How Ringo Starr Influenced me

#1 · June 28, 2015, 12:36 am

Quote from Forum Archives on June 28, 2015, 12:36 am
Posted by: rdo <rdo@...>

This is a copy-paste of a post I made on a message board a couple years ago. The thread I posted to was about how underrated Ringo was, and these were my thoughts about how INCREDIBLE Ringo was, and how he was one of the biggest influences on my musicianship. I'm posting this because I recently stumbled across this video that was shown at Ringo's induction to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (fair warning, the video has some profanity, including a couple uses of the "F-word") But it also features Abe Laborial, Jr.:

Anyway, here is what I had to say (mild profanity in there):

I'm not even a drummer, but I list Ringo as one of my primary influences as a musician. It's actually something I only realized relatively recently. I've realized he influenced me in two major ways. One was was there all along, the other was something I had to grow into.

I had the good fortune of having two aunts who were teenaged girls in the 1960s, and who had every single Beatles album. So when I picked up the guitar in 1980, at age 14, they were right there introducing me to The Beatles. My entire early training on the guitar (I was self-taught) revolved around strumming an acoustic guitar along with Beatles records. Because I was self-taught, and had no teacher telling me, "No, strum like this", I developed my own strumming style. And that strumming style attempted to replicate the "full band" experience. Meaning I emphasized the lower strings to incorporate the bass line to some extent, and also incorporated various muting techniques to imply the drum beat. None of this was a conscious decision; the different elements of my strumming technique just sort of naturally evolved.

I describe this "natural evolution", because, appraising my guitar-playing skills honestly, I'm a barely competent guitarist. By the time I was 19 years old I'd decided that what I really wanted to be was a bass player (the bass spoke to me in a way the guitar never did), and as I became more and more of a bass player, I became less and less of a guitar player. Over the last 20 years, I've often gone months without even taking my 1968 Gibson acoustic out of its case. But I'll take it out every now and then, and use it to accompany myself singing one or two songs in front of an audience, and afterwards I inevitably get some non-musician approaching me to tell me what an "awesome" guitarist I am. For years this baffled me. When I play my guitar, I don't do anything "fancy". I just strum the damned thing while I sing. I don't insert any kind of "lead guitar" work, or attempt any kind of complex fingerpicking. I just strum.

It was maybe 10 years ago that I finally figured out what was going on. It was that strum that I developed while playing along with Beatles records. A strum that I later adapted, unconsciously, to everything else I played on acoustic guitar. A strum that manages, somehow, to imply an entire backing band when it's only my voice and my guitar, and puts across just the right "groove" for whatever song I'm singing.

It turns out that Ringo is one of the primary reasons my "strum" fools people into thinking I'm an "awesome" guitarist.

Ringo's second influence was upon my bass playing. I didn't want to play bass because of The Beatles/McCartney. I wanted to play bass because a junior high school friend played Rush's "Freewill" for me, and that insane bass part during the instrumental breakdown on that song was the coolest f***ing thing I'd ever heard, and I wanted to do that. But, being 19 when I finally got my own bass, and being inspired by Geddy Lee and, later, Steve Harris of Iron Maiden, my idea of "good bass player" was "play as many notes as possible, as fast as possible".

And that idea got me fired from the first group I played bass with. Being a dumb kid, I failed to learn my lesson, and blamed my firing on "jealously of my mad skillz". I eventually learned some restraint, but it still took me a while. I've now been playing with the same group of musicians (on the worship team at my church) for 20 years. So, from ages 29 to 49. The first few years, I was still a fairly "busy" bass player. But, somewhere around age 40, it finally sunk in (without anybody telling me) that, often, "less is more". One of the key things with this group is that we don't get the "original recording" of the song to learn from. Our pianist/leader learns the songs, and then gives the rest of us a lyric sheet with the chords written in, and we all invent our own parts, cueing off of what she plays on the piano (usually her own arrangement of the song), and how she sings it. And more and more, I've learned to listen to what she's doing, and figure out the most appropriate bass line to play behind her. Sometimes, yeah, it calls for a "busy" bass line. But more often than not, I realize that the appropriate line is something mind-bogglingly simple. And, surprisingly often, I've found that the best thing to do at certain points in the song is to stop playing altogether. And all of that is something that, ultimately, I learned from Ringo way back when I was 14-15 years old and just starting out.

The other way Ringo influenced my bass playing was timing. I will credit Ringo with my devotion to timing. The one position in my current group that has never been settled is drums. Over the last 20 years we've gone through way too many drummers, of wildly varying levels of skill, from "serious jazz drummer" to "rank beginner" to "this kid who volunteered to try". And there I sit with my bass, between the pianist and the drummer, and doing my damnedest to maintain a steady, accurate tempo.

So that was my post. Let me add this bit about timing: Thanks to Ringo, I have this "feel" for what the proper tempo of a song should be. (I think this was represented in the movie, "That Thing You Do", when the singer/songwriter started his ballad, the title song, and the drummer decided to kick it up and play it faster. My WL keeps breaking out the digital metronome to find the right tempo (she's slightly younger than my 71-year-old mother, and I've started suspecting that she can't remember how fast or slow we played the older songs), and meanwhile, I'm hearing the song and thinking, "No, it should just a bit faster or slower." (Depending upon the song). So I find myself using the power of the bass to lead the tempo. One of the drummers in the above video called Ringo a "song drummer"; I've become a "song bassist". Listen to the song, and figure out the right and appropriate part to play for that song.

Though, for the record, I haven't played at church for nearly two months. I'm up for a promotion to my department manager position, and I've been stuck at work almost every day while I "audition" for the job (which is hilarious, because I am older than every other department head in my building, and older than my Executive Director (my immediate boss), and I have more experience in my profession than any of the other department heads have in theirs - I have more years of experience in my field than the years my Office Manager has been alive - I've been a cook for 32 years; my Office Manager is 31 years old).

I cook in a retirement home. I've been a cook for 32 years, and I'm very good at what I do. I started in fast food when I was 17, and worked my way up in the cooking business, working from one restaurant to the next, learning new skills every place I worked, and taking every new skill to the next job, where I learn even more new skills. I'm surrounded by coworkers who have college educations ... and I am completely dumbfounded by my coworkers inability to properly spell the simplest words. HOW DO THESE PEOPLE GET THEIR DEGREES WHEN THEY CAN'T SPELL?!! In the retirement home, these people need to write the resident's names on the meal tickets so that they know who gets what ... and I am gobsmacked by their inability to properly spell the resident's names. Every order I get for Virginia is spelled "Virgina" (say that out loud and you'll see my point). Warren? Spelled "Warant". Joan? Spelled "Jone". I will cut some slack to my Mexican-American, native Spanish-speakers. But most of these misspellings come from college-degree-bearing native born American English speakers. I am so glad that my residents, these 80-90-100-year-old people that I feed never have to see those meal tickets and see how my coworkers misspell their names.

I have little college education - the only "college" diploma I have is from one of those fly-by-night "business schools", which I now refer to as my "$5000-typing class" (but I did get an accountant's perspective on things). What's the difference between me and my actual college educated coworkers (you have to go to college to be a Certified Nursing Assistant)? I READ BOOKS.

--
Rik Osborne
<rdo@mister-rik.com>
<www.mister-rik.com/>
<www.facebook.com/mister.rik>

Posted by: rdo <rdo@...>

This is a copy-paste of a post I made on a message board a couple years ago. The thread I posted to was about how underrated Ringo was, and these were my thoughts about how INCREDIBLE Ringo was, and how he was one of the biggest influences on my musicianship. I'm posting this because I recently stumbled across this video that was shown at Ringo's induction to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (fair warning, the video has some profanity, including a couple uses of the "F-word") But it also features Abe Laborial, Jr.:

Anyway, here is what I had to say (mild profanity in there):

I'm not even a drummer, but I list Ringo as one of my primary influences as a musician. It's actually something I only realized relatively recently. I've realized he influenced me in two major ways. One was was there all along, the other was something I had to grow into.

I had the good fortune of having two aunts who were teenaged girls in the 1960s, and who had every single Beatles album. So when I picked up the guitar in 1980, at age 14, they were right there introducing me to The Beatles. My entire early training on the guitar (I was self-taught) revolved around strumming an acoustic guitar along with Beatles records. Because I was self-taught, and had no teacher telling me, "No, strum like this", I developed my own strumming style. And that strumming style attempted to replicate the "full band" experience. Meaning I emphasized the lower strings to incorporate the bass line to some extent, and also incorporated various muting techniques to imply the drum beat. None of this was a conscious decision; the different elements of my strumming technique just sort of naturally evolved.

I describe this "natural evolution", because, appraising my guitar-playing skills honestly, I'm a barely competent guitarist. By the time I was 19 years old I'd decided that what I really wanted to be was a bass player (the bass spoke to me in a way the guitar never did), and as I became more and more of a bass player, I became less and less of a guitar player. Over the last 20 years, I've often gone months without even taking my 1968 Gibson acoustic out of its case. But I'll take it out every now and then, and use it to accompany myself singing one or two songs in front of an audience, and afterwards I inevitably get some non-musician approaching me to tell me what an "awesome" guitarist I am. For years this baffled me. When I play my guitar, I don't do anything "fancy". I just strum the damned thing while I sing. I don't insert any kind of "lead guitar" work, or attempt any kind of complex fingerpicking. I just strum.

It was maybe 10 years ago that I finally figured out what was going on. It was that strum that I developed while playing along with Beatles records. A strum that I later adapted, unconsciously, to everything else I played on acoustic guitar. A strum that manages, somehow, to imply an entire backing band when it's only my voice and my guitar, and puts across just the right "groove" for whatever song I'm singing.

It turns out that Ringo is one of the primary reasons my "strum" fools people into thinking I'm an "awesome" guitarist.

Ringo's second influence was upon my bass playing. I didn't want to play bass because of The Beatles/McCartney. I wanted to play bass because a junior high school friend played Rush's "Freewill" for me, and that insane bass part during the instrumental breakdown on that song was the coolest f***ing thing I'd ever heard, and I wanted to do that. But, being 19 when I finally got my own bass, and being inspired by Geddy Lee and, later, Steve Harris of Iron Maiden, my idea of "good bass player" was "play as many notes as possible, as fast as possible".

And that idea got me fired from the first group I played bass with. Being a dumb kid, I failed to learn my lesson, and blamed my firing on "jealously of my mad skillz". I eventually learned some restraint, but it still took me a while. I've now been playing with the same group of musicians (on the worship team at my church) for 20 years. So, from ages 29 to 49. The first few years, I was still a fairly "busy" bass player. But, somewhere around age 40, it finally sunk in (without anybody telling me) that, often, "less is more". One of the key things with this group is that we don't get the "original recording" of the song to learn from. Our pianist/leader learns the songs, and then gives the rest of us a lyric sheet with the chords written in, and we all invent our own parts, cueing off of what she plays on the piano (usually her own arrangement of the song), and how she sings it. And more and more, I've learned to listen to what she's doing, and figure out the most appropriate bass line to play behind her. Sometimes, yeah, it calls for a "busy" bass line. But more often than not, I realize that the appropriate line is something mind-bogglingly simple. And, surprisingly often, I've found that the best thing to do at certain points in the song is to stop playing altogether. And all of that is something that, ultimately, I learned from Ringo way back when I was 14-15 years old and just starting out.

The other way Ringo influenced my bass playing was timing. I will credit Ringo with my devotion to timing. The one position in my current group that has never been settled is drums. Over the last 20 years we've gone through way too many drummers, of wildly varying levels of skill, from "serious jazz drummer" to "rank beginner" to "this kid who volunteered to try". And there I sit with my bass, between the pianist and the drummer, and doing my damnedest to maintain a steady, accurate tempo.

So that was my post. Let me add this bit about timing: Thanks to Ringo, I have this "feel" for what the proper tempo of a song should be. (I think this was represented in the movie, "That Thing You Do", when the singer/songwriter started his ballad, the title song, and the drummer decided to kick it up and play it faster. My WL keeps breaking out the digital metronome to find the right tempo (she's slightly younger than my 71-year-old mother, and I've started suspecting that she can't remember how fast or slow we played the older songs), and meanwhile, I'm hearing the song and thinking, "No, it should just a bit faster or slower." (Depending upon the song). So I find myself using the power of the bass to lead the tempo. One of the drummers in the above video called Ringo a "song drummer"; I've become a "song bassist". Listen to the song, and figure out the right and appropriate part to play for that song.

Though, for the record, I haven't played at church for nearly two months. I'm up for a promotion to my department manager position, and I've been stuck at work almost every day while I "audition" for the job (which is hilarious, because I am older than every other department head in my building, and older than my Executive Director (my immediate boss), and I have more experience in my profession than any of the other department heads have in theirs - I have more years of experience in my field than the years my Office Manager has been alive - I've been a cook for 32 years; my Office Manager is 31 years old).

I cook in a retirement home. I've been a cook for 32 years, and I'm very good at what I do. I started in fast food when I was 17, and worked my way up in the cooking business, working from one restaurant to the next, learning new skills every place I worked, and taking every new skill to the next job, where I learn even more new skills. I'm surrounded by coworkers who have college educations ... and I am completely dumbfounded by my coworkers inability to properly spell the simplest words. HOW DO THESE PEOPLE GET THEIR DEGREES WHEN THEY CAN'T SPELL?!! In the retirement home, these people need to write the resident's names on the meal tickets so that they know who gets what ... and I am gobsmacked by their inability to properly spell the resident's names. Every order I get for Virginia is spelled "Virgina" (say that out loud and you'll see my point). Warren? Spelled "Warant". Joan? Spelled "Jone". I will cut some slack to my Mexican-American, native Spanish-speakers. But most of these misspellings come from college-degree-bearing native born American English speakers. I am so glad that my residents, these 80-90-100-year-old people that I feed never have to see those meal tickets and see how my coworkers misspell their names.

I have little college education - the only "college" diploma I have is from one of those fly-by-night "business schools", which I now refer to as my "$5000-typing class" (but I did get an accountant's perspective on things). What's the difference between me and my actual college educated coworkers (you have to go to college to be a Certified Nursing Assistant)? I READ BOOKS.

--
Rik Osborne
<rdo@mister-rik.com>
<http://www.mister-rik.com/>
<http://www.facebook.com/mister.rik>