You’ve touched again on a bit of a hobby horse of mine Loco (as everyone had probably noticed), that on what is a “good” player on their instrument.
There’s what I call the teenage boy syndrome. When you’re 16 or 17, and mostly among guys, you have a fairly disparaging attitude to peoples abilities on their instruments based on fairly superficial criteria such as speed of playing and overall flashiness. It’s probably just a function of a person’s stage of development and no doubt crosses into other areas, such as sport. But, for a guitarist, if you cant blaze all over the fretboard at 100mph then you, to use a technical term, suck. It really doesn’t matter what musical value the playing has. It’s more about the technical capability on display. As you get older you tend to start appreciate more subtle things about people’s playing. So when you’re a teenager, in the era I was growing up, it was all about the Claptons, Pages and Hendrixs. Not so much the Knoplers, Buckinghams or Manzaneras. Appreciating what they did generally came later. Similarly, Ringo was always going to suffer in comparison to John Bonham or Keith Moon.
To me a good player is one who meets the requirements of the job. There’s a million different styles and countless genres. No-one is going to master them all. In that sense, Ringo, in a band that was all about the song, structure and arrangement, not about virtuosity, did his job extremely well. He did those fills in She Said, Rain or countless others to complement the song. If the song demanded straight playing without fills, he played it like that, although often with just subtle changes in the way he played which, especially on the old mixes where he was buried, people would barely notice. And he was steady as a rock. Lewisohn's analysis of the Beatles recording sessions showed that rarely did a take breakdown because of Ringo making an error.
I do think the word genius us thrown around a bit much. But to me Ringo was spot on in the things he played for the Beatles and always complemented the song. He had enough of a technical toolkit to play what the band needed live or in the studio. He wouldn’t have had the tools to play in say, Rush. Or in a jazz band. But he didn’t need it. He was a 60s pop/rock drummer and in that mode he was terrific.
