The album Ringo Starr said was too overstuffed: “The plan of life is that you improve”
If there’s one man you never need to question over having his head screwed on in music, it’s Ringo Starr.
That might seem like a somewhat ironic statement given that he famously spent the most prolific portion of his career flying high in the skies of psychedelia, but when it came to the making of the music itself, Starr has always been anything but an airhead. It’s the one thing that has kept him on the straight and narrow for so long.
After all, you can’t get to 85 years old and still be considered one of the greatest talents of your time without possessing the acerbic ability to sort the weak from the chaff. Starr has most definitely showcased this on many occasions when it comes to his thoughts on other artists, but there also came a point where he realised he had to eat a slice of humble pie.
It’s only natural that over the course of a career spanning a litany of decades and eras, not every move and moment is going to quite hit the mark every time. While it was possibly easier for him to cast aspersions when things with The Beatles got a little more fraught, Starr has never been so jaded as to not sometimes turn the mirror back in on himself.
That reflection became all too sharpened when it came to one particular album that he felt was far more exuberant than it should have been, thus teaching him vital lessons in how not to get too big for his boots, despite the precedent that he had already set for himself. The trouble was that he only realised that reality when he produced something infinitely better.
“The plan of life is that you improve. And I think since 1989, when I sort of got back into the music business – touring, making records – that, you know, they should get better. That’s the only plan, really, that your ideas about what you want to do are stronger and they come through,” he once wisely extolled.
In this sense, he knew exactly which two of his solo albums fitted the bill of the point he was trying to display. “On Ringo Rama it’s more of a band feel, where Vertical Man was a band also, but it had too much stuff on top in the end,” he explained. “It was still a good album, I’m not putting it down. But this one, I feel, is better because it’s more open and there’s more of my personality stamped on it. And that’s the aim of the game.”
It remains the mark of the man that an album released as relatively recently as 2003 stood out as one of his master works, not just for his spirit of sonic reinvention, but also the essential awareness of when things needed to change. For Ringo Rama, it was a new sound, a new label, and indeed a new Starr – but that made him one of the most visionary minds still going.
Of course, it seems unlikely that Starr will ever bow out in this regard, or at least not in a quiet fashion. His circus is continuing its rollicking romp, all under the watchful eye of its maestro, keeping things firmly under control. Somehow, you get the impression that by this point, he’s got the whole rock and roll thing down to a fine art.
