RINGO STARR’S BEAT GOES ON
The ex- Beatle’s intuitive playing still inspires
When John Lennon was recording Double Fantasy in 1980, he had a simple instruction for session drummer Andy Newmark.
Newmark — a man with a CV that included the likes of Sly and the Family Stone, George Benson and David Bowie — liked to experiment, but the former chief Beatle was not interested. “Keep it simple, Andy, and play like Ringo,” he said.
“I prayed daily that Ringo’s spirit would inhabit me,” Newmark is quoted as saying in Ken Sharp’s book Starting Over: The Making of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Double Fantasy.
With Richard Starkey, MBE, “simple” is a deceptive concept. He might have been less drawn to flash than groove and style ( he is reputed to have had trouble playing a standard drum roll), but many groundbreaking Beatle records are impossible to imagine without his contributions.
Starr’s big beat on Ticket to Ride alone — said by some to have been suggested by Paul McCartney — has been lifted wholesale by a couple of generations of rock drummers. His incomparable work in Strawberry Fields Forever, Something, Rain and Helter Skelter, among many others, played a serious role in making those recordings perfect. When you think of the opening seconds of Come Together, Starr’s inspired fills are right there in your brain. As the Beatles’ music became more challenging and more wildly inventive over the years, Starr always seemed to find a unique angle to lift the song.
Critics who have dismissed his playing over the years rarely seem to find their opinions supported by actual musicians. Writing for salon. com before Starr was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with the Award for Musical Excellence in April, drummer Patrick Berkery called him “the most important and influential rock drummer ever.”
“There are millions upon millions of us out there who were not only influenced ( by), but wanted to be Ringo Starr,” Max Weinberg of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band and Late Night With Conan O’Brien said in a recently released video featuring several high- profile rock drummers rhapsodizing about Starr’s work.
In the end, if Starr isn’t “better” than Keith Moon or Ginger Baker, who cares? He’s still the only one you’d want to hear on Beatles records.
“I’m an emotional man. An emotional drummer,” Starr explained during a recent interview with the Montreal Gazette. “I play with the song. I don’t want to play drum boogie if the singer’s singing. But I know how to bring a song up. I
know how to keep it in time. I know how to settle it down.”
For Starr, feelings and intuition have always trumped technique. “Let’s say at the moment, it seemed like a good place for the fill. Now if we did Take 2, I may not do the fill there. I might do the fill somewhere else because at that moment, it felt better,” he said. “It’s such an emotional thing when I play drums that I do it with the feel of how I think the colour should be changed. But when people have said, ‘ Let’s double ( track) that fill,’ I cannot double a fill — because it comes from my soul, you know what I mean?”
Starr’s recently published book Photograph uses photos taken during and after the Beatles years to offer his own highlights of the most well- documented story in rock history. Most of the moments were captured by his own lens. With some 15,000 words written by Starr to accompany the visuals, it’s a charming chronicle that feels like a fresh look at events every Beatles fan has been exposed to time and time again.
If you couple the book with the catchy autobiographical songs that have turned up on so many of his solo albums — like Liverpool 8, Never Without You, In Liverpool and the recent Rory and the Hurricanes, about the band he left for the Beatles — it seems clear that Starr has taken a unique approach to telling his life story.
“I’m never going to do the autobiography,” he said. “I’m doing it with photographs. I’m doing it with records. I don’t want to sit there with a co- writer and just be interviewed. Photographs, actually, are great for jogging the memory. I don’t know what happened in ’ 65, but if you show me the photo, I remember what we were doing — or ’ 64, we’re in Paris, or whatever.”
There’s a sweetness and camaraderie to the early shots of the Beatles on tour that predates the debauchery one has come to associate with rock ’ n’ roll artists on the road. Starr confirmed there is truth in that perception.
“They were innocent times,” he said. Even the recording process used by the Beatles seems quaint by today’s standards, he suggested. “The Beatles did all those early tracks on two- track,” he said, refer- ring to the space available to add instruments to a basic track. “When we went to four tracks, it was like, ‘ Wow! Four tracks!’ That was before we got to eight tracks. That’s as big as we ever got. Now, it’s like, 600 tracks. I’m exaggerating, but people can’t believe we did those records on four tracks.” He might have included the game- changing album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Starr said he is particularly attached to a 1964 photo of Lennon in France that is remarkable because of the people in the street ignoring him ( and, presumably, Starr, who was taking the shot). “There are all these people around, but none of them are looking at him. They’re all getting on with their time. That was probably the last day that happened. After that, we didn’t go out very much,” he said.
It’s when the Beatles began to belong to the world, for better or for worse. During the 51 highly documented years that followed, we lost too many Beatles and extended family. Among the most striking things about Photograph is the number of casualties in its pages, including Lennon, George Harrison, Brian Epstein, Mal Evans, Neil Aspinall, Starr’s first wife, Maureen, Lennon’s first wife, Cynthia, Linda McCartney, Harry Nilsson and Keith Moon.
Starr, 75, has survived with a vengeance. Much of it has to do with clean living, continued recording and a lot of touring — a combination that also seems to have worked for McCartney.
Starr’s renewed love affair with playing live began when he first assembled musicians under the All-Starr Band umbrella in 1989. Over the years, its revolving- door lineups have included Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Clarence Clemons, Burton Cummings, Randy Bachman, Felix Cavaliere, John Entwistle, Peter Frampton, Jack Bruce, Ian Hunter, Greg Lake, Rod Argent and Todd Rundgren. Rundgren will be with the group when they appear in Montreal on Wednesday night.
For Starr, the magic moments he experienced in the Beatles years live on with the All- Starrs.
“The Beatles would be playing, or Rory Storm, and there’d be certain nights where you, the band and the audience were just at one,” he said. “It’s one of those moments — and I think that’s the moment that keeps us doing it forever. With the All- Starrs, there’s never a bad night, because we’re doing what we love to do. But some nights are just over the edge, you know. It’s so fabulous, the feeling of oneness. It’s far out.”