The one Paul McCartney song Ringo Starr rejected: “I understand”
There is no one who has ever benefited more from the afterglow of The Beatles than Ringo Starr.
While he has always been happy to be one of the members of the greatest band of all time, he was the last person to claim that he could have written the same kinds of classics that John Lennon and Paul McCartney were writing. But even if it’s become a tired cliche to say that he got by with a little help from his friends, it’s not like his mates were ever unhappy to give him a song or two when he was working on one of his records.
Then again, there are more than a few times throughout Starr’s career where he has looked a lot more desperate than others. Old Wave was one of the only records that America refused to release altogether, and even though he flip-flopped from one label to the next throughout most of his career, he could always count on the other Fabs to give him a little bit of help, even if the results weren’t always great.
While Lennon has become deified in the minds of most people, there are still some who can’t stomach ‘Cookin’ in the Kitchen of Love’, and when Starr reached the 1980s, the fact that he didn’t have time to release many albums at all felt like he had thrown in the towel. But on Time Takes Time, Starr managed to pull off one of the greatest records that he had ever made decades after Ringo first dropped.
The album isn’t made to be anything groundbreaking, but when looking at the stacked cast of characters that worked with him, Starr was finally able to make a record that was a roaring good time from front to back. Joe Walsh had practically become family to him by the time he started working on the record, but even without his brother-in-law, Starr made the kind of album that actually made him seem current all over again, thanks to input from everyone from Brian Wilson to Jeff Lynne to the members of more current underground bands like Jellyfish.
But at the 11th hour, McCartney ended up coming in and giving him the song ‘Angel in Disguise’, saying at the time, “Ringo wanted an extra verse, so I said, ‘Let’s write the extra verse together. Or you can just write it and we’ll have co-written the song.’ I understand he has written a third verse. If it’s another ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’, great, if it isn’t, great!” But when the album came out, you’d notice that the song is conspicuously absent from the track listing.
Yes, for the first time in his career, Starr got a song from the songwriting wizard and managed to say that the songs that he used were better. Anyone else would have called him absolutely insane for turning it down, but when you listen to the rest of the record, it doesn’t necessarily fit with what the rest of the band was doing. Starr was going for a new sound, but the tragic part was the fact that the album never got its due on the charts.
Which is a shame, considering all of the praise that it got the drummer years after his prime. This was like him trying to make his own version of the other post-Beatle highlights like Macca’s Tug of War or George Harrison’s Cloud Nine, but even if it didn’t see the raw sales that it was supposed to, Time Takes Time still stands as a testament to what Starr could do when he was left with the right people to help him finish off one of his records.
He was still a master curator of talent when he wanted to be, and even if the album sank without a trace, the fact that he dismissed one of McCartney’s songs was more of a statement than anything else. He didn’t need to live in The Beatles’ shadow anymore, and even if he would forever be known as the hapless drummer for the Fabs, that didn’t mean he couldn’t make something new every now and again.
