Quoted from jongould

Dear All,

Forgive me for posting material from my own book, but as a writer who is also a professional drummer, I've been asked constantly about my opinion of Ringo as a drummer, both in his own right and in comparison with Pete Best.  To be sure, we don't have a whole lot of recorded evidence of Pete Best's playing circa 1960-62 apart from the Polydor Tony Sheridan tapes and the Parlophone audition tapes, but what we do have is pretty telling.  In the interests of stimulating this discussion, I offer the following from Chapter 11 of "Can't Buy Me Love":

"Though their handling of the matter was utterly callous, the Beatles’ decision to replace the strapping Pete Best with this diminutive product of the Dingle was based on sound musical considerations.  Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison had been hearing about their drummer’s shortcomings for more than a year from Tony Sheridan, whose musical judgment they respected. George Martin’s comment to Brian Epstein had seconded Sheridan’s opinion with the force of a voice from on high.  Though Martin had no way of knowing it, the Beatles had never thought of themselves as anything but a self-sufficient musical unit; the idea of having to rely on a session drummer (or, conversely, on a live drummer who wasn’t considered good enough to play on records) was an insult to their sense of autonomy.  Like Best, Starr possessed no more than a rudimentary technique on the drums.  He had never been one to practice, much less study, the instrument, but what distinguished him from Pete Best was the authority and feeling with which he applied his rudimentary skills.  Ringo’s playing was much punchier and more syncopated than that of his predecessor, and his fills – the accented interjections by a which a drummer annotates the structure of a song – were more varied and propulsive.  Like all beat drummers in Liverpool, Starr played loud and hard.  But whereas Pete Best tended to keep time with pounding quarter-notes on his bass drum, Ringo had learned to distribute the weight of his playing between his cymbals, bass, and snare.  However much an element of personal jealousy may have figured in the Beatles’ decision to change drummers, there was no question as to who was the better player of the two.  

"What was true of Ringo’s drumming was true of his personality as well.  Though his face retained the melancholy countenance of a sickly child, his disposition was generally agreeable and upbeat, while his long hospitalizations and his many comings and goings from school had made him something of an expert at fitting in.   At first, he was scarcely more outspoken than Pete Best.  “It’s how I’m built,” he explained.  “Some people gab all day and some people play it smogo.  I haven’t got a smiling face or a talking mouth.”  But where Best was bland, Starr had a decided flair.  He knew how to pick his moments, and he was a master of the quizzical Liverpudlian deadpan, the slow Liverpudlian double-take, and the curt Liverpudlian retort.  In some ways, his personality was everything the other three Beatles were not: stoic, unassuming, and unpretentious, with the only inauthentic thing about him being a stagename so preposterous that no one could be expected to take it seriously.  On account of his impoverished background and his lack of formal education, the other three Beatles looked down on him at first, for Ringo was truly a slum kid, utterly lacking in the glib confidence of suburban grammar school boys.  Yet this also made him a source of fascination to them.  As John Lennon put it, “To be so aware with so little education is rather unnerving to someone who’s been to school since he was fucking two onwards.”

"There is little question that the invitation to join the Beatles was the single luckiest thing that ever happened to Ringo Starr.  But Ringo’s acceptance of that invitation was also one of the luckiest things that ever happened to the Beatles.  It is hard to imagine that these three headstrong, self-satisfied young men could have anticipated how perfectly Starr’s looks and personality would complement their own, or how central the presence of this little comic drummer would be to the iconography that would develop around their group in the years ahead.  In any case, from the moment he joined, the Beatles became almost unimaginable without him.  As the author of the change from John-Paul-George-and-Pete to John-Paul-George-and-Ringo, he brought the ring of poetry to their common Christian names.  Moreover, at precisely the point where events were unfolding that would separate the Beatles forever from the city of their birth, they had added to their ranks an authentic souvenir of Liverpool.  Ringo’s presence ensured that, however far they ventured, they would always carry with them an unmistakable piece of home."

Quoted from Bill Harry

I've had bad luck with my books - lots of times the corrections I made were never done. In a book with 500,000 words and hundreds of dates, occasionally a printer would put 1968 when it would be 1962 and so on - and although I'd correct the proofs, often they wouldn't be corrected. With the original encyclopedia all the reviews of Beatles publications weren't used, all my colour photos of the Beatles were lost with the publisher, with the revised edition the publisher lost 40,000 words - and so on. With my original Mersey Beat book in 1977 I didn't get my set of original copies of Mersey Beat back, so I went to the publishers office and found them spread across some shelves in the basement - with half of the issues missing!
For an insight into author's publishing problems, I now give authors a forum to write about their books themselves in the 'Rock Books' section of http://www.merseybeat.co.uk