Ringo Starr Is Basically My Surrogate Uncle
SOMETIMES I THINK I’m the biggest Beatles fan in the world, which is probably how most Beatles obsessives feel. At age five, I attended my first Beatles convention; by age six, I could make the distinction between the group’s UK and US discographies. I was a savant in Fab Four trivia.
When I hear somebody say “the Beatles suck” (probably the textbook utterance of boilerplate iconoclasm), I take it personally. The Beatles raised me—my birthfather never paid a dime in child support, but he did leave me a turntable and ragged, water-damaged copies of 1962-1966 and 1967-1970 (also known as the Red and Blue Albums, respectively). As I got older and started surrounding myself with more and more Beatle-bashing, wannabe provocateurs, the band’s music would become my own little embryonic asylum away from the obscurantist chest-beating of punk and indie.
If the fact that I’m having fewer idiotic arguments about the band on social media is any indication, it appears that the music community has settled on the consensus that the Beatles were patently great (even if John Lennon was an asshole). But there’s one myth that even diehards like myself remain susceptible to: that Ringo Starr was a shitty drummer and somehow a “lesser” member of the group.
It’s not hard to see how this myth originated; there are pre-internet rumors that Paul McCartney secretly re-recorded drum tracks while Starr wasn’t in the studio. Actually, McCartney did play drums on “Dear Prudence” and “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” as Starr briefly quit the group during the White Album sessions. And it’s often erroneously reported that Lennon told an interviewer Starr “isn’t even the best drummer in the Beatles,” although this was actually a joke made by comedian Jasper Carrott in 1983.
By: Morgan Troper
Source: Portland Mercury
