A Purdie Girl Is Like A Melody

[BDJ]

It seems to me that Purdie did indeed overdub the sessions with Tony Sheridan. But no more than those tracks.
Also, his story about Epstein instigating the whole thing can't be right, because Epstein was not in the US around the time that Purdie recorded his overdubs. So perhaps it was somebody else from EMI or - most likely - Capitol?

A mashup of Best and Purdie on "Take out some insurance on me" is here: https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/bdj/ ... 4_24-08_00

By the way, the need for these drum overdubs arose because their Hamburg producer (Bert Kaempfert) was not impressed by Best's drumming, and took away most of his kit.........

[JoeWadley]

Gotta love how in his story, none of the Beatles or George Martin did it. Somehow it was only Brian, the only guy who couldn’t contradict his story. What with him being dead and all. So no one at the record company was involved at all? How did they get the tapes, where did they record them, who engineered the session, who did the remix, and how did the tapes get used for the US album? Did Brian do all of that, in secret?

I know the whole story is garbage, but couldn’t he at least make it sound good?

[D-listener]

Thanks for sharing these. Though the stories by Purdie are questionable and his bravado is obnoxious at times, the guy is a great drummer with amazing feel. Unfortunately this does prove that Pete Beat wasn’t up to snuff. Ringo should never be discounted as the perfect Beatle drummer with personality and musicality to spare.

[quigatolah]

Richard Bell commented on this January 26th 1996 :
This whole Purdie thing is a total "crock" and here's why. At the time Purdie says that he was doing these overdubs The Beatles music had already been released in America on VJ Records (and other small lables) and those of us with these original releases can compare with the Capitol releases. I did and you know what? THEIR EXACTLY THE SAME. Not only are they the same as the VJ releases but their also exactly the same as the Parlophone releases. And Purdie himself says that the sweetening was for the Capitol releases.

That should slam the lid on the whole controversy.

Also, I should think you could compare Ringo's style on the records to his live performances on many of the songs.

[thewarpedvinyljunkie]

For some reason I'm also reminded of a section in Rolf Harris's biography (hey, I just skimmed the Beatles bits, okay!) He says some not nice things about Yoko because at some point in the 80s he wrote to her asking for a copy of his BBC duet with The Beatles and she never replied. Like she'd have the slightest idea what he's talking about, or who Rolf Harris is.

Why, John! Everybody knows who Rolf Harris is! Especially the girls!
I keep singing "The Court of King Caractacus" at Karaoke...just hoping...

Thanks for this, by the way!

[Much2Much]

Thank you Lord, this is very interesting.

[Muzair]

As has been noted earlier, Bernard Purdie had (and probably still has) a tremendously huge ego... he's also been a consistently brilliant musician for several decades. As a rhythm and blues and funk drummer he's one of the all time greats. I can pick him out on records almost every time, even weird obscure shit where he isn't credited. He has a sound. Whatever bluster and bullshit he puts forward, he has absolutely contributed a hell of a lot to the language of drums, and music in general, and that cannot be denied.

My take on it is this:

I came to the conclusion that the truth - as he believes it - in his story of playing on early Beatles records lies in this overdub session, which WAS for Beatles songs, and WAS done by him. He was doing sessions for ATCO and Atlantic in the mid 60s and those Tony Sheridan era things were (if memory serves) released on ATCO at some point.

Loads of studio musicians talk about being called in to replace lackluster band members and play with the rest of the band on sessions... but the best ones also used to do 'sweetening' or 'ghosting' sessions where they overdub or replace parts on records and sometimes the original band members never know it's happened. Bass player Chuck Rainey talks about doing ghosting sessions, and Bob Babbitt (the second bass player at Motown in the 60s and then a Philly soul and New York first call guy in the 70s) talks about replacing all the bass parts on a Gene Simmons solo album. It became a lot more common as technology allowed for more separation.

Guys like Purdie were doing two or three or four 3-hour sessions a day for years upon years. He could be doing a soul jazz album in the morning and afternoon, and then a session for Don Covay or Aretha Franklin at night. Or a jingle, or a movie soundtrack.

I wouldn't be surprised if he'd done the Tony Sheridan/Beatle overdub session, and then a few days later done a session where he was asked to replace drums on an album by some pop group, got paid by an English manager, and then around the same time played on some session for a cash-in album of all Beatles covers. Take those three things together, add another decade and a half of 20+ sessions a week, add his ever growing ego, then add a decade and a half's worth of shit hot New York studio cocaine... and you've got a whole new truth as he sees it.

I don't think he's deliberately setting out to make shit up, I think he's just misremembered a bunch of stuff and then over time believed that's the way it actually went down. And part of being a great studio musician in New York or LA in the 60s and 70s when it was seriously high pressure and very competitive was being confident. In some cases, extremely confident, sometimes to the point of arrogance.

Put it another way: A drummer friend of mine saw Bernard Purdie play at Smoke in NY probably 15 years ago. Outside on the set break my friend went up to Bernard and said "Hey man, was it you who played on Donny Hathaway Live?"
Now my friend knew full well that Purdie recorded with Donny, but not that record (which is Fred White).
Purdie thought for a minute and said "Yes. Yes! I believe it WAS me!"

Make of that what you will

[zaval80]

Put it another way: A drummer friend of mine saw Bernard Purdie play at Smoke in NY probably 15 years ago. Outside on the set break my friend went up to Bernard and said "Hey man, was it you who played on Donny Hathaway Live?"
Now my friend knew full well that Purdie recorded with Donny, but not that record (which is Fred White).
Purdie thought for a minute and said "Yes. Yes! I believe it WAS me!"

Make of that what you will

A pretty common situation with famous sessioneers, they worked so much it felt like a conveyor belt in many cases. The classic story is Carol Kaye stating for years she was the bass player on "Light My Fire" by The Doors. Turned out, somebody told her about the girl bass player with The Doors (but that happened just for the occasion of their demo recording from 1965). In the end, she acknowledged in her self-published book (and maybe somewhere else) the origin of that rumour introduced by her.

[Lord Reith]

Come on though, Purdie is also making up stories about being paid a fortune by Brian Epstein to shut up and not tell anyone he drummed on the Polydor singles. He is making up a whole back story to it. He knew he was telling porkies. It's sad that these guys get such a head on them that they begin to think that people will believe anything, simply because they are famous.

[Muzair]

This is also true. Some people are compulsive bullshitters and just cannot help themselves.

Thankfully Bernard sends his bullshit out his mouth and not out through his drums...