John wasn't even the best guitarist in The Beatles, to borrow his own words about Ringo's drumming.
@jmyrlefuller Urban legend long debunked. The wisecrack about Ringo Starr's drumming actually came from a comedy routine, not from John Lennon himself. In fact, it was made in a 1981 episode of a British radio show called
Radio Active---an episode performed
after Lennon was dead.
This is what John Lennon
really thought of Ringo (who sometimes seemed to become his best friend in the later years of the Beatles, since they lived close together for a time), from the interview he gave to
Playboy shortly before his murder:
Ringo was a star in his own right in Liverpool before we even met. He was a professional drummer who sang and performed and had Ringo Star-time and he was in one of the top groups in Britain but especially in Liverpool* before we even had a drummer. So Ringo's talent would have come out one way or the other as something or other. I don't know what he would have ended up as, but whatever that spark is in Ringo that we all know but can't put our finger on -- whether it is acting, drumming or singing I don't know -- there is something in him that is projectable and he would have surfaced with or without the Beatles. Ringo is a damn good drummer. He is not technically good, but I think Ringo's drumming is underrated the same way Paul's bass playing is underrated. * Before he joined the Beatles, Ringo was the drummer for a band called Rory Storme & the Hurricanes, who were indeed the top rockers in Liverpool before the Beatles finally overtook them after all that dues-paying between Hamburg and Liverpool---and who had Ringo in their lineup before the Beatles managed to secure Pete Best as their pre-Ringo drummer. (The first time the Beatles met Ringo was on one of their Hamburg jaunts. "I didn’t like the look of Rory’s drummer myself. He looked the nasty one, with his little grey streak of hair. But the nastier one turned out to be Ringo, the nicest of them all."---George Harrison, remembering that first meeting.
