More Musing from Middle Class Suburbanites

update: ringo starr really does suck. i just got pwned by an anonymous poster who informed me that paul played drums on dear prudence, and suggested the triplet feel for ticket to ride. i verified what he told me, and he's right! that's what i get for not doing my research. apologies to all.

matthew and i are both fans of the beatles. i would say i could be placed under the "rabid" category while matthew just likes them a lot. matt believes my love for ringo is a byproduct of my fandom, and argues that ringo was not a necessary ingredient for the miraculous success of the beatles. matt is wrong. usually when i tell matt that he's wrong i like to bring in how beautiful ringo's drums sound. that's usually countered with "george martin and geoff emerick deserve that credit." i would say that although both those men were monumental in shaping ringo's drum sound, sound begins from the player. it's colored by microphones, pre-amps, eq's, compression and the like but you can't create something out of nothing... well at least before the age of drum replacer. but, just for the sake of fairness i will avoid all discussion of how great ringo's hi-hat sounds, or that inimitable snare drum from here on out. i'll stick to the parts. and here are a few of them.

ticket to ride (from help!)
ringo's drums in the verse use what are known as triplets. the term boils down to playing in threes in standard 4/4 time. it's what gives the song's verses their lurch. sure, the melody is reasonably strong, the byrds-like ringing guitar is pretty enough, and the words are serviceable. however, if that was all there was to the song, i'd put it at the level of "the night before," "another girl," or the many other songs in the beatles canon that i would call the "paul and john like to show off by writing songs better than pretty much everything in half an hour" category. however, add ringo to the equation, and suddenly the verse is falling over itself, drunkenly stumbling into the chorus. it almost makes us believe that john really is sad that "the girl that's driving [him] mad is going away."

glen kotche, wilco's drummer, commented that sometimes when he writes a drum part, he's playing to jeff tweedy's lyrics, to highlight tweedy's "poetry." ringo is that nerdy girl who never reads anything without a highlighter. his strength doesn't lie in songwriting. don't pass me by and octopus's garden are weak, but ringo knows that. so he listens. more than anyone, he must know and acknowledge john, paul, and george's songwriting prowess. his job is to make sure everybody else sees it too, and that's exactly what he does on "ticket to ride."

dear prudence (from the beatles)
i'm going to get into some sticky territory here as i'm going to argue for the merits of what ringo is not doing. not in the vein of idiot rock pundits maintaining the beauty of that ac/dc douche drummer never playing a fill or meg white's minimalist tendencies. ringo plays plenty of fills, and has a few songs where the drums can be termed "busy." yet, his ego is not the sort that drives him to want to play at every moment. he comes in for the first time on "dear prudence" when john begins what i'll term the first verse (where he sings "the sun is up"). ringo doesn't play anything for the chorus that introduces the song. ringo uses hi-hat, kick and snare, ending the verse with the subtlety of an open hi-hat hit rather than a ride or crash. in the second chorus, he drops the hi-hat altogether, resorting to rare tambourine hits, only adding hi-hat halfway through. the bridge is similarly devoid of any hi-hat. 2nd verse you ask? same beat, with claps behind the snare! the first time ringo hits a cymbal is three minutes into the song. that's when ringo gets all up in it, and struts his stuff. yet, never overstaying his welcome he meekly walks away with a pedestrian beat to bring the song back to its beginning.

ok, now listen to dear prudence, then go put on travis barker on whatever random blink 182 record. sure travis has got some chops, but do you really have to hit that damn cymbal on every beat travis? drums in a small rock group very much lead the changes in dynamics. power all the time through continuous bashing of crashes and rides ends in the result of no power at all. the ear tunes out, desensitized by a constant attack. but ah ringo knows that. he knows he can be boring, so he'll make you wait.

rain (b-side to the paperback writer single)
this whole recording is slowed down, giving it that sleepy feel, turning john into a muddied, slurred mess and making those crashes sound like the biggest thing you ever heard in your life. in one of ringo's earlier moments in the song, about 15 seconds in, he starts his fill with the hi-hat moving to snare. that slightly open hi-hat keeps popping up as an introduction to the majority of ringo's fills in the songs, and there's pretty much a fill every 5-10 seconds. its a thematic constant in the constantly changing soundscape of the song. backwards vocals, paul's ridiculous bass line, shifting drum fills, and harmonies that keep ascending are anchored by that tiny little hi-hat hit. it helps to keep the listener excited without throwing him off the cliff of unpredictability.

ok i feel that i'm starting to get all fanboy now, and this is getting a little ridiculous. but unless you're a drummer, or a total beatles nerd like me, you might never have noticed some of these things. it's easy to dismiss drums unless its rush and the drummer will never shut the fuck up. its also easy to reduce rock drums to animal and his primal beating of hide and skin. there can be a lot of beauty hidden under all of that, and ringo knows it and so should you.