Song Lyric of the Day (Ringo Starr, Throwing Off the ‘Weight of the World’)

“It all comes down to who you crucify.

You either kiss the future or the past goodbye.”— "Weight of the World," written by Brian O'Doherty and Fred Velez, performed by Ringo Starr from his Time Takes Time CD (1992)

All through his childhood and early teens, it would have amazed those who knew him to think that Richard Starkey—born on this day in 1940 in working-class Liverpool, England—would live to see 75, let alone that he would amount to much.

His parents divorced when he was a child. Through his early years, he battled one medical affliction after another: a ruptured appendix, an inflamed peritoneum, a coma for several days, a concussion, chronic pleurisy, and lung complications. All the time out of school left him barely able to read or write as he reached his teens, and he was forced to leave his second job out of school when he injured his finger on his very first day of work.

After all that, how did Ringo Starr ever turn into the zaniest Beatle, the one who came up with the phrase that became the title of the band’s first hit film: “A Hard Day’s Night”?

Normally, when I pick a “Song Lyric of the Dad,” I credit the composers directly in the title. But, if the onetime Beatles drummer didn’t write "Weight of the World," he directly inspired it.

Few outside the Beatles circle could have known how much this seemingly easygoing musician had endured.  The hard work he put into playing the drums after his stepfather bought it as a birthday gift; the success that came to him and his bandmates; even the wonderful sense of humor that helped him survive bad fortune and insane success alike proved, after a while, inadequate to the challenge of living.

The 1980s became not a lost weekend for Ringo, but a lost decade. It started with the murder of friend John Lennon, and ended with Ringo and his second wife, model-actress Barbara Bach, in rehab for alcoholism.

When he re-emerged, it was with his 10^th studio album, Time Takes Time. Its emotional centerpiece, "Weight of the World," did not chart very high in the U.K., and did not rise at all in the U.S. But of all his solo works, it is this one—not “It Don’t Come Easy,” not “Photograph,” not “You’re Sixteen,” not the ebullient tunes that were so much his stock in trade in the Seventies—which is my favorite. Without flinching, without self-pity, it reflects what he had learned in recovery: that you might have to square up against misfortune out of necessity, but also that you could do so on equal terms.

In the five decades since the onset of Beatlemania, people have tended to slot the Fab Four into The Cute One, The Subversive Genius, the Spiritual Seeker, and the Funny One.

Ringo has sometimes seemed like the one to make music and life look easy. In “Weight of the World,” in unexpectedly philosophical tones, he acknowledged that they weren’t, but still came away with renewed respect from longtime fans. In that spirit, I join with those millions to wish him Peace and Love on his 75^th birthday

This Day in Rock History (Macca Announces Beatles Split)

April 10, 1970—It fell to The Cute One to say that the Fab Four were history. Inevitably, the announcement by Paul McCartney ignited a debate that continues to this day about who or what was really responsible for the breakup of the Beatles.

The Beatles bassist (“Macca,” as the British tabloids have called him over the years) felt aggrieved that many fans blamed him for the split in the band that, since their landing in the United States six years before, had transformed world culture. From his perspective, he was the last person in the quartet who should have taken the rap for this. All three of his bandmates had, at one time or another in the last year or so, walked out on the group as they found it increasingly impossible to work together. The prior September, in fact, John Lennon had to be talked out of revealing his decision to exit because the other members were finishing negotiations for a longed-for better deal on past royalties.

It had simply been his lot to state publicly (albeit coyly, in a promotional “self-interview” for his first solo LP) what had become increasingly apparent to those in the know: that he did not expect to work with the other three again

So who or what drove the four apart?

  1) Drugs. How trite, I can hear you say, Faithful Reader: What rock ‘n’ roll group hasn’t gotten involved in drugs? True. But there are levels upon levels of drug use that make a huge difference, in productivity and interpersonal relations. In the case of the Beatles, McCartney might have been a pothead, but that didn’t interfere with his habit of doing something creative every day, instilled while he had dated former girlfriend Jane Asher by her mother. But Lennon had started taking acid and heroin, leaving him in little condition to match his ostensible songwriting partner in writing tunes or leading the band.  The other members were stunned by what was occurring. “This was a fairly big shocker for us," McCartney said, in Mikal Gilmore’s revealing Rolling Stone analysis of the split nearly 40 years after the fact, "because we all thought we were far-out boys, but we kind of understood that we'd never get quite that far-out."

  2)     Infuriating musical sessions. The death of manager Brian Epstein in 1967 left the Beatles rudderless—a void that McCartney sought to fill. That tendency might have been resented by Lennon, but he was in little shape to offer an alternative direction because of his heroin abuse. All he could do was go into passive-aggressive mode in his withdrawn, inert state. Recording sessions at their Abbey Road studios took forever to start and, often, just as long to finish. McCartney, getting little feedback from Lennon, as he had in the old days, now indulged to the hilt his control-freak tendencies, particularly irking George Harrison by telling the masterful lead guitar not to play on one song. Just how fragile things had become became apparent when Ringo Starr, the most easygoing of the four, walked out on the group became of these rising studio tensions. Matters reached a truly awful state while preparing for a lunchtime concert atop their Apple headquarters in 1969. The so-called "Get Back" rehearsals were so lifeless and uncollaborative that the group feared for its reputation. Their attempt at a solution--hiring "Wall of Sound" producer Phil Spector--only further contributed to tensions. John, delighted that someone could do anything with with this mess, would turn to Spector for several subsequent solo LPs; McCartney, appalled by all the strings added to his song 'The Long and Winding Road," released his alternative version more than 30 years later, Let It Be--Naked.

  3)     Women. Those men who ascribe the faults of the universe to the female of the species had a field day with the women closest to the Beatles. Only this time, other women, jealous at the ones who made off with one of the desired Fab Four, often joined in the pileup. For awhile, it was Linda Eastman, wed to Paul in 1969, who bore the brunt of much scorn, particularly when Paul, dispensing with any possible conflict of interest, turned to her brother for financial advice. But before long, Yoko Ono took the full wave of public opprobrium—for stealing Lennon away from his wife; for joining him in group recording sessions that had normally been closed to outsiders, becoming, in effect, a fifth Beatle; for distracting her husband with all kinds of extramusical adventures (e.g., a “bed-in” for peace); and sometimes (but not always) mixed in with this, simple racism.

     4) Money. They might have been the world’s most popular entertainers, but the Beatles were increasingly finding themselves hard-pinched. With their Apple venture, begun with high hopes, bleeding them dry, they sought financial advice to get them out of the morass. Their attempt to extricate themselves with a manager who would look after their interests only became a source of further division, with McCartney bitterly opposing their selection of Allen Klein to represent them. (They might have been better off simply to ask Dave Clark to chuck the music business for good and concentrate on their work-he was perhaps the most money-savvy of all the British Invasion musicians.)

         5) Different Places in Life. When they started, the Beatles were four young guys hoping to make enough from whatever talent they had to emerge with something more than they had in Liverpool. In the years since, fame, the world, their aspirations, and life itself had gotten between them. John was giving full vent to the rebel tendencies that had been apparent even as a teenager, even as the collapse of his first marriage was bringing to the surface all kinds of guilt he would increasingly try to expunge through unconventional forms of psychotherapy. Paul, less interested in social statements, was concentrating on his recently started family with Linda. George had grown tired of having John and Paul, the group’s two principal songwriters, vetoing one song or another of his from the group’s albums. Ringo was displaying an entirely non-musical interest: acting.

Just before the end of the year, a writ would be filed on McCartney’s behalf in High Court in London to extricate him from the Beatles. As with most legal wrangles, it created an ancillary set of tensions and resentments that would linger even after the case was settled in 1975.

With time, the hopes for a reunion grew so wild and hyped that the group members, even when they visited each other or helped on individual projects, came to see that any possible return concert or project could only be viewed as anticlimactic.

And then, with the murder of Lennon at the hands of a crazed Mark David Chapman in December 1980, a line from a solo song by the most complicated, tortured Beatle, “God,”  rejecting the myth of his old group, took on unexpected, definitive new meaning: “The dream is over.”

Happy 70th, Ringo!

Few phrases seem as incongruous to me as the one in the headline above. A thousand replays of Ringo Starr and the other Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show have made it impossible to expunge the image of enduringly carefree youth, even if the boys eventually fell apart over money and ego problems and two are now dead.

And that great opening-credits sequence in A Hard Day’s Night—yes, they were the ones being chased through the train station by crazy fans, but they turned the tables by chasing the blues away—the “blues” in this case being nearly a decade of depressing British “kitchen-sink cinema” such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, This Sporting Life, and the one that started it all, Look Back in Anger.

Ringo’s life offscreen and away from the drums hasn’t always been fun (he’s had to fight an alcohol problem), but he’s managed to keep his humor intact and not accumulated neuroses or pretenses. He really seems to believe it when he sings, “I get by with a little help from my friends.”

Peace and love, Ringo.

Movie Quote of the Day (Ringo Starr, in “A Hard Day’s Night,” Defying Pigeonholes)

Female Reporter (played by Marianne Stone): “Are you a Mod or a Rocker?”

Ringo Starr (played by himself, of course!): “Um, no. I’m a Mocker.”—A Hard Day’s Night (1964), screenplay by Alun Owen, directed by Richard Lester

In the year of Beatlemania, is it any wonder, when A Hard Day’s Night premiered on this date in the London Pavilion Theatre, that Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon were in the audience? 

Or that the Fab Four film produced such a mob of fans that Piccadilly Circus and surrounding streets had to be temporarily closed?

Every generation has to create its own musical heroes. So, if my niece and nephews were ever to ask me what the Beatles were all about, I’d point to this movie—one that, like the group itself, left the world, to borrow a phrase from C.S. Lewis in a far different context, “surprised by joy.”

Yes, yes—of course the film features performances of “Can't Buy Me Love,” “If I Fell,” “And I Love Her,” “Tell Me Why, “All My Lovin',” “She Loves You,” the title track, and six other tunes. 

But offhand, I simply can’t recall another motion picture (and the Beatles are always in motion here!) filled with so much infectious fun.

The direction by the American Richard Lester was rightly lauded for its innovations (including, as noted by Roger Ebert, the first time movie titles had been intercut by the title song and action—in this case, of course, the boys’ madcap dash through a train station with a mob of crazed fans right behind).

Lester certainly performed miracles with his black-and-white medium and a budget of only 175,000 pounds, creating, in effect, a precursor of the music-video format.

But we should note here the contribution of screenwriter Alun Owen. Partly because he had only three movie credits (counting this one) to his name, with most of his work confined to TV and radio, he has been largely forgotten—including by The New York Times, which dispatched him with an 81-word obituary. He deserves far better.

Nobody, but nobody, had any idea what the Beatles would be like onscreen. Could they act? Could they say normal lines?

Nobody knew for sure, which is why no single sentence spoken by any Beatle was intended to be longer than six words. That is, until Owen had a chance not only to hang around with the group, catching their cheeky attitude and rapid quips, but to see them interact with the media.

While fleshing out the resulting scenario, Owen created a Seinfeldian universe that blended reality and fantasy in entertainers’ lives.

Yes, the four group members all go by their own names. But their road manager, “Norm,” was played by a character actor, Norman Rossington. 

More prominently, the film featured the sublimely silly scenario involving Paul’s fake “grandfather” (played by Wilfrid Brambell). (The Beatle’s grandfather was named Joe, not John, and he played the tuba.)

The above quote is as good a place to start as any in seeing the unexpected exuberance of the script in action. Now, in doing this, we have to proceed cautiously, recalling E.B. White’s stern admonition: “Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.” Still, let’s have a go at it, shall we?

The reporter asking her question can barely disguise her boredom with—even ignorance about--her assignment. Her question is binary—either/or. 

Her story is already written in her head, the way so many reporters’ often are to beat deadlines. Ringo’s response will merely trigger which scenario she already has planned.

Then the drummer upsets the whole apple cart.

In a way, the gulf between uncomprehending reporter and these new young entertainers symbolizes the generation gap that would dominate headlines throughout the rest of the decade.

Ringo’s response represents an unanticipated third way totally unanticipated by reporters used to the careful, noncommittal “yes, ma’ams” of, for instance, Elvis Presley. We are beyond category, Ringo is telling her. We’ll blend traditions and make something new, different, and, if we’re lucky, better. See?

At the same time, Ringo’s deadpan answer is subversive. The group is “mocking” solemnity (including the media’s).

You can argue that the more appropriate person to deliver the dialogue would have been John Lennon, the musician with the sharpest wit and the most delight in Joycean wordplay of anyone in the group.

But putting the answer in the mouth of Ringo (who, as it happened, got most of the film’s funniest lines, and who, in a Yogi Berra-ish burst of brilliance, even came up with the title after one concert) turns out to be inspired precisely because it is so startling.

Several years ago, I was surprised and moved to hear Ringo Starr describe the Beatles simply as “four guys who loved each other.” Years before the end of the innocence, that joy in each other shows in this box-office smash.