The White Album 50 Project: "Don't Pass Me By"

As we all learned from the movie A Hard Day's Night, Ringo Starr has an inferiority complex. 

Ringo always felt like less of a musician than the other Beatles.  Ironically, he was sought after by the Beatles over every other drummer in Liverpool.  Drummers were always hard to come by in the early days of the Liverpool rock and roll scene, because, as John Lennon explained, few people there owned a set of drums; a drum kit was an expensive item.  So drummers in Liverpool could theoretically command high prices for their services in a band, and Ringo parlayed the high demand for drummers vis-à-vis the low supply into a sweet gig with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, one of the showiest rock and roll bands to play in Liverpool and in the Hamburg clubs. Ringo's playing attracted the Beatles, who had befriended him, and he usually sat in with them.  As lucky as they were to have a drummer already, they wanted the best, not the Best.  (Get it?)  They thought Ringo was superior, and they thought he could provide great chemistry with them.  They actively courted him even as he was pursued by another Liverpool group, King Size Taylor and the Dominoes.  Ted Taylor, that other group's leader, offered Ringo £20 a week.  The Beatles offered £25 a week, and, as Ringo himself has admitted, it was the money that made him decide which group to join.  (Taylor, incidentally, made one of the earliest audio recordings of a Beatles show by taping their New Year's Eve 1962 show at the Star-Club in Hamburg.  The low-quality recording was released on disc in 1977 and has been sporadically available since.)  

More money was important to a Liverpool lad who grew up poor, as Richard Starkey had.  The way Ringo saw it, a professional career in playing popular music wasn't going to last long; he was determined to make as much money off playing drums in a band as possible before he had to give it up and use his earnings to open a hairdressing salon with his girlfriend (later his wife) Maureen. As the Beatles' popularity grew, however, Ringo took his music more seriously, and the gamble on his chemistry with the others was paying off.  He began to contemplate songwriting. He had an idea for a song as early as August 1962, when he first joined the group, and in 1963, with Lennon and Paul McCartney earning acclaim for their songwriting abilities and with George Harrison writing his first song - "Don't Bother Me," which would appear on With the Beatles - Ringo pursued his song idea and told the press about the song he was writing - "Don't Pass Me By."  (It is telling that George and Ringo, writing songs under the shadow of Lennon and McCartney, would title their first Beatles songs with personal negative commands.)     

And then . . . nothing.

Ringo let the song languish, and during a 1964 BBC Radio interview, he asked John and Paul to sing a bar of it "just for a plug."  Paul sang the chorus of the song more to humor Ringo than to encourage him, and he explained why the Beatles hadn't recorded it yet.  "Unfortunately there's never enough time to fit Ringo's song onto an album," Paul said.  "He never finishes it."

Nor would Ringo write much of anything else.  He would try to write songs and would be able to think up lyrics, but when he thought he had an original melody, the other Beatles would point out to him what song it sounded like and play it for him.  "I was embarrassed by my little songs," he admitted in 1977.  "I'd write tunes that were already written and just change the lyrics, and the other three would have hysterics tellin' me what I'd rewritten."  All he'd managed to contribute as a composer were six words to his Rubber Soul vocal-feature song "What Goes On," credited to Lennon-McCartney-Starkey.  Meanwhile, the other three were being celebrated for their original songs, their good looks, their singing voices, and their guitar chops, while Ringo was just . . . the drummer, and a funny-looking drummer at that who could barely carry a tune when he sang.  "You've got an inferiority complex, you have!"

Finally, in 1968, "Don't Pass Me By" was done, and with the planned follow-up to Sgt. Pepper becoming a double album, there would be plenty of room for it.  In fact, "Don't Pass Me By" was the second song (after "Revolution 1")  to be started for the White Album.  But Ringo was unsure about keeping the title; when work began on the song at EMI Studios at Abbey Road, it was begun under the working title "Ringo's Tune (Untitled)," and then it progressed under a second working title, "This Is Some Friendly."  A friendly, for the record, is a soccer match that does not count toward any championship.  (See what I mean about Ringo's inferiority complex?)  In the end, Ringo reverted to the original title.

But what of "Don't Pass Me By" itself?  It's a charming country and western lament reflecting Ringo's love for country music.  Ringo sings about how his lady still hasn't arrived home, and he fears that she's left him but blames himself for having not realized she'd been in a car crash, and he says, "You lost your hair," a Britishism meaning that she became upset.  He hopes she doesn't leave him behind, professing that "I love only you."

The music is also pure country with a rock attitude. Anchored by the sound of Ringo's heavy drums, the song is carried by a tack piano - a piano producing a tinny sound from the nails on the hammers where they hit the strings, and a piano commonly played in saloons in the Old West - played by Ringo himself.  And even though Paul had chided Ringo over the song years before, he helped out here by arranging the song with George Martin and by adding bass and regular piano.  Ringo's biggest doubter of his songwriting abilities in the group became his staunchest ally; they're the only two Beatles on this track.

The rustic sound gives "Don't Pass Me By" the feel of a Grand Ole Opry ballad, and the fiddle playing from session musician Jack Fallon contemporizes the arrangement into something more innovative and fresh with a single-note line, rather than two notes played at the same time, called "double-stop."  As Fallon himself explained in 1988, "A lot of country fiddle playing is double-stop, but Paul and George Martin . . . suggested I play it single note. So it wasn't really the country sound they originally wanted. But they seemed pleased.  Ringo was around too, keeping an eye on his song."

Wonder what Roy Acuff would have thought? :-)

(One George Martin idea that did not make the cut was an orchestral introduction for the song, recorded and not released until it was used to kick off Anthology 3 under the title "A Beginning." It was also used in the Yellow Submarine film. The mono remix of this song included additional fiddle playing at the end from Fallon, which Fallon himself thought sounded dreadful.)

What makes "Don't Pass Me By" particularly fascinating is how it reveals Ringo's insecurities through a musical form he loves.  He sings about how he's afraid of being passed by, a fear he'd had for much of his time in the Beatles despite his indispensable drumming, because he'd been the last member to join and the last to contribute original material.  Ironically, Ringo would feel increasingly disregarded during the White Album sessions, triggering his ten-day walkout part of the way through.  The fractured nature of the White Album  was such that the Beatles, as noted, would record a couple of songs during Ringo's absence with Paul drumming - something they wouldn't have done four years earlier.  (A fourteenth song for the A Hard Days Night LP was never recorded because Ringo came down with tonsillitis on the day of the scheduled session, and so it was issued as a thirteen-song album.  Ironically, the fourteenth song likely would have been "You Know What To Do" - a song composed by George Harrison that the Beatles would tape in demo form only, making A Hard Day's Night the only Beatles album comprised entirely of Lennon-McCartney compositions.)    

The drumming on those White Album songs ("Back In the U.S.S.R." and Dear Prudence," again, as noted) is competent enough, but the other Beatles knew it wasn't the same without Ritchie on the skins.  He was persuaded to come back when they told him he was the greatest drummer ever, and they meant it.

"Don't Pass Me By" was a taste of Ringo's forays into country during a solo career that turned out to be more successful than anyone would have guessed, and he could claim to have the last laugh when this little song of his reached number one in Denmark, where it was released as a single, in 1969.  He soon followed it up with another song, "Octopus's Garden," for the Abbey Road LP.  And Ringo is regarded as a great drummer today.  But the slights have persisted.  For years, in rock magazines like Creem, best-drummer polls would regularly include Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones, Neil Peart of Rush, Keith Moon of the Who and John Bonham of Led Zeppelin (even after they were both dead), and the drummer of whatever group was hot at the time (like Gina Schock of the Go-Go's, the female Beatles).  Ringo wouldn't even place on them.  And here's another thing: In the discography appendix of his authorized Beatles biography, Hunter Davies placed asterisks next to titles of songs the Beatles recorded but did not write - that is, their early-period covers of American rock and roll, R&B and country songs - but he also placed them next to titles of two original Beatles songs.  Guess which two.

Inferiority complex.