Via Uncut:
It don’t come easy
As you’ll read in this new magazine, Ringo Starr didn’t mind where he met the press. In the studio, while The Beatles are recording. In a fish restaurant, during the Summer of Love, over a bottle of German wine. At the Apple offices shortly after his return from Rishikesh and just before the release of “Lady Madonna”. They’re all good, but wherever a writer from NME or Melody Maker encountered Ringo Starr, none could quite compare to the circumstances under which MM’s Michael Watts met him in the summer of 1971.
Just consider it. On location for a forthcoming film, Blindman. By the pool, with Beatles manager/ accountant Allen Klein in his trunks on the next lounger down. With the split of The Beatles very much on his mind. Hard, given the environment – extreme heat, heavy manager, ex-Beatle – to keep your head. But Watts uncovers some important truths about The Beatles, the Maharishi, and the day Ringo went round to Paul’s house to ask him to delay the release of McCartney. Not to mention the “pudding style” (don’t ask) and the number of times he himself took acid (“about nine”).
Watts’ epic, engrossing interview tacitly poses a question that Ringo Starr might have asked himself: how do you follow The Beatles? The answer, which you can read over the course of this updated and expanded 148- page special – with archive features and in-depth new writing on every phase of Ringo’s musical journey – is that it will be a challenge. You will be breaking new ground, and doing so pretty much entirely alone. But you can try to come to terms with it, and carry on making a contribution.
Most importantly, you carry on being yourself. In The Beatles, Ringo’s steadiness and charisma was at the heart of their early success – and his plain-speaking integrity an asset when, in 1968 and afterwards, their equanimity was sorely tested. But to follow up The Beatles, when only an infrequent composer (“Don’t Pass Me By” took five years from composition to recording), and no expert on any other instrument save the drums, wasn’t ever going to be easy. Still, the Ringo catalogue features great, always interesting stuff, and is a legacy which continues to speak to his enthusiasms (’50s rock’n’roll; country music) and to his place in history. As with his filmed work, it’s been a pleasure to revisit it.
After a great early 1970s, the next 15 years were tough for Ringo – as they were for many 1960s rockers. His former Beatles, once there to support with a song or a morale-boosting cameo, were no longer around. Movie work dried up and his own creativity proved insufficient to sustain a career on its own, so drink filled the gap until marriage, and the All-Starr Band (currently on tour in the USA) pulled him back from the brink. His path since The Beatles’ Anthology in the 1990s hasn’t been without the odd wobble – his comments on Liverpool and Brexit have seemed ill- timed – but 2025 finds him releasing a countrified new album with cool collaborators like Billy Strings and Alison Krauss – with T Bone Burnett in the producer’s chair – and reconciled to his spectacular past. It certainly hasn’t come easy. But as Ringo told NME in 1998, “The honour is in the trying.”
Available to order here.
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