Ringo Starr has a very unique place in The Beatles’ career. While most listeners know that the band’s sound wouldn’t have been what it is without Starr’s singular playing, his non-flashy, simple style keeps him from the spotlight at times.

Starr’s playing is characterized by impeccable timing. He always knew exactly what to play for each song, whether a simple blues-rock number or a psychedelic haze. Even Starr himself recognizes his timing. He once credited it as the thing he’s most proud of from his time with the group.

Starr was brought on after the other three members had been established, but The Beatles didn’t become The Beatles until Starr joined their ranks. Right from the start, it was clear that Starr’s timing was going to completely reshape the group’s career.

“Yeah, and I’ve got a lot of footage of George,” Starr once said. “He had that great line, he said, ‘You know, and the Beatles did this,’ and somebody said to him, ‘Did you have a click track?’ He said, ‘Yes, we did. Ringo, his name was.’”
Starr’s Timing

According to Starr, there is no trick to his signature timing. Instead, it’s just innately inside the iconic drummer. His timing can’t be repeated. He’s a once-in-a-generation talent.

“God gave me just great time,” Starr admitted in the same interview. “Jeff Lynne—they did a documentary on him. Jeff would call me over, ‘Could you play on this track?’ because we live close, and I’d go over, and he’d say, ‘Oh, just let me get the click.’ I said, ‘Jeff, I am the da** click.”

“It’s been asked a million times,” he continued. “I don’t know how I got to [play like] that. It just happened. And a lot of the way I play [it] just happens. I’ll keep the time and play rock or shuffle or whatever, and then I’ll come in wherever I come in, because you feel it from your heart.”

Source: Alex Hopper/americansongwriter.com

Read more>>>

Tehuan Harris is a news and features journalist at Collider, reporting and writing about all things music and reality TV (sometimes). She is a talented journalist and a natural storyteller who writes with curiosity and interest. After graduating from university, she jumped straight into journalism, with one goal in mind: to tell stories that matter.

Only the Fab Four saw the breakup coming, as tensions had been brewing for a while. However, the show must go on, as all four members of The Beatles pursued solo careers. George Harrison’s first stop was at the studio with Bob Dylan, as he helped him record “If Not for You,” a love song for Dylan’s wife, Sara, before their turbulent divorce.

Although Dylan was friendly with The Beatles, which led the four-piece band to record “I’m a Loser” inspired by the man himself, Dylan was closer to Harrison than to any other member. “If Not for You” helped build a friendship that no one in music can replicate, and the pair came together in a supergroup called The Travelling Wilburys. However, the friendship would not last as long as it should, as Harrison would soon succumb to cancer in 2001.

Harrison grabbed the opportunity to work with the “Like a Rolling Stone” singer almost immediately after he went solo. In fact, news of their collaboration created a buzz in the media while the Beatlemania slowly died down, and fans grieved the Fab Four’s separation. Dylan first recorded the song in March 1970, a month before the Beatles’ breakup hit the tabloids. It was recorded during the Self Portrait sessions, though the song was never meant to be for the album.

Source: Teguan Harris/collider.com

Read More<<<

Of the four distinct personalities that comprised The Beatles, the one largely regarded as the most clean-cut, straight-laced, and the kind of guy you’d be willing to introduce to your parents was the “cute” one, Sir Paul McCartney. Yet, in an ironic twist of events, McCartney was the first Beatle to spend a significant time in jail over drug possession. Of course, it wasn’t the charge that was remarkable—everyone but Ringo Starr had already had run-ins with the police over drugs by 1980. But Macca was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

More specifically, the musical legend behind hits like “Blackbird”, “Helter Skelter”, and “Yesterday” was at the Tokyo International Airport while on tour with his band Wings. The musicians had recently been in the States, and while there, McCartney had amassed an, er, significant collection of marijuana. Not wanting to waste his stash, McCartney quickly threw it into his carry-on luggage and went through airport security.

As McCartney described it, “When the fellow pulled it out of the suitcase, he looked more embarrassed than me,” per Performing Songwriter. “I think he just wanted to put it back in and forget the whole thing, you know. But there it was.” And indeed, there it was.
Paul McCartney Spent Just Over a Week in a Tokyo Prison

While marijuana certainly wasn’t legal in the United States in 1980, legal punishment for possession was much more lax in the U.S. than in Japan. Airport security officials arrested McCartney on the spot and escorted him to the Drug Supervisory Center for interrogation. From there, police took McCartney to the Tokyo Narcotics Detention Center, where he was given the descriptor “Inmate No. 22.” Japanese drug laws meant that McCartney was facing up to seven years of hard labor. He managed to get out in nine days on good behavior (and super-mega-rockstar status), though he was banned from Japan for years.

Source: Melanie Davis/americansongwriter.com

Read More<<<

McCartney's oldest child, Heather Louise McCartney, was born to Linda and her then-husband Joseph Melville See Jr., on Dec. 31, 1962, in Tucson, Ariz. By the time she was 3, however, Heather's parents had divorced.

In 1967, Linda and McCartney met. The couple got married on March 2, 1969, and McCartney officially adopted Heather around the same time. Like her parents, Heather has pursued a career in the creative arts. She studied printing at the Photographers' Workshop in Covent Garden, London, later winning the Young Black and White Printer of the Year award.

She then studied pottery and design in college and became an established potter. She eventually launched her own line of houseware products, called Heather McCartney Designs. In 1999, McCartney traveled to Atlanta to support the launch of Heather's brand, marking his first public appearance in the United States since Linda's death the previous year. "I'm happy to be here," he told Entertainment Tonight. "She's a lovely girl and I'm very proud of her."

When asked by the outlet who her biggest inspirations were, Heather answered, "My mom and dad. My brother and sisters, completely."

Aside from appearances in the documentaries The Beatles: Get Back and Let It Be when she was little, Heather has largely stayed out of the public eye.  McCartney and Linda's first child together, Mary Anna McCartney, was born in London on Aug. 28, 1969.

Mary followed in her mother's footsteps and became a photographer. In an interview with journalist Alain Elkann, Mary revealed that she fell in love with photography at a young age, having been introduced to it by her mom.

Source: Nicole Briese/people.com

Read more<<<

Fans of The Beatles are about to get a new look at the band from the point of view of George Harrison.

Random House is set to release the new book The Third Eye: Early Photographs in October, described as “the first ever collection of George Harrison’s personal photos taken between 1963 and 1970.”

The book will feature over 200 color and black-and-white images capturing the rise of The Beatles. The images, curated by Harrison’s widow, Olivia Harrison, were taken from the rocker’s personal photos and 8mm film stills.

According to the description, the photos give fans an “inside look at the human beings behind the Beatles, trying to hold onto themselves-and enjoy themselves-while standing at the center of the storm.”

The book will include essays by Olivia, as well as authors Colm Tóibín and George Saunders, and the photos will feature commentary, including never-before-seen quotes from George.

The Third Eye: Early Photographs will be released Oct. 6 in the U.S. and is available for preorder now. There will also be a deluxe edition coming later in the fall.

Source: Everett Post

The train from London cut through the verdant English countryside like a dreamy reverie. Tidy suburbs gave way to rolling hills until I was deposited in East Sussex, the enclave along the English Channel where Paul McCartney maintains a 160-acre estate and neighboring recording studio. The landscape outside looked like Hobbiton: sheep and hares dotting the meadows, a Dutch windmill towering overhead.

When Sir Paul arrived, he was dressed entirely in black, looking spry and sunny. He guided me to an upstairs lounge, where we settled on a couch, a plate of chocolate chip cookies between us. For the next hour and 20 minutes, it was just Paul and me.

Man on the Run, a new documentary about McCartney’s formation of Wings in the 1970s, arrives on Prime Video February 27. Directed by Morgan Neville, it is another in a series of McCartney-approved films that burnish not only the Beatles’ legacy, but also his own. The occasion of the film—and Jann Wenner’s recent 80th birthday—is an opportune time to publish the full and unexpurgated interview I conducted with McCartney for Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine, only a fraction of which made it into the book. The interview is an exegesis on McCartney’s relationship with Rolling Stone and the underground press of the 1960s, but also a deep dive into Beatles history—the breakup; the legal debacles that tore the band apart; Paul’s admiration and skepticism of Yoko Ono; his rocky relationship with John Lennon in the post-Beatles years; and the duo’s eventual reconciliation in Santa Monica in 1974.

On March 25, 2015, I’d flown to England with low expectations, figuring a rock-and-roll lion of McCartney’s stature would be overly diplomatic. Instead he was candid, freewheeling, and even pointed, blaming Rolling Stone and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame for crafting a revisionist history of the Beatles that cast him as the perennial also-ran to Lennon, whom the magazine venerated after his 1980 assassination—transforming Lennon into “the James Dean character,” says McCartney. Looking back, it was an opening salvo in Paul’s decade-long campaign to establish himself in popular memory as the co-equal to Lennon—foreshadowing Peter Jackson’s epic Get Back documentary and the many books, films, and exhibits that McCartney has since produced. In the interview—which Vanity Fair has published in two parts—McCartney was keen to separate myth from fact, taking issue with biopics of the band and even published histories, including the work of the foremost Beatles scholar, Mark Lewisohn. “It’s interesting because I’m a fact, not a myth,” he told me. “For me, this is fact.”

Source: vanityfair.com/Joe Hagan

Read More<<<