Wednesday, May 13, 1998: Ringo's American Confessions and All Saints' Cheeky Covers
In which the drummer tells lies beautifully, whilst the Quiet Beatle dodges death one more time
The rain was positively pissing down on New York's Greenwich Village that Wednesday evening as a select crowd of music industry types and one particularly blonde teen trio called Hanson filed into the Bottom Line Club. They'd come to witness something rather peculiar: Richard Starkey—yes, that Ringo Starr—performing his life story for VH-1's Storytellers programme, one part confessional, one part sing-along, and entirely too much bloody sentiment for anyone's taste at half past eight on a school night.
There was something gorgeously absurd about Ringo holding court in front of a roomful of American teenagers whilst across the Atlantic, the number one single belonged to four young women who'd taken the Red Hot Chili Peppers apart and reassembled them like an IKEA wardrobe. "We get by with a little help from our friends," indeed—especially when those friends were covering rock classics and calling it quits at the precise moment most musicians start getting serious.
Ringo, now fifty-seven and sporting the sort of beard that suggested he'd given up on razors sometime around the fall of Rome, had assembled his usual coterie of session musicians to help him excavate the Beatles catalogue one more time. The set list read like a greatest hits compilation assembled by someone with a peculiar fondness for his own work: 'With A Little Help From My Friends', 'Back Off Boogaloo', and 'Don't Pass Me By'—the latter performed as a solo piano piece, which was rather like watching Keith Moon attempt needlepoint.
"This is the first time I've ever done 'Don't Pass Me By' on me own," Ringo announced, settling behind an old upright piano that looked like it had seen better decades. "It's a bit scary, like, but then again, John used to say we were all bloody terrified most of the time." He paused, perhaps remembering the late Beatle's fondness for cutting remarks. "Course, John also said we were 'more popular than Jesus,' so maybe he wasn't the best judge of things."
The most telling moment came when Ringo sat behind the piano for 'Don't Pass Me By', his first-ever solo performance of the song. Here was the drummer who'd spent thirty years hiding behind Ludwig drums, suddenly naked at the keys, playing what was arguably the most autobiographical song he'd ever penned. The irony was delicious: a man who'd spent his career keeping time was now desperately trying to make it stop.
"Paul always said I was the luckiest bastard in the world," Ringo remarked between songs, grinning in that way that suggested he half-believed it himself. "Course, Paul says a lot of things. Like that he's the cute one." The audience laughed politely, though one suspected they weren't entirely sure whether this was meant to be funny or tragic.
Meanwhile, back in Britain, the music charts were undergoing their own peculiar form of time travel. All Saints had commandeered the number one spot with their audacious double A-side 'Under The Bridge/Lady Marmalade', a pairing so unlikely it made peanut butter and caviar seem like natural bedfellows. The quartet—Nicole and Natalie Appleton, Melanie Blatt, and Shaznay Lewis—had taken the Red Hot Chili Peppers' heroin-soaked meditation on urban alienation and transformed it into a sleek piece of R&B nostalgia, whilst simultaneously giving LaBelle's disco classic the sort of workout usually reserved for Jane Fonda videos.
Anthony Kiedis, the Chili Peppers' frontman, had gone on record saying he wasn't particularly fond of what All Saints had done to his song. "They stripped out the final verse," he complained to Rolling Stone. "The most meaningful part of the whole bloody thing." One imagined George Harrison might have sympathised—after all, he'd spent years watching Lennon and McCartney dismiss his contributions whilst simultaneously stealing his biscuits.
Speaking of George, the Quiet Beatle was maintaining his characteristic approach to mortality: facing it head-on whilst simultaneously denying it existed. Fresh from his second visit to the Mayo Clinic, where American doctors had pronounced him cancer-free (despite what the yellow press insisted on printing), Harrison was keeping a decidedly low profile. "I'm feeling fine," he'd told reporters earlier that month, "though I do wish people would stop sending me sympathy cards. It's like living my own bloody funeral."
The press, naturally, wasn't buying it. The American media had seized upon his hospital visit with the sort of enthusiasm usually reserved for royal scandals, breathlessly reporting that he was suffering from "advanced lung cancer"—a diagnosis that would prove tragically prescient, though thankfully premature. MTV and VH-1 were running stories about George's "death watch," which seemed particularly rich considering they'd spend the next decade pretending music died when Kurt Cobain did.
George had reportedly told friends he found the media speculation "disappointing and disgusting"—not unlike how he'd felt about most Beatles coverage since 1964. Paul McCartney, ever the diplomat, had rung his old mate immediately after reading the reports. "I spoke to George straightaway," Paul would later tell Rolling Stone. "He said, 'I suppose you're ringing about the newspaper bollocks.' I said, 'Not really, but I'm concerned.' He was very upbeat. He always is, until you actually meet him."
Paul himself was navigating his own peculiar form of nostalgia. His contribution to EMI's 'Twentieth Century Blues' album—a sterling rendition of Noel Coward's 'Mad About The Boy'—had been recorded in early March, part of a charitable impulse that seemed to strike him whenever someone died. The album, curated by Pet Shop Boys' Neil Tennant, was designed to raise money for AIDS research, a cause particularly close to Paul's heart since Freddie Mercury's death.
"Noel Coward was like the John Lennon of his day," Paul had remarked during the recording sessions. "Witty, cutting, occasionally brilliant, and absolutely convinced of his own genius. The difference is that Noel lived long enough to become unfashionable." It was the sort of observation that revealed more about Paul's own anxieties than about either Coward or Lennon.
The juxtaposition was striking: here was one Beatle paying homage to a master of British musical theatre, whilst another was across the pond confessing his life's work to a roomful of American teenagers and industry veterans. George was hiding from death in the English countryside, and John... well, John was still dead, though his posthumous career seemed to be going rather well. The John Lennon Anthology box set was due for release in November, a four-CD collection of demos, outtakes, and home recordings that would prove, once and for all, that John had been just as lost and confused as the rest of us.
Ringo finished his set with 'Love Me Do', the Beatles' first single, delivered with the sort of weariness that suggested he'd played it roughly ten thousand times too many. "This one takes me back to the beginning," he told the audience. "When we were young and stupid and thought we could change the world with a harmonica solo."
The audience applauded politely, but one couldn't help feeling that the evening had been less about storytelling and more about story-selling—the endless commodification of musical memories for an audience that seemed more interested in nostalgia than genuine emotion. As Ringo himself had once observed, "Everything's plastic, but I like plastic. I want to be plastic."
Jo Whiley, broadcasting from the BBC Radio 1 studios, was spinning All Saints whilst probably wondering if anyone remembered when covers used to sound like the original songs. Her afternoon show had become a curious hybrid of past and present, where the Spice Girls rubbed shoulders with Radiohead, and everyone pretended this made perfect sense.
Radio 1's schedule that day reflected the station's ongoing identity crisis. Chris Evans had departed the previous year in a blaze of glory and alcohol, leaving behind a breakfast show now hosted by Kevin Greening and Zoe Ball—a pairing that worked about as well as fish and custard. Evans had decamped to Virgin Radio, where he conducted his morning programme with the sort of manic energy that suggested he'd been mainlining espresso since the Thatcher years.
The cultural landscape felt schizophrenic: All Saints were conquering the charts with cover versions, The Spice Girls were falling apart without Geri, and somewhere in America, Ringo Starr was explaining to a roomful of strangers what it felt like to be the drummer in the most successful band in history.
"People always ask me about the old days," Ringo had said during a 1997 interview. "But here's the thing—we didn't know they were the old days when we were living them. We just thought we were four lads trying not to embarrass ourselves on stage."
Now, sitting at that piano in New York, playing 'Don't Pass Me By' for the very first time as a solo piece, Ringo embodied something rather profound: the realisation that all our stories are, ultimately, just variations on the same theme. We live, we love, we make music, and we hope someone remembers us kindly when we're gone.
The television listings for the day made for depressing reading. BBC One offered its usual diet of soap opera, quiz shows, and news programmes delivered with the sort of gravitas that suggested Martians had just invaded Surrey. EastEnders would air at 7:30, followed by Top of the Pops at 8:00, where Kate Thornton would introduce performances by artists whose greatest ambition seemed to be appearing on this very programme.
But perhaps that was the point. As John Lennon had once observed, "Life is what happens when you're making other plans." Ringo was making plans to tell stories; All Saints were making plans to conquer the charts with cover versions; George was making plans to stay alive long enough to see another spring; and Paul was making plans to honour dead poets whilst secretly hoping someone would still remember his own songs when he joined them.
The wheel continued to turn, as it always had, as it always would—one revolution at a time. The Beatles had taught us that much, at least. "I get by with a little help from my friends," Ringo sang, and for one brief moment, it didn't matter whether those friends were fellow Beatles, session musicians, or simply the ghosts of songs that refused to stay buried.
The day ended as it began: with uncertainty hanging over everything like a particularly persistent grey cloud. Would Ringo's stories survive the transition from stage to screen? Would George's health remain stable? Would Paul ever tire of explaining his post-Beatles output to journalists who clearly preferred talking about the old days?
As the lights dimmed at the Bottom Line Club and Ringo took his final bow to polite applause, one couldn't help but feel that the evening had captured something essential about being a Beatle in the late 1990s: the strange burden of having to repeatedly explain the most famous years of your life to people who weren't there, whilst simultaneously trying to create something new from the wreckage of the past.
Tomorrow would bring Frank Sinatra's death, the Seinfeld finale, and whatever other cultural markers awaited in an increasingly fragmented media landscape. But for now, all that remained was the echo of Ringo's voice, slightly off-key but undeniably human, singing words he'd written thirty years ago to an audience that understood their cultural significance without necessarily feeling their emotional weight.
The Beatles' legacy had become something like a beautiful prison: they were forever trapped inside the greatest moment of their lives, forever explaining what it felt like to be them when they were still figuring it out themselves. As Ringo himself had put it, "You tell me it's all for the best if I don't look around, and you tell me it's all for the best when you cut me down."
But perhaps that was the real story worth telling—not the official version, not the sanitised for-television narrative, but the messy, complicated truth of four lads from Liverpool who accidentally became the most famous people in the world and spent the rest of their lives trying to figure out what to do with that impossible gift.
After all, as John had once written in a song that wouldn't be released until the John Lennon Anthology that November: "Life is what you make it, and life is what you take it." On this particular Wednesday in May 1998, Ringo Starr was simply trying to make the best of what remained, one story at a time.