Ringo Starr joined The Beatles significantly later than his bandmates, so he didn’t live through some of their earliest experiences as a group. He also wasn’t on all the songs they recorded, though this continued to happen after he joined the band. For various reasons, Starr was not the drummer on five Beatles songs.
Ringo Starr plays a different instrument on The Beatles song ‘P.S. I Love You’
Soon after joining the band, Starr joined them in the studio to record “Love Me Do.” He struggled with timekeeping, though, much to the frustration of producer George Martin. Ultimately, Starr’s version of “Love Me Do” made it on the album, but he wasn’t so lucky with another song.
“They started ‘PS I Love You.’ The other bloke played the drums and I was given the maracas,” Starr said in the book The Beatles: The Authorized Biography by Hunter Davies. “I thought, that’s the end. They’re doing a Pete Best [the drummer Starr replaced] on me.”
Starr explained that while his name is on the song, he played maracas while a session musician played drums.
“When the record came out as a single, my name was on ‘PS I Love You,’ but I was only playing the maracas, the other bloke was on drums,” he said. “But luckily for me, they decided to stick to the first version of ‘Love Me Do,’ the one in which I’m playing drums, so that was okay.”
Ringo Starr quit The Beatles shortly before they recorded ‘Back in the U.S.S.R.’
While rehearsing “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” Starr and Paul McCartney got into an argument, leading Starr to walk out on the band. Per the book Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now by Barry Miles, they fought over a “fluffed tom-tom fill.” In his absence, the group lacked a drummer, so McCartney stepped in.
Evidently, McCartney did a good enough job to make the album, but the band realized that they needed Starr to work as a group.
Paul McCartney stepped in again for ‘Dear Prudence’
After Starr temporarily quit the band, the rest of The Beatles wrote him a letter begging him to return. Before he came back, though, they recorded the song “Dear Prudence” as a threesome.
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The band recorded the song, which they wrote about Mia Farrow’s sister Prudence, one week after “Back in the U.S.S.R.” Because of this, McCartney once again stepped in to play the drums.
Paul McCartney played nearly all the instruments on ‘Martha My Dear’
Starr did not play the drums on the song “Martha My Dear,” but he wasn’t the only Beatle left out of the recording process. With the exception of the orchestra, McCartney played most of the instruments in the song with no help from his bandmates. He explained that he did this to challenge himself on the piano.
“When I taught myself piano I liked to see how far I could go, and this started life almost as a piece you’d learn as a piano lesson,” he said. “It’s quite hard for me to play, it’s a two-handed thing, like a little set piece. In fact I remember one or two people being surprised that I’d played it because it’s slightly above my level of competence really, but I wrote it as that, something a bit more complex for me to play. Then while I was blocking out words — you just mouth out sounds and some things come — I found the words ‘Martha my dear.’”
John Lennon was too excited to wait for Ringo Starr on ‘The Ballad of John and Yoko’
John Lennon wrote “The Ballad of John and Yoko” about his wedding to Yoko Ono. He returned from his honeymoon extremely eager to record, even if that meant discluding two of his bandmates.
“John was on heat, so to speak,” McCartney said, per The Beatles Encyclopedia by Kenneth Womack. “He needed to record it so we just ran in and did it.”
At the time, George Harrison was out of the country, and Starr was filming The Magic Christian. Once again, McCartney played the drums.
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