5 Beatles Songs That Don't Have Ringo Starr on Drums
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.
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.”
Source: Emma McKee/cheatsheet.com
