By Brian Ives
It was a long night, but Beatlemania was still in the air at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony at Public Hall in Cleveland.
After Bill Withers’ induction, the stage went dark, and the crowd saw a film where drummers including Dave Grohl, Questlove, Max Weinberg, Tre Cool, Abe Laboriel Jr., Chad Smith, Taylor Hawkins, Stewart Copeland and others spoke about Ringo Starr while seated behind his drum kit. “You hear his drumming, and you knew exactly who it was,” Grohl said. Questlove added, “Ringo was the coolest one.”
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Screams, as if it were fifty years ago, greeted Paul McCartney, who spoke about his former bandmate. He recalled seeing Ringo with his pre-Beatles band Rory and the Hurricanes. “Ringo was a professional musician! He had a beard – that’s professional! He had a suit: professional! And he sat at the bar driving bourbon. We never saw anyone like this!”
“Me, John and George — God bless them — were on the fromt line singing,” he recalled of Ringo’s early days in the Fab Four. “And now behind us we had this guy we never played with before. I think we did Ray Charles’ ‘What’d I Say.’ Most drummers couldn’t do the drum part. Ringo nailed it! I remember the moment we were standing there and looking at John and George, and the look on our faces was ‘F***! What is this?’ That was the beginning, really, of the Beatles.”
“As all the other drummers said [in the film], he’s something so special. Other bands look at their drummer to see if he’s gonna speed up or slow down. You don’t have to look at Ringo! It’s a great honor for me to be able to induce him, I mean, induct him, into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame tonight.”
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Starr then waltzed on stage, saying, “My name is Ringo, and I play drums. Paul said a lot of great things, some of them were true. I was in the press room and they said, ‘Why did you wait so long [ to be inducted]?’ It had nothing to do with me, you have to be invited, and I’m glad to be invited.”
Recalling his youth, he said, “I was playing in skiffle bands, we were playing anywhere we could and then I joined a couple of other bands…” During his speech, Paul interrupted him pointing at his watch. Ringo protested, “After the things I’ve sat through tonight?” The crowd, many of whom came just for that moment, roared. He described hearing Alan Freed’s radio show which was broadcast, for some reason, in Luxenborg, and hearing Little Richard singing “Shag on down to the union hall.” “To you in America, that wasn’t very meaningful. To us, it was very meaningful!”
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“It was an incredible journey for me with theses guys who wrote these songs. We would get [songs] done in an hour and a half. It was a joy. A tip I’ve got for all bands, if you fart, own up! We made a pact in the van, if we fart in the van we admitted it. That’s what we did, and that’s why we got along so well.” The Beatles’ big secret: revealed!
