RINGO STARR – Non-Beatles Career
Ringo Starr is without a doubt the most under-appreciated member of the Beatles, so it is not surprising that, when us four Winfree kids divvied up the Fab Four among ourselves, I wound up with Ringo as my favorite Beatle.
Ringo Starr (real name: Richard Starkey, Jr.) was the final addition to the classic line-up when he was brought in as the band’s drummer, replacing Pete Best. He is the oldest of the Beatles (all of 23 when they hit the big time), having been born three months before John Lennon.
As a young teenager, he contracted tuberculosis in 1953 and was in a sanatorium for two years. To encourage physical activity, a makeshift drum set was set up next to his bed, and he later joined the band at the hospital. Ringo Starr recalls: “I was in the hospital band. . . . That’s where I really started playing. I never wanted anything else from there on. . . . My grandparents gave me a mandolin and a banjo, but I didn’t want them. My grandfather gave me a harmonica. . . . we had a piano – nothing. Only the drums.”
While working as a machinist in a local factory, Richard Starkey befriended Roy Trafford, who introduced him to skiffle music. The two began practicing together and were joined by another co-worker Eddie Miles, forming the Eddie Miles Band that was later renamed Eddie Clayton and the Clayton Squares. (Interestingly, Eric Clapton took the pseudonym “Eddie Clayton” in his credits for Wonderwall Music, perhaps from this connection).
As skiffle became displaced by American rock and roll, and billed as Ritchie Starkey, he joined a band called Texans in November 1959 that was led by Al Caldwell. They were a well known skiffle band that was trying to reinvent themselves as a rock band. The band went through several names – the Raging Texans, then Jet Storm and the Raging Texans – before settling on Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. Starkey developed the Ringo Starr persona at that time, due to his propensity for wearing numerous rings. They became one of the top bands in Liverpool in 1960 and eventually made their way to Hamburg, where they crossed paths with the Beatles; initially, however, they were billed above the Fab Four and were also paid more.
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Ringo Starr arguably has had the most successful post-Beatles career. His first solo album, Sentimental Journey is a collection of pre-rock standards; made mainly to please his parents, he is one of the first rock musicians to attempt to cover these earlier styles of music. After a country collection called Beaucoups of Blues, Ringo Starr settled back into rock music and made a series of excellent albums that spawned nearly as many major hit songs as his three better-known bandmates combined: two #1 singles, “Photograph” and “You’re Sixteen” plus “It Don’t Come Easy”, “Back Off Boogaloo”, “Oh My My”, “Only You”, and “No No Song”.
For the past 25 years, Ringo Starr has spent most of his time with Ringo Starr’s All Starr Band, which has featured a rotating line-up of some of the finest rock musicians on earth, Levon Helm, Joe Walsh, Nils Lofgren, Billy Squier, and Edgar Winter among them. They are dropping by the Mississippi Gulf Coast in the middle of next month.
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In an interview published in 2010 in The Daily Telegraph that was mostly about the “more popular than Jesus” business, Ringo Starr says that he has found religion: “For me, God is in my life. I don’t hide from that. I think the search has been on since the 1960’s.”
(September 2014)
