Beatles Drummer Likes Tight Touring Schedule

This summer and fall, as he has done annually since 1989, save for a two-year interruption because of the pandemic, Ringo Starr will be on tour, playing two month-long tours that include shows six days most weeks. For a drummer/singer who is now 82, that might seem like a demanding workload.

But this is exactly how Starr likes it. Speaking during a pair of press conferences with the other members of his All Starr Band – one last fall and one in mid-May, Starr said the original tour routing for this summer and fall actually had too many off days and he had his booking agent add some shows.

“If I’m on the road, I want to play,” Starr said during the mid-May video conference. “I don’t want to sit in a hotel and relax for three days. I want to get out there and play. It’s just how I am. I just love to do it. I mean, with this band it’s great because everybody takes the weight.”

This band includes six other stars in their own right -- Edgar Winter on keyboards and saxophone, Steve Lukather (from Toto) on guitars, Hamish Stuart (an original member of the Average White Band) on bass, Colin Hay (of Men At Work fame) on guitar, horn player Warren Ham and drummer Gregg Bissonette.

It’s the latest edition of what has been a rotating unit – although this lineup of the All Starr Band has been mostly intact since 2018 – since the former Beatle assembled the first All Starr Band in 1989. Each show features a cross-section of hits from Starr’s solo catalog and his time with the Beatles, while each member of the band plays a hit or two from their respective careers. Several band members agreed that the chance to play such a variety of songs is part of the appeal of the tours.

“I love the challenge of playing other peoples’ music,” Lukather said. “I want to try to stay as true to it as they expect, be true sonically as well as playing all the parts. I have more fun playing their stuff than mine, I can tell you that. Plus, playing all the great Ringo hits and Beatles stuff never gets old. I love everybody, they’re such great musicians and such great friends and just a joy. This is not work. This is a vacation as far as I’m concerned.”

For Starr, the All Starr Band tours enable him to do what he’s loved for some 65 years – play drums, sing, and perform for audiences

“I was inspired at 13 and that has never left me, the dream and the joy’” Starr said. “Then, I started playing. I only ever wanted to be a drummer from 13 and then I got a kit of drums. And I was in a couple of really good bands… And it's still there. I love to play, My mother had this great line ‘You know what, son? I always feel that you're happiest when you're playing.’ And deep inside I am.”

Starr didn’t specify his inspiration to pick up the sticks and in 1957 he broke into music when he helped form the Eddie Clayton Skiffle Group, which, he said, he wished had been captured on film like The Beatles' “Let It Be” recording sessions that became the recent documentary “Get Back.”

“The three of us worked in a factory,” Starr said during the fall press conference. “And we played in the basements of the workmen who eliminated s*** all over us. That's where we started. That'd be interesting to see that.”

Speaking of “Get Back,” Starr gave Peter Jackson’s six-hour documentary, now streaming on Disney+, his full endorsement.

“I remember quite a lot of it,” Starr said of the “Let It Be” sessions. “We made those records and it sort of went through the same cycle. But the difference with ‘Get Back’ was that we had no songs to start. John and Paul would always have a couple of songs that would start the ball rolling.

“The only thing I was grasping and desperate for, is when we did ‘Get Back.’ If you look at the early sort of getting it together, it (the drum part) is just like straight rock. I wanted to know how I got to that, that rock shuffle thing, just playing the snare drum. Because I have no idea why I changed that. I thought ‘I’ll see it on film.’ But it just happened the cameras were off when we did that.”

That disappointment aside, Starr said “Get Back” is a much more representative look at The Beatles putting together “Let It Be” than was Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s “Let It Be,” the 1970 documentary that, with its filming, provided the footage Jackson assembled into the new film.

“The original documentary, I never liked it,” he said. “It was so narrow. It was on one point of an argument and all these down parts. We were laughing and we were having fun as well and we played great and we did all this in a month. Michael Lindsey Hogg’s, I felt, was just too down. I spoke to Peter (and said) ‘I was there. It was lots of fun as well.’ He certainly brought that up. I’m ever grateful to Peter for doing such a great job.”

Although it was recorded before the “Abbey Road” album, “Let It Be” became the final Beatles album, released in May 1970, months before the band broke up. The Beatles, Starr said, had run their course

“We were lads when we started, and as it went on, we had wives and children,” he said. “And we stopped touring and made great records. But we didn't make good records while we were touring. We played well together and we got on with each other. That's just how it was. We came to a point, eight years later – it blows me away that we did all that in eight years – that it was time to leave.”

If all goes as Starr hopes, the All Starr Band could have a gig for years to come. Starr, who spent the pandemic going to the gym, painting, and making spin art, also continues to make new music at a steady pace.

He released two EPs, “Zoom In” and “Change the World” in 2021 and “EP3” last year. And he has three more EPs in the works. One was finished shortly before rehearsals for the current May/June tour. A second one will be produced by noted songwriter/producer Linda Perry and Starr is planning to do a third EP of country songs, a project that will be an outgrowth of a song written for him by T Bone Burnett.

“(He) sent me, I promise you, one of the most beautiful country songs, tracks I’ve heard in a long time. It’s very old-school country and it’s beautiful,” Starr said. “So I thought ‘Hey, I’m going to make a country EP.’”

Starr doesn’t plan to slow down any time soon, either – in the studio or on the road.

“People are saying, ‘What about retirement?’,” Starr said. “Well, I'm a musician. I don't have to retire. As long as I can pick up those sticks, I got a gig.”

Ringo Starr & His All Starr Band come to The Sound, a new amphitheater in Clearwater on Sept. 26. Click here for ticket information.