Ringo Starr was 18 and a half years old when he nearly emigrated to Houston, Texas, chasing the blues of Lightning Hopkins. A stack of embassy forms stood between him and a completely different life. He and a friend filled them out, handed them in, and were handed even more forms in return. They ripped them up on the spot and walked out. That small act of impatience is, in a very real sense, why the Beatles happened. That is the spirit behind his album ‘Long Long Road,’ a reflection on every crossroads, every detour, and every lucky decision that brought him from Liverpool to Los Angeles, and to a listening session at which actor Jeff Bridges joined him onstage to talk through the journey.
The night he said Saturday instead of tonight
When the call came asking Ringo to join the boys, he wanted in immediately. But he was already in a band, and walking out on them that same evening was not something he was willing to do. He told Brian he would be there Saturday. The rest, as he noted with quiet understatement, is well known. What is less discussed is the earlier chapter: two bands sharing the same club in Germany, playing eight hours across a weekend between them, learning to play and react in the way that only relentless live performance can teach. Ringo watched that front line every night from the drum riser and loved it. He did not plan to join it. He just said Saturday.
Jeff Bridges, who was onstage with Ringo for the session, described what 50 years of listening to Ringo play has done to him: ‘His feel is in my DNA at this point. It’s in my cells.’ Bridges, who recorded alongside Ringo on the album’s tracks, spoke specifically about a Carl Perkins number where Ringo’s drumming locks in so tightly with Nashville bassist Dennis Crouch that the two sound like they are in the same room. They were not. Ringo received tracks with some bass already laid down, added drums and vocals, sent everything back, and let the producer complete the arrangement from there. The remote process, he said, worked beautifully precisely because Nashville’s players are that good.
Playing on the back of the beat
When the conversation turned to how Ringo actually plays, he described his approach with the kind of directness that comes from never having been formally taught. He plays on the back of the beat. Many drummers sit in the middle of it; some push ahead of it. Ringo hangs just behind, and that slight delay is what creates the swing feel that has defined his sound for six decades. ‘It just came to me,’ he said. ‘I didn’t make it up.’ It started in the skiffle bands of Liverpool, where you were in the band if you had an instrument, and the snare drum was enough to qualify.
He recalled his first experience putting a band together: he heard a trumpet player killing it on ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’ at a local club and walked three streets to the man’s house to recruit him, because nobody had phones. At rehearsal, the trumpeter played brilliantly on ‘When the Saints’ and then sat silent through every other song. That was the only tune he knew. Ringo said good night and moved on.
On ‘Long Long Road,’ the collaborators include St. Vincent, Sheryl Crow, Billy Strings, and Molly Tuttle, who Ringo said has become his first-ever recurring duet partner across the last two albums. He called her ‘my duetist.’ Bridges noted that a separate record he has just finished with Billy Strings is, in his words, ‘a classic.’
The Houston forms, still on the floor somewhere
The ripped embassy forms never made it into any archive. They landed in a London office wastebasket sometime around 1958, when Ringo and a friend decided that more paperwork was not the path to Texas.
The road to Los Angeles turned out to be longer, and considerably louder.
