Every one of The Beatles was responsible for turning the band into the rock and roll legends they are today. Even though the band may have come down to the songwriting partnership of John Lennon and Paul McCartney in the early days, George Harrison and Ringo Starr were just as instrumental in turning their songs into classics when they added their signature touch to everything. While McCartney knew that the band were on to something in the beginning, he considered one performance as the moment when everything came together.
Before McCartney started to form a band, though, John Lennon was destined to play rock and roll. Loving the sounds he heard from everyone from Little Richard to Chuck Berry, Lennon became enamoured with rock and roll and would create a makeshift guitar vocabulary out of the banjo chords his mother had shown him.
Once McCartney turned up at one of the gigs from Lennon’s upstart group, The Quarrymen, Lennon realised that the new kid had something that might be bigger than he ever imagined. After drafting in McCartney’s boyhood friend George Harrison on lead guitar, the band recorded various demos wherever they could while going through many different drummers.
During their first trip to Hamburg, Germany, the band would learn to refine their chops, playing into the wee hours of the morning and finding new ways to entertain their audience and themselves onstage. Although the group would lose bassist Stu Sutcliffe after he decided to stay in Germany, McCartney would transition over to bass for the rest of their career.
As the band started refining their chops, though, Pete Best began to stick out as the hindrance to their early years. While there was nothing inherently wrong with the way Best played, Ringo Starr would breathe new life into the band whenever he sat in with them at their Liverpool gigs.
Coming from the group Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, Starr was known as a musical veteran in the band’s eyes, with McCartney noting that he looked like a proper grown-up musician compared to the rest of the band. Although Starr was meant to be a fill-in the handful of times he played with the group, McCartney remembered when Fab Four magic began onstage.
Tearing through their English version of Ray Charles’s classic, ‘What’d I Say’, the band worried they couldn’t pull it off with a new drummer. Not missing a beat, Starr would make the signature swing look effortlessly, which led the rest of the band to reconsider Best’s position.
When inducting Starr into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, McCartney thought this song was responsible for The Beatles magic truly beginning, saying, “It’s kind of a hard drum part to do, but Ringo nailed it. And I was looking at John and George going, ‘Fucking hell, what is this?’. And that was the beginning, really, of The Beatles”.
Starr would even get his fair share of mileage out of that shuffle groove, later incorporating it into the basic track for the band’s single, ‘I Feel Fine’. The Beatles may have been honing their craft for years at that point, but the pure magic generated by every member of the band solidified the moment that they performed this song.
