The ques­tion of whether or not Ringo Starr is a great rock drum­mer — maybe one of the great­est– seems more or less set­tled among drum­mers. “From the sim­plis­tic heavy-hit­ting of Dave Grohl, to the pro­gres­sive mind bend­ing of Mike Port­noy, and way beyond,” writes Stu­art Williams at Music Radar, “all roads lead back to Ringo.” Not only is Ringo “your favorite drummer’s favorite drum­mer,” but when he took the stage in 1964 on The Ed Sul­li­van Show, “you’d be hard-pushed to find anoth­er moment where one drum­mer inspired an entire gen­er­a­tion of kids and teenagers to pick up a pair of sticks and beg their par­ents to buy them a kit.”

There was lit­tle prece­dent for what he did in rock drum­ming even in the band’s ear­li­est years. Ringo helped change “the role of the drums from an ortho­dox, mil­i­tary and jazz-led dis­ci­pline into a more democ­ra­tised art form. If there was a blue­print for what drum­mers ‘did’ in rock ’n’ roll, Ringo’s approach widened it,” adds Music Radar. Much of his expan­sive vocab­u­lary was acci­den­tal, at least at first, a prod­uct of what Bea­t­les biog­ra­ph­er Bob Spitz calls a child­hood beset by “a Dick­en­sian chron­i­cle of mis­for­tune.”

Like many a ground­break­ing musi­cian, Ringo played at what might be con­sid­ered a phys­i­cal dis­ad­van­tage. He learned the drums in “the hos­pi­tal band,” he once said, while con­va­lesc­ing from tuber­cu­lo­sis. “My grand­par­ents gave me a man­dolin and a ban­jo, but I didn’t want them. My grand­fa­ther gave me a har­mon­i­ca… we had a piano — noth­ing. Only the drums.” Like Hen­drix, he was a lefty forced to adapt to a right-hand­ed ver­sion of the instru­ment, thus enlarg­ing what right- (and left) hand­ed drum­mers thought could be done with it.

As Ger­man drum­mer Sina demon­strates at the top of the post, Ringo’s unique style involves a great deal of sub­tle­ty, “tone, taste, musi­cal­i­ty, and that left-hand­ed drum­mer on a right-hand­ed kit reverse-fell tom-tom work,” writes Boing Boing. We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured Sina in a post in which great drum­mers pay trib­ute to Ringo. The daugh­ter of a musi­cian in Ger­man Bea­t­les trib­ute band the Sil­ver Bea­t­les, she shows off an unim­peach­able grasp of Star­r’s sig­na­ture moves.

In the clip above, Ringo him­self demon­strates his tech­nique on “Tick­et to Ride,” “Come Togeth­er,” and his high­est-chart­ing solo sin­gle “Back Off Booga­loo.” In explain­ing how he employed his most high­ly praised tal­ent — play­ing exact­ly what the song need­ed and no more — he shows how the drum pat­tern in the Abbey Road open­er came direct­ly from John’s vocals and Paul’s bass line. In “Tick­et to Ride,” he shows how he works from his shoul­der, pro­duc­ing a down­beat that’s slight­ly ahead.

Where do Ringo’s quirks come from, accord­ing to Ringo? “It has to do with swing,” he dead­pans, “or as we keep men­tion­ing, med­ica­tion.” More seri­ous­ly, he explains above in an inter­view with Conan O’Brien, he “leads with his left,” a lim­i­ta­tion that he turned into a musi­cal lega­cy on his favorite Bea­t­les drum moments and on every­one else’s.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Musi­cian Plays Sig­na­ture Drum Parts of 71 Bea­t­les Songs in 5 Min­utes: A Whirl­wind Trib­ute to Ringo Starr

How Can You Tell a Good Drum­mer from a Bad Drum­mer?: Ringo Starr as Case Study

Iso­lat­ed Drum Tracks From Six of Rock’s Great­est: Bon­ham, Moon, Peart, Copeland, Grohl & Starr

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

What­ev­er mar­ket­ing mate­ri­als may claim, the Rolling Stones did not just hap­pen upon Bud­dy Guy’s Checker­board Lounge on Chicago’s South Side (before it closed, reopened in Hyde Park, then closed again for good) on a night when Mud­dy Waters hap­pened to be there in 1981. And they did not spon­ta­neous­ly get invit­ed to jam, as it seems, when they “climbed over tables” to get onstage with their hero and blues leg­ends Bud­dy Guy and Junior Wells.

A chance meet­ing, of course, would have been mag­i­cal, but the truth is the event was prob­a­bly “planned and coor­di­nat­ed,” writes W. Scott Poole at Pop­mat­ters. These were the biggest names in the blues and rock and roll, after all. “Why,” before the Stones and their entourage arrive, “is there an emp­ty table on the night Mud­dy Waters came back to South­side?”

And why did the Rolling Stones’ man­ag­er claim he “approached the Checker­board high­er-ups a week in advance,” Ted Schein­man writes at Slant, “propos­ing a sur­prise con­cert and prof­fer­ing $500 as proof-of earnest”?

Was it a cyn­i­cal ploy to re-estab­lish the band’s blues cred dur­ing what would turn out to be the largest gross­ing tour of the year — one fea­tur­ing what Jag­ger called “enor­mous images of a gui­tar, a car and a record — an Amer­i­cana idea.” In some sense, Mud­dy Waters was also an “Amer­i­cana idea,” but how could he be oth­er­wise to the Stones, giv­en that they’d grown up lis­ten­ing to him from across the Atlantic, asso­ci­at­ing him with expe­ri­ences they had nev­er known first­hand?

And so what if the his­toric meet­ing at the Checker­board Lounge was stage-man­aged behind the scenes? That’s what man­agers do — they arrange things behind the scenes and let per­form­ers cre­ate the illu­sion of spon­tane­ity, as though they hadn’t spent an entire tour, or decades of tours, mak­ing the same songs seem fresh on any giv­en night. When it comes to the blues, play­ing the same songs over again is a key part of the game, see­ing how much atti­tude and style one can wring out of a few chords, dogged­ly per­sis­tent themes of sex, love, death, betray­al, and maybe a bot­tle­neck slide.

It’s a les­son the Stones learned well, and their ado­ra­tion and respect for Mud­dy Waters is noth­ing less than gen­uine, even if it took some back­stage nego­ti­a­tion to bring them togeth­er this one and only time. Mud­dy is spec­tac­u­lar. “Even as one of the aging elder states­men of the Chica­go blues in 1981,” writes Poole, “he exudes an aura of sex and pow­er, show­ing off every attribute that so inspired Mick and Kei­th and that became an inef­fa­ble part of their own music and their per­sona.”

Mean­while, the absolute­ly boy­ish glee on the faces of Jag­ger, Richards, Ron­nie Wood, and Stones’ pianist Ian Stew­art as they per­form onstage with an artist who had giv­en them so much more than just their name speaks for itself. The con­cert video and live album “began appear­ing as boot­leg and unof­fi­cial releas­es almost imme­di­ate­ly,” All­mu­sic notes, “from LP and CD to VHS and DVD.” Here, you can see them jam out three songs from the night: “Baby Please Don’t Go” (on which Waters brings Jag­ger onstage at 5:30 for an extend­ed ver­sion and Kei­th joins at 6:50), “Man­nish Boy,” and “Hoochie Coochie Man.”

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

10-Sto­ry High Mur­al of Mud­dy Waters Goes Up in Chica­go

A Visu­al His­to­ry of The Rolling Stones Doc­u­ment­ed in a Beau­ti­ful, 450-Page Pho­to Book by Taschen

The Rolling Stones Release a Long Lost Track Fea­tur­ing Led Zeppelin’s Jim­my Page

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness