The “ridiculous” 1973 song Ringo Starr rejected that went on to sell three million copies in three weeks
Ringo Starr likely has few regrets, but it’s hard to envisage him not being haunted by the dismissal of one of the decade’s biggest hits.
The fact is, 1973 was a mammoth year for the former Beatle drummer. Riding high off the ‘It Don’t Come Easy’ and ‘Back Off Boogaloo’ singles, his third LP managed to shoot to number two on the US album charts while his burgeoning acting gig was paying off with the acclaimed turn in that year’s That’ll Be the Day. His solo career and Hollywood hustle looked all but certain to continue to stratospherically rise.
It helped having all the former Beatles lend their lyrical hands to the drummer. Throughout Ringo, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, and George Harrison all pepper the record’s songwriting credits, with Harrison, in particular, co-writing the US number one smash ’Photograph’. With that in mind, Starr was in seriously good company and not lacking for a hit cooked up by his old Fab Four bandmates.
So, it was easy for his people to so blithely pass on a future chart-topper, as they didn’t foresee a time when the hits could dry up. The seeds of Ringo’s rejection were sown by an article in the New York Post and a later Reader’s Digest reprint concerning a busload of college students on their way to Fort Lauderdale who then befriend a convict who’s on the lookout for a yellow handkerchief on a roadside oak in Georgia’s Brunswick.
Chiming with the old custom of women wearing yellow ribbons illustrating their husbands’ service in the US Army, songwriter L Russell Brown convinced his creative partner Irwin Levine to draft ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon ‘Round the Ole Oak Tree’, a jaunty pop number concerning a convict released from prison and looking out for that yellow ribbon illustrating his lover’s embrace of his return.
It reportedly took less than 15 minutes to write, but it was even quicker for Brown’s hit hopeful to be kicked out of Apple Records. By all accounts, the label’s New York A&R man, Al Steckler, called ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon ‘Round the Ole Oak Tree’ “ridiculous” and even said, “never show this song to anybody again”.
A tough break considering how much of a Beatles fan Brown was. Eventually, ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon ‘Round the Ole Oak Tree’ was gifted to the confusingly named Tony Orlando and Dawn trio and released in February 1973, where it topped the Billboard Hot 100 for four weeks. Brown and Levine would also pen The Partridge Family’s top 20 ‘I Woke Up In Love This Morning’.
Still, despite it becoming a monster hit, it does make sense, in the grand scheme of things, why the single was given the boot by team Ringo; the song is an airy and breezy slice of pop fluff that wouldn’t look out of place on a Brotherhood of Man album.
Strangely, years later, ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon ‘Round the Ole Oak Tree’ would form a weird proximity to Fab Four lore when the song inspired the Philippines’ Liberal Party’s yellow colour branding, which ousted the Marcos regime in 1986 that had hounded The Beatles 20 years prior on their ill-fated show in Manila. Had Starr cut the tune and had the same effect on the country’s democratic insurgents, the old Beatles drummer could have flexed the ultimate last laugh.
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