RINGO STARR AND ME

 

On 16 August 1962 Ringo Starr, one of Liverpool’s and Britain’s best drummers, replaced Pete Best as the Beatles’drummer.1 The Beatles were, by then, recording with EMI/Parlophone Records. George Martin was their producer. Their first recording session with Ringo Starr was on 4 September 1962. On 11 September Ringo Starr played tambourine on "Love Me Do" and maracas on "P.S. I Love You.” Session drummer Andy White was hired to play drums. Before Ringo Starr starred on drums were measured by their soloing ability and virtuosity. Ringo's popularity brought forth a new paradigm in how the public came to see drummers. Due to Ringo’s style and approach, the public started to see the drummer as an equal participant in the compositional aspect of a group’s songs. One of Ringo's great qualities was that he composed unique, stylistic drum parts. His drumming parts possess a signature in the Beatles’ songs; his varied and advanced drumming techniques allow listeners to identify a Beatles song without evening hearing the rest of the music.2 Ringo was the first of the English rock drummers of the '60s to define the archetype of the present-day rock drummer." -Ron Price with thanks to 1Barry Miles, Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now, Henry Holt & Company, N.Y., 1997; and 2Robyn Flans, “Hall of Fame: Ringo Starr,” internet site: Percussive Arts Society. :heart:

 

The band's first televised performance was on People and Places. It was transmitted live from Manchester by Granada Television on 17 October 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Art Roberts, music director of popular Chicago radio station WLS, placed "Please Please Me" into radio rotation in late February 1963, arguably the first time a Beatles record was heard on American radio.3 –Ron Price with thanks to internet site “beatles.startingiseasy.com.”

 

While Ringo was making his entry as drummer in the world of the Beatles, I was 18 finishing my adolescent baseball career pitching my last game against Oshawa in Ontario for the Burlington Juvenile All-Stars and finishing my summer job with the Dundas Confectionary Company. I was also just starting my most demanding academic year, grade 13 in Ontario and unobtrusively beginning my pioneer life for the Canadian Baha’i community. While the Beatles were going on TV for the first time in October 1962, as I say, the Cuban Missile Crisis was mounting to a fever-pitch and my society was as close to nuclear war as it would get in my adolescent and young adult life.

 

All these juxtapositions, societal crises, an incipient Beatlemania and a general sense of the transitions in my life, though, were unknown to me. I was at that time buckling down, settled into, the task of getting through nine subjects at Dundas District High School. I was in love with a girl in Michigan. In August 1962, just days before Ringo had his first session as the drummer for the Beatles, I had touched the warm skin of a girl’s breast for the first time in my life. I was living with my mother and father at 47 Tweedsmuir Avenue in Dundas, a small town in the Golden Triangle of southern Ontario. My mother was working in her last year of employment at McMaster University in the Overseas Students Department as a secretary. My father was 67, had just retired and in three years would die of an aneurism, a localized, blood-filled dilation (balloon-like bulge) of a blood vessel.

 

So much going on all around me, then

in that hot August of ’62 and an autumn

that took my world to annihilation’s edge

with Ringo getting a bigger break than he

then knew that summer and me getting a

bigger break than I knew at the time

pioneering for a Movement that had

just struck its head above the ground,

but with my mind and emotions filled

to overflowing with the first taste of

anything one could call romance and

nine subjects that would make or break

my academic life, my career and what

direction my life would take back then

when the world stood at oblivion’s edge.

 

Ron Price

26 September 2008

 

 

interesting, though this would be better placed in 'retro' as the pop fans here prefer manufactured rubbish like the saturdays.

 

ps... ringo wasnt considered that good a drummer... he was often looked down on in the early years, possibly because he wasnt as good as others including pete best.

interesting, though this would be better placed in 'retro' as the pop fans here prefer manufactured rubbish like the saturdays.

 

ps... ringo wasnt considered that good a drummer... he was often looked down on in the early years, possibly because he wasnt as good as others including pete best.

 

Didn't Lennon say something like Starr 'wasn't the best drummer in the world, he wasn't even the best drummer in The Beatles'. Good addition to The Beatles though ... brilliant larger than life personality and he was (believe me I can't see it) a bit of a 'babe magnet'. Some people just seem to go for the ugliest pup in the litter!

 

Norma

interesting, though this would be better placed in 'retro' as the pop fans here prefer manufactured rubbish like the saturdays.

 

yeah its quite bizarre for this to listed in pop with all the saturdays threads...however maybe there's a discussion to be had here about how much the beatles could be seen to be a 'manufactured' merseybeat pop band - not manufactured in the pop idol way but more 'manufactured' as in refined by Brian Epstein from the raw materials, that raw lump that had been in Hamburg and at the Cavern Club (btw is it true that Erics is the where the Cavern Club is today and the Cavern Club is actually should be on the other side of the street)

 

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/fb/Promo_photo_of_Epstein.jpg

Brian Epstein - the Louis Walsh of his day?!?!?