The 1973 album Ringo Starr called a turning point in his career: “On the way back”
Every great rock and roll listener usually knows to grade on a curve when it comes to Ringo Starr.
It’s not fair to hold the former Beatle to the same standards that his bandmates did when he made a new record, and compared to the greatest rock and roll legends still making music, Starr wasn’t trying to impress anybody with his musical prowess. He was happy to have a good time with his friends, but it didn’t take him long to realise when the good times began to stall out after the band went their separate ways.
If Starr had had it his way, though, there’s a good chance that The Beatles would have continued working until their arms fell off. He was the last person who wanted to see the band break up, and when looking through the first albums that he made, it’s not like he had a good idea of what he wanted to make. Sentimental Journey wasn’t the first thing most people thought of when looking at the lovable drummer, and while his country career fared a little better, Ringo was the first time he actually seemed to be working himself out.
It’s almost funny looking at how well his singles like ‘Back Off Boogaloo’ and ‘It Don’t Come Easy’ were doing compared to what his bandmates had been cooking up at the time, but there had to come a point when the bubble started to burst. It happened with George Harrison on Dark Horse, and it happened with John Lennon on Sometime in New York City, and Star could see the writing on the wall during Goodnight Vienna.
In fact, Paul McCartney was the first member of the band that started off patchy before turning in classics. While everyone might have torn RAM through the mud, it really goes to show how well Macca was ahead of his time compared to Goodnight Vienna. Starr was clearly having a good time, but after the reprise of the title track comes on at the end of the record, with Lennon leading the band, Starr felt that he had officially clocked out.
Even decades after the fact, Starr felt that Goodnight Vienna was one of the last great records he made before getting a resurgence in the 1990s, saying, “I think [my career is] the best since the Ringo/Goodnight Vienna period, really. You look at my musical career and from Goodnight Vienna it started going downhill. And now we’re on the way back. I had the Time Takes Time album which I thought was brilliant. But people didn’t seem to want to go for it.”
That might seem a little bit harsh coming from Mr Starkey, but you have to remember where the timeline falls on this one. Ringo the 4th comes only a few years after Goodnight Vienna, and while there were a handful of decent songs in between, it was hard for Starr to even catch a break from his label when he tried to recapture the same kind of magic that he did when working with his friends.
There’s a good chance that the label wasn’t going to go for songs like Lennon’s ‘Cookin’ In the Kitchen of Love’, but the fact that Starr wasn’t taking care of himself around this time was downright sad. His drinking problem had become way out of hand by this point, and even when looking at the albums that were pretty decent, it breaks your heart a little bit to see that a record like Old Wave wasn’t even good enough for any US record label to be convinced to release it.
Starr did manage to clean himself up and turn his entire life around within the span of only a few years, but the reasons why his 1990s period saw him turn over a new leaf had more to do with the people he was surrounding himself with again. He was finally having fun making music for the first time in a while, and Goodnight Vienna seemed like the last hurrah for that period for far too many years.
