Looking Back Ticket to No-where Land (1981)

 

Looking Back Ticket to No-Where Land

By Roger Ebert

The Commercial Appeal (Memphis)

April 7, 1981

    "Before the tragedy, there might have been days or weeks when we didn't even mention the name of John Lennon," Barbara Bach said. She had her feet tucked beneath her on the overstuffed sofa and was curled up against Ringo Starr. He lit two cigarettes and handed one to her. She inhaled. "Now we think of him almost every day. Richie will look up and say something to John."

     This was at a point near the end of the interview. Ringo Starr and Barbara Bach had come to Chicago to be interviewed about their new movie, Caveman, and his new record, You Can't Fight Lightning. And of course, there were going to be other questions, the inevitable, obligatory question that the interviewer hates to ask, but must ask. The questions about how Ringo feels after the murder of John Lennon, and about whether the three surviving Beatles will ever hold a reunion. 

    I realized, as I asked him that, I already know how Ringo must feel, and that in simple truth, I would not want the surviving Beatles to appear together again in concert. What would be the point? 

    "We know the questions are going to come up somewhere," Ringo said, "It's all a question of when."

    "Can you talk about Lennon now?"

     "I can talk about him. I miss the man. For 10 years, he walked the streets of New York. He could wander around New York. He was a nice man. Last November 15, Barbara and I went to see John and Yoko. We had a great time. He was up, and we were up. It was really exciting. We planned to work on an album together. Then he was shot. 

    "There was no question, and there was no answer. It was just something that happened when we heard about it. We were in the Bahamas, and we got on a plane and flew up to be with Yoko. The memory was so fresh of being with them, and they were pleased with their new album."

     He was silent. Somehow, I thought it should not have come to this. The thing that began with the Beatles when John Kennedy was still president, should not have come down to Ringo Starr, 40 years old, sitting in a hotel suite in Chicago talking about a death. I wanted to say to Ringo that The Beatles had been important, that the joy and anarchy they let free in A Hard Day's Night and in their music had affected so many people, and that it didn't matter if they never had a reunion because the spirit of the Beatles....

     But oh, hell, talking about the spirit of the Beatles curdled my flesh. I sounded like a fan magazine writer and was nowhere close to saying what I wanted to say. So I told Ringo that just a few days earlier, I'd attended a screening of Rock Show, the new concert documentary starring Paul McCartney and Wings, that there had been half a dozen kids there celebrating a 13th birthday party, and that it had struck me that McCartney was 25 years older than those kids. That to them, he was not a Beatle, but an adult.

     Popular music is so strange. It freezes forever, certain memories of our youth, and yet never says the same things to those who are younger than we are. "When I was a kid," Ringo said. "It was Johnny Ray, he was an adult, and Frank Sinatra, he was an adult too. Our dad used to tell us to listen to Glenn Miller. And dad was right, too. Glenn Miller was good. For me Elvis was the first one who came on as a teenager. He was our age. 'No, I'm not a professional,' he used to say, 'You have to read music and all that to be a real singer like Tony Bennett.' Elvis was the first who was one of us. It doesn't matter that the Beatles won't perform again. We had turned into derelict musicians before we quit giving concerts, performing the same numbers every night. It got boring and we got stale. Now we work on each other's albums, and that's all you hear about. George and Paul and I getting together for a benefit in John's memory. It's over. We did it for a long time. "

    He still looked exactly like Ringo Starr. He was smaller than I had imagined he would be, not tall with the profile carved in granite.  He wore black slacks and a shirt divided into four big black and white squares. Next to him, Barbara Bach looked not at all like the sex symbol from Playboy and the Bond movies, but like a comforting friend. She wore hardly any makeup. She was cheerful. She thought of things to say during those moments where it seemed as if Ringo Starr could not answer one more question. 

    It was not at all that Ringo (Miss Bach always uses 'Richie', since his real name is Richard Starkey) was not civil, was not cordial. It was more than that.  In a press conference during the Beatles' first United States tour, someone had asked Ringo, 'What do you call your haircut?' And he replied, 'Alfred.' Having reached that ultimate insight to reply to an interviewer's question, what was there left that he could add now?

     But he would talk gladly about Barbara Bach.  "We've been together for a year as of February," he said. "During that time, I doubt if there had been 10 or 15 days when we have not been together. Those days were horrendous. I hated them. Today, when people ask me what I'm doing, I say 'I'm building a home for Barbara and her two children.' They are very dear to me. 

    "When we were filming Caveman, we became very good friends. Then, towards the end of the film, we realized that we each had separate lives. Since those lives did not seem to either one of us to be worth not being able to be together, we decided to live together. We've been together so much. It's been like what some couples take 15 years to achieve."

     They seem truly, touchingly in love. 

    "It's difficult sometimes," Barbara said. "I can walk down the street, and most people will not recognize me. Ringo cannot go anywhere. He is instantly recognized. We can't go shopping. We can't move without people being there."

     "I try to be nice to people," Ringo says, "but I never stop in airports. If you stop in a public place to give someone an autograph, you're dead. There's a crowd, and everybody must have one, and if you don't give them one, even if it means missing your flight, then you're an ass."

     What sort of accommodations have you arrived at with the fact that you are always going to be Ringo Starr, and people are always going to know that?  "I have a private life, a private existence, a place with padded walls." He grinned. "I was always able to shut it off. After a lot of musicians perform, they're all wired. They need hours to come down. They go to their hotel and destroy their suite. That's okay. They'll pay for it. So who cares?

     "I was able to leave the stage and say, 'All right, that's over now. It's me again.' I've had self-destructive periods when I was crazy when I was 18 or 19. That was the first rough one, the teenage crazies, and no-where land. There were other crazy times. Now I'm just trying to get through it, and I'm definitely getting happier every day. I hope I learned something every day of my life. My philosophy is, if you can be kind, be kind."

     What about this movie, Caveman?  "We shot it in Mexico. It's set in the year 2,000,008 BC. I play a caveman named Atuk, and Barbara plays a cavewoman named Lana. We shot it two hours outside Durango at Los Organos, which means 'God's organs', steep cliffs, and all."

     "It doesn't mean it. It doesn't at all mean 'God's organs'." Barbara said.

     But about caveman? I said

    "Yes. About caveman? Darling?"

     "Yes, darling," said, Barbara, "Well, it was hard to take yourself seriously walking around in a skunk bikini."

     "They made mine out of little puppies," Ringo said. "We learned how to walk like cavemen. I still do. So this is Chicago?"

     The Beatles. I said, perform concerts here in....

     "Whenever it was, they all blurred together," Ringo said. "We never knew what city we were in. I remember Chicago had a lot of tracks in those days,."

    Horse tracks?

     "No silly, railroad tracks. Weren't you the railroad track Center of America?" Ringo smiled. There was a short silence. "Those kids thought Paul was an old one ? Ah well, that's all right, there's some fine music around for them, nothing great. But for my children and Barbara's children, it's energy that's the best thing. Anyway, the energy they get from music. It's not easy for the kids out there these days. You know, who cares what music they listen to? Who cares if they've ever heard of The Beatles? They're having their little go. It's their turn to shout."