The Beatles Thread

I remember driving on some late night road trip and finding a station that was re-building it's music library. The station played only Beatles, Stones and Zepplin before fan votes would begin determining the next artist added.

 

Ringo is so great in this video. The looks of amusement on his face.

 

There are a whole bunch of those early 65-66 promo videos (some clips from "A Hard Day's Night" and "Help," and others live teevee performances) in that series.

In the first couple years of Beatlemania, before people were paying much attention to creative input or songwriting quality, Ringo was regarded by the public as the star of the group. He also became the de facto star of both movies.

 

Funny, in the first few years of MTV when there were a lot of shit videos on the air, there were always fan rumors that there was a great lost treasure trove of high quality Beatles song clips stored away in vaults somewhere.

People remembered clips that had been on major network teevee, like the "Hey Jude" and "Revolution" videos, but not many others remained in public consciousness.

 

Rumors in the early 1980s held that dozens of high quality Beatles clips were locked in vaults mainly for two reasons: 1, they were being saved for a long-awaited anthology movie, and 2, in the early years MTV was substantially backed by Warner Bros., and the Beatles rights were mostly controlled by Capitol and they didn't want to give WB the boost of releasing Beatles videos into heavy MTV rotation.

Then there was another theory that record companies in general in the early 1980s didn't want awesome-quality Beatles videos from 15-20 years earlier released into general airplay because it would have shown in glaring contrast what shoddy pieces of cheaply produced shit most early 80s videos were.

 

Wait, what? Ringo was considered the star? Not saying that can't be true, but i have never heard that before. Now, I was born years later and my knowledge of the band is through the lens of history that considered ringo as the band's comic relief. However, I have read several books on the band, and don't remember that being written. Hell, he was replaced on a short tour at one point and the public didn't appear to be blink.

 

When the Beatles first hit Ed Sullivan, a lot of people thought "Ringo Starr" meant Ringo must be the star.

Prior to the Beatles it was pretty much assumed every group should have a "star" -- usually the lead singer.

Ringo definitely was the star of "A Hard Day's Night," the first real look at the Beatles as personalities.

In 1963-64, nobody cared who wrote the songs. Elvis never wrote a song, and nobody cared. The Beatles were the ones who changed most of that.

 

Perhaps they were reading this thread that day.

 

Ringo's brother Bart was a hell of a quarterback.

 

Ringo was a big name in Liverpool music circles when Lennon, McCartney and Harrison were still bashing away in whatever coffeehouse or living room would have them.

 

Well, he wasn't THAT big a name in Liverpool, or the band would have been called "Ringo's Hurricanes."

Prior to "Please Please Me," being a "big name in Liverpool music" was a pretty relative thing.

Certainly nobody in America had ever heard of Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. The perception that Ringo was the "star" came from his name and the idea that pop groups were supposed to have "stars."

In any case, when the B's decided to dump Pete Best, it didn't take Ringo very long to chuck the Hurricanes and join up.