On Mon, 15 Oct 2007 12:04:58 -0700,
hopmanjr@
googlemail.com googlemail.com> wrote:> On Oct 15, 7:42 pm, AC
gmail.com> wrote:>> On Mon, 15 Oct 2007 11:34:38 -0700,
>>
>> hopma...@
googlemail.com googlemail.com> wrote:>>> On Oct 14, 3:05 am, AC
gmail.com> wrote:>>>> Paul [...] is a functional
>>>> drummer, but simply was no competition for Ringo.
>>
>>> Oooh... *Ducks in anticipation of the inevitable Ringo's drumming
>>> skills argument!*
>>
>> I didn't say Ringo was a skilled drummer. It's not hard to find other
>> drummers who had more technical abilities on the drums, but then again, you
>> could say that about all the Beatles (I believe it's John who made that
>> point). But Ringo was damn good in his own limited way, and had a way of
>> finding the groove in the Lennon-McCartney numbers.
>>
>> To compare the two, listen to Ballad of John and Yoko and then to Here Comes
>> The Sun. It's night and day. Yes, Paul can keep time and knows his way
>> around a drumkit, but goddamn it but Ringo had the feel, that indescribable
>> way of making the drums into a fully functioning instrument rather than a
>> a glorified metronome.
>>
>> To me what counts is what other drummers say, and between famous ones and
>> the ones I know personally, it seems that almost universally they all put
>> Ringo close to the top of their own list of great drummers.
>>
>> John Lennon said one nasty thing about Ringo's drumming (and let's face it,
>> John said nasty things a lot),
>
> Ron McNasty!
>
>>It's
>> pretty clear John was just trying to be clever, and it's also clear that he
>> was later aware of how hurtful that was to a man who he regarded as one of
>> his dearest friends, and also to a man whose drumming had been the backbone
>> to the Beatles' greatest successes.
>>
>> --
>> Aaron Clausen
>> mightymartia...@
gmail.com>
> I agree on all counts, it's just the Ringo debate is always a firey
> one!
>
> Incidentally, it seems to me - the comment made about producers
> sometimes wanting to get Paul to drum attests to this - that Ringo
> wasn't all that versatile. The question comes to mind, how important
> to 'greatness' is versatility? An artist can be considered great
> _because_ of their versatility, but often the artists considered the
> greatest only plough a narrow furrow. Interesting.
Throw that one back at Paul, with people defending his minimalist "style"
(which to my mind has more to do with the fact he wasn't a complex player,
and like lots of rock musicians, simply played chords with a few
flourishes). The Beatles had to lean on George Martin for any complicated
keyboard work.
I'm not saying Ringo was the greatest drummer around, and I do think there
was probably a period around 1968 when he clearly had a loss of confidence
(still, listen to Hey Jude to hear some damn fine work on the drums). I
imagine that as John and Paul brought in some different types of music that
went beyond Ringo's rock and roll skills, I'm sure producers would sit there
as he tried to nail it and think "Just down the hall is so-and-so, and he
could get that on the first take." But let's think about that. I'll wager
that could apply to the musicianship of all the Beatles. George apparently
often had a very hard time nailing a part, and John's rhythm could get
pretty erratic. Paul's probably the best all-around musician of the four,
but as I said, even he could reach his limits on piano.
To my mind what you can accuse Ringo of you can probably accuse all of them
of, of working on pieces of music that stretched their abilities to the
maximum, and at times they did have get someone else on a track.
The other thing to wonder at was Ringo's substance abuse. I mean, that's
pretty much what destroyed Keith Moon as a drummer, and you can see on Let
It Be what heroin did to John. Ringo was a big drinker, and I wonder if
that might have had some influence on his playing at times, because you can
say what you want, but by all accounts before he joined the Beatles, Ringo
was considered by a lot of fellow English musicians as one of the best
drummers around.
