A Starr Was Born

The Beatles set foot on Canadian soil for the first time on August 18, 1964. That afternoon, their Pan Am Boeing 707, christened “Jet Clipper Beatles,” stopped at Winnipeg International Airport to gas up en route to San Francisco, where the band would kick off its inaugural North American tour. A local TV personality got wind of the layover and put word out on the radio. Hundreds of young Winnipeggers beelined for the airport and packed the terminal roof.

Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager, persuaded the quartet to acknowledge the crowd and do a couple of impromptu interviews. A CBC Television crew recorded the twenty-two-minute stopover. Wobbly footage shows the Beatles waving to the crowd as they make their way down the airstairs toward a cluster of reporters and police. Those were the early days of Beatlemania, before the band soured on its excesses: John, Paul, George, and Ringo seemed genuinely delighted at the reception.

But the footage also evokes some unintended symbolism. John, Paul, and George were wearing smartly tailored jackets; Ringo was in shirtsleeves. It’s as if the three in suits, who’d been performing together since 1958, were unconsciously asserting their status as charter Beatles, suggesting that Ringo, who had played his first show with the group two years to the day earlier, was still apprenticing. The cover of Meet the Beatles!, their number 1 album at the time, conveyed the same impression. The side‑by-side faces of the original three dominate Robert Freeman’s iconic photograph, while Ringo’s image floats alone in the blackness of the bottom right, like an afterthought.

Not that such imagery made Ringo any less appealing. As a kid, I claimed Ringo rights when my friends and I staged pretend Beatles shows with badminton racquets, brooms, and upside-down pails. I couldn’t articulate it at the time, but now I realize I leaned toward Ringo because he was less of a Beatle than the others. John, Paul, and George were untouchable exotics, gifted with creative powers no mortal could hope to mimic. Not being a fully formed Beatle made Ringo more fully human. The schnozz, the mop‑top haircut he never got quite right, the vulnerability in his droopy eyes, the body language that suggested a little brother trying to keep up, his laboured singing voice — it all suggested something normal, endearing, almost attainable.

The Beatles ceased touring two years after that stopover in Winnipeg. By then, Ringo’s stock as a Beatle had appreciated on the strength of his stellar drumming and everyman charm. Yet there lingered a sense that he was still a little Fab-deficient. Natural acting skills landed him the central roles in A Hard Day’s Night and Help! In both films, he was a lovable loner while John, Paul, and George played their madcap, standoffish selves. Later, in Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, John and Paul poked fun at Ringo by having him sing, “What would you do if I sang out of tune / Would you stand up and walk out on me?” Simmering insecurity came to a head in 1968, during the sessions for the White Album, when Ringo turned tables and went for the door, complaining he felt like an outsider. He returned a couple of weeks later to a scene of contrition: he found his drum kit covered with flowers and a banner reading, “Welcome Back.”

Ringo Starr was twenty-two when he joined the Beatles, and he hadn’t cracked thirty by the time they split up in 1970. He’ll turn eighty-six in July. As the British author Tom Doyle makes clear in an exhaustive, unflinching new biography, Ringo has spent the last half century struggling to craft a post-Beatles identity where he plays second to no one. Ringo: A Fab Life could have easily borrowed its title from Ringo’s first solo hit: “It Don’t Come Easy.”

For Ringo, nothing ever has. As Doyle tells it, his life has been a series of dizzying peaks and dismal valleys. Doyle traverses this terrain in short, mosaically arranged chapters that give the narrative a snappy, syncopated feel, which seems apt for a book about the world’s most famous drummer. He nimbly tracks Ringo’s ascent from a childhood blighted by poverty and life-threatening illnesses, through his internship in a succession of Liverpool bands, to the day in 1962 that John, Paul, and George invited him to join them after they famously sacked Pete Best.

Roughly a third of the book details Ringo’s eight years as a Fab, though not chronologically. By now, much of that material is old hat, so Doyle endeavours to put a Ringo spin on it. Eye-opening chapters include a section on Ringo popping pills and going AWOL during the 1964 North American tour. Another highlights the disquiet that surfaced the same year when he was laid low by a virus and briefly replaced by an understudy named Jimmie Nicol. “It was very strange, them going off without me,” Doyle quotes Ringo as saying. “They’d taken Jimmie Nicol and I thought they didn’t love me anymore.” (The stand‑in’s fleeting brush with Beatle fame gets its own chapter. According to Doyle, the last known sighting of Nicol was in 2011, when a fan recognized him working at a construction site in Utrecht, the Netherlands.)

The bulk of the book covers the decades after the Beatles. Doyle walks readers through Ringo’s shambolic love life, his descent into substance abuse, his misadventures with pals Harry Nilsson and Keith Moon, his hit-and-miss solo albums, and his unlikely gig narrating Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends. His gentle baritone was perfect for children’s TV, writes Doyle, even if it often hinted at the revelries of the night before. Things turned around after Ringo met and married the actor Barbara Bach and they both checked in to rehab. Eventually Ringo was reincarnated as a supergroup frontman and zealous ambassador of peace and love.

Doyle salts the narrative with the bounty of his prodigious research, shedding new light, for example, on the myth that Lennon once said Ringo “wasn’t even the best drummer in the Beatles.” It turns out that the remark originated in a long-forgotten BBC comedy sketch and wormed its way into popular imagination as something Lennon might have said. Other nuggets: Ringo co-designed a successful line of space-age furniture; he still plays the hi‑hat cymbals he used on the Beatles’ first Ed Sullivan appearance; his original Ludwig drum kit sold for $2.1 million (U.S.) at an auction in 2015, making it the most valuable set on the planet. The nuttiest? Ringo threatened legal action against a company marketing a sex toy for men that arguably played on his name (use your imagination).

The book unfolds crisply — the short chapters like morsels in a tasting menu. It sags, however, when it comes to Ringo’s acting career. His filmography consists mostly of indulgent, spaced-out train wrecks, and Doyle isn’t afraid to call a stinker a stinker. Frank Zappa’s 200 Motels (1971), where Ringo played the director’s onscreen doppelgänger, is “a wigged-out, grown-up kiddie TV show.” Lisztomania (1975), with Ringo playing the pope, is “absolutely bananas.” Ringo’s last movie, Caveman (1981), where he was cast as a grunting Neanderthal, is the “stupidest film of his career.” As if to underscore how dreadful these and other Ringo vehicles were, Doyle devotes a chapter to each of them, complete with scene-by-scene plot summaries. His attention to detail is laudable, but even the most ardent Ringo fan might find this stuff a slog, even a little depressing. A Beatle has come to this?

Career missteps and past behaviour aside, Doyle clearly admires the easygoing disposition that was evident in Ringo from the get‑go. While the mainstream press wasn’t quite sure what to make of John, Paul, and George at first, the upright Saturday Evening Post had no qualms about naming Ringo “the most popular Beatle in America” in 1964. Bonhomie remains Ringo’s calling card. “His enthusiasm was infectious,” Doyle writes, recounting a 2024 video interview. “It was impossible not to flash the peace and love sign back at him. Both hands.”

Ringo was the oldest Beatle; maybe his even-tempered nature has helped to keep him “skinny, and sprightly, and keen to prove it.” A cleaned‑up lifestyle hasn’t hurt, either. He released his twenty-first solo album, Long, Long Road, in April, and he plans a new string of shows this summer with the current version of his All‑Starr Band. With each passing year, it becomes less of a stretch to fancy him still touring at ninety.

When he performs today, Ringo spends much of the show at centre stage, crooner-style, running through his hits and showering audiences with peace and love. His fans adore it, but something’s not quite right: he seems out of place. He should be enthroned at his black oyster pearl drums, grinning as if he can’t believe his good fortune, anchoring the alchemy of John, Paul, and George with faultless precision and, occasionally, alchemy of his own. What we really want is a flesh-and-blood Beatle. The best we get is a keeper of the Beatle flame.

My days of wanting to be Ringo are long gone, but that doesn’t stop me from imagining I’m in his shoes at eighty-six and wondering how on earth it all happened. For someone who wasn’t expected to live past the age of six, he’s led an astonishingly eventful life. His is “a tale involving an ordinary guy, with a standout talent, who stepped from his drab and troubled early life into an unimaginably colourful world and set off on a grand adventure.”

The next milestone will be a series of four interconnected biopics about each of the Beatles from the Oscar-winning British filmmaker Sam Mendes; Ringo will be played by the Irish actor Barry Keoghan. It remains to be seen how Ringo stacks up against the other Beatles in Mendes’s telling. But the fact that he joined Paul and the estates of John and George in greenlighting the project suggests he’s okay with the gist of it.

He wouldn’t have been so self-assured when he stepped off the plane in Winnipeg on that summer day sixty-two years ago. If there’s one take-away from Doyle’s book, it’s that Ringo has learned over these many years to feel secure in his own skin. Drumming made him a Beatle, and fate ordained that he’ll always be a Beatle, one way or another. But by the same token, he’ll never stop being Ringo, as long as “there’s work to do, shows to play, records to make.”