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Lot Essay
The first Ludwig kit that Ringo Starr played with the Beatles, this 1963 Ludwig Oyster Black Pearl Downbeat drum kit served as Starr’s one and only drum kit for every live performance and every studio recording session with the Beatles from 12 May 1963 to 4 February 1964, seeing Starr through the group’s meteoric rise to fame and the birth of Beatlemania in Britain. Instantly recognizable with its iconic Beatles drop-T logo drum head, Ludwig label and familiar Oyster Black Pearl finish, this drum kit became synonymous with the image of the band on stage and set a steady visual center point around which the most influential group in music history revolved, completing the classic Beatles line-up of John on the Rickenbacker 325, George on the Gretsch Country Gentleman, Paul on the Höfner bass, and Ringo on the Ludwig drums. Starr used this drum kit to record the Beatles' second studio album With The Beatles and three of the band’s biggest hit singles, ‘She Loves You’, ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, and ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’, as well as dozens of other songs for broadcast on British radio shows. He would play the kit for seventeen television appearances, including Thank Your Lucky Stars, Ready Steady Go, and Sunday Night at the London Palladium, and over 200 live performances across the UK, Ireland, Sweden and France, right up until the last few days before the Beatles set off to break America.
With their debut album flying up the charts by spring 1963, it was becoming pressing for the Beatles to begin upgrading their instruments and equipment as their growing success saw them securing bigger and better bookings. Starr was still using the same mahogany-brown Premier drum kit that had served him faithfully through a Hamburg residency and two summer seasons at Butlins holiday camp with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes before he had joined the Beatles in August 1962, and it was time to trade up to a smart, top of the line kit to tie in with manager Brian Epstein’s carefully constructed image for the band. Towards the end of April, Starr and Epstein made a visit to Ivor Arbiter’s Drum City on London’s Shaftesbury Avenue in search of a new kit. Drum City was quite original in England then in that it more or less copied the American idea of a store devoted to drums, owner Ivor Arbiter told Andy Babiuk for Beatles Gear in 1996. We had recently started distributing Ludwig drums. Our main line was Trixon drums, but we were trying to get Ludwig going. Accounts vary as to how Starr selected the Ludwig kit. As he told the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2015, Starr’s own recollection was of love at first sight when he spotted the Ludwig Oyster Black Pearl Downbeat kit in the shop’s window: I loved anything American. We went past this music store in London, and they had this kit. I said, “Oh great – look at this kit!” I just loved the kit; it was that black pearl… and it was American. Interviewed by Andy Babiuk in 1996, store manager Gerry Evans recalled that Starr had his mind set on a black finish from the start and revealed that originally he was going to have a Trixon kit, but because we didn’t have the right colour I showed him the Oyster Black Pearl finish that Ludwig did, and he said “oh, that’s the one”.
Ever the businessman, Epstein asked to meet with owner Ivor Arbiter to strike a bargain. I think they wanted a bit of a deal, Arbiter recalled. I tried to help, because we wanted to promote Ludwig products at the time… They chose Ludwig because of the colour, and I made some sort of deal with Brian. I have a feeling that they paid a bit of money for the drums, maybe cost plus five per cent, something like that. We had the kit in stock. Drum City accepted Starr’s old Premier kit in part trade, after which it was refurbished and sold without trace. At the time of purchase, Starr’s first Ludwig kit comprised a 14 x 20 in. bass drum, an 8 x 12 in. rack tom, a 14 x 14 in. floor tom and, instead of the regular 4 x 14 in. Downbeat snare, a 5 ½ x 14 in. Jazz Festival snare drum. Evans notes that this was a small kit compared to what most of the other bands were using. According to Beatles drum historian Gary Astridge, Starr specifically selected the slightly deeper Jazz Festival snare as he wanted a deeper sound in the studio. The snare was the only drum marked with an internal date stamp, dating its production to 18 April 1963. It remained Starr’s primary snare throughout his career with the Beatles and is not included with the present kit. The original kit came with standard hardware including Ludwig cymbal, snare and hi-hat stands, an Olympic cymbal stand, a WFL Speed King bass drum pedal, a Walberg & Auge bass drum anchor, and various cymbals.
As part of the deal, Arbiter insisted that the Ludwig logo be stuck on the front drum skin of Starr’s new kit for promotion of the brand. By all accounts, Starr was in alignment, exclaiming No! No! No! You've got to leave that on, it's American! when one of the shop assistants began to remove the Ludwig logo sticker from his new kit. When Epstein stipulated that the group’s name should be on the front bass drum too, Arbiter reportedly came up with the now iconic Beatles drop-T logo on the spot. Evans recalled that Ivor Arbiter drew the Beatles logo on a pad of paper… There were about three or four options, and they chose the one with the drop-T. With its oversized ‘B’ and elongated ‘T’ to emphasize the ‘Beat’ in ‘Beatles’, Arbiter’s design was hand-painted on the drum head by the store’s part-time sign painter Eddie Stokes, becoming the first in a series of seven logo drum heads that Starr would use over the course of his Beatles career. The drum head on the present kit is a replica of the first Beatles logo drum head, commissioned by Starr in 2013 and hand-painted by Beatles drum head authority Russ Lease. Around the same time, any original hardware that had been lost or discarded over the years was replaced with period correct hardware to match the original configuration of the kit when first acquired by Starr in 1963, including a 1960s front hoop with perfectly matched Oyster Black Pearl inlay and period correct Ludwig T-rods and Claws.
Store manager Gerry Evans personally delivered the new Ludwig kit to Ringo Starr at the Alpha Television Studios in Birmingham on Sunday 12 May 1963, where the Beatles were appearing as the lead act on the ABC television show Thank Your Lucky Stars. Starr used his Premier kit for the last time during rehearsals and made his first appearance with the new Ludwig Oyster Black Pearl Downbeat kit during the afternoon’s recording for the show. In the interim between placing the order and taking delivery of the new kit, the Beatles’ debut album and their third single ‘From Me To You’ had both hit the top of the UK charts. Building on their chart success, the group spent most of 1963 on the road, sustaining a relentless schedule of live shows, radio and television performances as their popularity continued to reach new heights and a frenzied fandom began to spread across the country.
The reaction to the Beatles on their third British package tour from 18 May to 9 June saw them promoted to co-headliners with Roy Orbison. A fourth nationwide tour immediately followed from 10 June to 15 September, which included the band’s final performance at the Cavern Club on 3 August. Starr’s first recording session with the new Ludwig kit took place at EMI on 1 July, when the Beatles recorded their fourth single ‘She Loves You’ and its B-side ‘I’ll Get You’. Released on 23 August, ‘She Loves You’ became the first Beatles single to sell a million copies and remained the biggest-selling record in the UK until 1978. In between live shows, the group found time to tape their own weekly BBC radio show Pop Goes The Beatles, which ran for fifteen episodes over the summer season. Many of their radio performances were later released on the 1994 compilation album Live at the BBC. The BBC also filmed the Beatles performing ‘Twist and Shout’, ‘She Loves You’ and ‘Love Me Do’ in Southport on 27 August for the Mersey Beat documentary The Mersey Sound, clips of which can be seen in the documentary television series The Beatles Anthology. The Beatles made their debut live appearance on ITV television show Ready Steady Go! on 4 October, where they were wheeled out on a platform as they sang ‘Twist and Shout’, with Ringo taking center stage at the drum kit. Photographs and surviving color footage of the show reveal that the Ludwig decal on the front of the bass drum had already lost part of the ‘g’.
The Beatles were catapulted to mainstream success when they topped the bill on UK variety show Sunday Night at the London Palladium on 13 October, which was broadcast live to 15 million viewers. Starr and his Ludwig kit were raised high on a glittering podium behind the other three Beatles on the show’s famous revolving stage. Usually the drum was on the floor, and you’d have to look around one of the frontmen to see me, Starr told The Charlotte Observer in 2024. So I thought – not that I invented it – but I demanded a rostrum to put me up a bit, so I’d be more part of it. The hysterical screams of the audience, which drowned out the band’s closing number, led the British media to coin the term ‘Beatlemania’ in response to the frenzy. There was nothing bigger in the world than making it to the Palladium… And we played ‘Sunday Night at the London Palladium’, and we were on the roundabout and it was dynamite, declares Starr. The fame really started from when we played the Palladium, adds McCartney in The Beatles Anthology. After a five-day tour of Sweden, which culminated with a performance on the Sveriges television show Drop In on 30 October, the group made a landmark appearance at the Royal Variety Performance at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London on 4 November, broadcast on ITV the following Sunday. Footage from both performances can be seen in Anthology.
Starr used this Ludwig kit throughout the recording of the Beatles' second studio album With The Beatles. Recorded at EMI between July and October, the album was released on 22 November 1963 with record advance orders of 270,000 copies, knocking their own debut album Please Please Me off the top spot after a thirty-week run. The album sessions also yielded the non-album single ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, which would be the song to finally break the Beatles in America. The band embarked on their fourth tour of Britain that year from 1 November to 14 December. Pathé News captured the Beatlemania phenomenon when they filmed the Beatles’ 20 November show at Manchester’s ABC Cinema, which would be released that December as the theatrical short The Beatles Come To Town. Performing against a backdrop of blown-up news headlines, the band played their forthcoming single ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ and B-side ‘This Boy’ on the Granada television show Late Scene Extra on 25 November, clips of which feature in Anthology.
When the group made their fifth appearance on Thank Your Lucky Stars on 15 December, Drum City’s Gerry Evans was horrified to see that the Ludwig logo sticker on Starr’s bass drum had almost fully flaked off by this point, telling Babiuk All it said was ‘Lu…’ That first Beatle drum head we provided had a stick-on Ludwig logo and it must have started to peel off as Ringo used the set. Obviously it was in our best interest to have the Ludwig logo visible on the drums, for promotion. After the Beatles’ 16-night run of Christmas shows at the Astoria Theatre in Finsbury Park from 24 December 1963 to 11 January 1964, Evans arranged for Stokes to replace the sticker with a more permanent hand-painted Ludwig logo above the band’s name. I later found out that John Lennon was making jokes about it on stage. He’d introduce the drummer: And on the Lu, Ringo! As you know, Loo is British slang for toilet. We were trying to sell Ludwig drums, not Lu drums! By the turn of the year, British Beatlemania had reached an absolute peak and the band’s Astoria shows were met with screaming so loud it was near impossible to hear the performance. On one of the Finsbury Park Astoria shows, Ringo broke his bass-drum pedal, a Speed King model, Evans told Babiuk. For a drummer, this would be like losing half your sound. So they rang us up to see what we could do, but we said we couldn’t get out there until Monday. And so Ringo says oh well, it doesn’t matter, because they can’t hear it anyway, it’s all just screaming. He said he’d make do – and he actually went on without a bass-drum pedal. Photographs of the Beatles’ return to Sunday Night at the London Palladium on 12 January 1964 show Starr’s bass drum with its newly painted Ludwig logo.
Having conquered Britain, the group kicked off 1964 with 18 days of shows at the Olympia Theatre in Paris from 16 January to 4 February, which soon provoked the same frenzied audience reaction as their UK appearances. Footage shot by ITN News on their opening night features in Anthology. While in Paris, the Beatles clocked in at EMI Pathé Marconi Studios on 29 January to record their two biggest songs ‘She Loves You’ and ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ in German for release by EMI’s West German arm. With time to spare at the end of the session, the band reverted to English to record the backing track for McCartney’s new song ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’, with all but a guitar and vocal dub to be completed at Abbey Road in late February. Released in March 1964 in both the UK and US, it would become one of their biggest selling singles. The final Olympia show on Tuesday 4 February would be the last public appearance of Starr’s first Ludwig drum kit.
Ahead of the Beatles' planned trip to America, where they were booked to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show on 9 February, it was decided that Starr would travel without his drum kit and instead take delivery of a second Ludwig Oyster Black Pearl Downbeat kit on arrival in New York, as it was envisaged that a secondary kit would be required for filming A Hard Day’s Night as soon as the Beatles returned to England. On their return to England, it appears that the second Ludwig Downbeat kit was immediately put into use both on stage and in the studio, as well as on set for A Hard Day’s Night, while the present kit was either retired or relegated to a backup.
According to Gary Astridge, Paul McCartney borrowed a combination of components from this kit and Starr’s second Ludwig Oyster Black Pearl Downbeat kit when he recorded his first solo album McCartney from late December 1969 to early 1970. McCartney used the rack tom and bass drum from this kit with the floor tom and snare from Starr’s second kit (see lot 15). Playing all the instruments himself, McCartney recorded the majority of the album at his London home, with occasional secret sessions at either Morgan Studios or EMI. Photographs taken by Linda McCartney during recording sessions at McCartney’s home studio in Cavendish Avenue, St. John’s Wood, in late December 1969, show that he removed the original Beatles drop-T logo drum head in order to muffle the bass drum with a blanket to tighten the sound, which had become common studio practice for the Beatles by that time. The original drum head can be seen set aside on the floor in some of the shots. As part of a promotional shoot for the album, Linda also photographed Paul playing the drums in the snowy garden of their St John’s Wood home in early 1970. The latter photo was later used as part of the inner sleeve artwork for the McCartney Archive Collection, released in 2011.
McCartney later took the hybrid kit up to his rustic “Rude Studio” at his farm in Scotland, where it was used by both Paul and drummer Denny Seiwell during early rehearsals with the newly formed Wings in July 1971, before the band recorded their debut album Wild Life at Abbey Road. Several photographs by Linda McCartney show the kit both in and outside the studio. Starr is seen playing the bass drum and rack tom in the music video for McCartney’s 1982 single Take It Away. The drums were later returned to Starr without the bass drum’s original drop-T logo drum head, T-rods and claws. The original drum head remains in the possession of Paul McCartney. The kit remained in storage for decades until 2013 when all five Beatles kits were organized and documented ahead of Starr’s major exhibition at the Grammy Museum. The present Ludwig kit was then auctioned by Starr in 2015 to benefit The Lotus Foundation. With the whereabouts of Starr’s Premier kit unknown and all other Beatles-era drum kits still in his possession, this is the only Beatles drum kit – and one of the most significant Beatles instruments – to ever come to market. Since acquiring this first Ludwig drum kit in April 1963, Starr has remained loyal to the Ludwig brand for over six decades, telling The Charlotte Observer in 2024: I’m still using them all these years later. From ‘63, say, we started. And they’re still the drums for me... They’ve never let me down.
ADDITIONAL REFERENCES
The Beatles, The Beatles Anthology, London, 2000.
A. Bell, ‘“They’ve never let me down.” Why Ringo Starr’s NC-made Ludwig drums mean so much to him’, The Charlotte Observer, 28 August 2024.
B. Kehew and K. Ryan, Recording the Beatles, Houston, 2006.
M. Lewisohn, The Complete Beatles Chronicle, London, 1992.
M. Lewisohn, The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, London, 1988.
With their debut album flying up the charts by spring 1963, it was becoming pressing for the Beatles to begin upgrading their instruments and equipment as their growing success saw them securing bigger and better bookings. Starr was still using the same mahogany-brown Premier drum kit that had served him faithfully through a Hamburg residency and two summer seasons at Butlins holiday camp with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes before he had joined the Beatles in August 1962, and it was time to trade up to a smart, top of the line kit to tie in with manager Brian Epstein’s carefully constructed image for the band. Towards the end of April, Starr and Epstein made a visit to Ivor Arbiter’s Drum City on London’s Shaftesbury Avenue in search of a new kit. Drum City was quite original in England then in that it more or less copied the American idea of a store devoted to drums, owner Ivor Arbiter told Andy Babiuk for Beatles Gear in 1996. We had recently started distributing Ludwig drums. Our main line was Trixon drums, but we were trying to get Ludwig going. Accounts vary as to how Starr selected the Ludwig kit. As he told the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2015, Starr’s own recollection was of love at first sight when he spotted the Ludwig Oyster Black Pearl Downbeat kit in the shop’s window: I loved anything American. We went past this music store in London, and they had this kit. I said, “Oh great – look at this kit!” I just loved the kit; it was that black pearl… and it was American. Interviewed by Andy Babiuk in 1996, store manager Gerry Evans recalled that Starr had his mind set on a black finish from the start and revealed that originally he was going to have a Trixon kit, but because we didn’t have the right colour I showed him the Oyster Black Pearl finish that Ludwig did, and he said “oh, that’s the one”.
Ever the businessman, Epstein asked to meet with owner Ivor Arbiter to strike a bargain. I think they wanted a bit of a deal, Arbiter recalled. I tried to help, because we wanted to promote Ludwig products at the time… They chose Ludwig because of the colour, and I made some sort of deal with Brian. I have a feeling that they paid a bit of money for the drums, maybe cost plus five per cent, something like that. We had the kit in stock. Drum City accepted Starr’s old Premier kit in part trade, after which it was refurbished and sold without trace. At the time of purchase, Starr’s first Ludwig kit comprised a 14 x 20 in. bass drum, an 8 x 12 in. rack tom, a 14 x 14 in. floor tom and, instead of the regular 4 x 14 in. Downbeat snare, a 5 ½ x 14 in. Jazz Festival snare drum. Evans notes that this was a small kit compared to what most of the other bands were using. According to Beatles drum historian Gary Astridge, Starr specifically selected the slightly deeper Jazz Festival snare as he wanted a deeper sound in the studio. The snare was the only drum marked with an internal date stamp, dating its production to 18 April 1963. It remained Starr’s primary snare throughout his career with the Beatles and is not included with the present kit. The original kit came with standard hardware including Ludwig cymbal, snare and hi-hat stands, an Olympic cymbal stand, a WFL Speed King bass drum pedal, a Walberg & Auge bass drum anchor, and various cymbals.
As part of the deal, Arbiter insisted that the Ludwig logo be stuck on the front drum skin of Starr’s new kit for promotion of the brand. By all accounts, Starr was in alignment, exclaiming No! No! No! You've got to leave that on, it's American! when one of the shop assistants began to remove the Ludwig logo sticker from his new kit. When Epstein stipulated that the group’s name should be on the front bass drum too, Arbiter reportedly came up with the now iconic Beatles drop-T logo on the spot. Evans recalled that Ivor Arbiter drew the Beatles logo on a pad of paper… There were about three or four options, and they chose the one with the drop-T. With its oversized ‘B’ and elongated ‘T’ to emphasize the ‘Beat’ in ‘Beatles’, Arbiter’s design was hand-painted on the drum head by the store’s part-time sign painter Eddie Stokes, becoming the first in a series of seven logo drum heads that Starr would use over the course of his Beatles career. The drum head on the present kit is a replica of the first Beatles logo drum head, commissioned by Starr in 2013 and hand-painted by Beatles drum head authority Russ Lease. Around the same time, any original hardware that had been lost or discarded over the years was replaced with period correct hardware to match the original configuration of the kit when first acquired by Starr in 1963, including a 1960s front hoop with perfectly matched Oyster Black Pearl inlay and period correct Ludwig T-rods and Claws.
Store manager Gerry Evans personally delivered the new Ludwig kit to Ringo Starr at the Alpha Television Studios in Birmingham on Sunday 12 May 1963, where the Beatles were appearing as the lead act on the ABC television show Thank Your Lucky Stars. Starr used his Premier kit for the last time during rehearsals and made his first appearance with the new Ludwig Oyster Black Pearl Downbeat kit during the afternoon’s recording for the show. In the interim between placing the order and taking delivery of the new kit, the Beatles’ debut album and their third single ‘From Me To You’ had both hit the top of the UK charts. Building on their chart success, the group spent most of 1963 on the road, sustaining a relentless schedule of live shows, radio and television performances as their popularity continued to reach new heights and a frenzied fandom began to spread across the country.
The reaction to the Beatles on their third British package tour from 18 May to 9 June saw them promoted to co-headliners with Roy Orbison. A fourth nationwide tour immediately followed from 10 June to 15 September, which included the band’s final performance at the Cavern Club on 3 August. Starr’s first recording session with the new Ludwig kit took place at EMI on 1 July, when the Beatles recorded their fourth single ‘She Loves You’ and its B-side ‘I’ll Get You’. Released on 23 August, ‘She Loves You’ became the first Beatles single to sell a million copies and remained the biggest-selling record in the UK until 1978. In between live shows, the group found time to tape their own weekly BBC radio show Pop Goes The Beatles, which ran for fifteen episodes over the summer season. Many of their radio performances were later released on the 1994 compilation album Live at the BBC. The BBC also filmed the Beatles performing ‘Twist and Shout’, ‘She Loves You’ and ‘Love Me Do’ in Southport on 27 August for the Mersey Beat documentary The Mersey Sound, clips of which can be seen in the documentary television series The Beatles Anthology. The Beatles made their debut live appearance on ITV television show Ready Steady Go! on 4 October, where they were wheeled out on a platform as they sang ‘Twist and Shout’, with Ringo taking center stage at the drum kit. Photographs and surviving color footage of the show reveal that the Ludwig decal on the front of the bass drum had already lost part of the ‘g’.
The Beatles were catapulted to mainstream success when they topped the bill on UK variety show Sunday Night at the London Palladium on 13 October, which was broadcast live to 15 million viewers. Starr and his Ludwig kit were raised high on a glittering podium behind the other three Beatles on the show’s famous revolving stage. Usually the drum was on the floor, and you’d have to look around one of the frontmen to see me, Starr told The Charlotte Observer in 2024. So I thought – not that I invented it – but I demanded a rostrum to put me up a bit, so I’d be more part of it. The hysterical screams of the audience, which drowned out the band’s closing number, led the British media to coin the term ‘Beatlemania’ in response to the frenzy. There was nothing bigger in the world than making it to the Palladium… And we played ‘Sunday Night at the London Palladium’, and we were on the roundabout and it was dynamite, declares Starr. The fame really started from when we played the Palladium, adds McCartney in The Beatles Anthology. After a five-day tour of Sweden, which culminated with a performance on the Sveriges television show Drop In on 30 October, the group made a landmark appearance at the Royal Variety Performance at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London on 4 November, broadcast on ITV the following Sunday. Footage from both performances can be seen in Anthology.
Starr used this Ludwig kit throughout the recording of the Beatles' second studio album With The Beatles. Recorded at EMI between July and October, the album was released on 22 November 1963 with record advance orders of 270,000 copies, knocking their own debut album Please Please Me off the top spot after a thirty-week run. The album sessions also yielded the non-album single ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, which would be the song to finally break the Beatles in America. The band embarked on their fourth tour of Britain that year from 1 November to 14 December. Pathé News captured the Beatlemania phenomenon when they filmed the Beatles’ 20 November show at Manchester’s ABC Cinema, which would be released that December as the theatrical short The Beatles Come To Town. Performing against a backdrop of blown-up news headlines, the band played their forthcoming single ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ and B-side ‘This Boy’ on the Granada television show Late Scene Extra on 25 November, clips of which feature in Anthology.
When the group made their fifth appearance on Thank Your Lucky Stars on 15 December, Drum City’s Gerry Evans was horrified to see that the Ludwig logo sticker on Starr’s bass drum had almost fully flaked off by this point, telling Babiuk All it said was ‘Lu…’ That first Beatle drum head we provided had a stick-on Ludwig logo and it must have started to peel off as Ringo used the set. Obviously it was in our best interest to have the Ludwig logo visible on the drums, for promotion. After the Beatles’ 16-night run of Christmas shows at the Astoria Theatre in Finsbury Park from 24 December 1963 to 11 January 1964, Evans arranged for Stokes to replace the sticker with a more permanent hand-painted Ludwig logo above the band’s name. I later found out that John Lennon was making jokes about it on stage. He’d introduce the drummer: And on the Lu, Ringo! As you know, Loo is British slang for toilet. We were trying to sell Ludwig drums, not Lu drums! By the turn of the year, British Beatlemania had reached an absolute peak and the band’s Astoria shows were met with screaming so loud it was near impossible to hear the performance. On one of the Finsbury Park Astoria shows, Ringo broke his bass-drum pedal, a Speed King model, Evans told Babiuk. For a drummer, this would be like losing half your sound. So they rang us up to see what we could do, but we said we couldn’t get out there until Monday. And so Ringo says oh well, it doesn’t matter, because they can’t hear it anyway, it’s all just screaming. He said he’d make do – and he actually went on without a bass-drum pedal. Photographs of the Beatles’ return to Sunday Night at the London Palladium on 12 January 1964 show Starr’s bass drum with its newly painted Ludwig logo.
Having conquered Britain, the group kicked off 1964 with 18 days of shows at the Olympia Theatre in Paris from 16 January to 4 February, which soon provoked the same frenzied audience reaction as their UK appearances. Footage shot by ITN News on their opening night features in Anthology. While in Paris, the Beatles clocked in at EMI Pathé Marconi Studios on 29 January to record their two biggest songs ‘She Loves You’ and ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ in German for release by EMI’s West German arm. With time to spare at the end of the session, the band reverted to English to record the backing track for McCartney’s new song ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’, with all but a guitar and vocal dub to be completed at Abbey Road in late February. Released in March 1964 in both the UK and US, it would become one of their biggest selling singles. The final Olympia show on Tuesday 4 February would be the last public appearance of Starr’s first Ludwig drum kit.
Ahead of the Beatles' planned trip to America, where they were booked to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show on 9 February, it was decided that Starr would travel without his drum kit and instead take delivery of a second Ludwig Oyster Black Pearl Downbeat kit on arrival in New York, as it was envisaged that a secondary kit would be required for filming A Hard Day’s Night as soon as the Beatles returned to England. On their return to England, it appears that the second Ludwig Downbeat kit was immediately put into use both on stage and in the studio, as well as on set for A Hard Day’s Night, while the present kit was either retired or relegated to a backup.
According to Gary Astridge, Paul McCartney borrowed a combination of components from this kit and Starr’s second Ludwig Oyster Black Pearl Downbeat kit when he recorded his first solo album McCartney from late December 1969 to early 1970. McCartney used the rack tom and bass drum from this kit with the floor tom and snare from Starr’s second kit (see lot 15). Playing all the instruments himself, McCartney recorded the majority of the album at his London home, with occasional secret sessions at either Morgan Studios or EMI. Photographs taken by Linda McCartney during recording sessions at McCartney’s home studio in Cavendish Avenue, St. John’s Wood, in late December 1969, show that he removed the original Beatles drop-T logo drum head in order to muffle the bass drum with a blanket to tighten the sound, which had become common studio practice for the Beatles by that time. The original drum head can be seen set aside on the floor in some of the shots. As part of a promotional shoot for the album, Linda also photographed Paul playing the drums in the snowy garden of their St John’s Wood home in early 1970. The latter photo was later used as part of the inner sleeve artwork for the McCartney Archive Collection, released in 2011.
McCartney later took the hybrid kit up to his rustic “Rude Studio” at his farm in Scotland, where it was used by both Paul and drummer Denny Seiwell during early rehearsals with the newly formed Wings in July 1971, before the band recorded their debut album Wild Life at Abbey Road. Several photographs by Linda McCartney show the kit both in and outside the studio. Starr is seen playing the bass drum and rack tom in the music video for McCartney’s 1982 single Take It Away. The drums were later returned to Starr without the bass drum’s original drop-T logo drum head, T-rods and claws. The original drum head remains in the possession of Paul McCartney. The kit remained in storage for decades until 2013 when all five Beatles kits were organized and documented ahead of Starr’s major exhibition at the Grammy Museum. The present Ludwig kit was then auctioned by Starr in 2015 to benefit The Lotus Foundation. With the whereabouts of Starr’s Premier kit unknown and all other Beatles-era drum kits still in his possession, this is the only Beatles drum kit – and one of the most significant Beatles instruments – to ever come to market. Since acquiring this first Ludwig drum kit in April 1963, Starr has remained loyal to the Ludwig brand for over six decades, telling The Charlotte Observer in 2024: I’m still using them all these years later. From ‘63, say, we started. And they’re still the drums for me... They’ve never let me down.
ADDITIONAL REFERENCES
The Beatles, The Beatles Anthology, London, 2000.
A. Bell, ‘“They’ve never let me down.” Why Ringo Starr’s NC-made Ludwig drums mean so much to him’, The Charlotte Observer, 28 August 2024.
B. Kehew and K. Ryan, Recording the Beatles, Houston, 2006.
M. Lewisohn, The Complete Beatles Chronicle, London, 1992.
M. Lewisohn, The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, London, 1988.