SOMETIMES I THINK I’m the biggest Beatles fan in the world, which is probably how most Beatles obsessives feel. At age five, I attended my first Beatles convention; by age six, I could make the distinction between the group’s UK and US discographies. I was a savant in Fab Four trivia.
When I hear somebody say “the Beatles suck” (probably the textbook utterance of boilerplate iconoclasm), I take it personally. The Beatles raised me—my birthfather never paid a dime in child support, but he did leave me a turntable and ragged, water-damaged copies of 1962-1966 and 1967-1970 (also known as the Red and Blue Albums, respectively). As I got older and started surrounding myself with more and more Beatle-bashing, wannabe provocateurs, the band’s music would become my own little embryonic asylum away from the obscurantist chest-beating of punk and indie.
If the fact that I’m having fewer idiotic arguments about the band on social media is any indication, it appears that the music community has settled on the consensus that the Beatles were patently great (even if John Lennon was an asshole). But there’s one myth that even diehards like myself remain susceptible to: that Ringo Starr was a shitty drummer and somehow a “lesser” member of the group.