Ringo Starr Is Reborn With a lot of help from his friends, Ringo has gotten his act together and taken it on the road
Ringo Starr during Ringo Starr Announces 1989 'Concert For All Generations' Tour at Hollywood Palladium, Hollywood, California, June 29th, 1989 Ron Galella
M ommy! Daddy! Ringo Starr is here! Ringo Starr is here!" Josh Fishof, the six-year-old son of concert promoter and sports agent David Fishof, is in a frenzy. He's running around his family's Manhattan town house, sounding the alarm that the British are coming — Ringo and his eighteen-year-old daughter, Lee, have arrived for dinner.
As it turns out, Josh is thrilled not because he's a Beatles fan — after all, the band broke up thirteen years before he was born — but because he knows Starr as the inch-tall character Mr. Conductor on the children's television show Shining Time Station. Starr is here for a party to celebrate the announcement of his first tour since the days when he was Fab. Even in this era of just saying no, the affair is an atypically wholesome rock & roll evening: It's kosher (in keeping with Fishof's Orthodox faith) and alcohol-free (in keeping with Starr's recent postrehab habits). Some members of Ringo's All-Starr Band — former James Gang and Eagles guitarist Joe Walsh, E Street Band saxophonist Clarence Clemons and E Street guitarist Nils Lofgren — are chatting down-stairs near a platter of kosher shrimp substitute in the shadow of a gargantuan projection TV; Todd Rundgren, who's not on the tour, is upstairs tinkling away on the Claviola that's next to the fireplace, above which hangs a Chagall. Though the air conditioning isn't keeping things nearly cool enough, the mood is relatively festive. Rightly so, since the evening is celebrating Ringo's return to musical activity after what he characterizes as "a long time during which I did a tremendous amount of absolutely nothing ."
Earlier that morning, Starr and most of the All-Starr Band — Walsh, Clemons, Lofgren, R&B keyboardist Billy Preston, former Band bassist Rick Danko and former Band drummer Levon Helm — assemble as a group for the first time at the elegant Upper East Side hotel serving as their current base. (The two other band members, New Orleans piano great Dr. John and famed session drummer Jim Keltner, have other obligations.)
After breaking bread together, the band members head downtown to the Palladium for the press conference announcing the tour. Broadcasting live to a national radio audience, Westwood One's Dick Bartley stands before a banner that reads, DIET PEPSI PRESENTS A CONCERT FOR ALL GENERATIONS: RINGO STARR AND HIS ALL-STARR BAND, and explains that he is about to announce "an unprecedented event in rock history." (Bartley used the same words at the press conference for the Who's reunion tour only weeks earlier.) Then a Pepsi executive presents the band with tour jackets, which prominently feature the Diet Pepsi logo.
Reporters meekly approach the mike to offer up a series of rather mundane questions — two reporters seem particularly concerned with whether or not Ringo will be performing "Act Naturally" in the show. The fact that nearly all the questions are directed at Ringo — who looks like Bono's hip uncle, with his black vest, white shirt, greased-back graying ponytail and, yes, several rings — suggests that the ex-Beatle's star power remains largely undiminished. Things only get interesting when a stuttering representative of the controversial New York City DJ Howard Stern asks a number of intentionally in appropriate questions, including one about how Ringo reacted to the recent trade of New York Met Lenny Dykstra. "I was shocked," Starr says, deadpan.
Throughout the event — which he opened by saying, "We're going on tour. Thanks very much. Goodbye" — Starr flashes his understated wit. He also tries, without much success, to divert the spotlight to his talented colleagues, and more than once he reassures the crowd that he and his musical pals will "play all the hits you all know and love."
Those words bring a big smile to David Fishof's face. Fishof is a hulking thirty-three-year-old who, in addition to serving as an agent for athletes like New York Giant Phil Simms and New York Met Keith Hernandez, has made millions in the last six years by putting together nostalgia shows jampacked with songs that we're all supposed to know and love — the Dirty Dancing tour, the Happy Together Tour and, most notably, the unexpectedly successful 1986 reunion tour by three-quarters of the Monkees.
But in the mathematics of the mainstream rock industry, one Beatle is still more impressive than three Monkees, and Fishof knows that this tour could become his great leap forward from rock's profitable but unprestigious minors to the big leagues of respectability. After last summer's Dirty Dancing tour (which was sponsored by Pepsi's Mountain Dew), Pepsi approached Fishof and asked him to come up with a package for this summer. Fishof — who received a flat no two years ago when he checked on Ringo's availability — decided to try again. His timing could not have been any better. Just a few months before, in October, Ringo and his second wife, Barbara Bach (whom he'd met on the set of the 1981 comedy film Caveman ), had checked into an Arizona rehab center to clean up their acts, and for the first time in years, he was itching to get to work.
"David did a very smart thing," says Starr. "He asked . No one else had for so long, and thank God, for once I felt up to the effort."
Fishof flew to England early this year to meet with Starr. Their discussions dragged on for months, nearly breaking down entirely a number of times. Originally, Fishof envisioned a package show — "a sort of rock & roll circus," he says — in which Starr would serve as a crowd-pleasing ringmast...
https://www.beatles.ru/books/paper.asp?id=2562
