The song that made Ringo Starr fall in love drumming again: “I felt like shit”
After being in the game for so long, it’s hard to stay passionate. It’s even harder when you’re playing the same songs on repeat and constantly being praised as one of the best, leaving you feeling like there’s no room left to grow. That’s exactly how Ringo Starr felt in the early 2000s.
In short, Starr was completely and utterly bored, which is tough to even imagine. Try to think what it must feel like being in his shoes, hitting the big time at 22, having your world-famous band collapse at 29, and then from then on, playing those same old hits over and over while also trying to get people to care about your solo work.
It’s not to say that Starr has been bored since the ‘70s, as he was the first of The Beatles to release a solo record, so the passion was obviously there. Since then, he’s released 21 albums all on his own, and would end up collaborating again with all of his old Beatles bandmates as he stepped into their own recordings, as well as collaborating with plenty of other names like Harry Nilsson and The Band.
He’s stayed plenty busy enough, and now in his 80s, the artist is still playing shows and still has an obvious love for the game, but in the 2000s, it all felt stagnated.
He was trying to make what would be his 13th album, Ringo Rama, and it seemed as unlucky as the number, for Starr couldn’t shake off the sense that he’d hit his peak. “We were working in England, and you have those days, or I do, where I felt that I’d drummed my last drum,” he declared, unable to shake off the sense that it was over.
Working alongside Mark Hudson again, Starr called in another all-star list of collaborators, including Eric Clapton, David Gilmour, Willie Nelson and more, but still, nothing seemed to make a dent in this prevailing feeling that he’d already done his best work, and all of this was just killing time.
That is, until one song, one beat, entered his consciousness. Sensing his bad mood, Hudson started a jam and quickly, Starr was locked into what would become the track ‘Instant Amnesia’. Heavier than anything he’d really done before, inspired more by acts like Metallica and the hard rock world, the drummer got the chance to pound the skins and seemingly pound the self-doubt away in the process.
By the end of the day, not only was Starr in a better mood, but he had this new song that captured exactly how and why he’d remained so enduringly excited by music for decades upon decades. “That’s where ‘Instant Amnesia’ came from because I’d forgotten that the day before, I felt like shit and I couldn’t play,” he said, with the song capturing the rejuvenating power of a good jam.
No longer did he feel like he’d hit his ceiling; instead, he said, “I actually played some of the best drumming I’d ever played in the past 10, 15 years”.
