As he’s done annually since 1989, save for a two-year interruption due to the pandemic, Ringo Starr & His All Starr Band will be out on tour this summer and fall, playing two month-long stints that include shows six days during most of the weeks. For a drummer-singer who is now 82, that might seem like a demanding workload.
But this is exactly how Starr likes it. Speaking during a pair of press conferences with the other members of his All Starr Band (one just last month and another last fall) Starr said the original tour routing for this summer and fall actually had too many off days and he had his booking agent add more shows.
“If I’m on the road, I want to play,” Starr said during the mid-May video conference. “I don’t want to sit in a hotel and relax for three days. I want to get out there and play. It’s just how I am. I just love to do it. I mean, with this band it’s great because everybody takes the weight.”
The current tour is hitting the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles on Thursday, June 15 and returns to Southern California during the fall leg of the run to perform at Toyota Arena in Ontario on Sunday, Sept. 17.
This band includes six other stars in their own right — Edgar Winter on keyboards and saxophone, Steve Lukather (from Toto) on guitars, Hamish Stuart (an original member of the Average White Band) on bass, Colin Hay (of Men At Work fame) on guitar, horn player Warren Ham and drummer Gregg Bissonette.
It’s the latest edition of what has been a rotating unit – although this lineup of the All Starr Band has been mostly intact since 2018 – since the former Beatle assembled the first All Starr Band in 1989. Each show features a cross section of hits from Starr’s solo catalog and his time in the Beatles, while each member of the band plays a hit or two from their respective careers.
Several band members agreed that the chance to play such a variety of songs is part of the appeal of the tours.
“I love the challenge of playing other peoples’ music,” Lukather said. “I want to try to stay as true to it as they expect, be true sonically as well as playing all the parts. I have more fun playing their stuff than mine, I can tell you that. Plus, playing all the great Ringo hits and Beatles stuff never gets old. I love everybody, they’re such great musicians and such great friends and just a joy. This is not work. This is a vacation as far as I’m concerned.”
For Starr, the All Starr Band tours enable him to do what he’s loved for some 65 years – play drums, sing and perform for audiences.
“I was inspired at 13 and that has never left me, the dream and the joy,” Starr said. “Then, I started playing. I only ever wanted to be a drummer from 13 and then I got a kit of drums. And I was in a couple of really good bands … and it’s still there. I love to play, My mother had this great line ‘You know what, son? I always feel that you’re happiest when you’re playing.’ And deep inside I am.”
In 1957, he broke into music when he helped form the Eddie Clayton Skiffle Group, which, he said, he wished had been captured on film like The Beatles “Let It Be” recording sessions that became the recent documentary “Get Back.”
“The three of us worked in a factory,” Starr said of his first band during the fall press conference. “And we played in the basements of the workmen who eliminated (stuff) all over us. That’s where we started. That’d be interesting to see that.”
Speaking of “Get Back,” Starr gave Peter Jackson’s six-hour 2021 documentary his full endorsement.
“I remember quite a lot of it,” Starr said of the “Let It Be” sessions. “We made those records and it sort of went through the same cycle. But the difference with ‘Get Back’ was that we had no songs to start. John and Paul would always have a couple of songs that would start the ball rolling.
“The only thing I was grasping and desperate for, is when we did ‘Get Back.’ If you look at the early sort of getting it together, it (the drum part) is just like straight rock. I wanted to know how I got to that, that rock shuffle thing, just playing the snare drum. Because I have no idea why I changed that. I thought ‘I’ll see it on film.’ But it just happened the cameras were off when we did that.”
That disappointment aside, Starr said “Get Back” is a much more representative look at The Beatles putting together “Let It Be” than was Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s “Let It Be,” the 1970 documentary that, with its filming, provided the footage Jackson assembled into the new film.
“The original documentary, I never liked it,” he said. “It was so narrow. It was on one point of an argument and all these down parts. We were laughing and we were having fun as well and we played great and we did all this in a month. Michael Lindsey Hogg’s, I felt, was just too down. I spoke to Peter (and said) ‘I was there. It was lots of fun as well.’ He certainly brought that up. I’m ever grateful to Peter for doing such a great job.”
Although it was recorded before the “Abbey Road” album, “Let It Be” became the final Beatles album, released in May 1970, months before the band broke up. The Beatles, Starr said, had run their course
“We were lads when we started, and as it went on, we had wives and children,” he said. “And we stopped touring and made great records. But we didn’t make good records while we were touring. We played well together and we got on with each other. That’s just how it was. We came to a point, eight years later – it blows me away that we did all that in eight years – that it was time to leave.”
If all goes as Starr hopes, the All Starr Band could have a gig for years to come. Starr, who spent the pandemic going to the gym, painting and making spin art, also continues to make new music at a steady pace.
He released two EPs, “Zoom In” and “Change the World” in 2021 and “EP3” last year. And he has three more EPs in the works. One was finished shortly before rehearsals for the current tour. A second one will be produced by noted songwriter-producer Linda Perry and Starr is planning to do a third EP of country songs, a project that will be an outgrowth of a song written for him by T Bone Burnett.
“(He) sent me, I promise you, one of the most beautiful country songs, tracks, I’ve heard in a long time. It’s very old-school country and it’s beautiful,” Starr said. “So I thought ‘Hey, I’m going to make a country EP.’”
Starr doesn’t plan to slow down any time soon either – in the studio or on the road.
“People are saying, ‘What about retirement?’,” Starr asked. “Well, I’m a musician. I don’t have to retire. As long as I can pick up those sticks, I got a gig.”
Ringo Starr & His All Starr Band
When: 8 p.m. June 15
Where: Greek Theatre, 2700 N. Vermont Ave., Los Angeles
Tickets: Starting at $72 at Ticketmaster.com.
Also: 8 p.m. Sept. 17 at Toyota Arena, 4000 E. Ontario Center Parkway, Ontario. Tickets are $60-$375 at Ticketmaster.com.
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