When people think of the Beatles (and they should every day) they invariably commit a grave injustice. John, Paul, George and Ringo, right? John was the smart one, Paul the cute one, George the quiet one, and Ringo, well, Ringo was just Ringo . A lovable lump with a big nose. The one who made funny jokes and sang those funny Beatles songs (albeit somewhat off-key) like "Act Naturally" and "Yellow Submarine".

I know. I was one of those people.

I used to think of Ringo as an afterthought when I thought of the Beatles...the drummer - yeah, sure - but, hey, they replaced him once (when Ringo had tonsillitis on a tour of Australia, he was replaced by some totally obscure session drummer who disappeared into the abyss later, not even reappearing to write a book about his exploits) and Paul swears he didn't even play drums on big chunks of "The White Album". He was not the most important, or even second most important Beatle. He was the least Beatle.

I thought and believed all of that, until one day, thinking about the seventies (which, it has been suggested, I do far too much for my own health), I thought of the song "Early 1970". Written by Ringo during the final Beatles break, it documents in a jolly, down-home country manner his relationships with the other three. It's a beautiful song, drolly caricaturizing the other three and their lives, accented with a rollicking slide guitar. Wow!

After that, I started looking at what Ringo had done. I heard new wave mavens Camper Van Beethoven cover Ringo's "Photograph" (from their EP, "Vampire Can Mating Oven"), and read the accompanying liner notes which document their overcoming the belief that Ringo had supernatural powers. Maybe, I thought, maybe they had something there. "Photograph" is easily one of the best broken-hearted love songs to come from the seventies. "Everytime I see your face," sings Ringo, "it reminds me of the places we used to go." God, what pathos.

Beyond his singing career, which also included the rocking "Back Off Boogaloo" and the haunting "It Don't Come Easy", Ringo had quite an acting career. He stole the show from Keith Moon in three movies - "Stardust", "That'll Be The Day" and "The Kids Are Alright" and earned rave reviews in "Caveman" with his battered-wife-to-be, Barbara Bach. Ed Stack remembers him particularly shining in an episode of the late, great "The Bionic Woman" (thanks, Ed), and I read somewhere he is now the host of kids' TV show in England.

I'm not really sure why I wrote all of this. I'm sure all of you gentle readers were already big Ringo fans. I know most of you have copies of Ringo's greatest-hits cassette "Blast From Your Past" (Capitol 4N-16236), and that you've seen all of the movies he's been in. I guess I just wanted to take the opportunity to remember Ringo. Ah, Ringo.

(Thanks also to Steve Kopka for research help.)