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My Book “Where’s Ringo?” Is An Illustrated Beatles History

August 2, 2016 · by solobeatles

From Thunder Press, it’s a take off on Where’s Waldo with twenty double-page illustrations packed with Beatles trivia in which you have to find Ringo and other Beatles-related people and things, and fifty pages of text.

The artwork by Oliver Goddard, Takayo Akiyama, and David Ryan Robinson is beautiful, each with their own inimitable style: from childlike whimsy to outrageous psychedelia.

With the prose I did my best to cover all the bases from the boys’ early days in Liverpool to their final album, Abbey Road, all told from Ringo’s perspective.

You can look inside at Amazon here:

http://www.amazon.com/Wheres-Ringo-Beatles-Visual-Puzzles/dp/1781312184/ref=pd_sim_sbs_b_1?ie=UTF8&refRID=13Q6WGP1GNF2E91D42SE

Ringo realizes a dream by recording a country album with Nashville legends.

July 12, 2016 · by solobeatles

Today “Beaucoups of Blues” (1970) stands as one of his finest moments. Click the link below to check out the story:

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/book-excerpt-ringo-starr-realizes-a-dream-with-his-1970-country-album-20120818

John and Ringo Promote Each Other’s Albums in 1974

June 24, 2016 · by solobeatles

Ringo Rocks Out With Elton In “Snookeroo”

July 17, 2015 · by solobeatles

One of the 1970s stars who came closest to reaching Beatles heights was Elton John, and he worked with both Lennon and Starr in 1974. For Starr’s album Goodnight Vienna, Elton John and his lyricist Bernie Taupin contributed “Snookeroo.”

John kicks things off with “Crocodile Rock”–style piano and Taupin sketches a song based on Starr’s upbringing in a working-class town in the North of England. It includes the same eye for detail that made John’s other working class portrait, “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting,” stand out lyrically as well as musically. The Band’s Robbie Robertson delivers on guitar, tasty horns lean in, gospel-sounding ladies back the Ringed One at the mike, and it’s an anthem for poor Andy Capps-turned-millionaire-playboys everywhere. It made it to number three in the United States as a double Aside with “The No No Song.”

Snooker is a British version of pool with a bigger table and smaller pockets. Basically, Starr sings about being a lazy, no-good guy who hangs out playing pool and refuses to work normal hours while his dad gets drunk and his sister gets a reputation.

He sings that he needs a factory girl who will cook for him and turn him loose at night, which is what he had in Maureen, though she would be the last factory girl with whom he’d bunker down. Technically, she wasn’t a factory girl; rather, she left school at fourteen to become a hairdresser trainee. Before Starr knew this drummer thing was going to sustain, his plan had always been to get his own hair salon, so they must’ve bonded over hair. Maureen was born in 1946 and a regular at the Cavern Club at age fifteen. Starr married her in February 1965 after she became pregnant with the first of their three children.

The lyrics talk about how the family’s four-room house is condemned. In 2005, the Liverpool City Council decided they would knock down Starr’s birth home at 9 Madryn Street—but after an outcry, it announced the building would be taken apart brick by brick and preserved elsewhere.

Starr’s Surf Rock Ode to Alcoholic Jet Set Madness

June 2, 2015 · by solobeatles

The dark climax of 2005’s Choose Love album, “Free Drinks” glamorizes Starr’s playboy/Arthur-like lifestyle even as the sinister music hints at disaster lurking just around the corner.

Most of Starr’s recent songs have been self-empowerment anthems with a modern retro sound, but one wishes Starr would offer more glimpses into his real existence like this one. (Though presumably the song recalls a period before he and his wife Barbara Bach got sober together.) Boasting about his life of sunbathing by day, blackjack and roulette by night, it shares the specificity of rappers’ lyrics, who Courtney Love once famously compared to Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho) for their slavish devotion to listing all brand names. While Starr doesn’t go that far, his snapshot of paintings by Chagall on the wall of his hotel suite with a dress on the floor says it all.

Starr’s voice calls out through a processor like a consciousness once removed through a steady imbibement of any and all intoxicants. Musically, it’s surf rock meets Ennio Morricone’s spaghetti western soundtracks. The reverb, delay, and tremolo also recall the Pulp Fiction soundtrack or a sped-up “Wicked Game” by Chris Isaac, while the persistent beat pounds like a guy on a rager with no end in sight. Laughing, Starr sounds as if he is unhinged on absinthe or cracking up in an old black and white film like The Lost Weekend or Reefer Madness.

Starr jets to Spain, hooks up in a disco, then loses the woman, but it doesn’t matter because there’s more everywhere. He shops in Juan Les Pins, Cannes, and Saint-Tropez, and invites girls to stay at his suite in Saint Paul’s Colombe D’or. In the final verse, he wakes up flying in first class, unsure where he is, but who cares? (Though part of him whispers he may be heading for a fall.)

George’s Original Version of “It Don’t Come Easy”

May 11, 2015 · by solobeatles

Harrison had a habit of offering his best tunes to his friends. He originally gave “My Sweet Lord” to Billy Preston. He gave a song called “You Gotta Pay Your Dues” to Badfinger, although they turned it down.

So Starr took a crack at “You Gotta Pay Your Dues” during his Sentimental Journey sessions. George Martin produced and Stephen Stills was on the piano, but after thirty takes on February 18 and 19, 1970, it still wasn’t coming easy.

Thus Harrison sang a demo himself with Badfinger on backing vocals, instructing them to chant “Hare Krishna!” during the instrumental. In the final version of the song you can still hear it, low in the mix.

Starr tackled the song again on March 8, this time with Harrison producing. It sat in the can until October, at which point Harrison added sax and trumpet like he had once added horns to The White Album’s “Savoy Truffle.”

In mid-April 1971, Harrison’s haunting guitar intro finally drifted across the airwaves. Its arresting sound came courtesy of the Leslie speaker cabinet.

The cabinet was originally built for the Hammond organ but had been adapted for guitar and vocals. It housed a rotating bass speaker and a pair of horn speakers that spun around in different directions, making the guitar sound as if it was swirling under the ocean. Lennon ran his vocals through the Leslie for 1966’s “Tomorrow Never Knows,” and Harrison had used it in 1969 when he wrote “Badge” with Clapton for Cream; in fact, the “Badge” instrumental break sounds pretty close to “It Don’t Come Easy.” Harrison was always a master at recycling—or should we say, developing further. Thus the outro of “A Hard Day’s Night” became the intro to “Ticket to Ride.”

The Leslie effect became one of the most distinctive sounds of the late ’60s and early ’70s, gracing songs including Harrison’s “Something,” Badfinger’s “No Matter What,” the Grateful Dead’s “Casey Jones,” Three Dog Night’s “Mama Told Me Not to Come,” The Hollies’ “Air That I Breathe,” the Eagles’ “Hotel California,” Boston’s “More Than a Feeling,” and even McCartney’s “Listen To What the Man Said.”

Badfinger’s soaring backing vocals, Stills’s pounding piano, Starr’s perfect drum fills, and the horns build an epic momentum behind Starr’s exhortation to stay resilient in the face of hardship. The lines about paying dues to pay the blues probably wouldn’t have worked with Harrison singing; the guy came from a stable family and was a superstar before he was twenty. But Starr was born into an inner city house without a toilet, fell into a coma from appendicitis at age six, then was confined to a sanatorium for two years at age thirteen due to tuberculosis, before dropping out of school altogether.

In Beatles tradition, the lyrics challenged the listener to be peaceful. It was a sentiment that could apply on any scale, though it might have been aimed at McCartney, who was taking the others to court at the time. Yet with a reunion increasingly unlikely, the song actualized Harrison’s and Starr’s determination to carve out a career for themselves independent of the Lennon and McCartney gravy train.

Starr preaches with such confidence that you wouldn’t know he was filled with doubt about the direction of his life. Perhaps his determination to transcend his fears is what fills the performance with its enduring power.

Forty years later, Starr still opens every show with it. The song shot up the charts, passing Lennon’s “Power to the People,” Harrison’s “What Is Life” (both reached number eleven), and McCartney’s “Another Day” (number five), all the way up to number four, settling just beneath the Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar” at number one. It was the first of three top ten hits Harrison cowrote or produced for Starr. The success stunned those who had assumed Starr couldn’t cut it on his own.

(Compare “Badge” at 1:09 to “It Don’t Come Easy” intro)

(There it is again in “You Never Give Me Your Money” at 3:37)

Starr Recaptures the ’60s Sound with ’80s Disciples

May 10, 2015 · by solobeatles

A jewel that could have come off of Help! or Rubber Soul, “I Don’t Believe You” was a track on one of Ringo’s best albums, Time Takes Time (1992). It was written by two members of the San Francisco power pop band Jellyfish, Andy Sturmer and Roger Manning, who also added backing vocals and acoustic guitars.

Another guy in Jellyfish, Jason Faulkner, had been in The Three O’clock, which was part of a short-lived Los Angeles movement called The Paisley Underground. That scene was comprised of groups in the ‘80s who were trying to sound like the ’60s in opposition to the synthesizers and drum machines that were then dominating the pop charts. The Bangles were the biggest Paisley Underground group to make it, epitomizing the genre with their 1985 single “Going Down to Liverpool.”

When the Ringed One speak-sings his lines as the backing singers answer him in harmony, the song is a perfect homage to the Beatles circa “You’re Gonna Lose That Girl” or “Run For Your Life” … not to mention Beatle-imitators like the Monkees or Knickerbockers.

Many mid-‘60s garage nuggets (such as Syndicate of Sound’s “Little Girl”) feature an agitated singer warning his woman that he knows she’s done him wrong and he’s at the end of his rope. Starr’s girlfriend has lied to him and maxed out his credit cards to buy fancy clothes and “powder for her nose.” So he’s kissing her goodbye for good, just in time for the rollicking instrumental with cries of “Ole! Ole!”

In the early ‘60s, McCartney wrote a number of these “disillusioned-with-my-woman” tunes, too, including one for Starr called “If You’ve Got Troubles” that went unreleased until being included on volume one of the Beatles Anthology. Oasis must’ve heard it earlier on a bootleg because they pilfered the riff for 1994’s “Up in the Sky.”

Credit for the album’s sound also goes to producer Don Was. Born Don Fagenson in Detroit in 1952, he was one of the founding members of Was (Not Was). The band had hits in the ‘80s, then Was racked up a stunning producer’s resume, doing albums or songs for Bob Dylan, Al Green, Garth Brooks, Iggy Pop, George Clinton, Paul Westerberg, and helping Bonnie Raitt win the 1990 Grammy Album of the Year for Nick of Time. He was also the producer the Stones picked to help them remaster Exile on Main Street in 2010 and find overlooked gems that could be refurbished for the Exile bonus album.

It’s a pity Time Takes Time is the only album Starr did with Was, but Starr continued to mine the ‘60s folk rock sound on his subsequent albums with producer Mark Hudson.

Ringo’s Movie Career

May 2, 2015 · by solobeatles

In the early ‘70s Ringo was wondering what he was going to do with the rest of his life. He drummed on Lennon and Harrison’s albums, but that wasn’t enough. He started a furniture company and designed things like donut-shaped fireplaces and flower-shaped tables with petal seats. But mainly, he wanted to be an actor.

Back in ’64 he showed up on the set of A Hard Day’s Night terribly hung over to shoot the part of the movie that featured him alone, and his doleful countenance was praised as pristine naturalism. Thus the Beatles built their next movie, Help!, around Starr. Indeed, while original drummer Pete Best may have been broodingly handsome (too handsome as far as McCartney and Lennon were concerned), Starr’s distinct look and persona were essential to the loveable moptop image that was so easily translated into cartoons and lunchboxes. (Most anything that reaches global proportions has to be able to be translated into cartoons and lunchboxes.)

Lennon was the first Beatle to try his hand at acting in a movie apart from the others (in How I Won the War, which I still have not been able to bring myself to sit through). But in 1968, after briefly quitting during The White Album sessions, Ringo started his own career.

He could’ve used an astute manager to help him select projects, however. Most of Starr’s films stand as cautionary artifacts of late ‘60s drug-addled indulgence. There were two disappointing Terry Southern adaptations – Candy (1968) and The Magic Christian (1969) with Peter Sellers — Frank Zappa’s 200 Motels (1971), an Italian spaghetti Western Blindman (1971), and probably the best of them, Harry Nilsson’s animated TV special The Point! (1971). In 1972, Starr directed a rockumentary about his good friend Marc Bolan of T. Rex called Born to Boogie.

The film that could have been a turning point was That’ll Be the Day (1973), which captured the nostalgia craze in Britain like American Graffiti did here in the States, though it didn’t make much of a splash on American shores. Written by journalist Ray Connolly, it was inspired partly by the story of John Lennon’s rise. Another influence was Harry Nilsson’s autobiographical song “1941,” about a father abandoning his son, which was one of the first things that drew Lennon to Nilsson, as it mirrored the story of his own childhood. The movie took place in the late 1950s and featured singer David Essex (“Rock On”) as a young man working at a summer resort. The streetwise Starr takes him under his wing, and eventually Essex’s character becomes a rock star.

Starr’s role was supporting but large. He played a Teddy boy, English cousins to American greasers, who wore velvet-collared jackets instead of the leather variety. Starr had been in teddy boy gangs in his youth as a drop out, forced to participate in gang rumbles before finding a way out through music.

Starr brought the same naturalistic, low-key charm to the role he had brought to A Hard Day’s Night. After the flops of his first two genre albums, Starr focussed on films and finally made an undeniably good movie. Had he continued performing in well-written indie films, he could’ve really made it as an actor. But just then, his record career kicked back in with the smash solo album Ringo, produced by Ringo’s best pal Nilsson’s producer Richard Perry.

A sequel was made to That’ll Be the Day called Stardust, in which Essex’ and Starr’s characters go through the decadent, psychedelic sixties. Perhaps because he was enjoying a streak of hit singles, Starr demurred and let buddy Keith Moon replace him in the role.

Starr and Nilsson attempted to do their own horror spoof called Son of Dracula (1974) but it was reportedly so bad Starr could subsequently not bear to look at it. He also appeared as the Pope in Ken Russell’s follow up to Tommy, Lisztomania (1975), with Roger Daltrey as classical composer Franz Liszt. But after That’ll be The Day, Starr’s most notable film was, alas, 1981’s goofy comedy Caveman. He also appeared in McCartney’s meandering Give My Regards to Broad Street, which offered to pleasure of seeing half the Beatles hanging together and playing good music, but little by way of story.

After a string of albums throughout the ‘70s and early ‘80s, Starr’s declining sales brought his recording career to a halt. Starr’s Old Wave (1983), produced by ex-Eagle Joe Walsh, contained some great tunes, but no label was interested in putting the record out in the U.S. or U.K. It would be his last album for nine years. For the rest of the decade he only appeared in the aforementioned Broad Street, Little Steven’s Artists United Against Apartheid’s “Sun City” (with his son Zak Starkey), and a Grammy-nominated cover of “Act Naturally” with Buck Owens.

Giving up on finding a new record label, in 1984 he took the Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends narration gig. Based on a series of children’s books, the TV show became a success in the U.K. and then around the world. Starr narrated two seasons, and when it spun off an American PBS series called Shining Time Station he played Mr. Conductor, for which he was nominated for a Daytime Emmy in 1989. “John had the intellectuals; Paul had the teenies and George the mystics; I always got the mothers and babies,” he quipped. It was nice timing in that he was the first Beatle to become a grandfather, when Zak had a daughter named Tatia Jayne Starkey in 1985.

In 1989 he would form the Ringo Starr All-Star Band, resume touring, and go on to make some of his finest albums. Still, one wonders what he could have done had he taken on more roles like That’ll Be the Day.

Peter Asher Produces One of Ringo’s Deepest Cuts: “Golden Blunders”

October 8, 2014 · by solobeatles

A song about troubled marriage and inescapable guilt by alternative power pop band The Posies, producer Peter Asher heard it while driving cross country and thought it would be a great song for Starr to cover on his album Time Takes Time (1992).

At first Starr didn’t like it, recalled Posies guitarist Ken Stringfellow to Ready Steady Go! in 1994. “But then Ringo saw the lyrics written somewhere and he thought ‘Aw, wow, it’s a deep song!’ I mean “Golden Blunders” is a Beatles pun and then a Beatle does it! And you’ve just gotta love Ringo’s drums, he does that “Ticket to Ride” kind of thing!”

Before Asher was a producer, he was of course half of the pop duo Peter and Gordon. And when Paul McCartney lived with the family of Jane Asher in the mid-’60s, Peter and Paul lived right down the hall from each other, which was why Lennon-McCartney wrote four singles for Asher and partner Gordon Waller, including this gem:

Ringo Rebounds With a Vengeance in “Don’t Go Where the Road Don’t Go”

December 30, 2012 · by solobeatles

After being unable to get distribution for his 1983 album OLD WAVE in the States or the UK, Starr dropped out of the music business for the rest of the decade and narrated the children’s TV series Tommy the Tank Engine along with appearing in the occasional commercial.

By the late 1980s, Starr’s substance abuse was out of control and he was blacking out often. So in October 1988, Starr and wife Barbara Bach entered a detox clinic in Tucson, Arizona, for a six-week alcohol and cocaine treatment program, trying to ignore the press constantly flying overhead.

He realized he needed to get back in the game, so with producer David Fischof came up with the concept for his All-Starr Band. The idea was to assemble a team of musicians who were concert draws in their own right. Starr would sing some Beatles songs and some solo songs, and then he would take a backseat on the drums while the other artists sang their hits.

The first incarnation of the All-Starr Band featured regulars Jim Keltner, Billy Preston, and Joe Walsh, along with Dr. John, Levon Helm and Rick Danko of the Band, and E Street Band members Clarence Clemons and Nils Lofgren. They made their debut in Dallas on July 23, 1989, to ten thousand people and toured North America through the summer. New incarnations would follow every one to three years. By 2010, there had been eleven All-Starr bands featuring the likes of Sheila E., Jack Bruce, Edgar Winter, Zak Starkey (his son), Todd Rundgren, Billy Squier, Richard Marx, Randy Bachman, Peter Frampton, John Waite, John Entwistle, Howard Jones, Greg Lake, Felix Cavaliere (The Rascals), Eric Carmen, and many more. Starr released live albums like baseball programs, ten as of 2011, which are five more live albums than McCartney has issued.

The structure helped him get back on his feet. In 1990, Starr recorded a cover of the Beatles’ “I Call Your Name” for a TV special marking Lennon’s birth and death anniversaries. Featuring Jeff Lynne, Tom Petty, Walsh, and Keltner, the track was produced by Lynne, who went on to produce two of the best songs on Starr’s first album in nine years, TIME TAKES TIME, including “Don’t Go Where the Road Don’t Go.”

Lynne gives Starr a tougher drum sound and plays a louder, fiercer guitar than had been heard heretofore on a Ringo tune, like “In My Car” on steroids. Lynne layers in some Petty-esque acoustic rhythm guitars, then Suzie Katayama on cello where the lead guitar would typically be. Ringo jumps in, angry, bitter, recounting how he woke up from a nightmare, beaten up and alone in rehab with the walls closing in, and one’s first reaction is, “Whoa, this is a Ringo tune that truly rocks.”

As with much of the album, the lyrics are heavier than those on Starr’s previous work. He sings of once being at the epicenter of the world, but from what he can barely remember of the past, he blew it. Friends who used him when times were good have all disappeared. Still, he’s back with a vengeance and warning us to learn from him: don’t drive/live drunk, or you’ll end up driving where the road don’t go and end up nearly killing yourself. With this song he fashioned an anthem for anyone who has driven their life off a cliff but has rebuilt themselves and hit the road with reborn determination.

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