Last night I noticed something weird in the video I posted yesterday.
Ringo Starr looks miserable.
In every other video I’ve seen, Ringo always looks as happy as a lark. He’s often the face of the party. He consistently turns interviews into setups for jokes, and even sneaks up on Ed Sullivan. And when he drums, he drums with energy.
So what’s the difference in yesterday’s video? In yesterday’s video, he’s not actually drumming.
In most videos, especially from earlier in their career, The Beatles perform live. They’re solid enough musicians that they can render their songs faithfully live, short of John mangling the lyrics to the chorus above. But in yesterday’s video, the audio is dubbed in. This isn’t a real problem for the other three Beatles. Lip-syncing was fairly common for band appearances on TV. Guitars can be unplugged and organs turned off. Dampening a drum, however, is a different story. Ringo is then in the position where he has to pretend to drum without actually making noise. No wonder he looks so miserable!
The poorly-dubbed drumming is not unique to The Beatles. When The Who appeared on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, their performance is dubbed as well. In a way, dubbing works well for The Who, because it allows the band to then play the most exaggerated versions of themselves, in all their amplifier-burning, guitar-smashing glory. That they are presented by the self-conciously square Tom Smothers only makes them seem that much more extreme. But for all that, Keith Moon still has to fake his drumming. For all that he rattles his trap set with his knees, notice how few drums he actually hits, and with what a subtle wrist he plays his ride.
