The reputation of Ringo Starr in the drumming community has undergone one of the most significant rehabilitations in the history of musical assessment. The casual dismissal — “Ringo wasn’t even the best drummer in the Beatles” is the joke that has been made so many times it has become its own reference — has given way, across decades of careful listening and the testimony of serious musicians who have actually tried to play his parts, to something approaching reverence.
Not reverence for technical complexity. Reverence for something harder to acquire than technical complexity — musical wisdom. The specific intelligence of knowing exactly what a song needs and playing precisely that, no more and no less. The discipline of restraint in an instrument that rewards excess. The willingness to be the right thing rather than the impressive thing.
And then there is the other thing. The thing that session drummers who have spent careers trying to reproduce the feel of classic Beatles recordings keep coming back to. The thing that makes the parts, which look simple on paper and sound simple on first hearing, completely impossible to replicate with the same effect.
1. “Come Together” (1969). The drum intro is four beats. That is genuinely all it is. Four beats before the bass comes in. Drummers who have transcribed the pattern and played it back note for note will tell you that their version sounds like four beats. Ringo’s version sounds like an entire mood being established. The ghost notes — the barely audible strikes between the main beats — the specific weight of the kick drum — the exact angle of the snare — something in the combination produces an atmosphere that the pattern alone does not account for.
2. “A Day in the Life” (1967). The section where the orchestra builds toward the famous final chord requires the drummer to hold a specific groove underneath what is essentially controlled chaos. Ringo’s playing during this section is so unobtrusive that most listeners do not register it consciously. But remove it from the mix — as engineers who have worked with the multitrack recordings can confirm — and something essential disappears. He is the ground that the sky is built on. The specific quality of being indispensable while being almost invisible.
3. “Rain” (1966). Considered by many professional drummers to be the greatest drum performance on any Beatles recording. The pattern is not technically complex. It is played with a looseness — a slight behind-the-beat quality — that gives the song its specific hypnotic feel. Multiple drummers have described trying to replicate this looseness and producing instead sloppiness. The distance between loose and sloppy is where Ringo lived. Getting there requires something that cannot be taught.
4. “Ticket to Ride” (1965). The drum pattern on this track was described by John Lennon as the first example of heavy metal drumming. Lennon was not making a genre claim — he was noting the specific weight of it. The pattern is not standard for the period. It does not fit the obvious rhythmic structure of the song. It plays against the song in a way that should create tension but instead creates drive. Ringo heard something in that song that the standard approach would have missed.
5. “In My Life” (1965). The simplest entry on this list. The drum part is so minimal that describing it takes longer than playing it. But the timing of every note — the specific placement of each beat relative to the melody above it — is so precise that the song seems to breathe because of the drums rather than despite them. Drummers who have played with session musicians of the highest caliber have said that Ringo’s timing on this track represents a level of musical sensitivity that cannot be faked.
The joke says he was not the best drummer in the Beatles. The musicians say different.
The musicians are right.