Ringo Starr celebrated his 83rd birthday on Friday, and it's no surprise that once again his wish is for everyone to say, think or post "Peace & Love" at noon local time.
What is a surprise are the two songs that mean the most to him -- one he neither sings nor plays drums on, and another that is a concert staple that he didn't write.
Asked by Vulture what song defines him, he said it's The Beatles' first single, 1962's "Love Me Do."
"It was the first song... We were on vinyl. We made a record. Even though when I got to the studio, [producer] George Martin had a session guy for the drums, Andy White, but I played on it anyway. He played it, I played it -- he’s on the album, I think, and I’m on the single, so go figure. We were just blessed that George Martin took a chance on us because many record labels sent us down.
"But the fun was the fact that we were still touring. And only the BBC was playing the song. It would say, 'At 3:14 p.m., this song will be on the BBC.' So we’d all pull over and think, 'Wow, we’re on the radio.' I mean, it was a really big moment. It was magic because we were on this piece of vinyl all to ourselves...
"George Martin apologized every time I met him after we recorded that song...because he didn’t know that we changed drummers [with me replacing Pete Best]."
36 years after The Beatles recorded it, Ringo did his own version for his 1998 album, Vertical Man.
Ringo Starr celebrates his 83rd birthday this Friday, and, as he has done every July 7th since 2008, he is asking everyone to say, think or post "Peace & Love" at noon their time.
And, in a new video encouraging everyone's participation, he says it "helps the planet. Peace & Love helps you, me, the world, the planet. And the new planets we're going to."
And as for number-83, he tells People, "Nothing makes me feel old. In my head, I’m 27. Wisdom’s a heavy word. [Getting older] is what happens, and you try and keep yourself busy.”
Ringo will gather in Beverly Hills, California at Beverly Hills Garden Park, home to his Peace and Love statue with his brother-in-law Joe Walsh, Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers' guitarist Mike Campbell and keyboardist Benmont Tench, and All Starr Band members and alumnus Edgar Winter, Sheila E, Richard Marx, Jim Keltner and many others.
NASA will transmit a pre-recorded message from Ringo into the universe at noon PT from NASA’s Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in Barstow, California.
Just ahead of his 83rd birthday today, Ringo Starr revealed the song that he feels changed his life and defines his career. The Beatles drummer admits that the band’s first official single, “Love Me Do,” is the song that means the most.
"We were on vinyl," he recalled. "We made a record. Even though when I got to the studio, (producer) George Martin had a session guy for the drums, Andy White, but I played on it anyway. He played it, I played it — he’s on the album, I think, and I’m on the single, so go figure.”
Starr remembers the band pulling their car over at 3:14pm to listen to the single on the radio. “ I mean, it was a really big moment,” the rocker, who as we well know would go on to be a global phenomenon, confessed.
Source: Louder Sound
Ringo Starr has chimed in on the forthcoming release of a new Beatles song that Paul McCartney first made us aware about last month.
Using Artificial Intelligence with help from director Peter Jackson and his team following their work on the 2021 Beatles documentary, Get Back, Ringo tells Rolling Stone, “This was beautiful, and it’s the final track you’ll ever hear with the four lads. And that’s a fact.”
Like McCartney, Ringo didn't say what the title is or the date this year that it will be released. But it's believed to be John Lennon's 1978 song "Now and Then," which McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo attempted to complete as the third "new" track for the Anthology series in 1995 and '96.
Yoko Ono had given McCartney the demo in 1994. It was one of several songs on a cassette labelled "For Paul" that Lennon recorded on a boombox in his New York apartment.
Jeff Lynne, who produced the two "new" songs they did release for that project — "Free As a Bird" and "Real Love" — was able to somewhat clean up that demo, but it was never finished.
At that time, Lynne said, "The song had a chorus but is almost totally lacking in verses. We did the backing track, a rough go that we really didn't finish."
And McCartney later explained that it was a group decision to abandon it.
"It didn't have a very good title, it needed a bit of reworking, but it had a beautiful verse and it had John singing it. [But] George didn't like it. The Beatles being a democracy, we didn't do it."
But he added that it was always on the back of his mind to try and finish.
The track, an apologetic love song, surfaced in 2009 on a bootleg. It didn't contain the background noise, leading to speculation that it was not the same recording Yoko gave to Paul and that it may have been stolen from her apartment, along with other items, after John's death in 1980.
In Ringo news, he will once again celebrate his birthday this Friday — his 83rd — by asking everyone to say or think "peace and love" at noon their time.
He will gather in Beverly Hills, California at Beverly Hills Garden Park, home to his Peace and Love statue with his brother-in-law Joe Walsh, Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell and keyboardist Benmont Tench, Edgar Winter, Sheila E, Richard Marx, Jim Keltner and many others.
NASA will transmit a pre-recorded message from Ringo into the universe at noon PT from NASA’s Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in Barstow, California.
You can also catch Ringo on a special Send Love, Spread Peace Sing for Science birthday podcast discussing his commitment to Peace & Love and the verified and quantifiable impacts of peace and meditation with Bob Roth, Transcendental Meditation teacher and CEO of the David Lynch Foundation, and the show’s host Matt Whyte.