"Ringo Starr: One of Them": 2022 Mini-Doc Explains Beatles Drummer's Importance in Rock and Cultural History

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Wednesday, August 23, after my husband Charles got back from work, we watched an intriguing 43-minute YouTube video on Beatles drummer Ringo Starr called Ringo Starr: One of Them (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mHop-TmIzQ). It featured interviews with two of the other three, Paul McCartney and the late John Lennon, though the main authority figure was someone I’d never heard of before, Sid Griffin. Apparently he’s a Louisville native, an eighth-generation Kentuckian and a long-standing country-rock musician who’s been in a series of bands including The Long Ryders, The Coal Porters (a marvelous pun) and Western Electric, as well as briefly a member of punk bands called Death Wish and The Unclaimed. He made a privately produced EP with The Unclaimed in 1980 on the Moxie label that contained his first recorded songs. Griffin is also a biographer of country-rock legend Gram Parsons (a drug casualty from the early 1970’s who recruited Emmylou Harris into the country world; other than that he’s one of the most boring musicians ever) and has written two books about Bob Dylan, including the definitive history of the so-called “Basement Tapes” recordings of 1967-68. Griffin has appeared as a talking-head in documentaries on John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, Keith Richards, Jimi Hendrix, Elton John, Adele and now Ringo Starr.

Ringo Starr: One of Them showcases Ringo’s early life, including the long hospitalizations during his youth (for peritonitis at age 7 and tuberculosis at age 14) that basically threw him out of school; his discoveries of music in general and percussion in particular (when he was in hospital he’d amuse himself by banging on various furniture fixtures with a stick, and at age 17 his stepfather, Harry Graves, bought him his own drum set after Richard Starkey (his real name) injured himself on his first day of work as a furniture joiner. One of the quirks about Ringo’s background is he was by far the poorest of the Beatles when he was growing up; while John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison all came from solidly middle-class backgrounds, Ringo grew up in The Dingle, Liverpool’s slums. His parents broke up when Ringo was three, and though his mom remarried (Ringo jokingly referred to her new husband as “stepladder” instead of “stepfather”) the family was a good deal worse off economically than those of the other Beatles. Happily, Ringo got a surprising amount of work on the Liverpool rock-music scene because he was one of the few people in town who actually owned his own drum set – as did Pete Best, who got the gig with The Beatles in 1960 because he owned his own kit and the rest of the Beatles needed a drummer for their proffered engagement in Hamburg, Germany. Ringo became the drummer for Rory Storm and The Hurricanes, who went to Hamburg themselves and ultimately alternated sets with The Beatles at Hamburg’s Kaiserkeller club. In 1960 one of Rory Storm’s musicians decided to make a demo showing off his own voice, and he picked The Beatles as backup but demanded Ringo play on it because he was Rory Storm’s drummer. Alas, this recording does not exist (Allan Williams, the Beatles’ first manager, lost it in a drunken binge on his way to delivering it to Ringo), but this is the first known instance of John, Paul, George and Ringo playing together.

By 1962 The Beatles were back in Liverpool playing at the Cavern Club, a dank, sweaty nightspot in an industrial basement, and after their failed audition for Decca Records in January they finally won a recording contract with Parlophone Records in June. The history of how Ringo joined The Beatles was screwed up in this video; Pete Best was still their drummer when they auditioned for George Martin at Parlophone, and Martin refused to record them with Best and told them he’d call in a session drummer for their record dates. In his 1979 autobiography All You Need Is Ears, Martin said he thought his denunciation of Best was the final straw that led The Beatles to fire him and offer Ringo the gig as his replacement. When The Beatles showed up in London for their first official Parlophone session on September 4, 1962, Martin had never even heard Ringo, though he used him on the version of the Beatles’ first single, “Love Me Do,” recorded that day and released as a single. Then he re-recorded the song with session drummer Andy White one week later, September 11, and that’s the version that ended up on The Beatles’ first album. (You can tell because Martin gave Ringo a tambourine to bang on the track.) The show did mention that Pete Best had a big following in Liverpool; The Beatles literally got death threats for having fired Best and fans showed up at The Cavern with signs reading, “Pete Forever! Ringo Never!” One of the interesting aspects of this show is its analysis of what Ringo actually brought to The Beatles musically. Though he was left-handed (ironic that both the surviving Beatles, Ringo and Paul, are “lefties,” though Paul is right-handed in normal life but left-handed as a musician), he played drums with a right-handed setup, so when he started a drum roll he was beginning it with his dominant arm. Ringo also didn’t just keep straight time like most rock drummers did; he accented a song and played fills that answered what John, George and Paul did.

Though the video doesn’t mention this, that’s how jazz drummers usually play, and though Ringo didn’t have any jazz experience (unlike other 1960’s drummers like Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones, Spencer Dryden of Jefferson Airplane, John Densmore of The Doors and Mitch Mitchell of the Jimi Hendrix Experience), he nonetheless expanded the horizons of rock drumming. At the same time both Charles and I thought of a 1950’s rock drummer who had also been important in creating the overall sound of his band: Jerry “J. I.” Allison of Buddy Holly and The Crickets. Allison not only co-wrote Holly’s two biggest hits, “That’ll Be the Day” and “Peggy Sue,” he essentially created hard rock and heavy metal with his paradiddle drum licks on “Peggy Sue.” (The Crickets also were the source for The Beatles’ name; their example gave John Lennon the idea of naming his own band after an insect.) Ringo Starr: One of Them also mentions Ringo’s – and the other Beatles’ – growing dissatisfaction with the circus-like atmosphere of their live tours. In other interviews Ringo has said he got so bored with touring his musicianship suffered; he got lazy and played only the afterbeats of the songs. In the Beatles’ last appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, September 12, 1965, when they did “Ticket to Ride” Ringo started out just playing the afterbeats, but a few seconds in, when the song reaches the lines “I don’t know why she’s riding so high,” his musical instincts kick in and he started playing normally – and powerfully. Oddly, for someone like Ringo who had the reputation of being the most good-natured Beatle, he was the first to leave the group in early 1968 during the recording of the White Album, and there are still debates among Beatles fans over how much of the drumming on the White Album is Ringo’s and how much is Paul’s via overdubbing. (There’s even one song, “Dear Prudence,” which starts out with Paul on drums but there’s a school of thought that at 2:50 into the song Ringo enters and takes over. A YouTube video on this is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptAmOYIFIx8&t=57s.) When Ringo thought better of it and returned, the rest of The Beatles had put a huge arrangement of roses on his drum set that spelled “Welcome home, Ringo.”

Ringo Starr: One of Them is about two-thirds over before The Beatles break up, and not surprisingly Ringo was the Beatle who maintained the best relations with the others: not only did he play on both John Lennon’s and Yoko Ono’s Plastic Ono Band albums, but after two Ringo solo albums during which he sang standards (Sentimental Journey) and country (Beaucoups of Blues), for his third one he got Richard Perry to produce and the three other Beatles all contributed songs to the Ringo album as well as his next two, Goodnight Vienna (1974) and Ringo’s Rotogravure (1976). Ringo went through a bad patch of alcohol and drug abuse in the early 1970’s and there’s an odd interview clip with John Lennon in which he recalled the so-called “Lost Weekend” in Los Angeles in 1973. He was there with Harry Nilsson, supposedly to produce a Nilsson album called Pussy Cats but actually to room with Nilsson, Ringo and Keith Moon, The Who’s drummer. The four of them consumed huge amounts of alcohol and various drugs, and Lennon savored the irony that he was the one who decided to knock it off, return to at least a semblance of sobriety, and pull the album together (though it’s not clear which album he was talking about, Pussy Cats or Lennon’s own Walls and Bridges and Rock ‘n’ Roll).

Ringo was also hailed as the Beatle most able to pursue a career in movie acting after his charming “This Boy” interlude in The Beatles’ first film, A Hard Day’s Night (1964), and he made his solo acting debut in a minor role in Candy (1968) and then a more important part in The Magic Christian (1969), both based on novels by Terry Southern. Later he would do Frank Zappa’s 200 Motels (1971) – he played Zappa’s alter ego and the best scene in the movie is the one in which Ringo as Zappa meets Zappa as Zappa – as well as a Western called Blindman, a film called That’ll Be the Day (1973) about the early days of British rock ‘n’ roll, and Harry Nilsson’s vampire spoof Son of Dracula (1973). In 1981 Ringo made a comedy called Caveman and there met his second (and still current) wife, actress Barbara Bach. Later he launched a series of concert tours with his so-called “All-Starr Band,” attracting a huge audience who had despaired of ever seeing any of The Beatles live – Paul has continued to tour but his ticket prices are a lot higher than Ringo’s – and he also has done children’s TV shows in Britain. Ringo Starr: One of Them is a welcome example that sometimes the good guys actually win; for a poor, sickly kid from one of the worst neighborhoods in Liverpool to make it to international superstardom and a genteel afterlife is a fate devoutly to be wished!