Ringo Starr’s first show as the Beatles’ new drummer was nearly ruined by a hostile audience that wanted him out of the band. Although he was finally accepted as one of the Fab Four, he was still targeted by those who did not wish him well. French-Canadian separatists in Montreal threatened to kill him. Mexican Federales tried to lock him up and throw away the key. And a decades-long running gag that he wasn’t creatively on par with his fellow Liverpool lads nearly undermined his legacy. It wasn’t until Ringo conquered his own beaucoups of blues that he got the respect he deserved and the world recognized him for what he is: in the words of his old mate John, “the greatest.”
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Disgraceland as a production of Double Elvis. The stories about
Ringo Star are insane. A hostile audience nearly ruined his
debut as the Beatles drummer because they wanted him out
(00:22):
of the band. French Canadian separatists in Montreal threatened his life.
He was followed and detained by Mexican federales hell bent
unlocking him up for good. He nearly killed himself and
his wife when he drove his Mercedes into not one
but two lampposts in a rainstorm. And despite a decade's
long running gag that he wasn't creatively on par with
(00:44):
his fellow Fabs and the Beatles, Ringo Star made some
of the most profound innovations in rock drumming, creating some
of the greatest drum tracks on some of the greatest
songs of all time. Unlike that music I played for
you at the top of the show. That wasn't from
a great song. That was a preset loop from a
mellotron called Phantom Buddha MK one. I played you that
(01:08):
loop because I can't afford the rights to breaking up
is hard to do by Neil Sadaka, And why would
I play you that specific slice of down doob Doo,
Down Down Cheese? Could I afford it? Because that was
the number one song in America on August nineteenth, nineteen
sixty two, And that was the day that Ringo star
(01:29):
played his first gig with the Beatles at the legendary
Cavern Club, a gig that nearly ended in a riot.
On this episode, hostile audiences French Canadian separatists, Mexican Federales,
and Ringo Starr. I'm Jake Brennan and this this disgrace Land.
(02:16):
You could tell they were Federales because they looked exactly
like they did in the movies. The military costumes who
were elaborate, downright theatrical, even jackets stiffly buttoned up to
the neck, crown hats with little visors nestled perfectly atop
their heads. But this wasn't a Sergio Leoni or Sam
PECKINPAM movie. James Coburn and Ernest Borgnin weren't going to
(02:36):
come to your rescue with shotguns, Draan. This was real life.
This was Guadalajara Airport. This was the dawn of the
nineteen eighties. February nineteen eighty, to be exact, Ringo Starr
was trying to go incognito, you know, like a man
with no name, but it wasn't working. Everyone knew Ringo's name,
(02:57):
and that is to say they knew the stage name
that long since eclipsed the name his mother gave him.
He had also just become the first Beatle to ever
step foot in Mexico. Thus the Federales in the cafe doorway,
Ringo worked on his breakfast of Champions champagne. It was
better than lukewarm coffee, plus at the blood flowing for
(03:18):
what was sure to be a multiple wine bottle kind
of day. At this point, most of his days were
the ones he remembered. At least. His friend Keith Allison,
formerly of Paul Revere and the Raiders, sat next to him.
The two were on a layover in Guadalajara on their
way to Durango to shoot a prehistoric slapstick comedy called Caveman.
(03:39):
They carried a few suitcases with them, including a road
case that held a four track tape recorder and a
guitar in case inspiration struck and the Federales sized up
the cases that sat next to Ringo and Keith and
thought about all the illegal drugs that must be inside,
maybe a brick of marijuana, just like the one Japanese
cops found on Ringo's former bandmate Paul McCartney at the
(04:01):
Narita International Airport one month earlier. Paul did ten days
in a hardcore Japanese prison for that offense. Now in Guadalajara,
Mexican authorities were hoping they could follow suit another Beetle
busted and that would be movie bueno. But the Federales
that could mean a serious bump take home pay. Ringo
(04:22):
knew it wasn't a movie, but still he couldn't help
but hear music playing his head as he returned the
federals dead eyed stare. He heard in akarina trumpet's whistling
a soprano recorder that sounded like a dying coyote, a
soundtrack to Ringo's own personal Mexican standoff. And the Federales
finally walked up to Margo and Keith and asked to
(04:44):
see their passports. Ringo began to panic. He couldn't be
that stupid, right, not after what happened to Paul. He
hadn't smuggled any drugs in his luggageer so he thought,
he was sure, pretty sure, And then again, there were
entire years in the last decade that he couldn't even remember.
His brain was pickled. Fuck, Ringo thought, just you know,
(05:06):
act naturally. Ringo's act was either too natural or not
natural enough. The Federals weren't satisfied with a stinking passport.
They took the duo to a cramped private room and
they dug through the pockets of Keith's jacket. They looked
inside Ringo's boot like it was a cavernous vessel for
contramand and the Federals told Ringo and Keith to take
(05:29):
out their wallets. Then they tapped the bills on top
of a slab of black marble on a table. The
marble was so black that any white residue that fell
from the bills would be noticed immediately. The Federals just
needed a speck to fall on that marble, a flake,
some dust. Ringo told them that their efforts were in
vain and they weren't going to find anything privately to himself.
(05:53):
He hoped to God they wouldn't. Ringo wasn't simply anxious.
He was so annoyed by all the unwanted attention. He
was currently receiving. He had spent a good chunk of
the past decade trying to distance himself from the Beatles,
trying to leave the past in the past and finally
move on. And now the only reason his shit had
(06:13):
been seized and searched was because of that past. When
the Beatles broke up in nineteen seventy, at the height
of an unprecedented career that seemed to have no ceiling,
Ringo let the other guys in the band cool off.
They could be angry. Ringo wasn't the getting angry tight.
He'd just hang around until they were ready to get
back together. As it became increasingly obvious that a reunion
(06:36):
was never going to happen, what with Paul and John
waging a public war and song, Ringo finally just got
on with it. Feeling like an equal to Paul, John,
and George had been hard enough from the start. Ringo
may have been the oldest Beadle in age, but he
was the last to join. The other three had already
developed a brotherly bond, and they'd spent the better part
of two years perfecting it. Ringo felt like a heel
(07:00):
and on the joke, even though he was as witty
as any of them. He was even known as the
Funny Beatle. The producer George Martin was underwhelmed by Ringo's
playing and replaced him with another drummer on his very
first recording session with the band. The version of Love
Me Do, released as a US single and on the Beatles'
debut album, Please Please Me, featured not Ringo on drums,
(07:21):
but session man Andy White. Ringo was relegated to tambourine.
Only the UK single release featured their earlier take with
Ringo on drums. In later years, George Martin explained that
he'd already booked White to play before Ringo had joined
the band, but that testimony contradict's studio logs that clearly
show the Abbey Roah production team was unsatisfied with Ringo's contribution.
(07:43):
Ringo never really shook the stigma of being just the
drummer and the Beatles. Did it bug him that he
couldn't write a song that could go toe to toe
with his bandmates? Sure was he frustrated that he couldn't
play any other instruments besides the drums, of course, but
that didn't mean he was creatively challenged. There's a joke
that's often attributed to John Lennon, though it was actually
(08:04):
made by a comedian after John's death. That goes Ringo
wasn't the best drummer in the world. It wasn't even
the best drummer in the Beatles. Consider, however, that when
Ringo briefly quit the band during the making of the
White Album, it took all three of the other Beatles
to cobble together a decent drum track for Back in
the USSR. I'm serious. Next time we listen to the
(08:24):
White Album's opening track, listen to the drums. That is
the sound of Paul, John and George all trying very
hard to do the thing that Ringo did very simply,
don't come easy, lads. The truth was that Ringo was
an innovator. Never before had the way the drums were
played been such a central component to the construction of
a song in the history of popular music. There's br
(08:46):
and Ar before Ringo and after Ringo, and no one
played the same after Ringo hit the scene. But in
nineteen eighty that wasn't Ringo's legacy. Ringo remained the fool,
the funny Beatle, the non creative one, the one who
wasn't rated very highly, just a lucky kid from Liverpool's
tough end who happened to catch the break of a lifetime,
(09:06):
and he was pretty goddamn sick of hearing about it.
Sitting in a private room at the Guadalajara Airport with
federales tearing through his luggage, Ringo was forced to hear
about it, talk about it, and think about it all
over again. He just wanted to be someone else. But
who exactly could he be if not a beetle? How
would Ringo star to find himself in the nineteen eighties
(09:28):
and beyond could he even summon the energy to try?
Just a few years before Ringo's star physically altered his
appearance and hopes that it would change who he was,
he walked into a barber shop and said, take it
all off. They shaved his head, his beard, his mustache.
The only hair he had left on his head was
his eyebrows. But if this barber were showing photographs, one
(09:51):
could plainly see that he had even severely sinned. The
wooly caterpillars above Ringo's eyes. He had never looked less
beutlesque than all of it life. At the time Ringo
said that he did it because where he was living,
Monte Carlo was too hot and he needed to cool off,
But later in an interview with People magazine, he gave
(10:12):
a very different reason. It was a time when you
either cut your wrists or your hair. Ringo set and
I'm a coward. It was widely known throughout Liverpool that
(10:43):
Ringo Star was the best. Other drummers wish they could
play like. Most bands thought seriously about replacing their drummers
with Ringo because no one played like Ringo. Ringo's technique
was homegrown. Unlike other drummers who held the right stick
over hand style left stick underhand style, Ringo opted for
an odd match stick style approach, which meant he held
(11:05):
both of his drum sticks overhand, and despite being left handed,
he played his drum kit as if he were right handed,
which meant that he led with his left hand while
moving across the drums from left to right, and he
looked cool as shit doing it. No one looked cool
as a Ringo Star. In the early nineteen sixties, he
how cooled his band leader Rory Storm of Rory Storm
(11:26):
of the Hurricanes, when he shook his head in ecstasy
from behind the kit. He had a beard. At the
time when young musicians were clean shaven, impresentable to take
home to mom. He drove a zephyr zodiac. He was
the coolest motherfucker in the room, in any room. But
tonight August nineteenth, nineteen sixty two, at twenty two years old,
on stage at the soon to be legendary Cavern Club
(11:48):
in Liverpool, perhaps the most important night of his professional
life up until that time, Ringo did not feel cool.
He felt woefully inadequate, like an impostor. The cavern was packed,
raucous applause quickly gave way to rabbit shouts and heckles.
Ringo had never experienced such a volatile live and all
of his year's drumming with other bands, the voices in
(12:10):
the audience weren't chanting for another song. They were chanting
for another drummer, and Ringo didn't know if he'd make
it out of the dance seller alive. As each second passed,
it felt more and more like his first gig as
the Beatles drummer would wind up his last. Okay, so
technically it was his second gig as the Beatles drummer.
The first had taken place at the Horticultural Society danced
(12:31):
the night before, but who's a fuck about the Garden Show.
This was the first gig that mattered. This was the
Cavern Club, the claustrophobic underground venue that was to early
rock and roll what CBGB's would beat a punk. It
was where early Beatles fans lost their collective shit while
witnessing some of the most cathartic live music ever performed.
(12:52):
And there was one thing the majority of those Beatles
fans agreed on that night. Pete Best Forever Ringo Never.
They shouted it over and over again. Pete Best, Forever,
Ringo never. Pete Best, Forever, Ringo never. Best, of course,
was the Beatles' original drummer up until a few days before.
(13:15):
His sacking came as a shock to fans. He had
been there from the beginning through the band's formative touring years,
but in the eyes of John, Paul and George, Pete
never really fit into the goon show vibe of the band.
As Paul McCartney once said, we were the wacky trio
and Pete was perhaps a little more sensible. So the
band did the sensible thing. They fired Pete. Technically they
(13:39):
had their manager, Brian Epstein, fired Pete Best. Pete felt
like he'd been stabbed in the back. He was so
distraught that he actually contemplated tying a rock around his
neck and jumping in the Mercy River. Other Liverpool drummers
were equally shocked to them. Replacing Pete even for one
gig was tantamount to a scab crossing a Union picket line.
(13:59):
When Johnny Hutchinson, drummer for a rival band called the
Big Three, was asked to keep pete seatwarm for Ringo,
who was tying up loose ends with Rory Storm, Hutchinson
immediately declined. I wouldn't join the Beatles for a gold clock.
He said. Pete Best is a very good friend of mine.
I wouldn't do the dirty on him. The Beatles' own
road manager, Neil Aspinall, was doing the dirty with Pete.
(14:20):
Best's mom was the father of Pete's newborn half brother.
Even he was on Pete's side at first, Neil refused
to set up Ringo's drums at shows. The coup happening
in the drum seat of Liverpool's greatest band was not
without some serious disturbances in both the band's camp and
its fanatical fan base, and right now in the depths
(14:42):
of the Cavern Club, it seemed a disturbance of savage
proportions was about to break out the chance and screams
from the audience, who were getting louder. Ringo tried to
tune them out, try to keep on playing, swinging the
beat like a motherfucker and shaking his head in the
way that typically got fans worked up into a frenzy.
But he couldn't concert. All he could hear was the
incessant Ringo never, over and over and over. It made
(15:06):
him feel less than unwanted, like he was trying to
insert himself into a family that didn't want him there.
And Brian Epstein was paying him twenty five pounds a week,
unheard of money for a drummer in Liverpool, but it
wasn't worth this. The crowd moved like a pregnant wave
at sea. Ringo could sense something horrible was about to happen.
(15:27):
All those angry people were about to crash on the stage,
swallowing up Paul John and George first, and then last,
and most definitely least Ringo. They'd destroy him he was
up on the drum, throwne all by himself, no protection.
He never felt so vulnerable in his life. Long before
(15:48):
he was Ringo star he was Richard Starkey, but he
had always been vulnerable. His father walked out when little
Richie was just three years old. When he was six,
his appendix burst and he was rushed into surgery to
have it removed. Nowadays, this procedure is fairly straightforward, but
in nineteen forty seven it was extremely risky. The doctors
(16:10):
told Richie's mother three times throughout the night that he
wouldn't make it. When he did pull through, the kids
at school gave him his first nickname, Lazarus. Richie put
that nickname to the test when, at the age of thirteen,
he was hospitalized for a second time. This time was worse.
This time he'd had to fight harder if he wanted
to see another day. This time it was tuberculosis TB
(16:34):
Next to London. Liverpool had whathered the most casualties and
architectural destruction of any British city during the war, four
thousand dead from Hitler's bombs. The place was reduced to
smoldering rubble. The air was choked with the Kenzieans, a
breeding ground for TP especially in the Dingle, Liverpool's rough
working class neighborhood, were Ringo lived with his mother in
(16:56):
the Dingle is where he returned after two years at
the Heswald children His Hospital, after rebilitating himself back to
good health, well good enough health, Richie was still more
fragile than the other kids, more vulnerable. He found that
our first hand on the mean streets of Dingle, to
survive meant first he had to have the look striped
(17:16):
jacket and trousers, string tie, hair grease back like a
duck's arse. The name teddy boy may have sounded sweet,
but the Dingle gangs that wore the InVogue look like
a badge were tough as hell. Being fragile in all
which he looked for protection in the gangs. He was
roughed up a few times, but he never caught a knife,
and he never knifed anyone else. But he saw other
(17:37):
boys get stuck. He saw blood spill out by the docks.
One kid get the ship pounded out of him with
a hammer, another lost his eye. Richie couldn't handle it.
He couldn't imagine this being his life, day in and
day out, stuck in the goddamn dingkle, breathing the filthy air,
watching his back at all times for fear of a
jump from a rival gang. He needed something to get
(17:59):
him out for good, and he was pretty sure he
had that something too. He had found it during those
two long years inside the children's hospital. During the music
classes that the hospital provided, Richie discovered the drums. The
kit was rudimentary, but he loved the sound of me,
the sound he made. From that point on, it's all
(18:20):
he wanted to do. He never returned to school. He
just wanted to make a racket. Playing the drums, and
playing the drums better than anyone else in town would
lead him to another gang, a rock band, which is
what rock bands are at their core, gangs. For this role,
he had to wear the right outfit, just like he
had as a teddy boy skulking around Liverpool, but he
(18:42):
also chose a fashion accent that was unique to him,
rings that covered his fingers, and those rings led directly
to his next nickname, a nickname that he would fully
embrace for the rest of his life, even when people
used it against him. Pete Best Forever, Ringo Never Jesus Christ,
(19:04):
the peap Best. Fans at the Cavern were going to riot.
Ringo could feel it. There was nowhere to run down
here and nowhere to hide. The cavern was a goddamn
fire hazard. Ringo began to regret his decision to leave
Ory's Storm in the hurricanes and then, for a reason
that was never made clear to him, a dissenting voice
rang out from the surly majority. Up with Ringo. A
(19:26):
few more voices began to chime in, Ringo Forever, peepe
Best Never. Ringo tried to find comfort in the sudden
positive reinforcement. He played white knuckled Phills to the rest
of the set. The tide was stammed, if not entirely turned,
yet no one let a finger on Ringo George, on
the other hand, he wasn't so lucky. An irate fan
(19:48):
headbutted and ran under his eye when he came off
the stage. The group was hustled up the stairs and
out of the club under the protection of a burly doorman,
and though the fans would eventually embrace Ringo as the
cheeky fourth ma member of the group, being accepted didn't
me being safe. If there was one thing Ringo knew,
it was that one could never have too much protection,
(20:10):
because what happens tomorrow, well, one never knows. We'll be
right back after this. We're we're, we're. Ringo Star was drunk.
He'd been knocking back booze by the bottleful well before
(20:32):
dinner at Pinocchio's, his favorite restaurant in the place he
now called home. Monte Carlo didn't just have great restaurants.
It offered shelter for a wealthy musician looking to avoid
paying eighty three percent of his earnings to the UK government.
Ringo's Monte Carlo shelter was swank a condo on the
thirty third floor overlooking the Mediterranean, but most nights the
(20:55):
view went unadmired. Ringo was such a regular fixture at
the Loewe's case that it felt more like his home
than his actual home did. The staff were so used
to seeing his face and taking his money that they
let him deal blackjack to gamblers who were so filthy
rich they didn't even know what a fucking beetle was.
On this night, however, Ringo wasn't playing with a full deck,
(21:18):
though he was full of wine. Wine helped him care
less that he was spending way too much money on
gambling and nightclubing. The Beatles had only just legally dissolved
the year prior, in nineteen seventy five, which meant that
after five long years of Allan Klein's even longer read tape,
Ringo finally got the financial windfall he'd been waiting for.
(21:39):
He prioritized spending his money over making records. It was
like all the things they said about him were true.
Ringo Star wasn't brilliant like the other lads. The New
York Times put it bluntly in a nineteen seventy five article,
Ringo was the Beatle quote generally judged the least exceptional
in terms of talent, unquote a self fulfilling prophecy. And
(22:02):
so was this night at Loew's. The rooms spawn almost
as fast as the roulette tables, slot machines rang out,
cards shuffled, champagne glasses clinked. Ringo began to argue with
an employee. Why was he arguing? He couldn't be sure,
he could barely see straight. Within minutes, he was tossed
outside onto the lonely sidewalk. It would be a while
(22:23):
before they invited him back. The nineteen seventies were rough.
The decade began auspiciously enough, and in nineteen seventy one,
Ringo released one of the greatest solo Beatles singles of
all time, it Don't Come Easy. It hit number one
on the Canadian charts and number four on the UK
and US charts. Even better, it outsold all three of
(22:44):
his ex band made singles released at the same time.
Maybe it was beginner's luck. Ringo had a few more
hits with Back Off, Boogaloo and a Photograph, but each
subsequent album he released so less and charted lower. Some
of his records in the mid to late nineteen siies
didn't even make the charts in the UK. And then
there was the divorce. And I'm not talking about the
(23:06):
split from the Fab four. Ringo's first marriage to Maureen
Cox was flaming out hard. Ringo and Maureen, or Mo
as she was known, first began dating wayback during the
Cavern club days, and they were young when they tied
the knot. He was twenty four and she was eighteen.
And as the whirlwind of fame beget the existential crisis
(23:28):
of the Beatles' breakup, which was then compounded by Ringo's
descent into alcoholism, the marriage buckled. To deal with the
ensuing heartache on wee. In despair, Ringo pulled to John
Lennon and flew out to Los Angeles to get high
with a little help from his friends. That men night
after night of copious drinks with Beatle John the Who's
(23:48):
Keith Moon, Alice Cooper, and Harry Nilsen, the La singer
songwriter beloved by the Beatles, who had struck up a
brotherly friendship with Ringo. When the group switched things up
and partied in London, Ringo's good friend Mark Bowlan of
t Rex would join them. In La. The lubricated crew
of so called Hollywood Vampires haunted the Sunset Strip. They corroused,
(24:09):
they cavorted, they emptied every bottle they could find, and
they could hardly remember any of it. In fact, Ringo
had to be reminded of the crazy shit he did,
like the fact that he and Harry made a seriously
awful rock and roll vampire foot that no one saw,
called The Son of Dracula, or that he recorded a
single called No No Song where he actually sings about
(24:29):
not drugging or drinking anymore. It's a great song, by
the way, or that he and Keith Moon managed to
get the Turtles flow and Eddie fired from their DJ
gig at LA's kro Q after they showed up, and
Ringo slurred the word fuck fifteen times in ninety seconds
live on air. And the dumbest shit was the shit
you could easily forget. What Ringo could never forget, however,
(24:51):
was the worst stuff, the most depressing stuff, like when
Mark Bolan died at twenty nine in nineteen seventy seven,
or when Keith Moon died at thirty two in nineteen
seventy eight. Both Mark and Keith died with their legacies intact.
They were both still members of the bands that made
them famous, and they were both regarded as geniuses. Ringo
(25:12):
shudder to think what would the world say about him
if he stopped breathing tomorrow? From where he typically sat
high above the rest of the Beatles on his drum riser,
Ringo Starr couldn't help but feel exposed. Maybe it was
the Cavern Club PTSD, but tonight at the Montreal Forum
he felt even more exposed than usual. It was a
(25:34):
sitting guck. He knew there were trained sharpshooters in the audience,
ready at a moment's notice to put a deranged fanatic
in the crosshairs. He knew that the guy sitting on
the side of the stage next to his drum riser
was actually a Montreal detective and playing clothes, but that
didn't make him feel any safer because the authorities weren't
on the lookout for your run of the mill hysterical
(25:55):
Beatles fan, not the kind who screamed, cried, pulled their
hair up, even dislocated their shoulders, shocking for a good view,
which is what actually happened a month earlier at the
North American tour opener in San Francisco. No, they were
looking for the people who had sworn to murder Ringo
star on this very evening. It was September nineteen sixty
(26:18):
four and the Beatles were playing two shows in one
night at the Forum. According to that day's edition of
Montreal newspaper, French Canadian separatists with an anti Semitic agenda
had threatened to shoot Ringo at the show because he
was Jewish. The thing was, Ringo wasn't Jewish. The fact
that he wasn't who the anti Semitic lunatics thought he
(26:39):
was didn't offer Ringo a whole lot of comfort. To
be honest, neither did the plain closed cops sitting next
to him. What was he gonna do catch the bullet?
After his drums had been set up, Ringo re arranged
all of his symbols so instead of laying flat as
they usually did, they were turned up to face the audience.
Could copper alloys stop a speeding bullet? Ringo had no clue,
(27:01):
but it was worth a shot. The first show of
the night was difficult enough. Ringo couldn't take his mind
off the death threat or his eyes off the strange
people in the audience, and the second show wasn't a
hard day's night. It was torture, worse than his Cavern
debut as Pete Best's replacement. Any drum fill could be
his last, but Ringo lasted until the end of the show.
(27:22):
As soon as the final chord of the final song,
Long Tall Sally rang out, Ringo descended from his drum
rise there deep into the bowels of the Montreal Forum,
where he felt a little safer. He wouldn't feel entirely
secure until they got the hell out of Montreal, which
they did immediately. The bad Nicks plans to stay the
night and instead ran for their lives. When the Beatles
(27:44):
stepped onto a plane later that evening, they had only
been in Montreal for ten hours and they would never return.
Their departure was witnessed by three hundred Canadian Beatle fans
and dozens of policemen. Ringo looked out the window at
the crowd as the plane began and a taxi down
the runway. He wondered if his would be assassin was
among the throngs staring back at him. He escaped death
(28:07):
that day, but he never escaped the feeling that whether
it was a fanatic with a gun or a fan
with a crush on a different Beetle, there would always
be someone waiting in the wings to knock him down.
(28:42):
Hundreds of fans were waiting when Ringo star stepped out
of the private room at the Guadalajara Airport. Word got
around that a Beetle was about to be handcuffed to Mexico,
just like Paul had demanded in Japan, but the federales
found nothing they were wrong about. Ringo. He and his
friend Keith Allison, we're free to go. The fans, however,
(29:03):
wouldn't let Ringo leave. They all wanted to touch him.
They asked in Spanish for an autographo. In nineteen eighty,
Ringo had been out of the Beatles for longer than
he'd been in the Beatles. It was still all anyone
wanted to talk about. No one wanted to talk about
Ringo's latest solo record or movie. It was always when
was the band getting back together? Was Ringo really hiding
(29:25):
drugs somewhere in his luggage? Ringo had Paul McCartney's recent
bust in Japan to thank for that last bit. Ringo
put on his sunglasses and kept his head down and
pushed his way through the crowds so that he could
catch his connecting flight to Durango. When he arrived, he
sent Paul a three word telegram thanks. A lot more
(29:45):
negative attention followed. Ringo's girlfriend turned fiance of six years,
Nancy Andrews, sued him when he left her for his
Caveman co star, playboy, model and former Bond girl Barbara Bach.
Nancy lost the lawsuit, put the case in reduced the
legal term palimony into the lexicon, as well as the
right in California for unmarried partners to sue for the
(30:07):
division of property following a split. In December of nineteen
eighty John Lennon was shot, and aside from mourning the
loss of his dear friend, Ringo mourned the fact that
the Beatles could never come together again. Even though he
had previously distanced himself from his past and the biggest
band of all time, it was crushing to know that
he and the other Fabs couldn't eventually drift back to
(30:29):
each other when the time was right. And then, in
May of nineteen eighty one, Ringo crashed his white Mercedes
three point fifty s l on a rainy road outside
London with Barbara and now his wife in the passenger seat.
The car went off the road, hit one lamp post
and then another, rolled over and wound up on the
other side of the highway. Ringo was thrown from the
(30:52):
car when it hit either the first or second lamp post. Luckily,
neither he nor Barbara sustained any major injuries, but his
solo career was the next to hit the skids. He
was dropped from RCA. He couldn't convince labels in the
UK or the US to release his music. He was
a Beatle and he couldn't get a label to sign him.
(31:13):
His ninth solo album, nineteen eighty two, s Old Wave,
only saw releasing Canada and Germany, and it was the
biggest flop of his career. Ringo had gotten what he'd wanted.
He'd been left alone and no one asked him about
the Beatles anymore, and no one asked about anything really.
By his own account, Ringo could be found at the
(31:33):
bottom of a bottle. He drank eight days a week.
Having been left alone meant being left to his own
devices and even worse vices. Barber drank with them, and
the drinking led to verbal and physical fights, many of
them in public, that often involved her old bottles and
slapped faces. He hit rock bottom in October of nineteen
eighty eight. Ringo star woke up after another bingch. He
(31:57):
had no idea how long he'd been under. House was
torn apart, bombed out. It looked like Liverpool's circa nineteen
forty five. I came to one Friday afternoon. Ringo later
said it was told by the staff that I had
trashed the house so badly that they thought there had
been burglars, and I had trashed Barbara so badly they
thought she was dead. This wasn't Ringo star. Deep down,
(32:23):
he knew it. He wasn't abusive. He did care about
his wife, his life, his place in the legacy of
the Beatles. Ringo and Barbara made the decision to get
clean together, and they flew out to the Arizona Desert,
specifically the Sierra Tucson Rehab Center, and dried up for
good wine tequila kangnac No, no, no no, he didn't
(32:46):
drink it no more for real. This time, Ringo and
Barbara's relationship became stronger than ever, and they moved forward.
They didn't look back, and that's to say they didn't
look back on the bad things. A sober Ringo discovered
that there were some things worth looking back on. First,
he formed a revolving supergroup of musicians and dubbed them
his All Star Band. The group's first iteration in nineteen
(33:10):
eighty nine included rock and roll royalty like Joe Walsh,
Nile's Loughbrin, Doctor John Billy Preston, and Rick Danko, and
Levon Helm from the band The All Star Band Mind
the Past for musical treasure, performing many of its members'
older hits for new audiences. Ringo then embraced the legacy
of his old band, The Beatles, beginning with the massive
anthology mini series and book undertaking in the nineteen nineties
(33:34):
and continuing with the seemingly perennial stream of reissues and
reappraisals of the band's back catalog that continues today. In turn,
the fans embraced Ringo and offered their own reappraisal of
his part in music history. Ringo stocks Guy rocketed. The
appreciation for his unorthodox playing hid an all time high.
(33:54):
Fans were suddenly rushing to his defense. Rather than making
him the butt of the joke, they protected him. They
praised Ringo's heavy drone beat and Tomorrow never knows his
rhythmic accents had come together the way he played his
part and ticket to ride, dragging the beat by thundering
of the toms. No one played like Ringo. Fellow drum
(34:15):
and admitted beatlemaniac Dave Grohl put it best, Ringo is
the king of feel, But Ringo Starr spent so much
of his life after the Beatles not feeling like the
king of anything. And that is a disgrace. I'm Jake Brennan,
and this is Disgraceland. Disgraceland was created by Yours Truly
(34:52):
and is produced in partnership with Double Elvis. Credits for
this episode can be found on the show notes page
at disgracelamdpod dot com. If you're listening as a Disgraceland
All Access member, thank you for supporting the show. We
really appreciate it. And if not, you can become a
member right now by going to disgracelampod dot com slash Membership.
Members can listen to every episode of disgracelan ad free,
(35:16):
Plus you'll get one brand new exclusive episode every month,
weekly unscripted bonus episode, special audio collections, and early access
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for details, Rate and review the show, and follow us
on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and Facebook at disgracelampod and on
YouTube at YouTube dot com slash at disgracelampod. Rock a Roller,
(35:43):
He's a Mann
Disgraceland as a production of Double Elvis. The stories about
Ringo Star are insane. A hostile audience nearly ruined his
debut as the Beatles drummer because they wanted him out
(00:22):
of the band. French Canadian separatists in Montreal threatened his life.
He was followed and detained by Mexican federales hell bent
unlocking him up for good. He nearly killed himself and
his wife when he drove his Mercedes into not one
but two lampposts in a rainstorm. And despite a decade's
long running gag that he wasn't creatively on par with
(00:44):
his fellow Fabs and the Beatles, Ringo Star made some
of the most profound innovations in rock drumming, creating some
of the greatest drum tracks on some of the greatest
songs of all time. Unlike that music I played for
you at the top of the show. That wasn't from
a great song. That was a preset loop from a
mellotron called Phantom Buddha MK one. I played you that
(01:08):
loop because I can't afford the rights to breaking up
is hard to do by Neil Sadaka, And why would
I play you that specific slice of down doob Doo,
Down Down Cheese? Could I afford it? Because that was
the number one song in America on August nineteenth, nineteen
sixty two, And that was the day that Ringo star
(01:29):
played his first gig with the Beatles at the legendary
Cavern Club, a gig that nearly ended in a riot.
On this episode, hostile audiences French Canadian separatists, Mexican Federales,
and Ringo Starr. I'm Jake Brennan and this this disgrace Land.
(02:16):
You could tell they were Federales because they looked exactly
like they did in the movies. The military costumes who
were elaborate, downright theatrical, even jackets stiffly buttoned up to
the neck, crown hats with little visors nestled perfectly atop
their heads. But this wasn't a Sergio Leoni or Sam
PECKINPAM movie. James Coburn and Ernest Borgnin weren't going to
(02:36):
come to your rescue with shotguns, Draan. This was real life.
This was Guadalajara Airport. This was the dawn of the
nineteen eighties. February nineteen eighty, to be exact, Ringo Starr
was trying to go incognito, you know, like a man
with no name, but it wasn't working. Everyone knew Ringo's name,
(02:57):
and that is to say they knew the stage name
that long since eclipsed the name his mother gave him.
He had also just become the first Beatle to ever
step foot in Mexico. Thus the Federales in the cafe doorway,
Ringo worked on his breakfast of Champions champagne. It was
better than lukewarm coffee, plus at the blood flowing for
(03:18):
what was sure to be a multiple wine bottle kind
of day. At this point, most of his days were
the ones he remembered. At least. His friend Keith Allison,
formerly of Paul Revere and the Raiders, sat next to him.
The two were on a layover in Guadalajara on their
way to Durango to shoot a prehistoric slapstick comedy called Caveman.
(03:39):
They carried a few suitcases with them, including a road
case that held a four track tape recorder and a
guitar in case inspiration struck and the Federales sized up
the cases that sat next to Ringo and Keith and
thought about all the illegal drugs that must be inside,
maybe a brick of marijuana, just like the one Japanese
cops found on Ringo's former bandmate Paul McCartney at the
(04:01):
Narita International Airport one month earlier. Paul did ten days
in a hardcore Japanese prison for that offense. Now in Guadalajara,
Mexican authorities were hoping they could follow suit another Beetle
busted and that would be movie bueno. But the Federales
that could mean a serious bump take home pay. Ringo
(04:22):
knew it wasn't a movie, but still he couldn't help
but hear music playing his head as he returned the
federals dead eyed stare. He heard in akarina trumpet's whistling
a soprano recorder that sounded like a dying coyote, a
soundtrack to Ringo's own personal Mexican standoff. And the Federales
finally walked up to Margo and Keith and asked to
(04:44):
see their passports. Ringo began to panic. He couldn't be
that stupid, right, not after what happened to Paul. He
hadn't smuggled any drugs in his luggageer so he thought,
he was sure, pretty sure, And then again, there were
entire years in the last decade that he couldn't even remember.
His brain was pickled. Fuck, Ringo thought, just you know,
(05:06):
act naturally. Ringo's act was either too natural or not
natural enough. The Federals weren't satisfied with a stinking passport.
They took the duo to a cramped private room and
they dug through the pockets of Keith's jacket. They looked
inside Ringo's boot like it was a cavernous vessel for
contramand and the Federals told Ringo and Keith to take
(05:29):
out their wallets. Then they tapped the bills on top
of a slab of black marble on a table. The
marble was so black that any white residue that fell
from the bills would be noticed immediately. The Federals just
needed a speck to fall on that marble, a flake,
some dust. Ringo told them that their efforts were in
vain and they weren't going to find anything privately to himself.
(05:53):
He hoped to God they wouldn't. Ringo wasn't simply anxious.
He was so annoyed by all the unwanted attention. He
was currently receiving. He had spent a good chunk of
the past decade trying to distance himself from the Beatles,
trying to leave the past in the past and finally
move on. And now the only reason his shit had
(06:13):
been seized and searched was because of that past. When
the Beatles broke up in nineteen seventy, at the height
of an unprecedented career that seemed to have no ceiling,
Ringo let the other guys in the band cool off.
They could be angry. Ringo wasn't the getting angry tight.
He'd just hang around until they were ready to get
back together. As it became increasingly obvious that a reunion
(06:36):
was never going to happen, what with Paul and John
waging a public war and song, Ringo finally just got
on with it. Feeling like an equal to Paul, John,
and George had been hard enough from the start. Ringo
may have been the oldest Beadle in age, but he
was the last to join. The other three had already
developed a brotherly bond, and they'd spent the better part
of two years perfecting it. Ringo felt like a heel
(07:00):
and on the joke, even though he was as witty
as any of them. He was even known as the
Funny Beatle. The producer George Martin was underwhelmed by Ringo's
playing and replaced him with another drummer on his very
first recording session with the band. The version of Love
Me Do, released as a US single and on the Beatles'
debut album, Please Please Me, featured not Ringo on drums,
(07:21):
but session man Andy White. Ringo was relegated to tambourine.
Only the UK single release featured their earlier take with
Ringo on drums. In later years, George Martin explained that
he'd already booked White to play before Ringo had joined
the band, but that testimony contradict's studio logs that clearly
show the Abbey Roah production team was unsatisfied with Ringo's contribution.
(07:43):
Ringo never really shook the stigma of being just the
drummer and the Beatles. Did it bug him that he
couldn't write a song that could go toe to toe
with his bandmates? Sure was he frustrated that he couldn't
play any other instruments besides the drums, of course, but
that didn't mean he was creatively challenged. There's a joke
that's often attributed to John Lennon, though it was actually
(08:04):
made by a comedian after John's death. That goes Ringo
wasn't the best drummer in the world. It wasn't even
the best drummer in the Beatles. Consider, however, that when
Ringo briefly quit the band during the making of the
White Album, it took all three of the other Beatles
to cobble together a decent drum track for Back in
the USSR. I'm serious. Next time we listen to the
(08:24):
White Album's opening track, listen to the drums. That is
the sound of Paul, John and George all trying very
hard to do the thing that Ringo did very simply,
don't come easy, lads. The truth was that Ringo was
an innovator. Never before had the way the drums were
played been such a central component to the construction of
a song in the history of popular music. There's br
(08:46):
and Ar before Ringo and after Ringo, and no one
played the same after Ringo hit the scene. But in
nineteen eighty that wasn't Ringo's legacy. Ringo remained the fool,
the funny Beatle, the non creative one, the one who
wasn't rated very highly, just a lucky kid from Liverpool's
tough end who happened to catch the break of a lifetime,
(09:06):
and he was pretty goddamn sick of hearing about it.
Sitting in a private room at the Guadalajara Airport with
federales tearing through his luggage, Ringo was forced to hear
about it, talk about it, and think about it all
over again. He just wanted to be someone else. But
who exactly could he be if not a beetle? How
would Ringo star to find himself in the nineteen eighties
(09:28):
and beyond could he even summon the energy to try?
Just a few years before Ringo's star physically altered his
appearance and hopes that it would change who he was,
he walked into a barber shop and said, take it
all off. They shaved his head, his beard, his mustache.
The only hair he had left on his head was
his eyebrows. But if this barber were showing photographs, one
(09:51):
could plainly see that he had even severely sinned. The
wooly caterpillars above Ringo's eyes. He had never looked less
beutlesque than all of it life. At the time Ringo
said that he did it because where he was living,
Monte Carlo was too hot and he needed to cool off,
But later in an interview with People magazine, he gave
(10:12):
a very different reason. It was a time when you
either cut your wrists or your hair. Ringo set and
I'm a coward. It was widely known throughout Liverpool that
(10:43):
Ringo Star was the best. Other drummers wish they could
play like. Most bands thought seriously about replacing their drummers
with Ringo because no one played like Ringo. Ringo's technique
was homegrown. Unlike other drummers who held the right stick
over hand style left stick underhand style, Ringo opted for
an odd match stick style approach, which meant he held
(11:05):
both of his drum sticks overhand, and despite being left handed,
he played his drum kit as if he were right handed,
which meant that he led with his left hand while
moving across the drums from left to right, and he
looked cool as shit doing it. No one looked cool
as a Ringo Star. In the early nineteen sixties, he
how cooled his band leader Rory Storm of Rory Storm
(11:26):
of the Hurricanes, when he shook his head in ecstasy
from behind the kit. He had a beard. At the
time when young musicians were clean shaven, impresentable to take
home to mom. He drove a zephyr zodiac. He was
the coolest motherfucker in the room, in any room. But
tonight August nineteenth, nineteen sixty two, at twenty two years old,
on stage at the soon to be legendary Cavern Club
(11:48):
in Liverpool, perhaps the most important night of his professional
life up until that time, Ringo did not feel cool.
He felt woefully inadequate, like an impostor. The cavern was packed,
raucous applause quickly gave way to rabbit shouts and heckles.
Ringo had never experienced such a volatile live and all
of his year's drumming with other bands, the voices in
(12:10):
the audience weren't chanting for another song. They were chanting
for another drummer, and Ringo didn't know if he'd make
it out of the dance seller alive. As each second passed,
it felt more and more like his first gig as
the Beatles drummer would wind up his last. Okay, so
technically it was his second gig as the Beatles drummer.
The first had taken place at the Horticultural Society danced
(12:31):
the night before, but who's a fuck about the Garden Show.
This was the first gig that mattered. This was the
Cavern Club, the claustrophobic underground venue that was to early
rock and roll what CBGB's would beat a punk. It
was where early Beatles fans lost their collective shit while
witnessing some of the most cathartic live music ever performed.
(12:52):
And there was one thing the majority of those Beatles
fans agreed on that night. Pete Best Forever Ringo Never.
They shouted it over and over again. Pete Best, Forever,
Ringo never. Pete Best, Forever, Ringo never. Best, of course,
was the Beatles' original drummer up until a few days before.
(13:15):
His sacking came as a shock to fans. He had
been there from the beginning through the band's formative touring years,
but in the eyes of John, Paul and George, Pete
never really fit into the goon show vibe of the band.
As Paul McCartney once said, we were the wacky trio
and Pete was perhaps a little more sensible. So the
band did the sensible thing. They fired Pete. Technically they
(13:39):
had their manager, Brian Epstein, fired Pete Best. Pete felt
like he'd been stabbed in the back. He was so
distraught that he actually contemplated tying a rock around his
neck and jumping in the Mercy River. Other Liverpool drummers
were equally shocked to them. Replacing Pete even for one
gig was tantamount to a scab crossing a Union picket line.
(13:59):
When Johnny Hutchinson, drummer for a rival band called the
Big Three, was asked to keep pete seatwarm for Ringo,
who was tying up loose ends with Rory Storm, Hutchinson
immediately declined. I wouldn't join the Beatles for a gold clock.
He said. Pete Best is a very good friend of mine.
I wouldn't do the dirty on him. The Beatles' own
road manager, Neil Aspinall, was doing the dirty with Pete.
(14:20):
Best's mom was the father of Pete's newborn half brother.
Even he was on Pete's side at first, Neil refused
to set up Ringo's drums at shows. The coup happening
in the drum seat of Liverpool's greatest band was not
without some serious disturbances in both the band's camp and
its fanatical fan base, and right now in the depths
(14:42):
of the Cavern Club, it seemed a disturbance of savage
proportions was about to break out the chance and screams
from the audience, who were getting louder. Ringo tried to
tune them out, try to keep on playing, swinging the
beat like a motherfucker and shaking his head in the
way that typically got fans worked up into a frenzy.
But he couldn't concert. All he could hear was the
incessant Ringo never, over and over and over. It made
(15:06):
him feel less than unwanted, like he was trying to
insert himself into a family that didn't want him there.
And Brian Epstein was paying him twenty five pounds a week,
unheard of money for a drummer in Liverpool, but it
wasn't worth this. The crowd moved like a pregnant wave
at sea. Ringo could sense something horrible was about to happen.
(15:27):
All those angry people were about to crash on the stage,
swallowing up Paul John and George first, and then last,
and most definitely least Ringo. They'd destroy him he was
up on the drum, throwne all by himself, no protection.
He never felt so vulnerable in his life. Long before
(15:48):
he was Ringo star he was Richard Starkey, but he
had always been vulnerable. His father walked out when little
Richie was just three years old. When he was six,
his appendix burst and he was rushed into surgery to
have it removed. Nowadays, this procedure is fairly straightforward, but
in nineteen forty seven it was extremely risky. The doctors
(16:10):
told Richie's mother three times throughout the night that he
wouldn't make it. When he did pull through, the kids
at school gave him his first nickname, Lazarus. Richie put
that nickname to the test when, at the age of thirteen,
he was hospitalized for a second time. This time was worse.
This time he'd had to fight harder if he wanted
to see another day. This time it was tuberculosis TB
(16:34):
Next to London. Liverpool had whathered the most casualties and
architectural destruction of any British city during the war, four
thousand dead from Hitler's bombs. The place was reduced to
smoldering rubble. The air was choked with the Kenzieans, a
breeding ground for TP especially in the Dingle, Liverpool's rough
working class neighborhood, were Ringo lived with his mother in
(16:56):
the Dingle is where he returned after two years at
the Heswald children His Hospital, after rebilitating himself back to
good health, well good enough health, Richie was still more
fragile than the other kids, more vulnerable. He found that
our first hand on the mean streets of Dingle, to
survive meant first he had to have the look striped
(17:16):
jacket and trousers, string tie, hair grease back like a
duck's arse. The name teddy boy may have sounded sweet,
but the Dingle gangs that wore the InVogue look like
a badge were tough as hell. Being fragile in all
which he looked for protection in the gangs. He was
roughed up a few times, but he never caught a knife,
and he never knifed anyone else. But he saw other
(17:37):
boys get stuck. He saw blood spill out by the docks.
One kid get the ship pounded out of him with
a hammer, another lost his eye. Richie couldn't handle it.
He couldn't imagine this being his life, day in and
day out, stuck in the goddamn dingkle, breathing the filthy air,
watching his back at all times for fear of a
jump from a rival gang. He needed something to get
(17:59):
him out for good, and he was pretty sure he
had that something too. He had found it during those
two long years inside the children's hospital. During the music
classes that the hospital provided, Richie discovered the drums. The
kit was rudimentary, but he loved the sound of me,
the sound he made. From that point on, it's all
(18:20):
he wanted to do. He never returned to school. He
just wanted to make a racket. Playing the drums, and
playing the drums better than anyone else in town would
lead him to another gang, a rock band, which is
what rock bands are at their core, gangs. For this role,
he had to wear the right outfit, just like he
had as a teddy boy skulking around Liverpool, but he
(18:42):
also chose a fashion accent that was unique to him,
rings that covered his fingers, and those rings led directly
to his next nickname, a nickname that he would fully
embrace for the rest of his life, even when people
used it against him. Pete Best Forever, Ringo Never Jesus Christ,
(19:04):
the peap Best. Fans at the Cavern were going to riot.
Ringo could feel it. There was nowhere to run down
here and nowhere to hide. The cavern was a goddamn
fire hazard. Ringo began to regret his decision to leave
Ory's Storm in the hurricanes and then, for a reason
that was never made clear to him, a dissenting voice
rang out from the surly majority. Up with Ringo. A
(19:26):
few more voices began to chime in, Ringo Forever, peepe
Best Never. Ringo tried to find comfort in the sudden
positive reinforcement. He played white knuckled Phills to the rest
of the set. The tide was stammed, if not entirely turned,
yet no one let a finger on Ringo George, on
the other hand, he wasn't so lucky. An irate fan
(19:48):
headbutted and ran under his eye when he came off
the stage. The group was hustled up the stairs and
out of the club under the protection of a burly doorman,
and though the fans would eventually embrace Ringo as the
cheeky fourth ma member of the group, being accepted didn't
me being safe. If there was one thing Ringo knew,
it was that one could never have too much protection,
(20:10):
because what happens tomorrow, well, one never knows. We'll be
right back after this. We're we're, we're. Ringo Star was drunk.
He'd been knocking back booze by the bottleful well before
(20:32):
dinner at Pinocchio's, his favorite restaurant in the place he
now called home. Monte Carlo didn't just have great restaurants.
It offered shelter for a wealthy musician looking to avoid
paying eighty three percent of his earnings to the UK government.
Ringo's Monte Carlo shelter was swank a condo on the
thirty third floor overlooking the Mediterranean, but most nights the
(20:55):
view went unadmired. Ringo was such a regular fixture at
the Loewe's case that it felt more like his home
than his actual home did. The staff were so used
to seeing his face and taking his money that they
let him deal blackjack to gamblers who were so filthy
rich they didn't even know what a fucking beetle was.
On this night, however, Ringo wasn't playing with a full deck,
(21:18):
though he was full of wine. Wine helped him care
less that he was spending way too much money on
gambling and nightclubing. The Beatles had only just legally dissolved
the year prior, in nineteen seventy five, which meant that
after five long years of Allan Klein's even longer read tape,
Ringo finally got the financial windfall he'd been waiting for.
(21:39):
He prioritized spending his money over making records. It was
like all the things they said about him were true.
Ringo Star wasn't brilliant like the other lads. The New
York Times put it bluntly in a nineteen seventy five article,
Ringo was the Beatle quote generally judged the least exceptional
in terms of talent, unquote a self fulfilling prophecy. And
(22:02):
so was this night at Loew's. The rooms spawn almost
as fast as the roulette tables, slot machines rang out,
cards shuffled, champagne glasses clinked. Ringo began to argue with
an employee. Why was he arguing? He couldn't be sure,
he could barely see straight. Within minutes, he was tossed
outside onto the lonely sidewalk. It would be a while
(22:23):
before they invited him back. The nineteen seventies were rough.
The decade began auspiciously enough, and in nineteen seventy one,
Ringo released one of the greatest solo Beatles singles of
all time, it Don't Come Easy. It hit number one
on the Canadian charts and number four on the UK
and US charts. Even better, it outsold all three of
(22:44):
his ex band made singles released at the same time.
Maybe it was beginner's luck. Ringo had a few more
hits with Back Off, Boogaloo and a Photograph, but each
subsequent album he released so less and charted lower. Some
of his records in the mid to late nineteen siies
didn't even make the charts in the UK. And then
there was the divorce. And I'm not talking about the
(23:06):
split from the Fab four. Ringo's first marriage to Maureen
Cox was flaming out hard. Ringo and Maureen, or Mo
as she was known, first began dating wayback during the
Cavern club days, and they were young when they tied
the knot. He was twenty four and she was eighteen.
And as the whirlwind of fame beget the existential crisis
(23:28):
of the Beatles' breakup, which was then compounded by Ringo's
descent into alcoholism, the marriage buckled. To deal with the
ensuing heartache on wee. In despair, Ringo pulled to John
Lennon and flew out to Los Angeles to get high
with a little help from his friends. That men night
after night of copious drinks with Beatle John the Who's
(23:48):
Keith Moon, Alice Cooper, and Harry Nilsen, the La singer
songwriter beloved by the Beatles, who had struck up a
brotherly friendship with Ringo. When the group switched things up
and partied in London, Ringo's good friend Mark Bowlan of
t Rex would join them. In La. The lubricated crew
of so called Hollywood Vampires haunted the Sunset Strip. They corroused,
(24:09):
they cavorted, they emptied every bottle they could find, and
they could hardly remember any of it. In fact, Ringo
had to be reminded of the crazy shit he did,
like the fact that he and Harry made a seriously
awful rock and roll vampire foot that no one saw,
called The Son of Dracula, or that he recorded a
single called No No Song where he actually sings about
(24:29):
not drugging or drinking anymore. It's a great song, by
the way, or that he and Keith Moon managed to
get the Turtles flow and Eddie fired from their DJ
gig at LA's kro Q after they showed up, and
Ringo slurred the word fuck fifteen times in ninety seconds
live on air. And the dumbest shit was the shit
you could easily forget. What Ringo could never forget, however,
(24:51):
was the worst stuff, the most depressing stuff, like when
Mark Bolan died at twenty nine in nineteen seventy seven,
or when Keith Moon died at thirty two in nineteen
seventy eight. Both Mark and Keith died with their legacies intact.
They were both still members of the bands that made
them famous, and they were both regarded as geniuses. Ringo
(25:12):
shudder to think what would the world say about him
if he stopped breathing tomorrow? From where he typically sat
high above the rest of the Beatles on his drum riser,
Ringo Starr couldn't help but feel exposed. Maybe it was
the Cavern Club PTSD, but tonight at the Montreal Forum
he felt even more exposed than usual. It was a
(25:34):
sitting guck. He knew there were trained sharpshooters in the audience,
ready at a moment's notice to put a deranged fanatic
in the crosshairs. He knew that the guy sitting on
the side of the stage next to his drum riser
was actually a Montreal detective and playing clothes, but that
didn't make him feel any safer because the authorities weren't
on the lookout for your run of the mill hysterical
(25:55):
Beatles fan, not the kind who screamed, cried, pulled their
hair up, even dislocated their shoulders, shocking for a good view,
which is what actually happened a month earlier at the
North American tour opener in San Francisco. No, they were
looking for the people who had sworn to murder Ringo
star on this very evening. It was September nineteen sixty
(26:18):
four and the Beatles were playing two shows in one
night at the Forum. According to that day's edition of
Montreal newspaper, French Canadian separatists with an anti Semitic agenda
had threatened to shoot Ringo at the show because he
was Jewish. The thing was, Ringo wasn't Jewish. The fact
that he wasn't who the anti Semitic lunatics thought he
(26:39):
was didn't offer Ringo a whole lot of comfort. To
be honest, neither did the plain closed cops sitting next
to him. What was he gonna do catch the bullet?
After his drums had been set up, Ringo re arranged
all of his symbols so instead of laying flat as
they usually did, they were turned up to face the audience.
Could copper alloys stop a speeding bullet? Ringo had no clue,
(27:01):
but it was worth a shot. The first show of
the night was difficult enough. Ringo couldn't take his mind
off the death threat or his eyes off the strange
people in the audience, and the second show wasn't a
hard day's night. It was torture, worse than his Cavern
debut as Pete Best's replacement. Any drum fill could be
his last, but Ringo lasted until the end of the show.
(27:22):
As soon as the final chord of the final song,
Long Tall Sally rang out, Ringo descended from his drum
rise there deep into the bowels of the Montreal Forum,
where he felt a little safer. He wouldn't feel entirely
secure until they got the hell out of Montreal, which
they did immediately. The bad Nicks plans to stay the
night and instead ran for their lives. When the Beatles
(27:44):
stepped onto a plane later that evening, they had only
been in Montreal for ten hours and they would never return.
Their departure was witnessed by three hundred Canadian Beatle fans
and dozens of policemen. Ringo looked out the window at
the crowd as the plane began and a taxi down
the runway. He wondered if his would be assassin was
among the throngs staring back at him. He escaped death
(28:07):
that day, but he never escaped the feeling that whether
it was a fanatic with a gun or a fan
with a crush on a different Beetle, there would always
be someone waiting in the wings to knock him down.
(28:42):
Hundreds of fans were waiting when Ringo star stepped out
of the private room at the Guadalajara Airport. Word got
around that a Beetle was about to be handcuffed to Mexico,
just like Paul had demanded in Japan, but the federales
found nothing they were wrong about. Ringo. He and his
friend Keith Allison, we're free to go. The fans, however,
(29:03):
wouldn't let Ringo leave. They all wanted to touch him.
They asked in Spanish for an autographo. In nineteen eighty,
Ringo had been out of the Beatles for longer than
he'd been in the Beatles. It was still all anyone
wanted to talk about. No one wanted to talk about
Ringo's latest solo record or movie. It was always when
was the band getting back together? Was Ringo really hiding
(29:25):
drugs somewhere in his luggage? Ringo had Paul McCartney's recent
bust in Japan to thank for that last bit. Ringo
put on his sunglasses and kept his head down and
pushed his way through the crowds so that he could
catch his connecting flight to Durango. When he arrived, he
sent Paul a three word telegram thanks. A lot more
(29:45):
negative attention followed. Ringo's girlfriend turned fiance of six years,
Nancy Andrews, sued him when he left her for his
Caveman co star, playboy, model and former Bond girl Barbara Bach.
Nancy lost the lawsuit, put the case in reduced the
legal term palimony into the lexicon, as well as the
right in California for unmarried partners to sue for the
(30:07):
division of property following a split. In December of nineteen
eighty John Lennon was shot, and aside from mourning the
loss of his dear friend, Ringo mourned the fact that
the Beatles could never come together again. Even though he
had previously distanced himself from his past and the biggest
band of all time, it was crushing to know that
he and the other Fabs couldn't eventually drift back to
(30:29):
each other when the time was right. And then, in
May of nineteen eighty one, Ringo crashed his white Mercedes
three point fifty s l on a rainy road outside
London with Barbara and now his wife in the passenger seat.
The car went off the road, hit one lamp post
and then another, rolled over and wound up on the
other side of the highway. Ringo was thrown from the
(30:52):
car when it hit either the first or second lamp post. Luckily,
neither he nor Barbara sustained any major injuries, but his
solo career was the next to hit the skids. He
was dropped from RCA. He couldn't convince labels in the
UK or the US to release his music. He was
a Beatle and he couldn't get a label to sign him.
(31:13):
His ninth solo album, nineteen eighty two, s Old Wave,
only saw releasing Canada and Germany, and it was the
biggest flop of his career. Ringo had gotten what he'd wanted.
He'd been left alone and no one asked him about
the Beatles anymore, and no one asked about anything really.
By his own account, Ringo could be found at the
(31:33):
bottom of a bottle. He drank eight days a week.
Having been left alone meant being left to his own
devices and even worse vices. Barber drank with them, and
the drinking led to verbal and physical fights, many of
them in public, that often involved her old bottles and
slapped faces. He hit rock bottom in October of nineteen
eighty eight. Ringo star woke up after another bingch. He
(31:57):
had no idea how long he'd been under. House was
torn apart, bombed out. It looked like Liverpool's circa nineteen
forty five. I came to one Friday afternoon. Ringo later
said it was told by the staff that I had
trashed the house so badly that they thought there had
been burglars, and I had trashed Barbara so badly they
thought she was dead. This wasn't Ringo star. Deep down,
(32:23):
he knew it. He wasn't abusive. He did care about
his wife, his life, his place in the legacy of
the Beatles. Ringo and Barbara made the decision to get
clean together, and they flew out to the Arizona Desert,
specifically the Sierra Tucson Rehab Center, and dried up for
good wine tequila kangnac No, no, no no, he didn't
(32:46):
drink it no more for real. This time, Ringo and
Barbara's relationship became stronger than ever, and they moved forward.
They didn't look back, and that's to say they didn't
look back on the bad things. A sober Ringo discovered
that there were some things worth looking back on. First,
he formed a revolving supergroup of musicians and dubbed them
his All Star Band. The group's first iteration in nineteen
(33:10):
eighty nine included rock and roll royalty like Joe Walsh,
Nile's Loughbrin, Doctor John Billy Preston, and Rick Danko, and
Levon Helm from the band The All Star Band Mind
the Past for musical treasure, performing many of its members'
older hits for new audiences. Ringo then embraced the legacy
of his old band, The Beatles, beginning with the massive
anthology mini series and book undertaking in the nineteen nineties
(33:34):
and continuing with the seemingly perennial stream of reissues and
reappraisals of the band's back catalog that continues today. In turn,
the fans embraced Ringo and offered their own reappraisal of
his part in music history. Ringo stocks Guy rocketed. The
appreciation for his unorthodox playing hid an all time high.
(33:54):
Fans were suddenly rushing to his defense. Rather than making
him the butt of the joke, they protected him. They
praised Ringo's heavy drone beat and Tomorrow never knows his
rhythmic accents had come together the way he played his
part and ticket to ride, dragging the beat by thundering
of the toms. No one played like Ringo. Fellow drum
(34:15):
and admitted beatlemaniac Dave Grohl put it best, Ringo is
the king of feel, But Ringo Starr spent so much
of his life after the Beatles not feeling like the
king of anything. And that is a disgrace. I'm Jake Brennan,
and this is Disgraceland. Disgraceland was created by Yours Truly
(34:52):
and is produced in partnership with Double Elvis. Credits for
this episode can be found on the show notes page
at disgracelamdpod dot com. If you're listening as a Disgraceland
All Access member, thank you for supporting the show. We
really appreciate it. And if not, you can become a
member right now by going to disgracelampod dot com slash Membership.
Members can listen to every episode of disgracelan ad free,
(35:16):
Plus you'll get one brand new exclusive episode every month,
weekly unscripted bonus episode, special audio collections, and early access
to merchandise and events. Visit disgracelampod dot com slash membership
for details, Rate and review the show, and follow us
on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and Facebook at disgracelampod and on
YouTube at YouTube dot com slash at disgracelampod. Rock a Roller,
(35:43):
He's a Mann
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