DISGRACELAND - Ringo Starr: Busted by Mexican Federales, Threatened by French-Canadian Separatists, and the King of Feel

Episode Date: October 4, 2022

Ringo Starr’s first show as the Beatles’ new drummer was nearly ruined by a hostile audience that wanted him out of the band. Although he was finally accepted as one of the Fab Four, he was still targeted by those who did not wish him well. French-Canadian separatists in Montreal threatened to kill him. Mexican Federales tried to lock him up and throw away the key. And a decades-long running gag that he wasn’t creatively on par with his fellow Liverpool lads nearly undermined his legacy. It wasn’t until Ringo conquered his own beaucoups of blues that he got the respect he deserved and the world recognized him for what he is: in the words of his old mate John, “the greatest.”This episode contains themes that may be disturbing to some listeners and includes descriptions of domestic violence and suicide. If you're thinking about suicide, or are worried about a friend or loved one, call the Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255.To see the full list of contributors, see the show notes at www.disgracelandpod.com.To listen to Disgraceland ad free and get access to a monthly exclusive episode, weekly bonus content and more, become a Disgraceland All Access member at disgracelandpod.com/membership.Sign up for our newsletter and get the inside dirt on events, merch and other awesomeness - GET THE NEWSLETTERFollow Jake and DISGRACELAND:InstagramYouTubeX (formerly Twitter) Facebook Fan GroupTikTok To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is exactly right. Double Elvis. Disgraceland is a production of Double Elvis. The stories about Ringo Starr are insane. A hostile audience nearly ruined his debut as the Beatles drummer because they wanted him out of the band. French-Canadian separatists in Montreal threatened his life. He was followed and detained by Mexican Federale's hellbent on locking him up for good.

He nearly killed himself and his wife when he drove his Mercedes and did not one but two lamp posts in a rainstorm. And despite a decades-long running gag that he wasn't creatively on par with his fellow fabs and the Beatles, Ringo Starr made some of the most profound innovations in rock drumming, creating some of the greatest drumtracks on some of the greatest songs of all time. Unlike that music I played for you at the top of the show, that wasn't from a great song. That was a preset loop from a Melotron called Phantom Buddha M. K. I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to breaking up as hard to do by Neil Sedaka. And why would I play you that specific slice of down-duby-doo down-down cheese could I afford it?

Because that was the number one song in America on August 19, 1962. And that was the day that Ringo Starr played his first gig with the Beatles at the legendary cavern club, a gig that nearly ended in a riot. On this episode, hostile audiences, French-Canadian separatists, Mexican Federales, and Ringo Star. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is disgrace land. You can tell they were Federales because they looked exactly like they did in the movies. The military costumes were elaborate, downright theatrical even. Jackets, stiffly buttoned up to the neck, crowned hats with little visors nestled perfectly atoply.

their heads. But this wasn't a Sergio Leone or Sam Peckinpaw movie. James Coburn and Ernest Borgna weren't going to come to a rescue with shotguns drawn. This was real life. This was Guadalajara Airport. This was the dawn of the 1980s. February 1980, to be exact. Ringo's star was trying to go incognito, you know, like a man with no name, but it wasn't working. Everyone knew Ringo's name. That is to say, they knew the stage name that had long since eclipsed the name his mother gave him. It also just become the first beetle to ever step foot in Mexico. Thus, the Federale is in the cafe doorway. Ringo worked on his breakfast of champions, champagne.

It was better than lukewarm coffee. Plus, it got the blood flowing for what was sure to be a multiple wine bottle kind of day. At this point, most of his days were, the ones he remembered at least. His friend Keith Allison, formerly of Paul Revere and the Raiders, sat next to him. The two were on a layover in Guadalajara, on their way to Durango to shoot a prehistoric slapstick comedy called Caveman. They carried a few suitcases with them, including a road case that held a four-track tape recorder and a guitar in case inspiration struck. The Federale sized up the cases that sat next to Ringo and Keith and thought about all the illegal drugs it must be inside. maybe a brick of marijuana,

just like the one Japanese cops found on Ringo's former bandmate Paul McCartney at the Nerita International Airport one month earlier. Paul did 10 days in a hardcore Japanese prison for that offense. Now, in Guadalajara, Mexican authorities were hoping they could follow suit. Another beetle, busted. That would be movie bueno. For the Federale, that could mean a serious bump at take-home pay. Ringo knew it wasn't a movie, but still,

He couldn't help but hear music playing his head as he returned the Federale's dead-eyed stare. He heard an ocarina, trumpets, whistling, a soprano recorder that sounded like a dying coyote, a soundtrack to Ringo's own personal Mexican standoff. The Federales finally walked up to Ringo and Keith and asked to see their passports. Ringo began to panic. He couldn't be that stupid, right? Not after what happened to Paul. He hadn't smuggled any drugs in his luggage.

so he thought. He was sure, pretty sure. And then again, there were entire years from the last decade that he couldn't even remember. His brain was pickled. Fuck, Ringo thought. Ringo's act was either too natural or not natural enough.

The Federales weren't satisfied with a stinking passport. They took the duo to a cramped private room, and they dug through the pockets of Geese jacket. They looked inside Ringo's boot like it was a cavernous vessel for contraband. The Federales told Ringo and Keith to take out their wallets. Then they tapped the bills on top of a slab of black marble on a table.

The marble was so black that any white residue that fell from the bills would be noticed immediately. The Federales just needed a speck to fall on that marble, a flake, some dust. Ringo told them that their efforts were in vain and they weren't going to find anything. Privately, to himself, he hoped to God they wouldn't. Ringo wasn't simply anxious. He was also annoyed by all the unwanted attention he was currently receiving. He had spent a good chunk of the past decade trying to distance himself from the Beatles, trying to leave the past in the past and finally move on.

And now, the only reason his shit had been seized and searched was because of that past. When the Beatles broke up in 1970 at the height of an unprecedented career that seemed to have no ceiling, Ringo let the other guys in the band cool off. They could be angry. Ringo wasn't the getting angry type. He'd just hang around until they were ready to get back together. As it became increasingly obvious that a reunion was never going to happen, but with Paul and John waging a public war in song, Ringo finally just got on with it. Feeling like it equal to Paul, John and George, had been hard enough from the start.

Ringo may have been the oldest beetle in age, but he was the last to join. The other three had already developed the brotherly bond, and they'd spent the better part of two years perfecting it. Ringo felt like a heel, like he wasn't out of the joke, even though he was as witty as any of them. He was even known as the Funny Beetle. The producer, George Martin, was underwhelmed by Ringo's playing

and replaced him with another drummer on his very first recording session with the band. The version of Love Me-Due released as a U.S. single and on the Beatles' debut album, Please Please Me, featured not Ringo on drums, but Session Man, Andy White. Ringo is relegated to tambourine. Only the UK single release featured the earlier take with Ringo on drums.

In later years, George Martin explained that he'd already booked White to play before Ringo had joined the band, but that testimony contradicts studio logs that clearly show the Abbey Road production team was unsatisfied with Ringo's contribution. Ringo never really shook the stigma of being just the drummer and the Beatles. Did it bug him that he couldn't write a song that could go toe-to-toe with his bandmates? Sure. Was he frustrated that he couldn't play any other instigues? besides the drums, of course. But that didn't mean he was creatively challenged.

There's a joke that's often attributed to John Lennon, though it was actually made by a comedian after John's death that goes, Ringo wasn't the best drummer in the world. He wasn't even the best drummer in the Beatles. Consider, however, that when Ringo briefly quit the band during the making of the White album, it took all three of the other Beatles to cobble together a decent drum track for back in the USSR.

I'm serious. Next time you listen to the White Album's opening track, listen to the drums. That is the sound of Paul, John, and George, all trying very hard to do the thing that Ringo did very simply. Don't come easy, lads. The truth was that Ringo was an innovator. Never before had the way the drums were played been such a central component to the construction of a song. In the history of popular music, there's B-R and A-R, before Ringo and after Ringo. And no one played the same after Ringo hit the scene. But in 1980, that was a lot of the wasn't Ringo's legacy. Ringo remained the fool, the funny beetle, the non-creative one,

the one who wasn't rated very highly, just a lucky kid from Liverpool's tough end who happened to catch the break of a lifetime. And he was pretty goddamn sick of hearing about it. Sitting in a private room at the Guadalajara airport, with Fetarola is tearing through his luggage, Ringo was forced to hear about it, talk about it, and think about it all over again. He just wanted to be someone else, but who exactly could he be, if not, a beetle? How would Ringo Starr define himself in the 1980s and beyond? Could he even summon the energy to try? Just a few years before, Ringo Starr physically altered his appearance

in hopes that it would change who he was. He walked into a barber shop and said, Take it all off. They shaved his head, his beard, his mustache. The only hair he had left on his head was his eyebrows. But if this barber were showing photographs, one could plainly see that he had even severely thinned the woolly catapy. pillars above Ringo's eyes.

He had never looked less beetle-esque in all of his life. At the time, Ringo said that he did it because where he was living, Monte Carlo, was too hot and he needed to cool off. But later, in an interview with People magazine, he gave a very different reason.

It was a time when you either cut your wrists or your hair, Ringo said. And I'm. It was widely known throughout Liverpool that Ringo's Star was the best. Other drummers wished they could play like them. Most bands thought seriously about replacing their drummers with Ringo

because no one played like Ringo. Ringo's technique was homegrown. Unlike other drummers who held the right stick overhand style and the left stick underhand style, Ringo opted for an odd matchstick style approach, which meant he held both of his drum sticks overhand. And despite being left-handed, he played his drum kit as if he were right-handed, which meant that he led with his left-hand while moving across the drums from the drum. left to right. And he looked cool as shit doing it. No one looked cooler than Ringo Star.

In the early 1960s, he out-cooled his band leader Rory Storm of Rory Storm in the hurricanes when he shook his head in ecstasy from behind the kit. He had a beard at the time when young musicians were clean-shaven and impresentable to take home to mom. He drove a Zephyr Zodiac. He was the coolest motherfucker in the room, in any room. But tonight, August 19th, 1962, At 22 years old, on stage at the soon-to-be legendary cavern club in Liverpool, perhaps the most important night of his professional life up until that time. Ringo did not feel cool. He felt woefully inadequate, like an imposter.

The cavern was packed. Rockets, applause, quickly gave way to rapid shouts and heckles. Ringo had never experienced the Javala Vive and all of his years drumming with other bands. The voices in the audience weren't chanting for another song. They were chanting for another drummer. Ringo didn't know if he'd make it out of the dang cellar alive. As each second passed, it felt more and more like his first gig as the Beatles drummer would wind up as last. Okay, so technically it was his second gig as the Beatles drummer.

The first had taken place at the Horticultural Society dance the night before, but who does a fuck about the garden show? This was the first gig that mattered. This was the Cavern Club, the claustrophobic underground venue that was to early. rock and roll what CBGBs would be to punk. It was where early Beatles fans lost their collective shit while witnessing some of the most cathartic live music ever performed. And there was one thing the majority of those Beatles fans agreed on that night. Pete Best, forever, Ringo, never. They shouted

it over and over again. Pete Best, forever, Ringo, never. Pete Best, forever, Ringo, never. Best, of course, was the Beatles' original drummer, up until a few days before. His sacking came as a shock to fans. He had been there from the beginning, through the band's formative touring ears. But in the eyes of John, Paul, and George, Pete never really fit into the goon-show vibe of the band. As Paul McCartney once said, we were the wacky trio, and Pete was perhaps a little more sensible. So the band did the sensible thing. They fired Pete.

Technically, they had their manager Brian Epstein fired Pete best. Pete felt like he'd been stabbed in the back. He was so distraught that he actually contemplated tying a rock around his neck and jumping in the Mercy River. Other Liverpool drummers were equally shocked. To them, replacing Pete, even for one gig, was tantamount to a scab crossing of Union picket line.

When Johnny Hutchinson, drummer for a rival band called the Big Three, was asked to keep Pete's seat warm for Ringo, who was tying up loose ends with Rory Storm. Hutchinson immediately declined. I wouldn't join the Beatles for a gold clock, he said. Pete Best is a very good friend of mine. I wouldn't do the dirty on him. The Beatles' own road manager, Neil Aspinall, was doing the dirty with Pete Best's mom,

and was the father of Pete's newborn half-brother. Even he was on Pete's side. At first, Neil refused to set up Ringo's drums at shows. The coup happening in the drum seat of Liverpool's greatest band was not without some serious disturbances in both the band camp and its fanatical fan base. And right now, in the depths of the cavern club, it seemed a disturbance of savage proportions was about to break out.

The chants and screams from the audience were getting louder. Ringo tried to tune them out, try to keep on playing, swinging the beat like a motherfucker and shaking his head in the way that typically got fans worked up into a frenzy. But he couldn't concentrate. All he could hear was the incessant Ringo never over and over and over. It made him feel less than, unwanted, like he was trying to insert himself into a family that didn't want him there. Brian Epstein was paying him 25 pounds a week, unheard of money for a drummer in Liverpool, but it wasn't worth this. The crowd moved like a pregnant wave at sea.

Ringo could sense something horrible was about to happen. All those angry people were about to crash on the stage, swallowing up Paul, John, and George first, and then last and most definitely least, Ringo, they'd destroy him. He was up on the drum throne all by himself, no protection. He never felt so vulnerable in his life. Long before he was Ringo Starr, he was Richard Starkey, but he had always been vulnerable. His father walked out when Little Ritchie was just three years old.

When he was six, his appendix burst, and he was rushed into surgery to have it removed. Nowadays, this procedure is fairly straightforward, but in 1947 it was extremely risky. The doctors told Ritchie's mother three times throughout the night that he wouldn't make it. When he did pull through, the kids at school gave him his first nickname, Lazarus.

Ritchie put that nickname to the test when at the age of 13 he was hospitalized for a second time. This time was worse. This time, he'd have to fight harder if you wanted to see another day. This time, it was tuberculosis, TB. Next to London, Liverpool had won, weathered the most casualties and architectural destruction of any British city during the war.

4,000 dead from Hitler's bombs. The place was reduced to smoldering rubble. The air was choked with Dickensian soot, a breeding ground for TB, especially in the Dingle, Liverpool's rough working-class neighborhood where Ringgo lived with his mother. In The Dingle is where he returned after two years at the Hezweil Children's Hospital after rehabilitating himself back to good health. Well, good enough health. Richie was still more fragile than the other kids, more vulnerable. He found that our first hand on the mean streets of Dingle. To survive meant first he had to have the look. Striped jacket and trousers, string tie, hair, grease back like a duck's arse.

The name Teddy Boy may have sounded sweet, but the Dingle gangs that wore the invoked look like a badge were tough as hell. Being fragile and all, Richie looked for protection in the gangs. He was roughed up a few times, but he never caught a knife. and he never knifed anyone else, but he saw other boys get stuck. He saw blood spill out by the docks. One kid got the ship pounded out of him with a hammer, another lost his eye. Richie couldn't handle it. He couldn't imagine this being his life day in and day out,

stuck in the goddamn dinkle breathing the filthy air, watching his back at all times for fear of a jump from a rival gang. He needed something to get him out for good, and he was pretty sure he had that something too. He had found it during those two long years inside the Children's Hospital. During the music classes that the hospital provided, Ritchie discovered the drums. The kit was rudimentary, but he loved the sound it made, the sound he made.

From that point on, it's all he wanted to do. He never returned to school. He just wanted to make a racket. Playing the drums and playing the drums better than anyone else in town would lead him to another gang, a rock band, which is what rock bands are at their core, gangs. For this role, he had to wear the right outfit just like he had as a teddy boy skulking around Liverpool.

But he also chose a fashion accent that was unique to him, rings that covered his fingers. And those rings led directly to his next nickname, a nickname that he would fully embrace for the rest of his life, even when people used it against him. Pete Best, Forever, Ringo, never. Jesus Christ. the peep best fans at the cavern were going to riot. Ringo could feel it. There was nowhere to

run down here, nowhere to hide. The cavern was a goddamn fire hazard. Ringo began to regret his decision to leave Rory's storm in the hurricanes. And then, for a reason that was never made clear to him, a dissenting voice rang out from the surly majority. Up with Ringo. A few more voices began to chime in. Ringo forever, Pete Bess, never. Ringo tried to find comfort in the sudden positive reinforcement. He played white-knuckled fills for the rest of the set. The tide was stemmed if not entirely turned. Yet, no one laid a finger on Ringo. George, on the other hand, he wasn't so lucky. An irate fan headbutted him right under his eye when he came off the stage. The group was hustled up the stairs and out of the club under the protection of a burly doorman.

And though the fans would eventually embrace Ringo as the cheeky fourth member of the group, Being accepted didn't mean being safe. If there was one thing Ringo knew, it was that one could never have too much protection. Because what happens tomorrow, well, one never knows. We'll be right back after this world, word, word. Ringo Starr was drunk. He'd been knocking back booze by the bottleful well before dinner at Pinocchio's, his favorite restaurant in the place he now called home.

Monty Carlo didn't just have great restaurants. It offered shelter for a wealthy musician looking to avoid paying 83% of his earnings to the UK government. Ringo's Monte Carlo's shelter was swank, a condo on the 33rd floor overlooking the Mediterranean. But most nights, the view went unadmired. Ringo was such a regular fixture at the Lowe's casino that it felt more like his home than his actual home did. The staff were so used to seeing his face and taking his money that they let him deal blackjack to gamblers who were so filthy rich they didn't even know what a fucking beetle was.

On this night, however, Ringo wasn't playing with a full deck, though he was full of wine. Wine helped him care less that he was spending way too much money on gambling and nightclothing. The Beatles had only just legally dissolved the year prior in 1975, which meant that after five long years of Alan's, and Klein's even longer red tape, Ringo finally got the financial windfall he'd been waiting for. He prioritized spending his money over making records. It was like all the things they said about him were true.

Ringo Starr wasn't brilliant like the other lads. The New York Times put it bluntly in a 1975 article. Ringo was the Beatle quote, generally judged the least exceptional in terms of talent, unquote. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy. And so was this night at Lowe's. The rooms spun almost as fast as the roulette tables. Slot machines rang out.

Cards shuffled. Champagne glasses clinked. Ringo began to argue with an employee. Why was he arguing? He couldn't be sure. He could barely see straight. Within minutes, he was tossed outside onto the lonely sidewalk. It would be a while before they invited him back.

The 1970s were rough. The decade began auspiciously enough. In in 1971, Ringo released one of the greatest solo Beatles singles of all time. It don't come easy. It hit number one on the Canadian charts and number four on the UK and U.S. charts. Even better, it outsold all three of his ex-band-made singles released at the same time. Maybe it was beginner's luck. Ringo had a few more hits with Back Off Bugaloo and Photograph.

But each subsequent album he released sold less and charted lower. Some of his records in the mid-to-late 1970s didn't. even make the charts in the UK. And then there was the divorce. And I'm not talking about the split from the Fab Four. Ringo's first marriage to Maureen Cox was flaming out, hard. Ringo and Maureen, or Mo, as she was known, first began dating way back during the Cavern Club days. And they were young when they tied the knot. He was 24 and she was 18. And as the whirlwind of fame beget the existential crisis of the Beatles' breakup, which was then compounded. by Ringo's descent into alcoholism, the marriage buckled.

To deal with the ensuing heartache, enwee, and despair, Ringo pulled a John Lennon and flew out to Los Angeles to get high with a little help from his friends. That men, night after night, have copious drinks with Beatle John, the Who's Keith Moon, Alice Cooper and Harry Nilsson, the L.A. singer-songwriter beloved by the Beatles who had struck up a brotherly friendship with Ringo. When the group switched things up and partied in London, Ringo's good friend Mark Boland of T. Rex would join them. In L.A., the lubricated crew of so-called Hollywood vampires haunted the sunset strip.

They caroused, they cavorted, they emptied every bottle they could find, they could hardly remember any of it. In fact, Ringo had to be reminded of the crazy shit he did. Like the fact that he and Harry made a seriously awful rock and roll vampire flick that no one saw called Son of Dracula, or that he recorded a single called No No Song, where he actually sings about not drugging or drinking anymore. It's a great song, by the way.

Or that he and Keith Moon managed to get the turtles, Flo and Eddie, fired from their DJ gig at LA's KROQ after they showed up and Ringo slurred the word fuck 15 times and 90 seconds live on air. And the dumbest shit was the shit you can easily forget. What Ringo could never forget, however, was the worst stuff, the most depressing stuff. Like when Mark Boland died at 29 in 19. or when Keith Moon died at 32 in 1978.

Both Mark and Keith died with their legacies intact. They were both still members of the bands that made them famous, and they were both regarded as geniuses. Ringo shuddered to think, what would the world say about him if he stopped breathing tomorrow? From where he typically sat, high above the rest of the Beatles on his drum riser, Ringo Star couldn't help but feel exposed.

Maybe it was the Cavern Club PTSD, but tonight at the Montreal Forum, he felt even more exposed than usual. It was a sitting duck. He knew there were trained sharpshooters in the audience, ready at a moment's notice to put a deranged fanatic in the crosshairs. He knew that the guy sitting on the side of the stage next to his drum riser was actually a Montreal detective in plain clothes.

But that didn't make him feel any safer, because the authorities weren't on the lookout for your run-of-the-mill hysterical Beatles fan, not the kind who screamed, cried, pulled their hair out, even dislocated their shoulders jockeying for a good view, which is what actually happened a month earlier at the North American tour opener in San Francisco. No, they were looking for the people who had sworn to murder Ringo Starr on this very evening. It was September, 1964, and the Beatles were playing two shows and one night at the forum.

According to that day's edition of Montreal newspaper, French-Canadian separatists with an anti-Semitic agenda had threatened. to shoot Ringo at the show because he was Jewish. The thing was, Ringo wasn't Jewish. The fact that he wasn't who the anti-Semitic thought he was didn't offer Ringo a whole lot of comfort. To be honest, neither did the plain-closed cops sitting next to him. What was he going to do?

Catch the bullet? After his drums had been set up, Ringo rearranged all of his symbols, so instead of laying flat as they usually did, they were turned up to face the audience. Could copper alloy stop a speeding bullet? Ringo had no clue, but it was worth a shot. The first show of the night was difficult enough. Ringo couldn't take his mind off the death threat

or his eyes off the strange people in the audience. The second show wasn't a hard day's night, it was torture. Worse than his cavern debut as Pete Bess's replacement, any drum fill could be his last. But Ringo lasted until the end of the show. As soon as the final chord of the final song, Long Tall Sally rang out, Ringo descended from his drum riser deep into the bowels of the show.

Montreal Forum where he felt a little safer. He wouldn't feel entirely secure until they got the hell out of Montreal, which they did immediately. The band X plans to stay the night and instead ran for their lives. When the Beatles stepped onto a plane later that evening, they had only been in Montreal for 10 hours, and they would never return. Their departure was witnessed by 300 Canadian Beatle fans and dozens of policemen. Ringo looked out the window at the crowd as the play. plane began to taxi down the runway. He wondered if his would-be assassin was among the throng

staring back at him. He escaped death that day, but he never escaped the feeling that, whether it was a fan with a gun or a fan with a crush on a different beetle, there would always be someone waiting in the wings to knock him down. Hundreds of fans were waiting when Ringo Starr stepped out of the private room at the Guadalajara airport. Word got around that a beetle was about to be handcuffed to Mexico, just like Paul had been in Japan. But the Federales found nothing. They were wrong about Ringo. He and his friend Keith Allison were free to go.

The fans, however, wouldn't let Ringo leave. They all wanted to touch him. They asked in Spanish for an autographo. In 1980, Ringo had been out of the Beatles for longer than he'd been in the Beatles. It was still all anyone wanted to talk about. No one wanted to talk about Ringo's latest solo record or movie. It was always, when was the band getting back together? Was Ringo really hiding drugs somewhere in his luggage?

Ringo had Paul McCartney's recent bust in Japan to thank for that last bit. Ringo put on his sunglasses and kept his head. head down and pushed his way through the crowd so that he could catch his connecting flight to Durango. When he arrived, he sent Paul a three-word telegram. Thanks a lot. More negative attention followed. Ringo's girlfriend turned fiancé of six years, Nancy Andrews, sued him when he left her for his caveman co-star playboy model and former bond girl Barbara Bach. Nancy lost the lawsuit, but the case introduced the legal term, palimony into the lexicon, as well as the right in California for unmarried partners to sue for the division of property following a split.

In December of 1980, John Lennon was shot. And aside for mourning the loss of his dear friend, Ringo mourned the fact that the Beatles could never come together again. Even though he had previously distanced himself from his past in the biggest band of all time, it was crushing to know that he and the other fabs couldn't eventually drift back to each other when the time was right. And then, in May of 1981, Ringo crashed his white Mercedes 350 SL on a rainy road outside London with Barbara, now his wife, in the passenger seat. The car went off the road, hit one lamppost, and then another, rolled over and wound up on the other side of the highway. Ringo was thrown from the car when it hit either the first or second lamppost. Luckily, either he nor Barbara sustained any major injuries.

But his solo career was the next to hit the skids. He was dropped from RCA. He couldn't convince labels in the UK or the U.S. to release his music. He was a beetle, and he couldn't get a label to sign him. His ninth solo album, 1982's Old Wave, only saw release in Canada and Germany, and it was the biggest flop of his career. Ringo had gotten what he'd wanted. He'd been left alone, and no one asked him about the Beatles anymore. and no one asked about anything really.

By his own account, Ringo could be found at the bottom of a bottle. He drank eight days a week. Having been left alone meant being left to his own devices and, even worse, vices. Barber drank with him and the drinking led to verbal and physical fights, many of them in public, that often involved her old bottles and slapped faces. He hit Rock Bottom in October of 1988. Ringo Starr woke up after another binge. He had no idea how long he'd been under.

His house was torn apart, bombed out. It looked like Liverpool's circa 1945. I came to one Friday afternoon, Ringo later said. It was told by the staff that I had trashed the house so badly that they thought there had been burglars and I'd trashed Barbara so badly. They thought she was dead. This wasn't Ringo Starr. Deep down, he knew it.

He wasn't abusive. He did care about his wife, his life, his life, his life. place in the legacy of the Beatles. Ringo and Barbara made the decision to get clean, together, and they flew out to the Arizona Desert, specifically the Sierra Tucson Rehab Center, and dried up for good. Wine, tequila, cognac, no, no, no, no, no. He didn't drink it no more, for real this time. Ringo and Barbara's relationship became stronger than ever. They moved forward. They didn't look back. That's to say they didn't look back on the bad things. A sober Ringo discovered that there was some things worth looking back on.

First, he formed a revolving supergroup of musicians and dubbed them his All-Star Band. The group's first iteration, in 1989, included rock and roll royalty like Joe Walsh, Nas Lofgren, Dr. John, Billy Preston and Rick Danko and Levant Helm from the band. The All-Star band mined the past for musical treasure, performing many of its members' older hits for new audiences. Ringo then embraced the legacy of his old band. the Beatles, beginning with the massive anthology miniseries and book undertaking in the 1990s, and continuing with a seemingly perennial stream of reissues and reappraisals of the band's back catalog that continues today. In turn, the fans embraced Ringo and offered their own

reappraisal of his part in music history. Ringo stocks skyrocketed, the appreciation for his unorthodox playing hit an all-time high. Fans were suddenly rushing to his defense rather than making him the butt of the joke. They protected him. They praised Ringo's heavy drone beat and Tomorrow Never Knows, his rhythmic accents had come together, the way he played his part and Ticket to Ride, dragging the beat by thundering on the Toms. No one played like Ringo. Fellow drummer, an admitted beetle maniac Dave Grohl, put it best, Ringo is the king of feel. But Ringo Starr spent so much of his life after the Beatles not feeling like this at the I'm Jake Brennan is Disgraceland.

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