Did three Beatles almost reunite in Syracuse? Ringo Starr says he absolutely .... can't remember
I’d waited a long time for a chance to ask Ringo Starr this question. I’d first heard the story more than a decade ago, from people of accomplishment and authority. Still, I remembered the basic point seemed so improbable I had trouble completely processing it, at first:
In 1971, not long after the breakup of the most famous rock band in history, there were serious hopes for a reunion of at least three of The Beatles …
In Syracuse.
“It was the jam that never happened, the one that got away,” said David A. Ross, a young museum assistant at the time who’d go on to a distinguished career as a museum director, curator and writer.
Ringo did a little news conference Friday before he and his “All-Starr Band” – Todd Rundgren, Gregg Rolie, Steve Lukather, Richard Page, Warren Ham and Gregg Bissonette – began a tour at the new Lakeview Amphitheater on the shoreline of Onondaga Lake, near Syracuse. The band moves on Saturday to the Seneca Allegany Resort & Casino, in Salamanca. Ringo is 75 now – if you’re a Baby Boomer, that’s a number hard to contemplate – but I wanted to ask him about that Syracuse gathering, long ago.
I wrote a piece about it in 2005 for The Syracuse Post-Standard, and the guys who told me the tale were Ross and James Harithas. Harithas is a former curator of the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston, while Ross - chair of art practice at the School of Visual Arts, in New York City - has served as director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art.
By: Sean Kirst
Source: The Buffalo News
