During his two years with Storme, rock music began to seep into the band, who was playing the same venues as another Liverpool group, the Beatles. Starkey became known as Ringo Starr, a name he chose due to his fascination with American cowboys and in keeping with the style of British skiffle music, which was much like American rockabilly. He was hooked, though, and in 1960 he quit his factory job to work full-time with another skiffle group, Rory Storme and the Hurricanes. While working full-time in a factory, Starkey played occasional gigs with the group. People were dropping like flies on the dance floor." We'd start with the count of `one, two, three, four,' and then it would be like an express train because we'd get faster and faster and faster. "If you had an instrument, you could join a band," he recalled with a laugh. Two months later, he joined his first band, the Eddie Clayton Skiffle group. Finally, in 1957, his stepfather bought him a used, mixed-and matched drumkit for Christmas. He recalls next making a kit out of tin cans. I wouldn't play in the band unless I had the drum."Īt age sixteen, he bought a $3.00 bass drum, made a pair of sticks out of firewood, and played constantly. "This guy would have these big green, yellow, and red notes, and if he pointed to the red note, you would hit the drum, or the yellow was the cymbal or the triangle, and things like that. "In the hospital, we used to play on the little cupboard next to the bed, and then once a week, they had a band to keep us occupied," Starr recalled when I first interviewed him in 1981 for Modern Drummer. During his second hospital stay, which ran nearly two years, Starkey cultivated an interest in a band that came to entertain the kids. As a young boy, he battled with ailments, first at age six, when appendicitis developed into peritonitis, and then at thirteen, when a cold turned into pleurisy. Twenty years earlier in Liverpool, England, it would have been impossible to predict that a boy named Richard Starkey would make the mark he made. Ringo was the first of the English rock drummers of the '60s to define the archetype of the present-day rock drummer." "Ringo was the first `outsider' to join a very exclusive club of drummers, because the drumset was developed in the United States. "He was also the first drum star who was not an American by birth," Smith adds. His parts are so signature to the songs that you can listen to a Ringo drum part without the rest of the music and still identify the song.
One of Ringo's great qualities was that he composed very unique and stylistic drum parts for the Beatles songs. We started to see the drummer as an equal participant in the compositional aspect. "Ringo's popularity brought forth a new paradigm in how the public saw drummers. "Before Ringo, drum stars were measured by their soloing ability and virtuosity," says Steve Smith. Without the contributions of all four Beatles-Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr-the Beatles music would not have been that music. But his creative input, time feel, unorthodox fills, and emphasis on serving the music helped make the Beatles' music what it was. Starr is the first to admit that he is not a technician on his instrument. As longtime writer for Modern Drummer magazine, I cannot count the number of drummers who have told me that Ringo inspired their passion for drums when they first encountered the music of the Beatles.
I could not have been more thrilled to hear that Ringo Starr is to be inducted into the PAS Hall of Fame.
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