Ringo Starr’s Liverpool Memories

Kevin Mazur/MPL/Wireimage

Ringo Starr is sitting in the middle of an art gallery in Santa Monica, selecting his favourite songs for an iTunes celebrity playlist. It is a strange sight, because for the past six years, the Beatles’ catalogue has been conspicuously absent from iTunes, despite several years of rumours that the group and Apple have come to a compromise.

Wearing dark glasses and a red T-shirt emblazoned with a mug shot of Frank Sinatra, Starr appears far more sprightly than his 69 years. “I’m back into reggae, but not Bob Marley,” he explains as he adds Burning Spear and Peter Tosh to his playlist, along with Sam Cooke, Michael Jackson and the first record he ever bought, ”˜Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing,’ by the Four Aces.

Don Was, who plays bass on Starr’s new (and 15th) album, Y Not, asks Starr whether he ever met Marley. “I didn’t know Bob Marley,” Starr replies in his rising-and-falling accent. “But he may have met me.”

He is not being cocky. He’s just been through more than he can remember. “I’ve been asked to do a book, but really they only want ’62 to ’70,” he says, referring to the Beatles’ peak years. “And I keep saying there’ll be nine volumes before we got there, because I’ve had a full life.”

So, instead, Starr’s been slipping his story into his songs. In ”˜The Other Side of Liverpool,’ on Y Not, he sings about his father leaving the family when Ringo was three years old, his mother taking a bartending job and the friends he made working as an apprentice for a building contractor at age 17, with whom he formed his first band.

“The plan is that, if I make another CD, there will be another glimpse of Liverpool,” he says, then pauses and turns to Bruce Grakal, his lawyer and friend. “That’s a great title: Another Glimpse of Liverpool. Where the sun always shines!” The two laugh about the ironic lyric as they walk upstairs to Was’ studio. On the way, Starr explains the situation with iTunes: “Well, the iTunes thing is, you know, a three-way situation. And the Beatles are interested in it, as well as Apple, but there is no conclusion yet.”

Y Not is the first album Starr has basically produced himself, and, like much of his solo career in the past 20 years, he caters to nostalgia. With its self-referential lyrics sung in Starr’s likable yet imperfect voice, it is catchy and wistful, but it is more an album for Ringo fans than for music fans in general.

It features two collaborations with Paul McCartney, marking the first time the two have been in a studio together in 12 years. McCartney sings on ”˜Walk With You,’ a sweet, soft-rock paean to God and enduring friendship, and plays bass on ”˜Peace Dream,’ an hommage to John Lennon, with Starr singing the line “So try to imagine if we give peace a chance,” his vocals treated similarly to Lennon’s on ”˜Imagine.’ “It would have been awkward if you’d have done it, but it was easier for me because I knew the man,” Starr says.

Not every song deals with the Beatles. On ”˜Fill in the Blanks,’ an uncharacteristically angry tune, with guitar from Joe Walsh (who happens to be married to the sister of Starr’s wife), Starr complains about modern technology. “Everyone’s got those dumb mobiles now,” he says. “They say goodbye, then by the time they get to their car, they’re calling again.”

For the time being, Starr is in a new phase of productivity. He has released three solo albums in five years, a far cry from the late Eighties and early Nineties, when he went nine years without releasing a studio album, in part due to alcohol abuse. “In the early Seventies, I made my biggest solo albums,” Starr says. “But by the Eighties”¦ I was taking more interest in other things than what I do best.”

As Starr begins to discuss his drumming style, Was enters the studio and interjects. “If you go back and listen to a song like ”˜Something,’ he puts the fills in the same place a guitarist would,” Was says. “He’s not sitting there counting. He’s playing to the vocal.”

“I’ve always felt, if you’re singing, I’ll hold back,” Starr replies. “But if you stop, I’m in! It goes back to when I was 13. I joined bands because I wanted to play with good players. That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. Of course the band I ended up in were really great, but it went a bit crazy.”