Ringo Starr: "Neither John, Paul nor George nor I knew how to read sheet music"

Los AngelesIn the summer of 1985, Ringo Starr's friend and drummer mate, Max Weinberg, flew to England to celebrate the ex-Beatle's 45th birthday.

Although they had been friends since they had met five years earlier in Los Angeles, in backstage After a concert where Weinberg was playing with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Weinberg was feeling a little intimidated on the day of his childhood hero's 45th birthday. (The always friendly Starr offered him some advice: "Sometimes it helps if you call me Richie.") As they celebrated the birthday at Tittenhurst Park—the grounds outside London that had belonged to John Lennon and Yoko Ono—Starr turned to his friend, then 34. "Max, I'm going to be 45. Doesn't that make you feel old?"

This is a typical Ringo line—clever and ironic, with a quip, the "Ringoisms," that became immortalized in Beatles titles like On a hard day's night and Tomorrow never knows.

Each year, Starr updated the phrase for Weinberg, until its recitation became an annual tradition. “I can picture myself talking to him on July 7,” Weinberg says in a phone interview, “and him saying, ‘I’m 85. You don’t look that old anymore.’”

Starr, who celebrated his birthday last week, will be the first Beatle to reach this milestone, and like his bandmate Paul McCartney, he has never retired. In the past seven months, Starr has released a country album that he recorded in Nashville and made a tour with the All-Starr Band, a group of rotating rock stars that now includes members of Men at Work and Toto. At an All-Starr Band performance at Radio City Music Hall, he moved around the stage with the energy of a man half his age and spent most of the show behind an elevated drum kit, dancing to the music.

When he introduced No-No Song, his 1974 single (which goes, "I've stopped drinking / I'm tired of waking up on the floor"), offered a clue as to why he's aged, as Weinberg puts it, like "the original Benjamin Button." "The heart of this song," Starr told the audience, "explains why I'm on this stage today." He and his wife, Barbara Bach, have been dry since 1988.

"It blows my mind," Starr says one April afternoon in Los Angeles, reflecting on his birthday. "I look in the mirror, and I'm 24. Yeah, I've done 24. But I've never done 24. What have you done!"

Starr has the mannerisms of a witty, goofy-doing guy who just happened to be in the most successful band in the history of the universe. After wrapping a photo taken in a suite at Sunset Marquis (a hotel she likes, she jokes, "so I don't have to bring the press into my house"), Starr wears her round sunglasses and a black blazer adorned with white peace signs, layered over a T-shirt from the brand's casualwear. (crazy). During the quiet moments of the photo shoot, she drops her quips with a timing impeccable, he becomes abstracted and pretends to play the drums on a table, and occasionally sings a series of meaningless syllables: doo-dah, doo-dah dae.

When asked about the past, Starr is likely to offer a typical cop-out rather than dwell on old emotions. He insists it hasn't been particularly difficult being known as the only Beatle who didn't write songs for most of the group's existence, and recounts a story about a highlight from his freewheeling days. "I shaved my head," he recalls with a good-natured laugh and a shrug.

But he's not shy when it comes to Beatles memories. His conversations are packed. For example, the invitation to join the Nashville musicians' union prompted him to recall, with a laugh: "Our biggest fear was that the union would make us read music. None of us—John, Paul, George, and Ringo—could read sheet music. I thought, well, I'll just play the tambourine."

Seven decades after they first met—and 55 years after the group split up—McCartney was effusive about his bandmate. "Even though I've played with other drummers, he's the best," McCartney said in a telephone interview. "Ringo is able to capture things that it's very difficult for other people to capture."

Summing up the I don't know what Starr, McCartney adds: "He's Ringo. Nobody's like him."

Weinberg expresses a sentiment that many drummers have shared over the years. "It's impossible to play like Ringo in the Beatles," he says, adding that the magic which lacks many Beatles tributes proves it–. It’s like singing over a Sinatra recording: you can get close, but you never quite get the phrasing, you never get the weird little things he does.”

This was made evident in January, during two sold-out, star-studded shows at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium. Ringo & Friends at the Ryman, available on Paramount+). How Look Up, the country album Starr released that month, the Ryman performances brought him closer to a younger generation, including psychedelic bluegrass shredder Billy Strings and crooner Mickey Guyton. The octogenarian impressed them with his brazen energy.

"I remember him doing jumping jacks in rehearsals," says Molly Turtle, the quick-fingered 32-year-old guitarist. "I was like, 'Oh my God, you have so much more energy than I do!'"

She and percussionist Sheila E., who has done tours with the All-Starr Band three times, highlight Starr's generosity as a collaborator. Tuttle recalls a moment in rehearsal when he told him to take the lead while he figured out an adjustment. "It was cool to work like I would with any other bandmate." At the end of his first tour with the All-Starr Band, Starr told Sheila E. that working with her had made him a better drummer. "I cried," he says. "Wow. Wow".

The day after the first Ryman show, as we sit amid the steam from several humidifiers installed in his hotel suite, I ask Starr, who is wearing camouflage-print pants and a necklace adorned with—what else?—a peace sign.

"Man, I just love what I do," he says in a tone that seems to say, "Isn't it obvious?" He always said, "You know, kid, I always feel like you're the happiest when you're playing drums." He noticed. And so do I"—he grins. "I love beating these motherfuckers up."

Richard Starkey was born in a rough Liverpool neighborhood known as the Dingle. When he was three, his father left. When he was thirteen, his mother, Elsie, married Harry Graves, whom Starr still describes with "childlike adoration." Young Richie suffered two major illnesses. First, when she was six, a bout of peritonitis so severe it left her in a children's hospital for a year. "It was crazy," Starr says, recalling the moment. eureka–. I hit the drums. All I wanted from then on was to become a drummer."

Starr began improvising on whatever he touched, creating homemade drumsticks out of spools of cotton string. This skill would come in handy years later when Liverpool was gripped by drumming fever.skiffle, a genre influenced by American blues that used homemade instruments, such as washboards and beer steins. But these improvised substitutes couldn't compare to the real thing. Finally, in late 1957, Graves gave him his first kit. Without a doubt, the best stepdad in the world.

Starr quickly made a name for himself playing in various bands. skiffle, and then spent a few years playing drums with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. While on residency in Hamburg and also at home, he often crossed paths with another Liverpool band, who made him an offer he couldn't refuse.

"He was a fantastic drummer," McCartney recalls. "We asked him if he'd like to be in our band, and luckily for us, he agreed."

Many detractors have said that Starr was the lucky one in this equation—jazz drummers, in particular, seem to have a thing for him—but everyone I spoke to wanted to put it to rest.

"It's a ridiculous argument," Weinberg says, scoffing. "There were these three talented lyricists, and then this one guy who got lucky. If you actually talk to the people who were there at the time, you see how far from reality it is... Taking Ringo to what the Beatles would be."

"His simplicity was complicated," says Sheila E., who studied Starr's playing while they were on tour together. The Beatles' recordings, she said, always sounded like a four-part conversation. "The drum sounds land where there's space, where they made sense."

Recalling the struggles of the early days, Starr emphasized that the group didn't start out on top. "Although a lot of people forget, we opened for a lot of people. Everyone thinks we woke up and were already the best of the best, but it's not true. We worked a lot."

Although Starr provided lead vocals on almost a song per album, he was the last Beatle to actually start writing songs. "It's hard to be front and center when you've got John and Paul," he admits. He remembers his early attempts at songwriting as unwitting stand-up comics. "I'd say, 'I've got this song.' And halfway through, everyone would be on the floor laughing. I wasn't writing new songs. I was putting new lyrics to old songs." (McCartney corroborates this with a laugh. "We'd be like, 'Yeah, the song's great. It's a great Bob Dylan song.')

Eventually, Starr learned to follow his own muse. His first completed composition for the Beatles was Don't Pass Me By, one country-rock part-time that appeared in TheWhite AlbumMost of the songs he wrote or sangAct Naturally, Honey Don't, What Goes On—had roots in country and blues, two of the American musical traditions that had most captivated him as a child. (As a major port city for the merchant navy, Liverpool was a destination for imported American records.) "There's no English drummer who's come close to playing one." shuffle like him," says musician and producer T Bone Burnett. "He does it like crazy."

Weinberg has long admired how Starr used his tom-tomos as "a separate voice", and cites as an example the son playful at the end of the first tune of With on Little Help From My Friends. "Most recording engineers back then wanted you to keep the toms hi-hat very well closed, he adds. I don't know of any drummer my age who wasn't influenced by his creative use of opening and closing the hi-hat. That brush, that whisper…

Sheila E. supports this assessment, calling Starr's style "very melodic," she adds, "It was his voice, whether he was singing or not. The drum melody was another vocal part. Not many people do that."

It's easy to dismiss Starr because he always resisted boasting: the only drum solo in the entire Beatles catalog is the brief burst of cymbal sounds and I take children without stridency in The End, withinAbbey Road. But a significant part of Starr's greatness is in his generosity, his dedication to serving the songs.

"Many musicians learn the wedges, the blessed, the moods, and things like that, and then they just play on that plane,” says T Bone Burnett. “Ringo is more of a literary artist. He feels what the song is saying and he expresses it.” Onstage in Nashville, he put it another way: “All great musicians play stories. Ringo plays words.”

Starr’s life is less hectic these days. Though he and Bach had “multiple homes in various countries,” they now spend most of their time in the Los Angeles house they’ve owned since 1992.

Professionally, too, Starr has streamlined his playing. “Songs like Peter Sellers, Marlon Brando, and Thomas the Tank Engine—used to be one of his biggest draws, but aside from the occasional voice-acting gig, Starr says acting no longer interests him. “Now I just play, live and in the studio making records.”

Starr will return to the screen, but not for long. Although he won't be doing it in person. In April, Starr flew to London to meet with Sam Mendes, the film director who has taken on the ambitious task of directing the four biopeaks about the Beatles. (Last November, Starr accidentally leaked the news that his character will be played by Irish actor Barry Keoghan, of Saltburn. They met recently).

Starr and Mendes sat down together for two months and went through the Ringo movie script line by line, with Starr making lengthy recommendations for a more realistic portrayal, particularly in scenes with his family and his first wife, Maureen Starkey Tigrett. “I had a very good writer, a great reputation, great writing, but what he was writing had nothing to do with Maureen and me,” says Starr. “He didn’t explain what we were like. I said, ‘We would never have done this…’”

He’s much happier with how he appears in the script, though he’s still unsure how Mendes will manage to film four movies at once. “But he’ll do what he’s doing,” Starr concludes, “and I send him peace and love.”

I asked him to explain what that mantra meant to him, and if there was an incident it could be linked to. “Back in the 1960s, here’s the incident,” he replies. For him, "peace and love" isn't just a desire for a world with less violence and anger, but an expression of nostalgia for a simpler time, filled with optimistic idealism. "There was a peace and love movement in the beginning, and in my eyes and in my head, the peace and love have remained," he says. (Every evening on July 7, Starr gets together with his friends and invites fans to spread "peace and love" to the universe.)

But not all of his rock 'n' roll peers have taken that message the same way. Starr's name has been in the news recently for a secondary reason, after his son, Zak Starkey, 59, was abruptly fired from The Who, where he had played for the past 29 years. "He was wrong twice, according to Roger," Starr says, referring to Daltrey.

It's all peace and love these days between Starr and McCartney. At the end of December, the pair played for the first time in five years, when McCartney brought Starr by surprise to a show at London's O2 Arena. Helter Skelter And while the song is, in McCartney's words, "unapologetic rock," he noticed that it got "a little emotional."

Starr and McCartney have been the only remaining Beatles for 25 years, and the experience has deepened their relationship. "I think the fact that John and George aren't here makes us realize that nothing lasts forever," McCartney says. "So we kind of hold on to what we have now because we've realized it's so special. It's something that almost no one else has. In fact, in our case, it's something that no one else has. It's just Ringo and me left. We're the only ones who get to share these memories. Being in the same group—separating the personal from the professional—can do wonderful things to a friendship, and both say it's strengthened their bond. So when they decide to work together, it always seems, as McCartney describes it, "spontaneously present." "I didn't plan anything. I want the life that I get to live."