In the summer of 1985, Ringo Starr’s friend and fellow drummer Max Weinberg flew to England for the former Beatle’s 45th birthday.
Though the pair had become chummy since meeting five years earlier in Los Angeles, backstage at a concert Weinberg was playing with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Weinberg remained somewhat intimidated by his boyhood hero in the early stages of their friendship. (The ever-amicable Starr offered advice: “Sometimes it helps if you call me Richie.”)
While celebrating at Tittenhurst Park — the sprawling estate outside London that had previously belonged to John Lennon and Yoko Ono — Starr turned to his younger friend, then 34, and said something that remains an inside joke between them: “Well, Max, I’m going to be 45. Doesn’t that make you feel old?”
That line is classic Ringo — a dryly clever, double-take koan from rock ’n’ roll’s Yogi Berra, the man whose tossed off “Ringo-isms” became immortalized in Beatles song titles like “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Tomorrow Never Knows.”
Each year, Starr would update the line for Weinberg, until its recitation became something of an annual tradition. “I imagine if I was speaking to him on July 7,” Weinberg said in a phone interview, “him saying to me, ‘I’m 85.’ And it doesn’t sound so old anymore.”
Starr, who celebrates his birthday next week, will be the first Beatle to reach that milestone, and like his surviving bandmate Paul McCartney, he never retired. In the past seven months alone, Starr has released a country album he recorded in Nashville and toured with his All-Starr Band, a group with a rotating lineup of rock luminaries that currently features members of Men at Work and Toto. At a recent All-Starr Band performance at Radio City Music Hall, he bounded onstage with the springy energy of a man half his age and spent much of the show behind an elevated drum kit, bopping away.
While introducing his cheeky 1974 single “No-No Song” (“I don’t drink it no more / I’m tired of waking up on the floor”), he gave one indication of why he has aged, as Weinberg put it, like “the original Benjamin Button.” “The sentiment of this song,” Starr told the audience, “is why I’m on this stage today.” (He and his wife Barbara Bach have been sober since 1988.)
“It blows me away,” Starr said one April afternoon in Los Angeles, reflecting on his birthday. “I look in the mirror and I’m 24. I never got older than 24.”
“But guess what?” he said to himself with a cackle. “You did.”
Starr has the amiable manner of a goofy, wisecracking uncle who happens to have been in the most successful band in the history of the known universe. After wrapping a photo shoot in a suite at the Sunset Marquis (a hotel he likes, as he said teasingly, “so I don’t have to have the press in me house”), Starr was wearing his signature round sunglasses and a black blazer adorned with white peace signs, layered atop a T-shirt bearing the logo of the streetwear brand A Bathing Ape (“I love them, they’re mad”). During idle moments in the shoot, he had dropped one-liners with impeccable timing, drummed absent-mindedly on a table and occasionally sung an easygoing refrain of nonsense syllables to himself: Doo-dah, doo-dah dae.
When asked about the past, Starr is more likely to offer an artfully evasive Ringo-ism than delve into old emotions. He insists that it wasn’t particularly difficult to be known as the only Beatle who didn’t write songs for much of the group’s existence, and he recounts a story about a notorious moment in his hard-partying days — “I’d shaved my head” — with a good-natured laugh and a shrug.
But he is not reticent when it comes to talking about Beatles memories; his conversations are peppered with them. A recent invitation to join the Nashville musicians’ union, for example, made him recall, with a laugh, “The biggest fear, a long time ago, was that the union was going to make us all read music. Because none of us — John, Paul, George and Ringo — none of us read music. I thought, well, I’ll go play tambourine then.”
Seven decades after they first met — and 55 years since their band split — McCartney was effusive about his onetime bandmate. “Even though I’ve played with other drummers, he’s the best,” McCartney said in a phone interview. “Ringo has got a certain feel that is very difficult for other drummers to capture.”
Summing up Starr’s je ne sais quoi, McCartney added, “He’s Ringo. And nobody else is.”
Weinberg expressed a sentiment shared by many drummers over the years. “It’s impossible to play like Ringo did in the Beatles,” he said, citing the absence of magic in most Beatles tribute acts as proof. “It’s sort of like singing along with a Sinatra record — you might get close, but you’ll never get the phrasing, you’ll never get the little odd things that he does.”
This was apparent in January, during two sold-out, star-studded shows at Nashville’s storied Ryman Auditorium. (They were adapted for a CBS special titled “Ringo & Friends at the Ryman,” currently streaming on Paramount+.) Like “Look Up,” the country album Starr released the same month, the Ryman performances paired him with a younger generation, including the psychedelic bluegrass shredder Billy Strings and the soulful crooner Mickey Guyton. The octogenarian thoroughly impressed them with his spunky stamina.
“I remember he was doing jumping jacks at the rehearsals,” said Molly Tuttle, the fleet-fingered 32-year-old guitarist. “I was like, oh my God, you have way more energy than me.”
She and the percussionist Sheila E., who has toured with the All-Star Band three times, stressed Starr’s generosity as a collaborator. Tuttle recalled a moment in rehearsals when he told her to lead the way while figuring out an arrangement: “It was cool, working it out like you would with any other bandmate.” At the end of her first tour with the All-Starr Band, Starr told Sheila E. that working with her had made him a better drummer. “I cried,” she said. “Wow. Wow.”
The day after the first Ryman show, as we sat in the steamy crossfire of several humidifiers arrayed in his hotel suite, I asked Starr — who was wearing camo-print pants and a necklace adorned with, what else, a peace sign — how he has been able to maintain that vitality into his mid-80s.
“Well, I love what I’m doing,” he said in an isn’t-it-obvious tone.
Starr then drifted back to a memory of his early days gigging around Liverpool, before he joined the band that he sometimes refers to as “the Fabs.” “When I first started,” he said, “my mother would come to the gigs. She would always say, ‘You know, son, I always feel you’re at your happiest when you’re playing your drums.’ So she noticed. And I do.” He smiled. “I love to hit those buggers.”
RICHARD STARKEY WAS BORN in a hardscrabble Liverpool neighborhood known as the Dingle. When he was 3, his father left; when he was 13, his mother, Elsie, married Harry Graves, who Starr still describes, with childlike adoration, as “the best stepdad in the world.”
Young Richie suffered two major illnesses: First, when he was 6, a bout of peritonitis so severe it put him in a children’s hospital for a year, and then, at 13, a case of tuberculosis that required a two-year convalescence in a Merseyside sanitarium. At one point, a music teacher came around with tambourines, triangles and small drums for the bored, bedridden children to play.
“It was like a craziness,” Starr once recalled of this eureka moment. “I hit the drum and I only wanted from that moment to be a drummer, and that was what my aim was.”
Starr began improvising with whatever he could get his hands on, fashioning makeshift drumsticks out of cotton bobbins. This ingenuity would come in handy a few years later when Liverpool was overtaken by the skiffle craze — a genre influenced by American blues that relied on homemade instruments, like washboards and jugs — but these jury-rigged substitutes couldn’t match the real thing. Finally one day in late 1957, Graves gave Starr his first proper kit. Best stepdad in the world, indeed.
Starr quickly made a name for himself playing in several skiffle groups, and then spent several years drumming with the rock showmen Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. While playing a residency in Hamburg and later back home, they often crossed paths with another young Liverpudlian group, who eventually made Rory Storm’s drummer an offer he couldn’t refuse.
“He was a fantastic drummer,” McCartney recalled. “We asked him if he would be in our band, and luckily for us he agreed.”
Plenty of naysayers have, over the years, suggested that Starr was the lucky one in that equation — jazz drummers in particular seemed to have it out for him — but everyone I spoke with wanted vehemently to put that tired point to rest.
“It’s the most ludicrous and funny argument that, you know, you had these three talented singer-songwriters up front, and then you had the guy who got lucky,” Weinberg scoffed. “That was so far from the case, if you really go back and talk to people who were in that scene. To get Ringo in what became the Beatles was a coup for the three of them.”
“His simplicity was complicated,” said Sheila E., who studied Starr’s playing while on tour together. Beatles records, she said, always sounded like a conversation between four voices. “Those drum fills are not him trying to play a bunch of fills just to be heard,” she said. “They land in a place where there was space and where they make sense.”
Recalling the grind of their early performing days, Starr emphasized that the band didn’t start as stars. “We opened for a lot of people — people forget that. Everyone thinks that we just woke up and were top of the pops, but that’s not true. We worked really hard.”
Though Starr sang lead on roughly one track per album, he was the last Beatle to start writing songs. “It’s hard to come to the front when you’ve got John and Paul,” he admitted. He remembered his earliest attempts at songwriting as unintentionally comedic. “I’d say, ‘I’ve got this song.’ And halfway through they’d all be laying on the floor laughing, because I wasn’t writing new songs. I was writing new words to old songs.” (McCartney corroborated this with a laugh: “We’d say, yeah, that’s a great one. That’s a great Bob Dylan song.”)
Eventually Starr learned to follow his own muse. His first solo Beatles composition was “Don’t Pass Me By,” a midtempo country-rocker that appeared on the White Album. Most of the Beatles songs he wrote or sang lead on — “Act Naturally,” “Honey Don’t,” “What Goes On” — were rooted in country and the blues, two of the American musical traditions that had first captivated him as a child. (As a major port city for the Merchant Navy, Liverpool was a hotbed of imported American records.) “There’s no English drummer that’s ever come close to playing a shuffle like he does,” said the Texas-born musician and producer T Bone Burnett. “He shuffles like crazy.”
Weinberg has long admired the distinct way Starr used his tom-toms “as a separate voice,” citing as one example the playful fill at the end of the first chorus in “With a Little Help From My Friends.” “Most recording engineers in those days wanted you to keep the hi-hat cymbals very tightly closed,” he added. “I don’t know any drummer who came up at my age who wasn’t influenced by his creative use of opening and closing the hi-hat. That sizzle, that swish.”
Sheila E. echoed that assessment, calling Starr’s playing “very melodic.” She added, “It was his voice, whether he was singing or not. That drum fill was another vocal part, as far as I’m concerned. Not a lot of people do that.”
Starr could be easy to underestimate because he always resisted showboating; the only drum solo in the Beatles catalog is the brief, unflashy flurry of cymbal crashes and tom fills in the “Abbey Road” rocker “The End.” But an important part of Starr’s greatness is his selflessness, his dedication to serving the song.
“A lot of musicians learn licks and beats and modes and things like that, and then they just play within those,” T Bone Burnett said. “Ringo is more of an art drummer, a literate drummer. He listens to what the song is saying, and then expresses that.” Onstage in Nashville, he put it another way: “All the great musicians play the story. Ringo plays the words.”
THESE DAYS, Starr’s life is less hectic. Though he and Bach used to own “several houses in several countries,” they now spend most of their time in the Los Angeles home they’ve owned since 1992.
Professionally, too, Starr has streamlined. Acting — and co-starring with such varied company as Peter Sellers, Marlon Brando and Thomas the Tank Engine — used to be one of his main gigs, but aside from the occasional voice-acting role, Starr said he’s not particularly interested in that anymore. Does he miss it? “I don’t barely, no. I’m just playing now, live and in the studio making records.”
He will, however, soon be back on the big screen, in a manner of speaking. In April, Starr flew to London to meet with Sam Mendes, the filmmaker who has taken on the ambitious task of directing four upcoming Beatles biopics. (Last November, Starr accidentally leaked the news that he will be played by the Irish actor Barry Keoghan, of “Saltburn.” They recently met for the first time.)
Starr and Mendes sat together for two days and went over the script of the Ringo film, line by line, while Starr offered extensive notes to make his depiction truer to his own experiences, particularly in scenes with his family and his first wife, Maureen Starkey Tigrett. “He had a writer — very good writer, great reputation, and he wrote it great, but it had nothing to do with Maureen and I,” Starr said. “That’s not how we were. I’d say, ‘We would never do that.’”
He’s now much more satisfied with how he’s depicted in the script, even if he’s still not sure how Mendes is going to shoot four films at once. “But he’ll do what he’s doing,” Starr concluded, “and I’ll send him peace and love.”
I asked Starr to explain what that mantra means to him, if there was a specific incident to which it could be traced. “The ’60s — that was the incident,” he answered. For him, “peace and love” is not only a wish for a world with less violence and anger, but an expression of nostalgia for a simpler time of optimistic idealism. “There was a peace and love movement in the beginning, and in my eyes and in my head, it stayed peace and love,” he said. (At noon each year on July 7, he gathers a group of friends and invites his fans to send “Peace & Love” to the universe.)
Not all of his rock ’n’ roll peers have taken that message to heart. Recently, Starr’s name has been in the news for a roundabout reason, after his 59-year-old son Zak Starkey was abruptly fired from the Who, with whom he’d been playing for the past 29 years. “He played, like, two beats wrong, according to Roger,” Starr said, referring to Daltrey. He shrugged before summing up the whole absurd kerfuffle with a classic Ringoism: “What the Who?”
It’s all peace and love these days between Starr and McCartney, though. In late December, the pair played together onstage for the first time in five years, when McCartney brought Starr out for a surprise encore during a show at London’s O2 Arena. They played “Helter Skelter,” and even though the song is, in McCartney’s words, “an out-and-out rocker,” he found himself getting “a little bit emotional.”
Starr and McCartney have been the last Beatles standing for nearly 25 years, and that experience has deepened their relationship. “With John and George not here, I think we realize nothing lasts forever,” McCartney said. “So we grasp onto what we have now because we realize that it’s very special. It’s something hardly anyone else has. In fact, in our case, it’s something no one else has. There’s only me and Ringo, and we’re the only people who can share those memories.”
The night before we spoke in Los Angeles, Starr had gotten to spend some time with, as he put it, “my friend Paul McCartney.” Not being in a band together anymore — separating the personal from the professional — can do wonderful things for a friendship, and both men said it has strengthened their bond, so that when they do decide to work together it always feels, as McCartney describes it, “spontaneous.”
Spontaneity is also, of course, a core tenet in the Tao of Ringo Starr. “I live in the now,” he told me. “I didn’t plan any of it. I love that life I’m allowed to live.”
Lindsay Zoladz is a pop music critic for The Times and writes the subscriber-only music newsletter The Amplifier.
The post He’s Ringo. And Nobody Else Is. appeared first on New York Times.
