(Credits: Far Out / TIDAL / George Martin)
Sun 30 November 2025 18:58, UK
A lot of the greatest moments Ringo Starr ever had in The Beatles are so subtle that it’s easy to miss them.
While many people dismiss Starr as the least talented member of the band who got the role of a lifetime playing the drums, a lot of what he was doing was about more than simply keeping time. He was the beating heart of the band, and while he could never be replaced in the Fab Four, George Martin knew that there were some people that could completely smoke the drummer if they were playing together.
Then again, even Starr never rated himself as the greatest drummer in the world. He was never one to show a lot of flash whenever he played, but if the song called for it, he could manage to fly off the handle at the right time, like the final verse of ‘Long Tall Sally’ or banging the life out of his cymbals during ‘Helter Skelter’. If it was right for the song, he played it, but it wasn’t in his character to play too fiercely like John Bonham or anything.
He certainly had friends in the business that could throw some crazy shapes at their respective bands like Keith Moon, but Starr was the epitome of a ‘songwriter drummer’. What he did wasn’t technical, but the drum parts that he came up with for the Beatles’ classics were so good that you could practically sing along to them. If he wanted to, though, Starr could have gone in a much different direction.
Because while Martin was interested in bringing every one of the Fab Four’s ideas to life, he wasn’t about to stop at making simple pop songs. His arrangements were about pushing the boundaries of rock and roll, and when working with everyone from Jeff Beck to the Mahavishnu Orchestra, he got a decent education of what rock could be if they decided to push the music forward a little bit more.
You have to remember that the world of fusion was right around the corner when The Beatles broke up, and even if bands like Weather Report or U.K. weren’t going to have the same major hits as the solo Beatles were going to have, the session scene was becoming a who’s who of legends. So when seeing what the jazzy drummers were doing in a band like Steely Dan, Martin thought that Starr would have never fit in with them.
He was a talented drummer to be sure, but Martin felt that Starr’s skillset wasn’t suited to playing those kind of complicated charts, saying, “As a drummer, Ringo is unique. He’s not a great technical drummer if you measure him against someone like Steve Gadd or Jeff Porcaro, he wouldn’t be able to play like that. But he has a unique sound. When you hear Ringo, you know it’s Ringo, there’s no one else.”
And compared to what Gadd had done during his sessions, there’s hardly any competition in terms of technical ability. Starr did have more than his fair share of chops when he started working with the rest of the Fabs, but since he had to be talked into making that minimalist drum solo in the middle of ‘The End’, he would have probably melted into the floor if Donald Fagen gave him the sheet music to a song like ‘Aja’ and asked him to figure the drum solo from front to back.
But like all great rock and roll musicians, a lot of Starr’s strengths come from that lack of physical finesse. Not everything needed to be perfect, and he was more than laying down exactly what was needed for the song than having to rely on throwing in the perfect drum fill that would leave most drummers running scared.
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