Daily Mail, 22.4.15
Yoko Ono no doubt meant well when she said last weekend that Ringo Starr was the ‘most influential Beatle’, but, bless him, he wasn’t. Not in any way, shape or form. And he would readily admit that.
Certainly he wasn’t the most influential musically, because his contribution could have been made by any number of good drummers; nor was he the most influential as a song writer. He only wrote one song that the band recorded, Octopuses Garden, because Lennon and McCartney were just so brilliant. Even George Harrison, who was no slouch as a songwriter, struggled to get his compositions on Beatles’ albums.
Nor was Ringo the best singer. His range, he once told me, was narrow, and he wasn’t ‘very good at singing’. So Lennon and McCartney would toss him compositions that they weren’t that bothered about, children’s songs like Yellow Submarine, keeping their best for themselves. Wouldn’t anyone?
What Yoko surely really meant to recognise in her comments, during Ringo’s very belated induction to the Rock and Hall Of Fame, was the debt the other Beatles owed to the drummer’s general affability and uncompetitive nature.
Without him there might have been more metaphorical blood on the floor when they broke-up, and their healing process, incomplete as it was, might have been even more difficult.
Yoko said, Ringo was ‘always very gentle’. Let’s put it another way. He was so easy to get on with, so down to earth, so determined not to take sides, it was impossible not to like him.
And he didn’t bicker or argue in the studio, or tell the others how he wanted them to play – as Paul was won’t to do with his colleagues.
Because of all that, he was perfect to be the go-between for the Beatles when things went bad, as they did right at the end of their partnership.
Just picture the scene. It is February 1970. Ringo drives tentatively up to Paul McCartney’s house in London’s St John’s Wood, presses the button on the intercom at the gate, announces his identity into the speaker and the gate swings open.
Paul McCartney greets him suspiciously, as his friend and colleague enters the house. He hasn’t spoken to any of the other Beatles in weeks and is wondering, no doubt, to exactly what he owes the honour of Ringo’s visit.
Sheepishly Ringo passes him a letter which has been signed by John Lennon, George Harrison and himself. It isn’t a long letter and it simply requests that Paul delay the release of his first solo album for a month or two until the Beatles’ last album, Let It Be, has come out.
You and I may think it a quite reasonable request to want to stagger the releases of the two records, rather than find them competing with each other for sales and publicity. And it must be said that McCartney had three of his biggest hits on the forthcoming Beatles’ album – Let It Be, Get Back and The Long And Winding Road.
Paul McCartney, however, didn’t see it that way. He wanted his solo album out now! He exploded in fury. And, as he admitted to me, rather ruefully, a few days later, he called poor Ringo ‘everything under the sun’, before kicking him out of his house.
Ringo, the unsuccessful peacemaker with a flea in his near, retreated in some dismay to report the unhappy encounter to Lennon and Harrison.
Oh dear. But, then, that’s what happens to emissaries when passions are high and egos are huge. And, after seven years of extraordinary and mind-bending success, egos didn’t come much bigger than those of John Lennon and Paul McCartney.
Ringo, on the other hand, famous to the outside world as he was, didn’t then have much in the way of ego. Mainly he deferred to the others, kept his drum beat steady, was amusing, down to earth and plainly spoken and had a native wit.
In other words he was the sensible emollient in the band. While Lennon and McCartney, had been at loggerheads for months over among much else, who would manage them, Allen Klein, John’s choice, or Paul’s father-in-law, Lee Eastman, Ringo had no argument with anyone. He loved being a Beatle and just wanted to play the drums.
Those were the qualities that the other three musicians had admired when they had decided, on their brink of fame in 1962, to sack their drummer, Pete Best, and replace him with Ringo. Yes, for the Beatles, Ringo was a better drummer, but he fitted in better, too.
He’d had a difficult start in life and had missed much education because of ill health, but what he’d gained was a calm, fatalistic attitude to life. When Lennon and McCartney asked him to join them, he considered the offer carefully before agreeing. He was already doing quite well playing with another Liverpool band, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes.
As he once told me: ‘I’ve never really done anything to create what has happened. I’m here because it happened, but I didn’t do anything to make it happen apart from saying ‘Yes’.’
And that was what he continued to do: to say ‘yes’. While the rivalry between Lennon and McCartney grew sharper, and the chip that he wasn’t being appreciated by the two leaders grew heavier on George Harrison’s shoulder, Ringo kept playing and doing whatever was necessary.
The idea of an extrovert drummer, such as, for instance, Keith Moon, fitting into the Beatles is impossible to imagine. It would have unbalanced them.
From quite early on in their success, John and Paul, had, quite understandably, aspirations to being something more than merely a very good rock group. And George had his interest in the spiritual.
Ringo saw life more simply. ‘When everyone began analysing Beatle songs, I don’t think I ever understood what some of them were supposed to be about,’ he would say.
And, although he now says ‘peace and love’ as readily as most of us say ‘good morning’, when, in 1968, all four Beatles followed the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi out to an ashram in the Himalayas to study meditation, it was level headed Ringo who summed the experience up most eloquently.
‘It was just like Butlins,’ he told me. Added to which, he and his first wife Maureen didn’t like the food.
Although there were always internal rivalries, the Beatles didn’t really begin falling out until 1968 when they were recording what is known as the ‘White Album’.
Interestingly it was Ringo who walked out first, fed up with all the arguing. It wasn’t any fun anymore, he told them bluntly, only to return a few days later to bouquets of flowers after the others phoned him telling him how important he was to them.
He was always a plain speaker, but somehow, because of his easy-going loyalty, he didn’t insult. He just said what he thought. During the making of the film, Let It Be, John and Yoko were getting deeper and deeper into the avant garde, when at one point they both began to wail like demented wraiths. Eventually Ringo couldn’t take anymore. ‘I think you’re both nuts,’ he told them.
Paul could never have said that to them. Ringo, because he was so likeable and non-threatening, could get away with.
What he couldn’t hope to do was to keep the warring Beatles together, but,not surprisingly, after their dissolution was complete, it was only Ringo who ever managed to work with all three ever again, Lennon and McCartney both giving him songs for his solo albums.
He’s always had a comic’s natural timing, which not only endeared him to the other Beatles, but was the reason that film producer David Puttnam and I chose him for a part in our film That’ll Be The Day. He made us laugh, and he made the audience laugh, too. It always seemed a pity to me that he didn’t pursue that side of his career more assiduously.
I can’t really believe, as Yoko asserts, that Ringo taught the other Beatles how to appreciate peace and love. That’s just flattery. That’s just flattery. They simply got over their business differences.
John Lennon once told me that he worried that Ringo might end up playing the Northern clubs when the Beatle money ran out.
That didn’t happen. Ringo is seventy four now, and, though not of the stature of Paul McCartney, who tours world arenas, he’s happily still playing and singing with his own All Starr Band.
And seeing him on TV recently, looking so well, now that he’s given up the booze and drugs, and being feted by an American TV audience, it did occur to me that, in so far as the Far Four are concerned, the meek one has inherited the earth.
