RICHARD STARKEY WAS BORN in a hardscrabble Liverpool neighborhood known as the Dingle.
Young Richie suffered two major illnesses: First, when he was 6, a bout of peritonitis so severe it put him in a children’s hospital for a year, and then, at 13, a case of tuberculosis that required a two-year convalescence in a Merseyside sanitarium. At one point, a music teacher came around with tambourines, triangles and small drums for the bored, bedridden children to play.
“It was like a craziness,” Starr once recalled of this eureka moment. “I hit the drum and I only wanted from that moment to be a drummer, and that was what my aim was.”
“When I first started,” he said, “my mother would come to the gigs. She would always say, ‘You know, son, I always feel you’re at your happiest when you’re playing your drums.’ So she noticed. And I do.” He smiled. “I love to hit those buggers.”
Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney have been the last Beatles standing for nearly 25 years, and that experience has deepened their relationship. “With John and George not here, I think we realize nothing lasts forever,” McCartney said. “So we grasp onto what we have now because we realize that it’s very special. It’s something hardly anyone else has. In fact, in our case, it’s something no one else has. There’s only me and Ringo, and we’re the only people who can share those memories.”
“A lot of musicians learn licks and beats and modes and things like that, and then they just play within those,” T Bone Burnett said. “Ringo is more of an art drummer, a literate drummer. He listens to what the song is saying, and then expresses that.” Onstage in Nashville, he put it another way: “All the great musicians play the story. Ringo plays the words.”
~ Lindsay Zoladz for the New York Times
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