Could ‘Yellow Submarine’ have been another color? Ringo Starr responds
Ringo Starr chats with USA TODAY’s Melissa Ruggieri about staying in shape and the history of The Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine.”
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Beetles first appeared on our planet about 300 million years ago and they’re still going strong.
Beatle Ringo Starr is making his own bid for the record books. At 82, the Fab Four kit man is still on the road making music, kicking off yet another leg of his never-ending Ringo Starr & His All-Starr Band tour Friday in Temecula, California.
Why do it? Surely he’s got famous friends to visit and grandkids to goof off with.
“We come from an area of life where they didn’t have to pay you, we wanted to play more than anything else,” says Starr, who will play 23 U.S. dates in the West through late June before launching a broader national tour in the fall.
“I love playing, it’s just part of me now, and it was then, at 13,” he says. “I had the dream to play drums, and I ended up being that person, and I’m still that person. There’s nothing like it. You’re onstage, with the audience, there’s the band, it’s magical nights. You can’t explain it, it’s just wow.”
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Asked if he ever imagined that he’d be gigging more than 60 years after he first sat behind a drum kit, Starr suddenly is back in the 1960s, recalling the time when The Beatles were – incredibly – just an opening act.
“We opened in England for this girl, (teen pop sensation) Helen Shapiro, and she had a big band behind her,” Starr recalls. “I asked one guy in that band how old he was, and he said 40. And I said, ‘Forty, get off, and you’re still doing it?’ Well, that’s how you feel when you’re younger.”
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Starr allows that he is grateful he can find musicians to go on tour with him, “as I can’t just do songs with me and my drums.”
Not that that was ever a problem. Starr formed his All-Starr band back in 1989 after getting fast commitments from musicians such as the Eagles’ Joe Walsh, Bruce Springsteen guitarist Nils Lofgren and legendary session drummer Jim Keltner, who remains a icon for the Beatles drummer.
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“Jim is my all-time hero drummer, no one is as good as him − I love Jim, and that’s about it,” he says. But someone else actually does impress Starr: a Foo Fighter.
“I’ve seen Dave Grohl play straight,” he says, meaning without the usual thundering, cymbal-crashing drama Grohl made famous on Nirvana albums. “He was doing backup at some party and he was doing it straight. And I was like, OK, wow.”
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Starr’s fierce desire to be on the road gigging aside, he was sidelined twice in 2022 with COVID-19, the second time last October before a show in Seattle. “It was all set up, and we got to the soundcheck and then it was all … ugh.”
While he says the virus never kept him down for long, it made its way through his band of veteran musicians, felling bluesman Edgar Winter, 76, and Toto guitarist Steve Lukather, 65. (The current lineup also includes Colin Hay, Warren Ham, Hamish Stuart and Gregg Bissonette.)
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But everyone is healthy now, he says, and eager to play. And what is one of his all-time favorite tunes to perform live?
That would be “Get Back,” the namesake song of Peter Jackson’s epic retooled Beatles documentary about the 1969 studio sessions that preceded the band’s breakup.
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The mere mention of the eight-hour documentary sends Starr back in time once more.
“I love (the song) ‘Get Back,’ ” he says, beaming. “If you look at the (documentary) … I never played to the whole song (in the studio). Anyway, all the bits we were writing, it was regular rock,” he says, miming a straight-ahead drum pattern.
But when the band decided to perform the song live on the rooftop of their Apple Corps headquarters in London, Starr found himself playing a more shuffling rat-ta-tat pattern.
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“Up there on the roof, it was this other pattern,” he says, eyes widening at the memory of it. “I thought, why did I get to that, how did I get to that?”
Told that band acquitted themselves well despite that chilly January English weather, Starr laughs. “It was raining, I’ve got my wife’s red raincoat on,” he says of first wife Maureen Cox. “But, hey, we’re English.”
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Speaking of The Beatles, might he ever consider telling the band’s epic tale from the point of view of the man behind the bass drum? The question brings an unhesitating no.
“That’s all they want to know, that’s why I got fed up (with the idea),” he says. “They offered me lots of money over the last many years, and I said I’m not doing a book, because it’d be three volumes before I get to that year.” (He joined The Beatles from Rory Storm and the Hurricanes in 1962.)
“I have just never found interest in it,” he says of writing a book. “I don’t want to do Ringo the drummer, because we’re all a bit more than that.”
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Having said that, the eight impactful years Starr spent with his mates from Liverpool is never far from his heart.
In fact, if you’re lucky, you might spot him in the crowd during one of the final performances of “The Beatles Love by Cirque du Soleil,” whose Las Vegas run is thought to be wrapping up possibly late in 2023 after 16 years as The Mirage hotel undergoes a major renovation after being purchased by the Hard Rock.
“We live in LA, so it’s just up the road,” he says. “I was thinking of going nearer the end.”
The end? It’s not in sight yet for this Beatle.
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