I have had it up to here waiting for the Beatles catalogue to be remastered

Ringo is lucky but The Beatles are just as lucky to have him. as much as Ringo has a reputation for being a bad drummer, there are very very few examples of this on record, if any.

John Densmore is more of the lucky drummer. he couldn't play his way out of a paper bag.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viAF6CFwU0E

Ringo's a great drummer. Densmore unarguably more technical, though.

Ringo is not the best drummer, but he is the best drummer for the Beatles, which is all that matters.

I like to imagine Keith Moon or John Bonham drumming for the Beatles whenever things like this come up.

Always a productive enterprise.

when did the "ringo = bad drummer" thing even start? clearly the beatles themselves didn't think that.

I like to imagine Keith Moon or John Bonham drumming for the Beatles whenever things like this come up.

heh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaG0Sadav_s

and wtf

https://i.imgur.com/zx2bjCN.jpg

when did the "ringo = bad drummer" thing even start? clearly the beatles themselves didn't think that.

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Tuesday, April 18, 2017 1:57 AM (eighteen minutes ago)

so how is it that I have MP3 files of "Carnival Of Light"? I swear it showed up at some point.

In his last interview John got defensive about Ringo -- because Charlie Watts played w/amateur jazz combo or whatever, John claimed, he had the snob vote that Ringo never earned.

Anyway I tried making sense of George a few months ago.

Pretty good list. Had forgotten about "Awaiting On You All." Was under the impression you didn't like Thirty Three & 1/3 but seem to see to tracks from it.

And a Gone Troppo track!

Two tracks

Three, actually!

Ah yes. I have zero recollection of "Woman Don't You Cry For Me."

I think that Ringo and Bonham photo is from the unplanned Monte Carlo bender they had with Oliver Reed and Peter Sellers. Bonham shaved Ringo's head and eyebrows. Somewhere in the second day they all got arrested for a food fight at a restaurant.

It's probably for the best they shaved his head--I recently saw Born To Boogie (Ringo's T.Rex movie) and the mullet he was rocking at the time did him no favors.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/J3HvmWvkzoI/hqdefault.jpg

sleeve - all fakes. I had one but it was rub, just 30 seconds of backwards guitar noodling.

I can imagine a few bods took the descriptions and made something that matched - "Yeah, someone shout Barcelona, and try to sound like John yeah?"

this George blog post is great Alfred. which was the 'George squeezing lemon over McCartney's kumbaya' clip you linked to? the clip in question has vanished from YouTube whatever it was.

The clip with the three survivors from Anthology alluded to upthread.

Thanks!

"so how is it that I have MP3 files of "Carnival Of Light"? I swear it showed up at some point."

that is fake

good to know, thanks y'all

it's probably better than the actual thing though

Should have just farmed it out to ILM, woulda got twelve or fifteen top-notch carnivals of light.

carnival of shite more like: ilx imagines 'carnival of light'

xxp ah right gotcha.

i thought i could detect a faint glimmer of a wry smile around Giles Martin's lips when he was talking about Carnival.. in that q+a last week; there's still a chance that it'll be an Easter Egg on the dvd/blu ray in the box. what a ripping wheeze that would be.

I watched a torrent of Let It Be recently. I know there's very obvious reasons why they wouldn't want to dig it up, but it's still surprising that it hasn't been given some kind of public once-over.

yeah the rooftop gig alone i mean.. it was all filmed. where's THAT polished HD remastered Blu Ray? the 20 minutes in the film is only a taster.

I complained about that upthread. Would really like to see that whole performance.

The luck the Beatles stumbled into was mind-boggling (....)

― Montgomery Burns' Jazz (Tarfumes The Escape Goat), Monday, 17 April 2017 19:14 (two days ago) Permalink

That's the crazy joy of the Lewisohn book. Just vital lucky break after vital lucky break, and that's not even factoring in innate talent.

― Josh in Chicago, Monday, 17 April 2017 19:19 (two days ago) Permalink

I've long thought one of the luckiest breaks the Beatles got was one that didn't seem like a break at all at the time: getting rejected by Decca Records after their audition. Imagine the alternate reality if Decca had signed them: they wouldn't have been produced by George Martin, wouldn't have Abbey Road studio 2 or 3 to record in, wouldn't have Norman Smith and Geoff Emerick as engineers, wouldn't have Ken Townsend to invent automatic/artificial double tracking at John Lennon's behest, and on and on. Maybe they may have found excellent counterparts to these people and entities, maybe they wouldn't have, but it's fair to assume Beatles records wouldn't sound like they do had Decca signed them instead of Parlophone.

We'd probably have "Besame Mucho" as their first single!

That would have been awesome! Way better than "Love Me Do" imo

Also, would Pete Best still have been sacked if they became famous while he was still in the band?

I've long thought one of the luckiest breaks the Beatles got was one that didn't seem like a break at all at the time: getting rejected by Decca Records after their audition.

This is otm. I finally found the quote that lodged "mind-boggling" in my brain relating to their luck (from Revolution in the Head):

All in all, Decca's coolness about The Beatles in January 1962 is quite understandable. Though Mike Smith, the producer who oversaw the audition, had seen the group in action at The Cavern, there was no precedent for signing an act merely because they could whip up their home crowd. The first prerequisite for an early Sixties recording contract was presentability: potential 'artistes' had to be 'professional', i.e., musically competent, groomable, and acquiescent to the demands of their producers who, it was assumed, would select their songs for them from batches circulated by writing teams through the normal channels. Loud, long-haired, and seemingly incapable of desisting from laughter, The Beatles did not meet these requirements. Nor, at this stage, did they have much going for them as songwriters. It didn't help that, while there was nothing wrong with his managerial instincts, Brian Epstein lacked musical judgement. Left to his own devices, he would have been at a loss to develop the group's creativity. Doing that would require someone highly qualified yet unhampered by the hidebound UK studio scene of 1962. By a coincidence so unlikely as to be positively mind-boggling, The Beatles were about to encounter such a man.

One thing I got from that Beatles Big-Book, was that Pete was just the latest one in a series of drummers, that the three Japage's didn't exactly become great mates with.

Ringo was afraid he might get fired in... '64 or '65?

I don't know about '64-'65, but he was always hard on himself. In the Anthology he can't mask his bitterness and loathing of the '66 shows, and how poorly he (and they) played -- it's evident it still stung 18 years later.

He left for a couple of weeks during the white album thinking the others weren't into his playing, and I don't really know what the source of that was, but they all convinced him to come back.

and if the Beatles had been signed by Decca, there might have been no Rolling Stones since the latter were signed by Decca as a reaction to the Beatles' success.
Even considering the Beatles would have been as successful on Decca, I doubt Parlophone/George Martin would have worked well with the Rolling Stones...

xp sorry, still stung 28 years later

xpost Re: Ringo on the White Album, the first time I heard Long, Long, Long, I thought it was Pink Floyd due to his drumming (and the stoner vibe).

Watched Conan O'Brien do a really long interview with Lewisohn on YouTube there and the way he puts it rather than them being lucky, is that what happened by was by no means always going to happen, and that at every point, it almost doesn't happen. I suppose that could be said about any even in historical narrative that you focus on with the same breadth and depth.

Also Conan is a gigantic Beatles nut, which I probably should've assumed from his stint at the Simpsons, but I mean he's really, really, really knowledgeable about them.

btw here's a short playlist of Beatles keepers I compiled for the new year.

ctrl-f savoy truffle Phrase Not Found

Great to see "Boys" on the list; one of Ringo's greatest early performances.

how many of y'all have read Peter Brown's book The Love We Make? sooo juicy, we all know they were speed freaks but good god Ringo stayed up for three days on uppers and his legs gave out on stage, he was wandering around barefoot in the middle of the night totally suicidal. this was in early '64. also how George had the flu really bad the day that they were on Ed Sullivan, and the doctor gave him vitamins but mostly just shot him up with a heroic dose of amphetamines.

They basically subsisted on uppers while in Hamburg. I wouldn't be surprised if George said to the doctor, "That's it? That's all you got?"