Don’t Pass Me By is unusual in being written by Ringo (there is only one other Starkey song in my list, plus a few more where he is credited as co-writer or arranger).
It’s another song on the White Album that IMO would not have made it past quality control in the earlier stages of the Beatles career. It’s part of a bigger pattern with the album and maybe the inclusion of this one helps shed light on that bigger picture.
Why don’t I like it? For me, Don’t Pass Me By has a dull melody, poor lyrics and an unpleasant lo-fi sound. I particularly dislike the modulation (Leslie speaker?) on the piano. Ringo is playing piano and Paul is playing drums.
The Beatles BibleRingo Starr’s first recorded composition, ‘Don’t Pass Me By’, was written several years before its 1968 release on the White Album.
Continue reading on Beatles Bible →
WikipediaDon’t Pass Me By is not a great song, but I can kind of understand why it made it onto the album – this is a bit speculative, but I guess Beatles supernerds have already thought about it, and maybe I picked it up from some book or other (I have read a lot of Beatles books over the years) …
Having watched Get Back it’s obvious that Ringo played a central role in the band’s success and creativity, well beyond his brilliant drumming and distinctive singing. He has a unique warmth, humour and patient gravitas and a kind of inspirational presence.
I also sense (maybe wrongly) that his almost relentless optimism is a big part of whatever alchemy drove the Beatles to keep on improving year after year.
In Get Back you can really feel him defusing the tensions and pulling everything together. It’s fascinating and not coincidental, in my view, that his musical role as drummer parallels his role in the Beatles’ intense friendship.
However, at some stage during the recording of the White Album he’d had enough of defusing those tensions and left the band between the middle of August and the beginning of September 1968.
Don’t Pass Me By had been recorded before this in July, but you can well imagine that when the time came to pick songs for the album’s release in November, no one would have had the heart to tell Ringo that his song really belonged on the cutting room floor.
… especially given the vital role he played in keeping the band together. The inclusion of his song would help show how much he was valued, and through royalties it might not have been purely symbolic.
Thank God he did come back because we’d have missed out on some truly great Beatles’ music if he hadn’t.
Coming up…
In the next set of posts I’ll consider one more song that might have been omitted from a tighter White Album, on why they weren’t omitted and why, as a whole, the album sounds so bleak to me.
The next song is the last in a run of four from the White Album at the bottom of my list. The ranking system I used is based on several ratings for each song combined in a complicated way. I fiddled about with the scheme a bit and was never really happy with the ordering.
In the end you can’t rationally order something that is multidimensional. Songs have lots of different qualities and they can be good or bad for different reasons. What seems important at one moment might seem unimportant in another context…
Ranking songs or any kind of art is not just difficult, it’s crazy. The whole point is to make something unique and original. To rank them is to miss that point…
Still it’s useful to deal with things one at a time and the ordering creates a bit of mystery and tension.
Which brings us to…