Having a daytime job doesn’t allow me to do stuff like this,… but what am I talking about, I was not even invited! Ringo Starr and comedian Russell Brand took the Troubadour stage in the middle of the afternoon on Monday, for the taping of one of these Sirius XM satellite radio’s Town hall sessions.
According to the LA Weekly, Brand said a few stupid things like ‘This whole day was designed to elicit non-stop ejaculations’ and ‘I represent L.A. because as you all know, I grew up in South Central’, before Ringo came on stage to answer questions from members of the audience, for about an hour.
According to the LA Times, the LA Weekly, Rolling Stone and other sources, the questions ranged from personal advice for someone’s son (whom these people think Ringo is? Dr. Phil?) to complex, convoluted pseudo-philosophical ones, the kind of questions that never finish and were certainly longer than any possible answer Ringo could give.
There were a few interesting ones like the one about his ‘matched grip drumming technique’ (‘I didn't really know how to play’, he said), or the one about whether he regretted that the ‘Let It Be’ concert on the rooftop of the Abbey Road studio, was not ‘a meticulously planned farewell blowout that a popular band might engineer today for its swan song’.
‘I have no regrets’, Ringo said after revealing they also had more grandiose ideas in their mind like going to an exotic performance space, such as an Egyptian pyramid. "But then we just decided, ‘Oh let’s just go up to the roof and have done with it. That’s the way we worked a lot of the time: There would be all these grand plans, but in the end it came down to, ‘Let’s just get the job done.’
Strangely, Monday was the 43rd anniversary of this famous performance, but Ringo could not remember: ’Is it really?’
He also said he will never write an autobiography, as his songs, that he calls his ‘audio-biographies’, are just doing this job. To what he added: ‘They really only want those eight years. And I say, ‘But there are 10 volumes before we get to that, and 20 afterwards’.
He also shared his thoughts about the digital revolution, and the disappearance of the album:
‘It's a different time, and I'm afraid to say that's what I do. If you made a record, I'd probably pick out tracks that I like and download that. That's just how it is. We have to go with that because it's changed.
‘I love the modern technology now. I was a little opposed to it –'Oh, in my day, we used to have a donkey turning the wheel, and two guys chewing tape to make it soft,’ he joked.
But he is not the kind of guy to have nostalgia for the good old times: ‘I don't want to go back anywhere, I want to deal with what's in front of me now to the best of my abilities, and sometimes that's not very good. But a lot of the days it is really great.’
Ringo was on the grill like this for an hour, then he played a short set with his 5-piece band, (among them Joe Walsh, the husband of Marjorie Bach, sister of Starr’s wife) playing some Beatles tunes ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’, ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’, but also his own ‘It Don’t Come Easy’, ‘Act naturally’, and also ‘Wings’, the only tune from his new album ‘Ringo 2012’.
Of course, he was there to promote his new material, but didn’t seem to push it too hard, how cool is this? He also announced some plan for a 2012 US tour.
Ringo seems to have kept his cool effortlessly after all these years. I remember seeing him among the Amoeba CDs rows when Paul McCartney did an in-store a few years ago. He was among the public, like any of us, not even too close to the stage, waving at anyone. Cool guy!
If you have Sirius, the session will be repeated on the Spectrum, Sirius XM Channel 28 during the week.
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