Ringo Starr is back on the road with a little help from his friends
Photo by Mike Colucci
Ringo Starr and His All Starr Band will be at PPG Paints Arena Saturday. The line-up for this tour is, from left, Warren Ham, Edgar Winter, Colin Hay, Ringo Starr, Hamish Stuart, Gregg Bissonette and Steve Lukather.
Courtesy of Beautiful Day Media
Ringo Starr at a press conference last month before the start of his latest U.S. tour.
Editor’s note: Ringo Starr and his All Starr Band just announced that the Pittsburgh tour date and 11 others would be canceled after two band members tested positive for COVID-19. Starr said the canceled dates would be added to the fall leg of the tour, but a new date for the show has not yet been set.
His fortune presumably secure and his legacy even more so, Ringo Starr has no need to tour.
The former Beatles drummer who is a couple of weeks shy of his 82nd birthday could comfortably stay close to his Los Angeles mansion and putter around in his home studio, create some art and maintain the rigorous diet and exercise regimen that has led to him looking and performing like someone decades younger.
Yet during the enforced layoff from the road over the last two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Starr said he was itching the whole time to get back in front of audiences.
“Two-and-a-half years has been really difficult,” he explained last month in an online press conference from suburban Toronto the day before his latest North American tour got underway. “I love to play, as you can tell. I put the All Starrs together 33 years ago, and I was in a couple of bands before that, and for me that’s what it’s all about — playing and having an audience.”
As always, Starr is hitting the highway with a little help from some high-profile musical friends. Since 1989, Starr has been taking various editions of his All Starr Band out with him, with lineups consisting of fellow veteran rockers who have notched hits of their own. Past iterations have included Peter Frampton, Billy Preston, Joe Walsh, Todd Rundgren and Billy Squier, among many, many others. This time around, Starr is surrounding himself with multi-instrumentalist and “Frankenstein” creator Edgar Winter, former Men at Work frontman Colin Hay, Toto guitarist Steve Lukather, former Average White Band bassist Hamish Stuart, percussionist Warren Ham and second drummer Gregg Bissonette. They will be at PPG Paints Arena in Pittsburgh Satuday, playing a show that was originally scheduled for June 20, 2020, was postponed to June 18, 2021, and ended up being moved back one more year as the pandemic dragged on.
“It was the first time we ever had to go through anything like that,” Starr said.
Since 1988, Starr has replaced the alcoholism that could have made him into another rock and roll casualty with a kind of workaholism. He’s regularly released new music, though it has not found the same level of chart success he enjoyed with the Beatles or in the early days in his solo career, and his All Starr tours have become more and more frequent. In the 22 years since the turn of the century, he has not been out playing live in only seven of those years, with two of them the result of the pandemic.
Without an All Starr trek to look toward, Starr put out two EPs, “Zoom In” and “Change the World,” and has completed a third one that has yet to be released. He also played drums on albums by other artists, turning up on new discs by Hay and Winter, as well as onetime All Starr Sheila E., and country singer Ray Wylie Hubbard.
“They just send the files to my studio,” Starr explained. Playing drums for fellow musicians “was great for me in the pandemic, that I was asked to play on all these records, with different styles, different attitudes. So, overall musically, I’ve been compensating a lot because I couldn’t go out on the road.”
Another preoccupation has been art. Starr has released books of his photographs and paintings and has an online gallery — www.ringostarrart.com — where visitors can look at his work and buy posters, signed prints and other merchandise. More recently, Starr has expanded into digital art, samples of which were auctioned off this week.
“I started doing computer art in the 1990s on tour, because there’s a lot of downtime in the hotel room and I started to paint,” he said.
Over the years, the All Starr tours have been predicated on the idea that all the participants would play “the songs you know and love,” and on this tour Starr offers up solo hits like “Back off Boogaloo,” “It Don’t Come Easy” and “Photograph,” as well as Beatles classics like “Yellow Submarine” and “I Wanna Be Your Man.” For the first time ever on an All Starr tour, he is also playing “Octopus’s Garden,” his contribution to the Fab Four’s “Abbey Road” album.
Given the undying fascination the world has with the Beatles, it’s inevitable that Starr is still asked about the group more than a half-century after they went their separate ways. He had nothing but compliments for the eight-hour “Get Back” documentary that looked inside the turbulent January 1969 sessions that yielded the “Let It Be” album and movie and aired on Disney Plus in November. Edited together by “Lord of the Rings” maestro Peter Jackson using footage that had long languished in the Beatles’ archives, Starr said he preferred “Get Back”‘s more expansive and nuanced look at the band’s musical and personal relationships to the more downbeat “Let It Be” movie, which has not been available on home video or been screened on television in 40 years.
He explained, “I never liked (‘Let It Be’) because it was so narrow. … All the down parts. We were laughing and having fun and we played great. I thought it was too down.”
Starr will be in Pittsburgh on the 80th birthday of Paul McCartney, the other surviving Beatle. McCartney just finished a round of shows in the United States, and Starr is due to be back out in North America in September and October, playing in markets as large as Mexico City and as small as Mount Pleasant, Mich. Despite many of their contemporaries quitting live work or charting farewell tours, neither Starr nor McCartney seem inclined just yet to entertain the “r” word — retirement.
“My mother, she had this great line,” Starr recalled. “She said, ‘You know what, son?’ I always feel you’re at your happiest when you’re playing. And deep inside, I am. … And people say, ‘What about retirement?’ Well, I’m a musician, I don’t need to retire. As long as I can pick up those sticks, I got a gig.”