The rare song featuring Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton, and John Entwistle recorded at John Lennon’s house
A remarkable collection of rock royalty came together to record a song in the spring of 1982. If it’s stunning that Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton, John Entwistle and Joe Walsh all ended up in the same studio, more impressive is that practically no one knows the song. In fact, it was never even released in the US because no record label would give Ringo – a Beatle – a deal at the time.
Still, the combo did lay down a rocking instrumental titled ‘Everybody’s In A Hurry But Me’ during sessions for Ringo’s solo album in the works. It was recorded at Tittenhurst Park, the mansion in Ascot, England, that John Lennon owned and where he recorded his Imagine album in 1971 before Ringo bought the house from his old bandmate two years later.
A group featuring a Beatle, a Cream, a Who and an Eagle at any other time in history would blow up the music world with listeners waiting to hear the first rarified magical notes. Early 1982 was a far cry from early 1970 for Ringo, though. So what happened?
Surprisingly enough, of all the Fabs, Ringo – who had composed two songs during the Beatle years – enjoyed the most success on the record charts out of all four members right after the breakup. Including two number one hits, Ringo put eight straight singles into the US top ten, plus two albums, from 1970 to 1975. “Congratulations,” Lennon sent in a telegram to Starr. “How dare you? And please write me a hit song.”
A string of tragic blows soon hit Ringo’s personal life. Professionally, good material was drying up. Even a Beatle with solo gold records could struggle in a music scene being taken over by disco on radio stations and punk in the clubs. In 1975, Starr and his wife of ten years, Maureen, divorced. A string of deaths close to Ringo followed. Mal Evans, the Beatles’ longtime road manager, was killed in 1976; good buddy Marc Bolan of T. Rex died in 1977; and Keith Moon, whom Starr once called “my best friend” and who was godfather to his son Zak, died in ’78.
More devastating was John Lennon’s murder in December 1980. Not only would the death of one of his oldest and dearest friends shake Ringo to the core, but the two were also due to work together in a bid to give his career a boost. Two weeks before he died, Lennon had given Starr a demo for the song ‘Nobody Told Me’ for Ringo to record, and they booked a session for January 14, 1981, to make it happen. Instead, Starr returned home to England to live at Tittenhurst Park after Lennon’s death. “I stopped making albums for two years, and got crazy for a while,” the drummer told Tom Snyder on The Tomorrow Show in 1981. “And I stopped that, too – just getting drunk and crazy every night. After a couple years it gets boring,” he added.
Ringo was eager to get back to work, but it wouldn’t come easy.
After his 1978 album Bad Boy failed to crack the top 100 on the US chart, Starr was dropped from the Polydor Records label. His follow-up, Stop And Smell The Roses, barely cracked the top 100 in 1981, leading him to then be dropped by the Portrait Records label, which itself would be defunct five years later. “He was a real lost soul there for a while,” a friend told Rolling Stone magazine in 1981.
Then, Starr set up shop in his Tittenhurst studio – Startling Studios – which he had remodelled from when Lennon had recorded there. With Joe Walsh in the producer’s chair, sessions began on Ringo’s next solo project, and the studio soon found itself jammed with Starr’s old pals. John Entwistle of The Who brought his bass, Eric Clapton brought his guitar, and Joe Walsh strapped on a guitar as well. With Starr’s backbeat, the combo developed an impromptu jam into the one-off instrumental track ‘Everybody’s In A Hurry But Me’, which also featured keyboardist Chris Stainton. Stainton, fittingly, played on Joe Cocker’s 1968 cover of Ringo’s signature Beatle tune, ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’.
The song was a cool moment full of historic proportions looking back but didn’t carry that weight in 1982. Nor was it enough to salvage the album, Old Wave, as a whole. With a bad sales streak, Starr had a hard time finding a label. The closest Old Wave got to an American release was on RCA Canada by the time it came out in June 1983. It also came out in Japan, South America and Germany, but to little acclaim.
It would be Ringo’s last album for over a decade. Newly sober, he and his career bounced back big with the album Time Takes Time in 1992, and he was already underway on his All-Starr Band touring package that would become a success for the next 30 years – and counting.
