How much of Ringo's drumming came out of his creativity and how much came from the other guys do you think? I only ask because every so often I read about how Paul or the others came up with an idea for the drum parts and then got Ringo to do it.
This is a banal answer, but I imagine it varied from song to song. He probably did receive more direction from Paul, particularly as the sixties wore on and Paul became much more definite about how he wanted his records to sound. There were probably varying degrees of give-and-take during rehearsals and recording sessions, too. Some songs were probably fairly quickly arranged and dispatched, others less so. Listening to the session tapes would surely help here.
Which leads to another point: for all the thousands of hours of interviews done with The Beatles, there's not all that much on the music itself. John talked about it in the 1980 Playboy interview, and Paul did the same in
Many Years From Now, but offhand I don't recall much else. Maybe George did, too, in
I, Me, Mine but I haven't seen that.
