The song that made Ringo Starr quit The Beatles: “I feel unloved”
When talking about the breakdown of The Beatles, there is always a lot of talk about Paul McCartney’s final walkout, John Lennon’s surprise exit and George Harrison’s cold and savage final line, “See you around the clubs”. The focus usually lands on the fallouts between those three and the frosty tensions that had been building over the years. But what about Ringo? The drummer has his feelings, too, as the recording of one track in particular made him feel unloved by his old friends.
“And Ringo Starr was there too.” That’s usually the line tagged onto stories about The Beatles. In the history of the band, the drummer is all too often forgotten, as Starr was stowed away behind his kit with largely no issue. In the end, when John Lennon and Paul McCartney had fallen out, and Harrison was sick of being underappreciated, Starr was still friends with them all, still wanting to make the band work. While his bandmates went off into their solo projects to write cutting tracks about the others, Starr’s take on the split in his track ‘Early 1970’ was simply a sad message about wanting to see his friends, singing, “I wanna see all three.”
But that doesn’t mean that the drummer also didn’t have his breaking point. As with the rest of the band, Starr’s came during the recording of the White Album, during which tensions across the board all boiled over. “There was a lot of friction during that album. We were just about to break up, and that was tense in itself,” McCartney said about the session. But it was Lennon who was brave enough to put it matter of factly as he said, “The break-up of The Beatles can be heard on that album.“
That’s largely reflected in the record’s swollen tracklist, as bickering in the group meant that no one would compromise and leave their songs behind to cut it down. Lennon and McCartney were no longer a collaborative unit, so the record was caught in the cross-fires of their split visions, while Harrison was also battling to be represented on the album. But from Starr’s perspective, it was ‘Back In The USSR’ that hurt him.
Recorded on August 22nd and 23rd, 1968, Ringo Starr isn’t present on the track. Instead, the rest of the members chipped in on drums and percussion as their resident player walked out early in the morning of the first day, finally sick and tired of the atmosphere of their workplace.
“I left because I felt two things: I felt I wasn’t playing great, and I also felt that the other three were really happy and I was an outsider,” Starr said of his exit. The fact that the band quite happily continued and made the track without him certainly wouldn’t have helped, likely compacting the drummer’s feelings of unessential or forgettable in the group.
But not one to stew in silence, Starr stopped in at Lennon’s house to talk it out. “I said, ‘I’m leaving the group because I’m not playing well and I feel unloved and out of it, and you three are really close’”, the drummer recalled, but to his surprise, Lennon felt the same as he explained, “And John said, ‘I thought it was you three!’”
From there, he went to McCartney, where the bass player said the exact same thing, also admitting to feeling left out. “I didn’t even bother going to George then,” he said, understanding the truth of what was really going on now. Instead, Starr went on holiday and then returned, ready to be back behind his kit where he belonged.
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