Some of the best artists in the world don’t always need to be the most versatile musicians anyone has ever heard. It usually comes down to band chemistry when making a great group, and while bands like Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd had completely different skill sets, it always worked in the context of whatever song they happened to be working on.
But in terms of every other rock band in the world, the kind of electricity that The Beatles had in their prime wasn’t lost on Ringo Starr when he first started playing with his friends.
The whole point of getting Starr in the group was because he managed to have the right feel for the songs, and even before he joined the group, the drummer would always hang back and listen to the band when he was offstage. It’s one thing to be prepared for when the band covered some obscure American songs, but once they started to make the studio their home, Starr had a completely different job cut out for him. He needed to start thinking like a musician, and that meant playing to the song.
And while many people single out albums like Rubber Soul as the moment where they started to get weird, Starr was already well ahead of everyone else in the percussion department. He had thrown some bongos onto a handful of their ballads on A Hard Day’s Night, and by the time they began working on Beatles for Sale, Starr managed to get a beat out of everything from a timpani to his own knees when tracking the song ‘Words of Love’.
But if ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ was the signal that the Fabs were going to move in different directions, Sgt Pepper was the point when they were never coming back. The album may have been looked at as the moment that kickstarted the Summer of Love, but for Starr, all he could remember from those sessions were the number of chances they took trying to make something no one had ever heard.
After coming off the road, Starr always felt proud going back to what they did on Pepper, saying, “I’m actually starting to play Sgt. Pepper. Because George Martin is doing a show, The Making of Sgt. Pepper, and he’s interviewing us all, and so I thought I’d better play that record and see what it’s like. I was really knocked out again. I hadn’t played it in so long that the diversity of the songs blew me away. But it also sounds kind of naïve, really.”
Starr had already gone over how bored he was behind the scenes waiting for John Lennon and Paul McCartney to complete one of their songs, but listening to his performance, a lot of the greatest moments come from his drumming. ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’ will always be his token moment to shine on the record, but ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ wouldn’t be half as good without him announcing the chorus, and the only reason ‘Good Morning Good Morning’ stays together is because of his metronomic drumming.
Revolver may have meant more to them at the time, but in the greater context of history, this was them crossing a threshold. Their previous albums had become works of art, but now that they had officially given up live performances, this was them announcing to the world what people could do with the album, and it didn’t take long before everyone else started taking cues from the different twists and turns on the record.
While some albums have become more revered over time, there’s a good chance that Starr sees Sgt Pepper as a perfect moment in time for the group. In an era when most rock bands dry up or burn out by the time they give up touring, The Beatles proved that they were only just beginning to impress us.
