will work for this?” (…) With a wink and a sly grin, the burly roadie reached into the bag, fished around for a moment, and cheerfully waved a condom aloft. ‘Well done, Malcom!’ John proclaimed as the others burst into laughter. ‘After all, we don’t want the microphone to get in the family way, do we?’
Fighting an attack of the giggles myself, I wrapped the mic carefully and lowered it into the milk bottle, then placed it on top of one of the keyboards as Lennon pulled up a chair, prepared to sing into it. Then it dawned on me: My God, if the studio manager sees this, I’ll be fired on the spot! Just then the door swung open and none other than Mr. E.H. Fowler appeared. Fortunately for me, he was a bit nearsighted. BY the time he got close enough to see what we were actually doing, John had bolted from his chair, grabbed the offending milk bottle, and hit it behind his back. My heart started pounding as Fowler came closer.
“Everything all right, lads?” he asked
“Yes, sir, Mr. Studio Manager, sir, absolutely smashing, sir,” Lennon replied somberly, standing stiffly to attention. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the others stifling their laughter – even George Martin. “Very well, then,” Fowler replied. “Carry on.” And with that, he turned on his heels and marched out of the room, satisfied that everything was under control. When the peals of laughter finally died down, we continued our sonic experiment, but the results were disappointing. Maybe it was just that the walls of the milk bottle were too thick – or perhaps the condoms of the day weren’t up to to the taks! – but the signal was so muffled and weak as to be unusable, and the idea was abandoned. To my relief. The microphone was unharmed. I wasn’t until many years later that I realized with horror that the microphone we were using was phantom powered – meaning it was actually a live electrical object. It conjunction with the 240 volt system used in England, any of us, including Lennon, could easily have been electrocuted, and I would have gone down in history as the first recording engineer to kill a client in the studio. At the time, though, we were blissful in our ignorance. The party resumed. People began clinking wineglasses and shouting out at random; those background screams during the second verse came from Patti Harrison, which was always ironic to me, considering how quiet she usually was. As we neared midnight, Mal Evans began marching around the studio wearing a huge bass drum on his chest, everyone else in line behind him conga-style singing along to the chorus. It was utter madness. When John ran back into the echo chamber and ad-libbed his ‘Captain, captain’ routine to the sound of clanking bells and chains, we were all doubled over with laughter. The ambience around his voice was just perfect, and that was the way all those bits happened. Although the record sounds quite produced, it was actually spur of the moment – John and the others were just out there having a good time. Somehow it worked, though, despite the chaos.
And here’s the song. Imagining four Beatles, two Rolling Stones, Marianne Faithfull, Pattie Harrison, roadies Mal and Neil and the EMI recording staff conga-dancing while singing it is optional. *g*
Then there was the song which became in a way the ultimate Ringo signature tune (he’s still singing it), and at the same time one of the most widely covered ones; Paul and John wrote it for the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band album.
Paul: This was written out at John's house in Weybridge for Ringo; we always liked to do one for him and it had to be not too much like our style. I think that was probably the best of the songs we wrote for Ringo actually. He was to be a character in this operetta, this whole thing that we were doing, so this gave him a good intro, wherever he came in the album; in fact it was the second track. It was a nice place for him, but wherever it came, it gave us an intro. Again, because it was the pot era, we had to slip in a little reference: 'I get high!' It was pretty much co-written, John and I doing a work song for Ringo, a little craft job. I always saw those as the equivalent of writing a James Bond film theme. It was a challenge, it was something out of the ordinary for us because we actually had to write in a key for Ringo and you had to be a little tongue in cheek. Ringo liked kids a lot, he was very good with kids so we knew 'Yellow Submarine' would be a good thing for Ringo to sing. In this case, it was a slightly more mature song, which I always liked very much. I remember giggling with John as we wrote the lines 'What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know it's mine. (…) Denny Cordell gave me a ring and said, 'We love that song that Ringo sings but we've got this treatment of it that we really think would be great, singing it very bluesy, very crazy, slow it right down.' I said, 'Well, great, try it, and let me hear what you do with it.' He came over to see us at Apple studios at Savile Row and played it and I said, 'Wow, fantastic!' They'd done a really radical treatment of it and it's been Joe (Cocker)'s staple diet for many a year. Then it was taken on by John Belushi, who used to do a Cocker impression, and so taken even further by Belushi, so it has good memories, that song. It became the theme tune to the very good American series about growing up in the sixties called The Wonder Years, so it's been picked up and used a lot, that song, but it really started just as a co-written song crafted for Ringo.
Regarding the recording of the song, Geoff Emerick writes:
We now getting very near the end (of the Sgt. Pepper sessions), but there was still no song for Ringo to sing. Paul and John set out to remedy that, giving their drummer a true showcase: With a Little Help From My Friends. There was an unusually late start for that night’s session because the Beatles had spent the afternoon and early evening overseeing preparations for the upcoming album cover photo shoot. Despite the late hour, all four Beatles were wide awake, excited by the events of the day; I remember them animatedly discussing the set that Peter Blake had built for them and talking about how much they loved their satin Pepper costumes. After hurredily consuming cops of tea, we finally got to work. The backing track for the new song – initially called ‘Bad Finger Boogie’ for some reason – had a real spark to it, and an inspired Ringo was really smacking his tom-toms, so I decided to take the bottom skins off again – something I hadn’t done since ‘A Day in the Life’. Ten takes were required to get a ‘keeper’; it was nearly dawn by that time. Richard and I watched an exhausted Ringo begin to trudge up the stairs. That was our signal, as usual, that the session was over, and we began to relax. He was at the halfway point when we heard Paul’s voice call out.
“Where are you going, Ring?” he said.
Ringo looked surprised. “Home, to bed.”
“Nah, let’s do the vocal now.”
Ringo looked to the others for support. “But I’m knackered,” he protested. To his dismay, both John and George Harrison were taking Paul’s side. “No, come on back here and do some singing for us,” John said with a grin. It was always a group decision as to when a session would end, and obviously Ringo had jumped the gun a bit. Reluctantly, he headed back down the steps. “Oh no”, groaned Richard, “Are we still going to be here when tomorrow’s session is due to start?”
Fortunately for all of us, Ringo got his lead vocal done relatively quickly: perhaps the shock tactic of having him sing when he was least expecting it took the nervousness away, or perhaps it was just how supportive everyone was being. All three of his compatriots gathered around him, inches behind the microphone, silently conducting and cheering him on as he gamely tackled his vocal duties. The only problem was the song’s last nigh note, which Ringo had a bit of trouble hitting spot-on. For a while he lobbied to have the tape slowed down just for that one drop-in, and we tried it, but even though it allowed him to sing on pitch, it didn’t match tonally to the rest of the vocal – he sounded a bit silly, almost like one of the Goons. “No, Ritch, you’ve got to do it properly,” Paul finally concluded. “It’s okay; just put your mind to it. You can do it.” Even John added some helpful – if decidedly untechnical – advice: “Just throw yer heard back and let ‘er rip!”
It took a few tries, but Ringo finally hit the note – and held it – without too much wavering. Amdit the cheers of his bandmates and a Scotch-and-Coke toast, the ssion finally ended. Outside, the spring air was frish with dew and the birds were already chirping. It looked to be a lovely, sunny day and I would get to enjoy none of it. We were all due back in the studio in less than twelve hours. Later that night, Paul and John added their counterpoint backing vocals with ease – they had obviously rehearsed the parts quite a bit, and their voices blended so naturally, always – and then George Harrison added a guitar lick or two. Ringo sat up in the control room with us for most of that session, beaming like a proud papa. This was his song, and he was quite interested in its progress, listening intently to every new overdub. But there was still no bass on it because Paul had played piano during the backing track. So around three in the morning, John, George Harrison, and Ringo finally headed home, accompanied by George Martin. Richard and I again hunkered down for what we knew was going to be a long night. We were right – it was a marathon, not a sprint – but it was worth every second of it. By this time, I knew exactly the kind of sound Paul was after, and I didn’t do anything differently than on other Pepper tracks, but I do think there’s something unique about the bass sound in ‘With a little help from my friends’. Perhaps it’s because Paul deviated from the usual routine in that he decided to sit up in the control room with us while he played; to accommodate his wishes, Richard ran an extra-long lead down to the bass amp. Brow furrowed in deep concentration, Paul instructed Richard to drop in and out again and again. ‘Determined to get every single note and phrase as perfect as it could possibly be, that night he was like a man possessed. Sitting side by side with the ultra-focused McCartney in that cramped control room in the middle of the night, shouting out encouragement every time he’d nail a section, Richard and I felt truly privileged to be there. We knew that the work we were doing was important, though we could hardly guess at the seismic impact it would have on popular culture when Pepper was finally released a few months later.
And here’s the song. First in the Beatles’ version:
Then, because it’s the cutest thing ever, as sung by Sean Lennon while his father sounds ever so proud in the background. This also amuses me because John in his 1980 interviews is all about how Sean doesn’t know Daddy was ever a Beatle. Here, Sean doesn’t only have a favourite Beatle song but evidently knows who Paul and Ringo are in addition to Dad. Oh John, you fibber:
And lastly, “With a little help from my friends” sung by Ringo and Paul last year:
Ringo did try his hand in song writing, though not often. The first time it was just a contribution to “What goes on”; but near the end of the Beatles, he managed, with some support from George, to compose one of the band’s very much beloved songs, Octopussy’s Garden. He started to work on it during the Let It Be sessions:
The finished song from Abbey Road:
And because it’s cute and Ringo loved it, the Sesame Street cover:
The last to join, Ringo was also the first Beatle to walk. Just for a week, during the tension-ridden White Album sessions. (He wasn’t the only one. Geoff Emerick walked away as well, because he couldn’t stand the breaking down of relationships and the suddenly hostile atmosphere; he and George Martin thus were not there during the Let it Be sessions and were only cajoled back by promises of everyone being on their best behaviour by Paul for Abbey Road.) In retrospect, it was a warning sign. If the eternally good natured Ringo does a walkout, times have irrevocably changed.
Ringo:Yoko being in the studio a lot was a new thing. It was all new. We’re very Northern: the wives stayed at home and we went to work – we dug coal and they cooked dinner. It was one of those flat-cap attitudes which we were losing by then. I think if Maureen came to the studio five or six times that would be about it, and in all the years Pattie came several times at the most. I don’t remember Cynthia coming much when she was married to John. It was just something that didn’t happen. And suddenly we had Yoko in bed in the studio. All the time. It created tension because most of the time the four of us were very close, and very possessive of each other in a way; we didn’t like strangers coming in too much. And that’s what Yoko was (not to John, but to the three of us). That was where we were together, and that’s why we worked so well. We were all trying to be cool and not mention it, but inside we were all feeling it.
George Martin: I think they were all feeling a little paranoid. When you have a rift between people – if you go to a party and the husband and wife have been having a row – there’s a tension, an atmosphere. And you wonder whether you are making things worse by being there. I think that was the kind of situation we found with Ringo. He was probably feeling a little bit odd because of the mental strangeness with John and Yoko and Paul, and none of them having quite the buddiness they used to have. He might have said to himself, ‘Am I the cause?’
Ringo: I left because I felt two things: I felt I wasn’t playing great, and I also felt that the other three were really happy and I was an outsider. I went to see John, who had been living in my apartment in Montagu Square with Yoko since he moved out of Kenwood. I said, ‘I’m Leaving the group because I’m not playing well and I feel unloved and out of it, and you three are really close.’ And John said, ‘I thought it was you three!’
So then I went over to Paul’s and knocked on his door. I said the same thing: ‘I’m leaving the band. I feel you three guys are really close and I’m out of it.’ And Paul said, ‘I thought it was you three!’
I didn’t even bother going to George then. I said, ‘I’m going on holiday.’ I took the kids and we went to Sardinia.
George: I can’t remember exactly why Ringo left. Suddenly one day somebody said, ‘Oh, Ringo’s gone on holiday.’ Then we found out that he thought that the three of us all got on so well and he didn’t. It was just one of those things. Everybody felt the same, we were all getting cheesed off. I felt: ‘What’s the point in me being around here? They all seem so cool and groovy and I just don’t fit.’ And I actually left on the next album.
Paul: I think Ringo was always paranoid that he wasn’t a great drummer because he never used to solo. He hated those guys who went on and on, incessantly banging while the band goes off and has a cup of tea or something. Until Abbey Road, there was never a drum solo in The Beatles’ act, and consequently other drummers would say that although they liked his style, Ringo wasn’t technically a very good drummer. It was a bit condescending and I think we let it go too far.
I think his feel and soul and the way he was rock solid with his tempo was a great attribute. I always say if you can leave a drummer and turn your back on him, then you’re very lucky. You could just tell Ringo how it went and leave him – there was always this great noise and very steady tempo coming from behind you. Rock’n’roll is all about feel really, and sound. So at that time we had to reassure him that we did think he was great.
That’s what it’s like in life. You go through life and you never stop and say: ‘Hey, you know what? I think you’re great.’ You don’t always tell your favourite drummer that he’s your favourite. Ringo felt insecure and he left, so we told him, ‘Look, man, you are the best drummer in the world for us.’ (I still think that.) He said ‘thank you’, and I think he was pleased to hear it. We ordered millions of flowers and there was a big celebration to welcome him back to the studio.
Ringo: I got a telegram saying, ‘You’re the best rock’n’roll drummer in the world. Come on home, we love you.’ And so I came back. We all needed that little shake-up. When I got back to the studio I found they had it decked out with flowers – there were flowers everywhere. I felt good about myself again, we’d got through that little crisis and it was great.
This time, the cracks in the wall were papered over – or should that be flowered over? - but everyone knew they were there, and it was the beginning of the end. During the 70s, Ringo managed the not so minor miracle of being on good terms with all three of his former bandmates at the same time and have all of them contribute to his solo albums (though not on the same time). Ringo’s albums were as close as the Beatles ever came to a reunion. Because they loved him, and honestly – how could you not?
As two last demonstrations of that, here’s the end of the Anthology, aka the documentation the three surviving Beatles worked on in the 90s:
When he turned 70 earlier this year, there was, of course, a concert in his honour. The number everyone thought was the conclusion was With a little help from my friends, but there was an encore in store; Paul playing Birthday for and with him. Birthday was a number from the White Album, the tension album, long after they had stopped touring and so it was in fact the first time they ever played it live, and together:
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Date: 2010-11-02 10:08 am (UTC)I didn't know the story behind how he got hired , one can't help thinking that he was lucky .;) I liked John's words about Ringo's skills and Paul's talent with a bass.
Re the last vid : the noise in the room is so loud you can't properly hear Paul singing! I wish I could have been there.
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Date: 2010-11-02 11:52 am (UTC)The noise level really comes close to Beatlemania days.:) Paul also sang the song on the Red Square when he had a concert in Moscow, and the Russians, while also enthusiastic, did not scream so you can hear him very well. :) Still, the concert for Ringo must have been special. Yoko and Olivia Harrison were there as well, and even people from the old days I hadn't been aware to be still in contact with Ringo, like Peter Asher. (Peter Asher: brother of actress Jane A. who was dating Paul during much of the 60s, was friends with Paul and half of the duo Peter & Gordon who got launched with some Lennon/McCartney tunes, was one of the Beatles' friends to work at Apple - he supervised the musical department.)
I like John's words re: Ringo and Paul too. For starters, they are an excellent refutation if people claim he didn't like Ringo's drumming! (And I find it amusing that in a reply to a question about Ringo, he works in a lengthy aside about Paul, whom he hadn't been asked about. These two have/had mentionitis about each other. I don't know whether you've read my review of Keith Richard's memoirs some days back, but near the end of the book he mentions running into Paul on vacation and promptly chatting away about John, complete with John-inspired jamming session.)
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Date: 2010-11-02 02:47 pm (UTC)And I find it amusing that in a reply to a question about Ringo, he works in a lengthy aside about Paul, whom he hadn't been asked about. Yeah , I was thinking the same.
These two have/had mentionitis about each other. Ah Ah, I like how you put it.:) So true.
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Date: 2010-11-03 02:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-03 02:30 pm (UTC)