Elvis in Las Vegas

 This is  group of people including Ringo & Maureen, Peter Brown, Denis O'Dell and Ken Mansfield who went to see Elvis in concert in Las Vegas in January 1970.   Elivs called out Ringo in the audience during the show.  

Ringo: Not Through Yet (1971)

One thing that stands out to me about this article is that while it was published in February 1971 -- the events in the story are all from 1970 - heck Lee wasn't even born yet!  Fans had to rely on getting Beatles news from newspapers and were often several months behind in what was going on.  Say what you want about the evils of the Internet -- but we sure are now up to date on Beatles news. 

Ringo:  Not Through Yet 

By Marvin Kupfer

Newsweek Feature Service

February 19, 1971

    Ringo Starr has always been a self-effacing sort of a Beatle. While the other lads were experimenting with politics, the drug culture, multiple marriages, and the 10 notes scale, Ringo just sat back, smiling his slightly baffled smile and playing his drums. 

    Then came the group's great split. But to everyone's surprise, Ringo, who at any given time in the past would have been voted the Beatle least likely to succeed on his own, seems on his way to becoming the most successful of all. 

    Ringo has been making albums of his own in an awesome variety of styles. He has two movie "singles," and made the long, strange journey to Nashville to record Beaucoup Blues, an album entirely made up of country music. "I was a bit uptight and stiff at first," he says of the Nashville experience, "because suddenly I was like in the front, singing all those songs, you know, like the leader of the band. I'd never been there before."

     Ringo was the last of the Beatles to join the group, and to outsiders, at least, he always seemed slightly less equal than the other three. He did not compose. He rarely improvised, and he was always satisfied to sing only one song per album. "One's enough for me,: he used to say cheerfully.

     Placid was the word for Ringo. He's married to one wife. He has kids. He's not a threat. He's always been sort of small, and comfortable, and friendly, just a nice chap.

     But the Beatles have always had separate identities. John Lennon is the clever one with the Japanese wife. Paul McCartney, the creative, cute one. George Harrison, the quiet one. And Ringo, well, Ringo plays the drums.

     Now the horizons have widened out of all normal contours. His first solo album, the newly released Sentimental Journey, may be even more off the Beatle beat than the country item. It is a schmaltzy melody of old standards ("Stardust", "Bye Bye Blackbird") which he says "Me Mum and Dad and aunties used to sing."

     He made the album for his father, who, according to Ringo, "was once the best singer in our house," until a throat operation diminished his voice. "I thought it would be nice if I did it for him and for me as well. And if anyone else likes it, well, that's okay too."

Ringo lives 15 minutes (by his six door chauffeur driven Mercedes) from London. His large red brick Tudor-style house contains four television sets, two children, his wife, and a third baby, due for release in November. He is, incredibly enough. 30, now, his hair is cut shorter. He even wears a necktie on occasions. 

    Friends say that he prefers to be known at least privately as Richie. (Richard Starkey is his real name.) "I've always been two people," he says. "Ringo, they can have. Richie stays at home. When I get into the house, it's Daddy and Richie, and that's how I like it."

     But the Beatles ties are still not completely broken. The boys were together in a movie, Let it Be, though none of them bothered to attend its London opening, and they see one another frequently, though in threes, never all four together, due to the hard feelings between John and Paul.

     Only Ringo is presently active. Paul is holed up on his farm in Scotland. George is in London, and John is in Los Angeles, reportedly seeing Dr. Arthur Janov, the controversial psychologist and author of The Primal Scream, a book which elaborates on the ego-crushing methods allegedly so beneficial to the doctor's patients.
 

Recording at Trident

 

It's Not Always Gonna be This Gray

 

The Final Rift (1970)

The Beatles:  The Final Rift

By Ray Connelly

Evening Standard

December 31, 1970

    Paul McCartney's application to the High Court for the winding up of the Beatles' affair is not unexpected. It is the legal end to a situation which has been inevitable for many months, but it could turn out to be a very messy affair. 

    The Beatles as a group broke up 15 months ago when John Lennon told the other three that he wanted a divorce from them. His new life with Yoko Ono left him no energy or interest for the Beatles, and he set about making a career for himself .

    For a time, his decision was kept secret. Meanwhile, enormous friction was developing between John and Paul over John's decision to bring in American businessman Allen Klein to run the affairs of Apple the Beatles record company. 

    McCartney wanted his father-in-law, Lee Eastman, a New York lawyer, to manage him. Last March, McCartney made the split between the Beatles public when he brought out his own first solo album. But at the time, he appeared to be leaving a few avenues open, should the situation improve. 

    But since then, the relations between Lennon and McCartney have been nonexistent. For much of this year, Paul stayed on his cottage farm before going to New York in the autumn to make an album. So far, there is no sign of that album being issued. 

    Now it looks as though Paul wants to get out of Apple and away from Allen Klein completely. But efforts to break up the affairs of the Beatles could be very, very complicated. 

    It is sad to see the affairs of the Beatles now end in public dispute. Both John Lennon and Paul McCartney have been playing together for practically half their lives. (They met at a village fete outside Liverpool when Paul was 14; he is now 28).  And until the last two years or so, they were the closest of friends. 

    But the different types of women that all four Beatles married indicate the underlying differences in their personalities. While John, George, Paul, and Ringo may once have been friends, it is difficult to imagine avant-garde artist Yoko Ono, model Pattie Harrison, photographer Linda McCartney, and former hairdresser Maureen Starkey having a great deal in common. 

    Nine months ago, Paul told me, "The Beatles have left the Beatles, but no one wants to say the party's over. John's in love with Yoko, and he's no longer in love with the other three of us. And let's face it, we were in love with the Beatles as much as anyone. 

    "We're still like brothers, and we have enormous emotional ties because we were the only four that it all happened to. I don't mind being bound to them as a friend. I like that idea. I don't mind being bound to them physically, because I like the others as physical partners, but for my own sanity, we must change the business arrangements we have.

     "Only by being completely free of each other financially will we ever have any chance of coming back together as friends, because it's business that's caused a lot of the split."

     He went on, "We should all have our independent incomes and let us work out for ourselves the company problems.

    After all the years of work, all I've got to show is money locked up in a big company. "

    The Beatles shot to world prominence in 1963 when, under the guidance of Liverpool manager Brian Epstein, they became the biggest entertainment attraction ever. 

    At a conservative estimate, the record sales in the seven years must be well over 250 million copies. While their incomes have been equally staggering.

     They have appeared in three films: A Hard Day's Night (which was shown on BBC television on Monday, and appeared woefully old-fashioned),  Help!, and Let It Be. During virtually the whole of the 60s, the western world was obsessed with the Beatles and their many fads, but the effect upon the four individuals involved has been staggering. 

    They became the greatest show business phenomenon ever known, but their private lives could hardly be less glamorous. Now, all four live as quietly as possible.  John, Paul, and George are in situations that are very close to isolation, and all four have a cynical disregard for the trappings of show business. 

    We'll all be sorry to see them go forever, but it was inevitable. We all grow up. 

The Working Class Hero at Age 30 (1970)

 

The Working Class Hero at Age 30

No Writer Listed

The Sun (Massachusetts)

December 30, 1970

I was the dream weaver, but now I'm reborn. I was the walrus, but now I'm John, and so do dear friends, you have to carry on. The dream is over.

     For eight years. John has been our favorite performing flea with The Beatles. He submerged his identity and performed cartwheels of compromise on the merry-go-round of madness that he and they and we created. With Yoko, the flea became a crutch for the world's social lepers. Freaks flocked to him, and sadder cases believed he could help them where conventional methods were unable or unwilling.

     "Love and peace," said John, as a turmoil of his and our making engulfed him. "Love and peace," the pace was a fraught lunatic, 100,000 miles an hour, when last spring, he and Yoko dropped out of sight and set to work on the six-month-long course of psychotherapy in California. In September, they reemerged and made straight for the recording studio. John had not been idle during therapy, and the traumas of his experiences became the mirror from which to draw enough songs for a new album.

     Lennon was back and doing the things he knew best. That album has been released-- a brilliant, untitled viewpoint on John Lennon as he now sees himself: not as the Walrus, not as the Beatle, not as the world's guru, not as that performing flea, just the working class hero of age 30.

    "I was saying 'peace' everywhere, and getting none myself," he says.

 A working-class hero is something to be.  If you want to be a hero, well, just follow me. 

    The Lennons' home is an estate near Ascot where doves perch, look out on a high terrace. Seventy hilly acres of Heath groves woods, massive and exotic oriental trees protected by the local council, donkeys, gardens, lodges and an artificially created lake with a bed of rubber lining(to keep the water from running away) and a splendid, white, spacious, perfectly proportional sized house where workmen look like being busy forever, and where John and Yoko entertain in either the kitchen or a large, all purpose room in which the television and stereo speakers stand sentinel on the bed. 

    They have few visitors. It will be a long time before the friendship wall is covered in writing and very few friends. They get an enormous buzz out of showing one around their home, the acres of creamy, furry carpet from communist China, the bath, which looks like a giant saucer set into the bathroom floor, the completely equipped recording studios, dark room, and offices. 

    In the future, their records will be made at home, and the musicians will be able to stay with them. They can be virtually a completely self-sufficient cottage industry, equipped for a technical siege.

     For visiting the gardens, they have a little electric buggy and supplies of army and RAF great coats with the insignia pulled off. They like to spend an hour or so in the garden every day; it is idyllic. "I always wanted to be an eccentric millionaire, and now I am," says John, allowing himself a moment of whimsical satisfaction.

     Yet his new album is, in one way, the work of an eccentric millionaire. It is a plentifully self-aware statement about himself. "I was trying to make a bloody variety show," he says, and he hasn't. There are 11 songs, all of them deeply personal. Songs about his mother, about God, and about his upbringing. In one track, "Working Class Hero."  He uses what would once have been considered a dreadful four-letter word because it was the only way he could say exactly what he not.

     It is a brilliantly precise and economical album. Every word is used with care and thought. There's no lazy moments. It's a devastating, disturbing, autobiographical insight into the mind of one of the greatest hero figures of our time.

     "It's just what came out of my mouth when I tried to write songs, "he explained. "I was doing therapy and going through my life, and so I wrote about the most important things that happened to me in my life."

Mother, you had me, but I never had you. I wanted you, but you didn't want me. 

    "I'm writing this now because that's the way I feel. I used to say I wouldn't be singing. 'She Loves You' when I was 30, but I didn't know I'd be singing about my mother."

     This interview took place, generally over three separate visits to Ascot, but mainly one night after dinner, when John and Yoko sat on their bed and went through a more formal question-and-answer bit for my sake.

    They're both plumper than they used to be. John, being as heavy as he was, in Help!, although it hardly shows with Yoko. And I thought I detected a noticeably more aggressive attitude.

     "No," says John, "it's just that I get carried away a bit when I can talk to someone. We don't talk to many people, and I'm very excited with the record coming out and everything."

Shopping in Paris

 

Wedding guests

 

To have been a fly on the wall

 

December 14, 1970

Making of the film "Fly"

Up Your Legs Forever

December 9, 1970
 

Pair of Hits

 December 7, 1970 

Lennon Remembers

 December 4, 1970 

Badfinger Boogie

 

strumming in Barbados

 

November 21, 1970

Happy (Belated) birthday to Lee!

 

I missed Lee's birthday on November 11 because I had these photos labeled as November 16, which could be the day they were published in newspapers or magazines.  

Ringo and Maureen must have really liked the name "Lee" for a little girl because if Zak had been a girl, his name would have been Lee, and if Jason were a girl, his name would have been Lee.   The third time was a charm for the Starkeys because Lee was born!

Long haired, crossed legged guitar picker

October 31, 1970
 

NYC Arrival with the master tapes

 October 28, 1970

Rode all Night

 October 22, 1970 

Ringo is the Plastic Ono Band

 October 1970 

The Making of Ram

 October 12, 1970