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  • 2019-10-30 (xsd:date)
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  • Did John Lennon Say 'Ringo Wasn't Even the Best Drummer in the Beatles'? (en)
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  • During the height of Beatlemania in the mid-1960s, debates about the virtues of individual members of the Fab Four tended to take place among their young female fans, who focused on questions such which Beatle was the cutest, the funniest, or would make the best husband. As the Beatles made the transition from teenage idols to pop music legends, debates about the individual members shifted to more substantive matters, such as pondering which one was the best singer or best songwriter or best instrumentalist. https://youtu.be/b5rpAqfd35QIn the best instrumentalist category, arguments over Ringo Starr's drumming prowess were often polarized between two camps: those who believed Ringo to be one of the best rock drummers ever, and those who viewed him as an ordinary talent (at best) who lucked out in being tapped to join a group of three vastly superior musicians. Proponents of the latter viewpoint often cited a purported quote from John Lennon himself in which Lennon supposedly scoffed at the notion of Ringo as the best drummer of all time, quipping: The best drummer in the world? Ringo wasn’t even the best drummer in the Beatles! It's unlikely Lennon would ever have said such a thing and meant it seriously, as he — along with the other Beatles — typically spoke fondly and positively of Ringo, both as a person and as a drummer. In the famous Playboy interview conducted just a few months before his murder in 1980, for example, Lennon responded as follows when asked for his opinion of Ringo's musicianship: Those who have tried to run the alleged criticism of Lennon's to ground have found it to be sourceless, something that has not turned up in any known audio recording, interview transcript, or primary reporting on Lennon and the Beatles, as renowned Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn noted in an interview with the Los Angeles Times: Those who have sought the true origins of this quip have commonly attributed it to a 1983 television appearance by British comedian Jasper Carrott. Although Carrott may have employed the gag (or something like it) back in 1983, a more recent discovery has traced the earliest known source to a joke used in a 1981 British radio comedy show: Further scholarship may eventually uncover even earlier antecedents. (en)
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