Ringo's Drum Fill Returns!

Back in December of 2010 I wrote a blog about Ringo Starr’s signature drum lick: two sixteenth notes on the one beat, followed by a sixteenth rest, followed by four or five more sixteenth notes.  Here's how it sounds:

Since then, I’ve heard this drum lick many times over from other drummers: some Ringo’s contemporaries, others more modern drummers who weren’t even alive when John Lennon died, much less when The Beatles were in full-throttle mode.

Consider this perfectly placed addition to the 2013 song “The Vampyre of Time and Memory” by Queens of the Stoneage:

Or the lick at 0:13 in Stone Temple Pilots’ “Plush”:

John Bonham uses a slight variation of the lick at 1:51 in Zeppelin’s “Thank You”…

 …and Don Henley uses it ad nauseam  in “Victim of Love” (but since The Eagles are and have always been about the money, their song isn’t up on youtube, and I’m not prepared to give them even one dollar of my money).

Ringo Starr may not have invented the lick, but he (along with Paul McCartney in “Dear Prudence”) certainly put it in the minds of drummers going forward.  See if you recognize any of the songs in the following montage:

So there you go.  Long live Ringo!