Richard Starkey was born into a working-class home in the Dingle, a rough neighborhood in Liverpool, England, on July 7,1940. A sickly boy, he spent several years in a children’s hospital, and while there he was taught how to play drums by a percussion band that showed up regularly to entertain the kids. At 16 he bought a $3 bass drum and built a kit around it out of tin cans.
In 1959, Richard—now called Ringo—became popular around Liverpool drumming for Rory Storme & the Hurricanes, a skiffle group that would evolve into the city’s top rock’n’roll band.. .until another outfit called the Beatles started competing with them.
When Ringo joined the opposition in mid-August 1962, he hit the ground running, for the Beatles had just landed a contract with EMI and were beginning one of the most remarkable careers in music history. Within a year and a half, Ringo was an international celebrity.
Because of his sweet, placid nature-coupled with the fact that he rarely sang and didn’t begin writing songs until late in the Beatles’ career—Ringo’s talented, often volatile mates overshadowed him. He was often perceived as the "dull" or "dumb" Beatle.
However, as John Lennon remarked to Tom Snyder on the Tomorrow show in 1974, "He ain’t dumb."
After the 1970 breakup of the group, Ringo enjoyed a string of with Rory Top 40 charters, including two #1 hits, "Photograph" (which he wrote with his pal George Harrison) and "You’re Sixteen," in 1973. He also starred in a dozen or so films, including That ’ll Be the Day. Now closing in on 50, Ringo is married to his second wife, Barbara Bach, and has been a grandfather for five years. He returned to the limelight last year with a successfiil 30-city American tour. He also, in his own Words, "returned to the land of the living" by entering a detox center and ending his alcohol dependency.
We spoke to Ringo in Beverly Hills.
SH-BOOM: I understand you changed your name to Ringo Starr while you were with Rory Storme’s band?
RINGO: We all thought we’d change our names because show biz means changing your name. [Laughs] So the guitarist called himself Johnny Guitar, and in the end, because we’re all English, we all picked cowboy names like Ty Hardin, Lou O’Brien, Rory Storme and Ringo Starr—because of the rings, which I always wore then.
SH-BOOM: Did the West fascinate you?
RINGO: Yeah, cowboys. Your cowboys were great heroes to us. To an English kid, a cowboy was a fascinating thing, you know, in his leather waistcoat and his black gloves and all that. Also, where we come from, Liverpool, which is a port, is very heavy into country and western [music] because all the guys on the boats would fetch records from America. It’s the capital of England for country-and-western music. We were like the English cowboys.
SH-BOOM: Did you have any drummer idols who influenced you?
RINGO: No, the only drum record I ever bought was Cozy Cole, "Topsy, Part 1 & 2." [Cole was a black jazz drummer from the ’30s and ’40s whose "Topsy" was a huge 1958 rock’n’roll hit.] I used to like Gene Krupa, although I never bought any of his records. It was that type of drumming, though—heavy tomtom stuff—and Cozy Cole was another tom-tom person. I was never into drummers, and I never did solos. I hated solos. I wanted to be the drummer within the band, not the front man. The longest solo I ever did was 13 bars.
SH-BOOM; Did you always want to play rock’n’roll?
RINGO; I was purely rock’n’roll. Drummers or musicians were either going for jazz or rock’n’roll. I used to get so mad at the drummers who wanted to play jazz. I always felt it was like rats running around the kit if you played jazz, and I just liked it solid. So we’d have these great, deep discussions about drums. It was all so exciting then.
SH-BOOM: How’d you meet the Beatles?
RINGO; I was playing with Rory for 18 months or two years. We’d all played the same venues, and at the time, Rory and the Hurricanes used to be top of the bill, and there’d be all these other bands on, and occasionally the Beatles would play. It ended up that they were the only band I ever watched, because they were really good, even in those days. Just one morning I was in bed, as usual, because I don’t like getting up in the day, I live at night, so a knock came at the door and Brian Epstein said, "Would you play a lunchtime session at the Cavern with the Beatles?" And I said, "Okay, okay, I’ll get out of bed," and I went and played with them. They were doing very few of their own songs then, but they were doing really great old tracks—Shirelles’ tracks and Chuck Berry tracks—they did it so well. They had a good style. I don’t know; there was a whole feel about Paul, George and John. And Pete [Best], it’s no offense, but I never felt he was a great drummer. He had one sort of style, which was very good for them in those years, I suppose, but they felt, I think, that they wanted to move out of it more. So I played the session, then we went out and got drunk, and then I went home.
SH-BOOM: So it was a one-shot deal.
RINGO: It was, but we [already] knew each other. We met in Germany when Rory played there and so did the Beatles, but we didn’t play with each other.
SH-BOOM: Was that gig an audition?
RINGO: No, Pete wasn’t well or something, so they needed a drummer for the session. So I went and played, and that was all there was to it. This went on for about six months where every couple of weeks I’d play, for whatever reasons. Then there was some talk about me joining, and I was asked would I like to. I said yeah, and then went away again with Rory to play a holiday camp for three months. About five weeks in...
https://www.beatles.ru/books/paper.asp?id=2555
