The Ringo Starr album John Lennon described as “embarrassing”
Ringo Starr is primarily famed as the drummer of The Beatles, for both good and bad reasons. From the likes of Dave Grohl effusing about his ability or other commentators unfairly maligning his work with the Liverpool band, Starr is an interesting character who has enjoyed a long journey outside being the drummer of the world’s biggest group. One part of this arc has been his solo career, which at one point, was more revered than that of Paul McCartney and George Harrison – a remarkable feat.
The first album of his solo career is Sentimental Journey. It was released in March 1970 as The Beatles were on the verge of breaking up. A stark departure from the experimental sound of the band’s later years, the album is a collection of pre-rock ‘n’ roll standards that Starr remembered from his childhood, including big band and jazz tracks.
Famously, the album’s impact was negatively affected by Paul McCartney refusing to delay the release of his solo debut, McCartney, and his calling time on The Beatles. This meant that Sentimental Journey received mixed reviews from critics distracted by the array of Beatles news. It did chart in the UK’s top ten, though, so it wasn’t a complete flop.
However, when Ringo appeared on Frost on Sunday to promote Sentimental Journey, he garnered an awkward response from the audience, with some confused by its choice of music. “It’s a lot of songs that were my initiation to music”, Ringo said of the album. “It’s all the tracks that, when my mother and my father came home from the pub out [of] their heads, they’d sing all these songs.”
Then, as an uncomfortable silence fell over the studio audience, Ringo quipped: “It went better in the dressing room.”
So what did Ringo’s Beatles bandmates think about Sentimental Journey? Per a 2020 article in The Telegraph, typically, George Harrison kept his cards close to his chest, labelling it “really nice”. However, John Lennon, who was growing further apart from the rest of the band at the time, was less pleasant. Reportedly, he described Ringo’s debut solo effort as “embarrassing”. This is ironic as it is now regarded as a forerunner to standards collections by artists such as Linda Ronstadt and Harry Nilsson, the latter of whom was very close to Lennon.
As ever, Ringo was unphased by Lennon’s prickly critique. “The great thing was that it got my solo career moving — not very fast, but just moving,” he said later. “It was like the first shovel of coal in the furnace that makes the train inch forward.”
In 2001 he explained the provenance of Sentimental Journey further: “I was lost for a while. That’s well-documented … And I just thought of all those songs that I was brought up with, all the parties we’d had in Liverpool at our house and all the neighbours’ houses … So I called George Martin and said, ‘Why don’t we take a sentimental journey?'”
