40 Year Old Ringo Stops to Smell the Roses (1981)

 

40-Year-Old Ringo Stops to Smell the Roses

By Steve Morse

The Boston Globe 

November 1, 1981

    Ringo Starr's new album contains songs by fellow Beatle alumni, Paul McCartney and George Harrison, but none by the deceased John Lennon. Though Lennon had written songs for it before he died.

     "I spoke to John, and he was going to do a few tracks, but that didn't come about," Starr said, speaking by phone recently from Los Angeles. "We had this meeting in the Plaza Hotel, and he was really up for it. He was excited. We were going to do it in January. "

    Those plans were cut short by Lennon's death last December. Lennon had already made demo tapes of the new songs. They were merely awaited the added of Ringo's vocals, but Starr subsequently shied away from them for use on his new album. Stop and Take the Time to Smell the Roses, which is his first release in three years. 

    "Of course, I would have gotten great publicity from it, but I didn't want to use a dead friend," he said bluntly. "They wanted to send them, but I said, 'No, I don't want to hear them'. 'Just put your voice on them', I was told. But no, if we had played together and done it together, it would have been different."

     Neither is there any Ringo tribute to Lennon on the album. "That's not my nature", he says, modestly, adding that the only tribute is "to my three brothers", which is a line at the back of the album. "It wasn't in me to do a tribute thing. I loved the man. The man is gone. We all have to carry on."

     For his part, Starr is carrying on, bloodied but unbowed. His philosophy appears to be summed up in "All the same I play the game"- a verse Harrison wrote for him, in the song "Wrack My Brain", just chosen as the first single off the new album. 

    Playing the game, at least the promotional game, is something at which the 40 year old Ringo Starr is very skilled these days. He does interviews only when he has a product to sell. Earlier this year, it was when his movie Caveman, a lightweight jungle spoof in which he romped with his wife actress Barbara Bach now it's his LP Stop and Take the Time to Smell the Roses, which features songs not just by McCartney and Harrison, but by Ronnie Wood, Steven Stills, Harry Nilsson and Carl Perkins.

    Several times during the interview, Starr in a cool bit of salesmanship implants the imagery of roses. He begins right off by saying, in a good natured voice, "So are you smelling the roses?"  Later, he chuckles,  that if the album sells, he'll buy roses for the garden of his new country home in England. "Barbara just bought me every gardening tool in the world," he jokes, "So I keep threatening to go out."

     The title song, "Stop and Take the Time to Smell the Roses,"  co-written by Ringo and Harry Nilsson, is a virtual summary of the 1981 Ringo, "What's all this? Hurry? Have a good time in life. Don't let everything pass you by. You're only here once, and I've been here longer than most of you." He recites during a stream of conscious portion that he calls the songs "mad verbal part". 

    Despite the songs breeziness, one of the verses, "take the time to fill your noses" will nevertheless incite controversy. It sounds like a cocaine joke, but Starr is quick to point out it isn't. "I'm against that [cocaine]", he says on a serious note, "but we all knew as soon as we did it, that would get read into it. People always look for double meanings. That's why I've never bothered to disclaim anything, because you can't stop anybody from reading into your records."

     People also will, no doubt, see what they want to see in "Private Property", a rather silly pop tune donated by McCartney. "She's mine. She belongs to me. She's my private property". Are the lyrics, and the reference appears to be to Ringo and his wife. "Yeah, it was written for Barbara and me. She's my private property." Starr says, tongue in cheek. Asks if he might get into trouble with women's groups for such a sentiment. He adds humorously, "Yes, I can get into a lot of trouble, but we can't help you with that.  At least Barbara's not offended. "

    There are other novelty songs on this LP, including, "Drumming is My Madness" with  Ringo singing in his patent hearty tone. "Drumming is my middle name. Drumming makes me go insane" And "Back off Boogaloo", which incorporates snippets of old Beatles verses such as, "good day sunshine", "I need somebody, not just anybody". And "what do you see when you turn off the light?"

     Considering Ringo dislikes reminiscing about the Beatles. Why did he resurrect Beatles lyrics? "What it mainly was going to be was lines from my tracks, not Beatles tracks, but they just happened to fit, so we threw them in. It was not intentional to refocus people's attention. It's just that the pieces sounded good," he said. 

      During his solo career, Starr has always come off as more congenial than talented, especially as a vocalist. That remains true on his new album, though, there are a few songs: Ron Wood's smoldering "Dead Giveaway," Stephen Stills, smoothly funky, "Nice Way" and Carl Perkins country sing along, "Sure to Fall in Love With You" that are among the best songs he has recorded. 

    In general, there's an uptown feel to the new disc, (lots of saxophone).  Starr does sound recommitted to his music following a disastrous late 70s period in which his solo albums steadily declined, capped by 1978s Bad Boy, a schlocky, lifeless effort. The albums were going downhill. 

    He agrees. "Oh yes, you got to be daft, if you won't admit that things weren't going well. The album sales were really low, and what I was doing on them wasn't that exciting. We had done it before, so I sat around with no great enthusiasm to do an album because of that."

     Starr finally got the fever again early last year. "I was wandering around the world and thought, well, while I was doing that, I might as well make an album as well. So we started in France with Paul, because just a few months before Barbara and I were in Monte Carlo, we were residents there then, and he was in Cannes with his wife, Linda. We went to dinner, and I said, 'I'm thinking of getting an album together. Got any songs, brother?' He said, 'Yeah, I'll get some something'."

     One thing led to another, and Starr ended up with five separate producers on the album, (McCartney, Harrison, Nilsson, Stills and Wood). Continent hopping, he recorded with McCartney in France, Harrison in England, Stills in Los Angeles and Nilsson in the Bahamas. "I was in some indecision as to what to do musically, and that's why I have five producers," he explains. "I didn't want to get stuck with one producer and create a one dimensional album. I didn't want just another 'Ringo album'".

     The new album is important to him, he says, "because I'm coming back into the music business, I'm really more interested in doing albums right now than movies". He has no movie slated, and perhaps the most we'll hear from him in that regard is when the Beatles Hard Days Night is re-released nationally next spring, though it has a special reopening in Providence on November 6.

     Although Caveman did well at the box office, films have been a continual source of frustration for him. "Every year I say I want to play a killer. It just seems to be the only way I'll get away from being this happy go lucky clown," he says. "I'm typecast in lightweight roles, but I think I can handle a lot more meat than they want to give me. But the problem is that the film industry just thinks I'm a recording artist. No matter how many movies I've done, I've done 11 or 12 of them, they still feel 'well, he's a drummer, not an actor'". 

    For now, Starr is going to live up to that image. However, he'll do his drumming in the studio. He plans to start recording again next month, and not on the stage. As always he has no intent to tour. "If I did tour. I don't know how we do it, because I've always sort of been in the back on the drums. In the old days, I did a number or two, and that was easy, but if I toured now, I'd have to work out a whole stage show, or I'd have to get up and say 'hi, we're going to slow that tempo down', and other chit chat. It's difficult to work up. Every year we think about it, and then every year we sort of say, 'Oh, well.'"

     A far more appealing than the road, apparently, is the peace and quiet of his new home studio in England. "Now we don't have to travel around the world all the time to record.." He notes, "You can just get out of bed and go to work in your own home."

     Pleased with his recent move to England after living in rented houses in Los Angeles for much of the past two years, Starr can now also see his three teenage children who live in England with his former wife, and can visit on weekends.

     Overall, his existence, accepting the shock of Lennon's death last year has become a happy one. Gone are the mid 70s carousing days with buddies Harry Nilsson and who drummer Keith Moon, as outlined in the new book Full Moon, written by Moon's paid confidant Dongel Butler. The book candidly states that Ringo and his pals had a great deal of free time to booze away, dope away, have it away and generally behave like juvenile miscreants.

     "Yeah, it was just three guys going crazy", Starr confesses of that period. "Every night  we would go on the town, sort of the happy go lucky bachelor's. And some nights it would get a little rough. But that was that. It was a period you go through."

     Just how rough did it get?  "There was never any serious damage," he says, coyly. "We may have broken up a restaurant or two, but we always paid for the furniture. But I'm very nice now I don't break any any restaurants now."