The band John Lennon told Ringo Starr to follow: “Great and simple”
The number one rule that every record exec should abide by is quite simple: never tell a Beatle what to do.
They might not be working on the most in-demand style that the kids are listening to, but when you’ve made some of the most celebrated pop music of all time, the chances are pretty good that you have a pretty good insight into what the charts like. But if there was one band member willing to go with the flow, it was bound to be Ringo Starr.
Every one of the Fabs was bound to go in their own direction once they split up, but no one was expecting that the biggest star of the group was going to be the drummer. Not that he had no talent; far from it, actually. He had been one of the greatest drummers that the world had ever seen. In any studio situation, he’s exactly the percussionist you want. As a songwriter, though, he was going to need a bit of work.
He never bothered to try and compete with goddamn titans of music like John Lennon and Paul McCartney, but if some of his friends wanted to write a tune to feature on his album, was he supposed to say no? When you have an open goal and only a few minutes left in the game, are you supposed to not kick it right into the back of the net? Starr wasn’t a great songwriter at that stage, but he hadn’t forgotten what the right help looked like.
But he wasn’t meant to have his hand held throughout his solo career, either. He could make his own decisions, and even if he had the token songs from George Harrison or Lennon now and again, there was no point in him trying to have the same song doctors nurse his tunes to health when it came time to put out a record. After one too many times, though, his old buddies did have a certain idea for what one of his albums should sound like.
After all, Starr was about having a good time and letting everyone share some decent music as he played drums in the background, but as disco was rapidly starting to approach, Starr remembered getting a message from Lennon that he might need to start going down that musical rabbit hole once in a while.
It’s not like Lennon didn’t have good ears, either, and according to Starr’s records, he said that he met up and talked to his old mate about the bands that he could sound like, saying, “Blondies’ ‘Heart of Glass’ is the type of stuff y’all should do – great and simple.” Starr also noted how accommodating his old mate could be, saying, “Even though he was always treated in the press as a cynical put-down artist, John had the biggest heart of all of us.”
The disco angle would have been a good look, but it probably wasn’t the best idea for Starr at the time. He was certainly on the cutting edge of the genre when he made albums like Ringo the 4th, but the fact that his own backup singers were giving him a run for his money was proof enough that the genre wasn’t the greatest fit for Starr to begin with.
Then again, it’s easy to appreciate Starr’s early solo work these days in the same way that people enjoy disco. It’s not nearly the most well-aged product of time, but when listening to Goodnight Vienna or Ringo, it has the same kind of care-free spirit that people have when listening back to the bands they loved from the Studio 54 scene.
