Meat the beat of the Beatles

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Ringo Starr replaced the famously ousted Pete Best as the Beatles' drummer in August James Rosen

1962, on the eve of the band's dazzling emergence from Liverpool.

A myth has long persisted that because Ringo was the last to join the group, he was just lucky, incidental to the Beatles' sound and success.

Today, the man who put the beat in Beatles is fast approaching 65. He has, according to published reports, undergone three shoulder surgeries this year just to be able to continue playing the drums in that familiar, cross-handed, deceptively simple way of his.

Earlier this month, Capitol released the Beatles' first four American albums on compact disc, in mono and stereo. September saw the publication of Ringo's own valentine to his old mates - "Postcards From the Boys" (Chronicle Books), a coffee-table book reproducing the fronts and backs of alternately sweet, silly and sad dispatches he received from his fellow Beatles spanning 1965 to the mid-'90s.

Ringo's book of postcards, paradoxically enough, reinforces the stubborn misconception that his three great claims to fame are named John, Paul and George.

The postcards from his friends might feed the myth - but those early albums he recorded with them don't.

There's one thing about the Beatles that still needs to be said. It can fit on a postcard: Ringo Starr was a musical genius. His drumming revolutionized pop music and was indispensable to the Beatles' artistic alchemy and commercial dominance.

It is a tribute to this legendary performer's self-effacing nature - his unassuming personality and uncanny knack for knowing how much, or how little, was needed to build and release tension in a song - that the world has showered every last superlative on the Beatles' output without ever fully recognizing the contribution of the fourth man, the noncomposer, the novelty vocalist - the comic relief.

The myth holds that the Fab Four could have made it with any passable yahoo planted behind them, simply keeping the beat to those indestructible Lennon-McCartney gems.