Originally published in Uncut Take 162 (November 2010 issue)…
John is in Primal Scream therapy, Paul has escaped to the Scottish wilds, George is working on his masterpiece… But what about RINGO? We discover the irrepressible drummer making a psychedelic movie with Peter Sellers, a lush oldies album with George Martin and a pioneering country album with the cream of Nashville session cats. Oh, and giving a little help to his oldest friends, of course…
THE AFTERMATH OF The Beatles’ break-up was a time of searching questions. How had it happened? What role had Yoko played? Was Paul innocent or guilty? Which band, if any, could possibly fill their shoes? And far, far below this uppermost stratum of urgent inquiry – down somewhere near the Jurassic and Triassic layers – lurked a question so poignant that it almost broke the heart to ask it. What was going to become of Ringo? The idea of a Ringo-fronted supergroup seemed unlikely to electrify the 1970s. As a singer, he made a decent fist of his limitations, if you happened to like octopuses and gardens. As a songwriter, he couldn’t have filled an EP, let alone an album. And his drumming? In an era of whirling dervishes like Keith Moon and Ginger Baker, Ringo was routinely depicted as a meat-and-potatoes sticksman. The cruellest joke ever told at his expense (“Best drummer in the world? He’s not even the best drummer in The Beatles” – John Lennon) would haunt Ringo for decades.
By October 1970, when Lennon recorded his ‘Primal Scream’ album at Abbey Road, Ringo seemed to have found a niche as a member of the Plastic Ono Band. He kept the beat with a steady hi-hat and snare, just as Lennon’s stripped-down songs required. But the Plastic Ono gig was not full-time, and Ringo was effectively a session man. “Ringo was sad,” relates Klaus Voormann, the bassist. “John was not really interested in him. John was only interested in himself, in Yoko, in the songs. Ringo was very saddened. He had lost the friend he knew. He had lost the half of John that went to Yoko. I really felt for Ringo.”
However, in the 18 months prior to the sessions for John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, Ringo had not been idle. Far from floundering, he had released two albums, won the hearts of the Nashville music community, and co-starred in a major motion picture opposite Peter Sellers. He’d even written a future Top 5 hit. To everyone’s surprise, the Beatle Least Likely To had become the most productive Beatle of all.
A SUAVE MULTIMILLIONAIRE SIDLES up to a homeless young man in a park, who is throwing bread to the ducks. As the pathos builds, under the lilting strains of Badfinger’s “Carry On Till Tomorrow”, the rich man asks the poor man if he can adopt him as his son. After some confusion, Ringo says yes. He is duly christened ‘Youngman’ and given a picaresque education in human nature – in all its greedy, needy turpitude – by his outrageously misanthropic father (Peter Sellers). Based on a Terry Southern novel, The Magic Christian is a psychedelic gross-out with an anti-capitalist message, in which familiar faces from British comedy – Patrick Cargill, Wilfred Hyde-White, Hattie Jacques – are interspersed with anarchic cameos by Yul Brynner (in drag) and Raquel Welch. As the naïve foil to the world-weary Sellers, Ringo appears in almost every scene.
“The first choice for The Magic Christian was John Lennon,” explains Joseph McGrath, the film’s director. “At that time we thought we were shooting in the States. I’d known John since I booked him as a guest on Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s Not Only… But Also, which I produced. We paid him five pounds! But the problem was, when we wanted to shoot The Magic Christian, John couldn’t get to the States. They would have turned him back as an undesirable.” Lennon’s immigration dilemma became Ringo’s stroke of fortune – although, as it happened, the film would be made in Twickenham after extensive rewrites.
Even before the disintegration of The Beatles, Ringo had come to feel that acting was an avenue worth exploring. Five years earlier, he had received impressive reviews for his Chaplinesque scene near the canal in A Hard Day’s Night, and in 1968 he’d appeared in a satirical sex comedy, Candy (based on another Terry Southern novel), trying not to feel too intimidated by the heavyweight presences of Richard Burton and Marlon Brando in the cast. “I can do the walks, the funny looks,” Ringo told Melody Maker. “To make you laugh is not hard for me on film. I can pull faces and limp a bit.” The Magic Christian was an easier proposition than Candy, since Ringo and Peter Sellers were friends in real life. It was Sellers’ yacht (Amelfis) that Ringo had escaped to after temporarily quitting The Beatles in August 1968; and he bought Sellers’ house from him that same year – Brookfield at Elstead, in Surrey-where he, his wife Maureen and theirtwo youngsonsZakand Jasonlived until December 1969. As Ringo often remarked, he and Sellers were kindred spirits. Both were drummers who’d gone into the movie business.
“we would mess around on songs. but ringo didn’t write any himself” – klaus voorman
“Ringo was fine to work with. He turned up on time, knew his lines and photographed well,” says Joe McGrath. “Every woman on the set said, ‘Aw, he’s got lovely eyes. And we let him contribute a line here and there. There’s a scene in an art gallery where Sellers buys a painting off John Cleese and then cuts the nose out of it.
Sellers says, ‘Is it Rembrandt?’ Cleese says, Well… school of Rembrandt. And Ringo ad-libs ‘St Rembrandt’s High. Which I thought was a very funny line.”
Production of The Magic Christian was due to end in May 1969 with a finale filmed beneath the Statue Of Liberty. In one last act of sneering contempt for his fellow man, Sellers’ character fills an industrial vat with excrement and throws money into it, to see if any tourists are tempted to dive in. Sellers, Starr, McGrath and the wives left Southampton on the QE2, bound for New York. McGrath: “When we got there, Commonwealth United, who were paying for the film, said, ‘We’ve changed our minds, this is disgusting.’ So we weren’t allowed to shoot. Sellers, Ringo and I decided to stop off at Nassau in the Bahamas and spend a week there. Ringo was very nice, very laidback. One day a guy turned up with a bag of golf clubs and said, ‘I’m looking for Ringo.’ I said, ‘Who are you?’ He said, ‘I’m Ringo’s best mate from Liverpool. He’s just rung me and told me to come out here.’ I think he ended up sleeping on the floor of Ringo’s chalet.”
The Magic Christian premiered in London in December 1969 (and in America a month later). Despite a lot of advance publicity, it failed at the box office. Sellers blamed poor relations between himself and the British press. The movie fared better in California, especially among young people smoking marijuana in open-air cinemas. Ringo once went to see it in Los Angeles and reported back: “You could hardly see the screen for the smoke.”
RINGO ONCE AGAIN turned his attention to making music. He’d been feeling increasingly frustrated in Surrey. He complained that it was a 90-minute drive into London, and the same on the way back, and he “hated the idea of three hours a day of my life wasted, sitting in a car”. As the 1960s ended, he moved his young family to Highgate, in north London, in order to be closer to the studios, the shops and the Apple offices. Klaus Voormann, who lived nearby, became a regular visitor to the Starr household. “Ringo was sitting there doing nothing, because he didn’t have much else to do,” Voormann comments. “We would mess around and play some pool, and have a nice time. But Ringo didn’t write any songs himself.” Which begged the question: what kind of solo records could he realistically make?
Sentimental Journey, which he recorded between October 1969 and March 1970, made no effort to be contemporary or groovy. It was an album of tunes that Ringo remembered from the wireless in the family home in Dingle. They tended to be songs written in the ’30s and ’40s. The “oldest” – “Bye Bye Blackbird”, “Stardust” – dated back to the ’20s. Ringo even consulted his aged parents, asking for requests. The producer of Sentimental Journey was George Martin, who commissioned a different arranger for each song. They included Quincy Jones, Elmer Bernstein (The Great Escape), Maurice Gibb, John Dankworth and Paul McCartney. “I enjoyed working with Ringo on the album,” Martin tells Uncut. “I recall he did it to please his father. He wanted the arrangements to be varied and good, of course, which is why I coerced some old friends to do the job. I remember Quincy being somewhat baffled, and I think he was uncomfortable with the brief, but I was able to persuade him to contribute. Elmer Bernstein took it in his stride.” The songwriter Les Reed (Herman’s Hermits, Tom Jones), who provided an arrangement of “Let The Rest Of The World Go By”, tells Uncut that he used to perform the song on an accordion in 1945 to entertain people on weekend coach trips to the seaside. Sentimental Journey was that kind of album.
In May, George Harrison asked Ringo to play drums on some sessions at Abbey Road (for All Things Must Pass), which got underway at the end of the month. Ringo was not the only drummer that Harrison had approached, and he occasionally had to suffer the ignominy of shaking a tambourine in a booth while a younger man such as Alan White sat behind the drumkit. In the meantime, unbeknown to Ringo, a conversation had taken place in New York three weeks earlier, which would have a direct influence on his next musical move. Charlie Daniels, the Nashville country singer, explains: “I ran into George Harrison at a Bob Dylan session (on May 1) and he asked the name of the pedal steel player who had played on Nashville Skyline. George gave me his phone number and I passed it on to Pete Drake. Pete went to England to work on one of George’s albums (All Things Must Pass) and while he was there, he met Ringo.”
Pete Drake was more than a pedal steel player. He was also a music publisher and record producer in Nashville, and he had songwriters who could submit material at the drop of a hat. During sessions for All Things Must Pass, Drake and Ringo had broad discussions about country music – Ringo was a longtime fan, and thought his voice might suit the country idiom – whereupon Drake offered to fly Ringo to Nashville, place him in Elvis Presley guitarist Scotty Moore’s studio with the finest musicians in town, teach him 12 tunes composed by local writers, and record a bona fide country album in two days. This was the part Ringo had difficulty believing. An album in two days? To a man who’d sat through projects like Sgt Pepper and The White Album – and taken five months to complete Sentimental Journey – the notion of making an album in 48 hours was incomprehensible. All the same, Jerry Kennedy (guitar), one of the 16 musicians who play on Ringo’s Beaucoups Of Blues, confirms: “Two days was commonplace for Nashville back then. I remember a Roger Miller album we did in one day. Every one of those musicians on the Ringo album was pretty doggone busy during those years. And I gotta tell you, they were world-class players.”
Drake assembled a ‘who’s who’ of the Nashville studio scene, including Charlie McCoy, Charlie Daniels, Ben Keith, Jim Buchanan and Grover Lavender. With Scotty Moore as engineer, DJ Fontana on drums and The Jordanaires on backing vocals, six former Elvis Presley regulars were involved. Charlie McCoy (organ, harmonica) was a veteran of Dylan’s Nashville albums Blonde On Blonde, John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline. McCoy remembers: “By that time, the gates of the Nashville recording industry were wide open. After Dylan, it became a stampede. Nashville was used to seeing pop singers and folk-rockers: The Byrds, Leonard Cohen, Joan Baez, Buffy Sainte-Marie. As we saw it, it helped to spread the fame.” But Nashville had never greeted a Beatle. The Fabs had not played there.
“Try hiding one of The Beatles in a place like Nashville. the kids went crazy!” – jim buchanan
The closest they’d come was Memphis, 200 miles away, in the infamous ‘firecracker’ concert of 1966. Andy McLenon, a Nashville-based music writer, remarks: “It’s easy to forget, but the ‘magic’ of a Beatle was so strong at that point. If Ringo came to town now, God bless him, it would be no big deal. But when he came here in 1970, he was part of the biggest phenomenon the pop world had known. I think his visit to Nashville is very underrated. Dylan had been here, but Dylan never had that kind of teen fanaticism that The Beatles had. Nashville was going through a mindset change – marijuana was introduced, and the whole deal – and Ringo’s visit was important in the history of that. Here was a legitimate rock god, doing a real country record in Nashville.”
Ringo arrived in late June. Jim Buchanan, a fiddle player, was deputed to drive him around town. “Try hiding one of The Beatles in a place like Nashville,” Buchanan says ruefully. “The news broke and the kids just went absolutely crazy in Davidson County and all around. We were having to send out false information. The kids were at all the hotels and motels, hanging out on each floor by the elevators. They had walkie-talkies so they could contact one another if he was seen. Tracy Nelson [Nashville-based singer] lived on a farm east of town, out towards the Mount Juliet area, so I took Ringo out of the recording studio, put him on the bus and took him out to the farm. He could relax there, hang out, admire the South and enjoy what we had to offer.”
In the studio, the Nashville musicians were struck by Ringo’s easygoing personality and professionalism. “He is no George Jones but he did a decent job” more than one of them concludes. Like Charlie McCoy, guitarist Jerry Kennedy regarded the Ringo project as a positive step for the Nashville music community, but came to see it as something more. Kennedy: “It was exciting to meet a Beatle, number one, and number two, I felt we did something [good] for him. I was impressed by him. He could have been a jerk if he’d wanted to, with his stature and his success, but he was really down-to-earth.” Ringo endeared himself to the musicians by having a photo taken with all of them on a vacant lot across the road from the studio. A few brought their families to meet him. Ringo used the photo on the back cover of Beaucoups Of Blues, with all their names underneath. It was a much appreciated gesture. Jim Buchanan: “The picture was his way of saying, ‘These are my friends – and this is what they look like.’ I used to talk with Ringo, riding around on the bus, and I told him my people were from Scotland. He said, ‘Oh, I go to Scotland all the time. Why don’t you come over and spend two or three months with me, and we’ll jump on a train and ride up to Scotland?’ And I’m sure he meant it, too. He really seemed to be that nice a guy.”
Beaucoups Of Blues was released in September 1970 and was an immediate anomaly. It was a country album made by an English rock star, as the follow-up to an album to which it bore no thematic relation. It was released on Apple, not a label accustomed to marketing forlorn ballads and whiskey-drinking songs, and little airplay was forthcoming on radio stations around Nashville because Ringo was not a recognised country artist. The album flopped, but Ringo has frequently called it his personal favourite. Six months later, he had no such trouble obtaining airplay. “It Don’t Come Easy”, a song Ringo had written and recorded with George Harrison during the Sentimental Journey period, was finally released in 1971 and reached No 4 in both Britain and America. “Even if he can’t sing for peanuts, it’s good to see Ringo having a go,” wrote the NME. It was the sort of complimentary insult that the sad-eyed drummer from St Rembrandt’s High was just going to have to get used to.