Starr Time[I]
In the dawning days of the Mersey sound, before packaged tours kept bands booked for months on end, a summerlong gig at Butlins was regarded as either Fat City or the Gulag. Few getaways were as popular as the institutionalized “holiday camps” scattered around Great Britain in rather modest and unassuming locales. Vacation retreats in Skegness, Pwllheli (Wales), Clacton, Blackpool, Filey, and Bognor Regis provided sanctuary for thousands of young working families on a budget for whom two weeks of regulated social activity and nightly entertainment was the perfect interlude to a fearsome fifty-week grind. Work and play: you could load up the car, drive a few hours through countryside as uncompromisingly beautiful and familiar as the backyard, and arrive in a walled-in oasis shimmering in the heat, where kids and adults romped side by side.
Catering to the masses, the Butlins camps were governed by vox populi, and by 1960 it was clear that rock ’n roll had crystallized as a mainstream trend. Up-and-coming groups were awarded summer residencies at each Butlins satellite: Cliff Richard at Clacton, Clay Nicholls and the Blue Flames at Filey, and the Trebletones at Bognor Regis. For £16 a week—a cushy twenty-hour week—plus room, board, and flocks of adoring birds, it was a steady, much-sought-after gig.
The Beatles, however, avoided Butlins like church. Disdainful of organized functions and the camps’ loutish appeal, John, who was inexorably middle class, refused to apply there for work. The whole concept of “chalet”—or barracks—living and uniformed perky “redcoats” who herded guests from activity to activity revolted him, and he waxed eloquent on it, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that Paul’s family had spent many happy summers at Butlins. Johnny Byrne recalls how John wasted no opportunity to trash Butlins. “He told us it reminded him of a German concentration camp,” Byrne says.
Liverpool’s representative at Butlins was Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. In 1960, billed as Jet Storm, they spent two fun-packed months at Pwllheli, opening for the blustery Blackjacks. After the headliners departed early, Storm swiped Rory Blackwell’s first name and suggested his sidemen change theirs as well to spice up the band’s “boring” image. Just as the aggressively offbeat Lord Sutch had given his Savages appropriate stage names, Storm imposed a Wild West theme, so Johnny Byrne became Johnny Guitar, Charlie O’Brien metamorphosed as Ty Brien (after Ty Hardin, the star of TV’s Bronco), and Wally Egmond adopted the name Lu Walters, which, for all its commonness, sounded to Scousers like a chaw-spittin’ desperado. The only group member who balked at the hijinks was the drummer.
Ritchie Starkey’s tenure as a teddy boy gave him the requisite aura: flamboyant clothes, an exquisitely chiseled beard, swaths of silver streaked through his lank hair, and status as one of the city’s fleetest dancers. His twelve-cylinder, red-and-white Standard Vanguard (for which he had no license) sealed the spectacular image. Although disenchanted with the idea of stage names, Ritchie was a team player and for a while consented, begrudgingly, to let Storm introduce him as “Rings,” in deference to his penchant for flashy jewelry. There was an effort to amend it to Johnny Ringo, after the mythical gunslinger; however, that fizzled when it was determined that the Colts’ singer had already staked a claim to it. Still, Rory was nothing but persevering. When Rory grabbed a ten-minute break in the middle of a set, his illustrious drummer took over the spotlight. “Ritch wasn’t that interested,” recalls Byrne. “He didn’t want to sing. But we’d bring the drums forward, which kind of amazed the crowd—you’d never see a drummer singing—and he’d do three numbers: ‘Alley-Oop,’ ‘Matchbox,’ and ‘Boys,’ the B-side of a Shirelles record we dug up.” In no time, he grew into the role; its blinding attraction energized him. “And eventually Rory began introducing the break, saying: ‘All right folks—it’s Ringo Star-Time!’ ”
Ringo: it had a nice theatricality—not too tricky, not too serious. It synchronized awkwardly with Starkey, but “Starr was a natural,” the drummer recalled. “It made sense to me, and I liked it.” Ringo Starr. It rolled right off the tongue. What’s more, it looked great emblazoned on his bass drum. While the others struggled to establish their new names, Ringo seemed born to it.
But his style wasn’t limited by name alone. Ringo had chops. “He was an excellent drummer and had a good feel,” says Adrian Barber, with whom Ringo occasionally gigged. It was an opinion that resonated throughout the Merseyside club scene. He was very popular with musicians, in general because of his personality, but particularly because he wasn’t a showboat: he established a nice groove that managed to serve the songs without taking anything away from them. His ego never got in the way. Of all the drummers in Liverpool, where the pecking order was so clearly established, bands ranked Ringo among the best. And by the summer of 1962, he figured in many of their plans.
One band in particular.
The Beatles had more than an inkling that they were only one man away from being great. As musicians, they had developed immeasurably over the years together, and it was impossible not to hear exactly how far they had come. They had gotten progressively better—and not just better, but accomplished, versatile. There was a cleverness about their playing, an ingenuity that took routine lines of music and gave them a sharp, inventive twist. A lot of it happened without a great deal of forethought. They’d hit a chord, either experimentally or by accident, and bells would go off. Some of it was innate. Paul picked up instruments the way some people pick up new languages; he had the ear for it, with all the proper accents in place. And George, especially, seemed consumed with fundamentals and technique. Both handled guitars with stunning self-assuredness and possessed the power to make their instruments hum like Maseratis. John had everything else: the right sensibility and taste. And it all fit together in a stylized groove.
And then there was the matter of ambition. “There was a feeling we all had, built into us all, that something was going to happen,” George recalled in his memoirs. Who else would have presumed to write their own songs? Or team up so audaciously with a manager? Ambition. It was never more apparent than in their long-range outlook: none of them had anything to fall back on. Their peers all had day jobs; the Beatles had never even thought seriously about punching a clock. It was only ever music, only the band, only the Beatles. There were no other options. This was their life’s work.
If perfectionism was one objective, continuity was another. Neither John nor Paul wanted to rock the boat, so it was George who ultimately was “responsible for stirring things up.” As a perfectionist, it bugged him that the drum patterns remained so static. Thunk-thunk-thunk-thunk! Thunk-thunk-thunk-thunk! They provided no contrast to the music, no matter what was being played.
Paul’s own deep passion for drumming had never been concealed. He’d long had a trap set at home, which he mastered as he did all the other instruments in the band. And during jam sessions at the Blue Angel, with Gerry Marsden and Wally Shepherd, he “always made for the drums.” Earl Preston’s drummer, Ritchie Galvin, recalled encountering Paul and Pete huddled at the Mandolin Club one afternoon in 1962 after a lunchtime session at the Cavern. “Paul was showing Pete the drum pattern that he wanted on a particular song,” Galvin remembered. “Pete tried to do it, but he didn’t get it.”
And by now it was no secret that the other Beatles resented Mona Best. The band had used her house as its unofficial headquarters since 1960, camping in the Bests’ upstairs Oriental living room between gigs and using her phone to confirm dates; as a result, they suffered her persistent interruptions—and opinions. “Mona was an attractive, strong, very forceful woman, in the tradition of John’s aunt Mimi,” says Bill Harry, who admired her. “She ran the Casbah with an iron fist, and she tried to run the Beatles with the same vigor.” Radio personality Spencer Leigh shared Harry’s regard for Mona but wrote that “she could also be a harridan.” “If she said it was Sunday when it was Tuesday,” one musician relented, “you’d say it was Sunday too.” Her high-handedness seemed particularly accentuated when the Beatles were there holding court. She came to view herself as their adviser, their patron, and the Beatles, who were fiercely independent, to say nothing of chauvinistic, “didn’t want her interference.” Only one person dreaded her more, and that was Brian Epstein. She was the bane of his existence, always on his back, always haranguing him, demeaning his position, challenging his authority, belittling him. In self-defense, he referred to her impersonally, as that woman, never by name.
Aside from a two-month stint with Tony Sheridan, Ringo had been with the Hurricanes for four years, but rumors abounded that he was again up for grabs. Kingsize Taylor’s band, on tour in Hamburg, was losing its drummer, Dave Lovelady, who was due back at school in September to finish his degree in architecture. “Teddy wrote to Ringo to ask him if he’d take my place,” Lovelady recalled. A decent raise was proposed: £5 a week more than the £15 Rory was paying him. A 35 percent hike was nothing to sneeze at. “[Ringo] wrote back to say that he would [do it,] and he gave Rory Storm his notice.”
But Ringo and Johnny Byrne were tight. They had shared a camp chalet at Pwllheli for two years running, and this summer at Skegness, on the east coast of England, arrangements remained the same. Truthfully, their chalet was an awful hole—a shabby little room so primitive that it had no electricity aside from a solitary bulb hanging by a frayed cord. But otherwise, “the lifestyle,” as Byrne says, “was ideal.” There was a snazzy new performing center, the Rock ’n Calypso Ballroom, with energetic crowds and “an electric-type atmosphere” that recharged itself every night. The boys would get up late and go for a swim or a horseback ride. Johnny and Ringo, in particular, enjoyed some lazy roller-skating in the afternoons, then came back for “a lie-in.” If they behaved, Rory’s sister, Iris, who worked in the camp dance troupe, brought some of her friends around. Recalled Johnny, “We had food, money in our pockets. We weren’t getting our hands dirty. And the girls! We did quite well with them at Butlins. There were different campers every week, so nothing ever got messy. After all, they were the main reason we’d gotten into rock ’n roll—the money and the girls. What else was there? Well, maybe the music.”
Ringo remembered the scene was “fabulous… the best place we could have been.” And his years with the Hurricanes were loaded with similar memories. “But Ringo was like all of us,” according to Byrne, “ruthless. You had to be to stay on top. Rory was that way; I was, too. And the Beatles were the most ruthless of all. No one was going to stand in the way of success.”
On the morning of August 15, 1962, Johnny and Ringo had slept late after having been up “until nearly dawn” the night before following a raucous show and its vital cool-down. Two weeks earlier Johnny and Ringo had been unceremoniously “put off” the Butlins grounds for “security purposes.” At two in the morning, after yet another uproarious show, the boys had been caught “committing the cardinal sin” of playing music in their chalet. The two young girls lounging there, however innocently, didn’t help matters.
So as not to jeopardize the gig, the two boys had rented a trailer, laying out a precious £2 per week, and parked it rather presumptuously opposite the Butlins front gates. “Ringo had one end, I had the other,” Byrne recalled. They decorated it with posters of American rock ’n roll artists and brought the record player out of hiding. Johnny brewed coffee; Ringo heated “tins of beans,” which before would have tipped them to “the camp Gestapo.” And it was there, on that Wednesday morning in August, just after ten o’clock, they were so rudely awakened by a knock.
Drowsily, Byrne answered the door. “It was John and Paul,” Johnny recalls vividly. “As soon as I saw them, I knew what they wanted. They wanted Ringo.” Apparently they’d been driving since dawn, roaring along the narrow highways toward Wales, around the sprawl of Manchester and Sheffield, then winding, with slow progress that continued mile after mile, through Wragby, Horncastle, and Spilsby, traveling even narrower roads that took a good five hours to negotiate. Byrne invited the two Beatles inside, but he grew increasingly distraught at the sight of them. He loved Rory Storm and the music they’d made together, and this development had disaster written all over it. As Johnny rubbed his eyes, sinking into the dull reality of the situation, John Lennon confirmed his worst suspicions. “Pete Best is leaving [the band],” John stated, “and we want Ringo to join.” Everyone stood there awkwardly, embarrassed, as Johnny and Ringo got dressed. “Let’s find Rory,” they suggested, and set off for their leader’s chalet.
It took more than two hours to locate Storm. He’d been in the coffee shop having breakfast and had sunk into a tranquil reverie. He was thinking, planning new routines, sending out discouraging vibes to any friendly camper who might otherwise intrude, so much so that he missed hearing the repeated announcements blaring over the camp’s P.A. system: “Would Rory Storm report to Reception. Rory Storm—please report to Reception.”
When he finally arrived, Johnny, Ringo, John, and Paul were already deep into discussions about an exit strategy and timing. The Beatles were pressuring Ringo to leave immediately with them. They had a gig that night at the Cavern and planned to introduce him as their new mate. The whole situation caught Rory totally off guard. “He was angry,” Byrne recalls. “We’d had no warning. Ringo had been with us for four years. We were in the middle of a season-long gig, doing two shows a day—and suddenly your drummer’s going on you.” Pinched by longtime pals. Still, even the ambitious Rory recognized a golden opportunity when he heard one. The Beatles were offering Ringo a king’s ransom: £25 a week! As Byrne says, “They were also waving a recording contract around, which was a big thing in 1962. Nobody was queuing up to sign us. If they had come to me and said, ‘George is leaving and we want you to replace him,’ I wouldn’t have thought about it for very long.” The same went for Rory; a pragmatist at heart, he refused to stand in Ringo’s way. Yes, he was annoyed, but he also knew the score. “You should go,” Rory told him with a shrug of inevitability.
But not so fast. Rory insisted that Ringo finish out the week: two more nights. If Ringo left them cold, they’d likely lose a week’s wages, which would sour everything. Ringo, who “was embarrassed” by the state of affairs, agreed. And reluctantly, so did John and Paul before they headed back to Liverpool—empty-handed but content. They got what they had come for, a drummer and, ultimately, a legacy.
Forevermore, the Beatles would be John, Paul, George, and Ringo.
[II]
The Beatles played a routine show that evening at the Cavern. While they were thrashing away onstage, Brian sauntered into the bandroom, where Bob Wooler was enjoying a sly nip, and asked: “Is it possible for us to talk later?” The men agreed to meet at the Old Dive, one of the furtive late-night pubs on Williamson Square, where anyone demanding entrance was required to knock three times at the window, Prohibition-style, and ask for “Joe.”
Sometime after eleven o’clock, Bob found Brian in the back room, hunched over a bottle of gin. “He was terribly upset,” Wooler recalls. And he wasted no time in delivering the news: Pete was being sacked. Moreover, the other Beatles had insisted that it was Brian’s duty, as their manager, to “do the dirty work.” Desperate to get it over with, he’d already made an appointment to meet Pete at NEMS the next morning for the showdown.
Wooler was stunned. “Why?” he wondered aloud.
Brian ignored the question. “How do you think the fans will react?” he asked.
Wooler was frank. “They’re not going to like this at all. Pete’s very popular.”
Following Wednesday night’s gig at the Cavern, Pete made arrangements to have Neil Aspinall drive the Beatles to Thursday’s gig at the tony Riverpark Ballroom, the first of four weekly performances there that would run through the end of September. As was usual, Pete scheduled convenient pickup times with each of the guys so that he could coordinate it with Neil. When he got to John, however, there was some hesitation. Pete thought that “his face looked scared” and was confused when John told him not to worry about it, “he would go on his own.” That didn’t make sense. The Beatles always traveled together to gigs, especially when they went someplace so distant. Moreover, John didn’t drive. But to each his own, Pete decided. He certainly wasn’t going to lose any sleep over it.
On the morning of August 16, a typical summer day in the muggiest part of England, Neil Aspinall drove Pete to NEMS and dropped him off at the curb in Whitechapel, outside the busy shop. Pete went upstairs alone. There, he “found Brian in a very uneasy mood,” straining for meaningless pleasantries and chitchat. This wasn’t the usual rule. Brian normally got right down to business, but this time he “hedged a little,” and although the manager’s smile never wavered, there was not only nervousness behind it but fear. He was delaying the inevitable, trying to build up some nerve. Finally, he just blurted it out: “Pete, I have some bad news for you. The boys want you out, and it’s already been arranged that Ringo will join the band on Saturday.”
Pete stared dazedly at Brian. The news knocked him sideways. He was “in a state of shock.” After a short but numb swoon, he managed only one word, mumbling, “Why?”
Rather than tap-dance, Brian told him the truth: the other Beatles didn’t think he was a good enough drummer. And neither did George Martin, who had decided to sign the band to Parlophone. The Beatles had known this for two weeks and had kept it from Pete. Brian could be shrill and irrational at times, a bully with a knack for delivering a vicious tongue-lashing, for picking apart his victim for sport, but he was also a master of tact, appealing to people’s most unresolved feelings, expressing sympathetic concern, and deploying great reserves of compassion when the situation demanded it—and this was one of those situations. There was no ruthlessness to it, he assured Pete in as soothing a voice as was possible. It was a business decision. “The lads don’t want you in the group anymore.”
It’s unlikely that any of Brian’s finesse had a consoling effect on Pete. It hit him so suddenly, caught him so seriously off guard, Pete recalled, that “my mind was in a turmoil.” All that time he’d put in with the Beatles, their would-be friendship, the dreams. Now, for this to happen—on the eve of a record deal. He considered it a “stab in the back.” Partly to defuse Pete’s rage and partly to remain in the boy’s good graces, Brian offered to form another group around Pete.
Somehow, as Pete stalked out of the office, Brian found the nerve to ask him to play the three remaining gigs before Ringo joined the Beatles on Saturday. And somehow Pete, insanely, agreed. If Brian believed him, it was because there was never any doubt in his mind, or anyone else’s, that Pete was an honorable guy. But like his drumming, the agony became too overpowering. The promise rang hollow; it was nothing more than an exit line.
Pete’s face, pale, downcast, alerted Neil Aspinall to the fact that something had gone wrong. “What’s happened?” he asked.
Pete barked back: “They’ve kicked me out!”
Neil, skimming the spaces between what he heard and guessed, suggested they go someplace to talk. The Grapes, opposite the Cavern, was nearby, and the two boys dug in there to drink and sulk.
Pete was stunned and demoralized, not just by the dismissal but by the cutthroat way in which it had been handled. Where were the Beatles? he wanted to know. Why hadn’t they been men enough to tell him themselves? A confrontation would have made it easier to accept. This way just “disgusted” him. Neil agreed, vowing to quit his job as road manager in protest over Pete’s treatment. Neil’s loyalty to Pete was complicated. The dark, handsome Aspinall, just turned twenty-one, was a different type of “guest” or “lodger” in the Bests’ house than history has recorded. Throughout his residency there, he’d been having an affair with Mona Best, well into her forties. By the end of 1961, she was pregnant, and the birth of a son, born on July 21, 1962, less than a month before Pete’s dismissal, was registered as Vincent Roag Best despite—or maybe to blur—the fact that Neil Aspinall was his father.* Neil and Pete were like brothers—now perhaps more. It was all Pete could do to talk him out of quitting that night.
Pete promised Brian that he would finish out the week, but by the time he got home the absurdity of that idea loomed large. “I’m not going to the gig,” he told Neil. “I couldn’t play with them, knowing that this has happened and I’m out.” Later he would admit: “Once I was home at Hayman’s Green, I broke down and wept.”
[III]
Pete’s fate mattered naught to Ringo Starr. “I never felt sorry, for [him],” Ringo admitted much later, dismissing the entire matter by saying: “I was not involved. Besides, I felt I was a much better drummer than he was.” Unlike Pete, he would be considered by many to be the Luckiest Man Alive. But Ringo Starr began life battling more adversity than Job.
The saga of Ringo’s personal history—more like a Dickensian chronicle of misfortune—is one of the erratic tragic chapters in the glittering Beatles legacy. In contrast to the others, who were middle- (John) or working-class (Paul and George), Ringo was “ordinary, poor,” a hardship case. “He was not a barefoot, ragged child,” recalls Marie Maguire Crawford, a neighbor who doubled as his surrogate sister, “but like all of the families who lived in the Dingle, he was part of an ongoing struggle to survive.”
The Dingle, which was christened by immigrant settlers after the arcadian glade in Ireland, bore little resemblance to its romantic namesake. One of the oldest inner-city districts in Liverpool, it was grim and “really rough,” the very edge of civilization, and housed the “artisan working class”—a miscellany of carpenters, plumbers, joiners, and “others with a trade,” who became as tightly intertwined as the terrace houses. Sixty families, a mixed bag of Irish and Welsh, were often jammed shoulder to shoulder on a short, sooty Dingle street, each clinging to its tiny stake, impervious to the vagaries of fate. There was nothing grandiose about their provisions: generally, a poorly ventilated, postage-stamp-size house patched together by crumbling plaster walls, with a rear door that opened onto an outhouse. Parents shooed their children to the embrace of nearby Prince’s Park, on which it is said New York’s Central Park planners had based their design. “Most of us were brought up there,” recalls Marie Maguire Crawford. “People lit coal fires, and so the green parks became our lungs.”
When Richard Starkey, Ringo’s father, married Elsie Gleave in 1936, he followed the Dingle tradition and set up house a scant hundred yards from where he was raised. The Starkeys moved into an unusually roomy—Ringo recalled it as being “palatial”—three-bedroom terrace house at 9 Madryn Street, a narrow artery lined with humble plane trees (a species known to every local schoolchild who recited: “The plane trees / kind to the poor, dull city”) and grids of discolored, cracked pavement. Richard’s parents, John and Annie, lived nearby at number 59, just as later his sister, Nancy, would move into number 21, following her marriage to Tony Christian. The Starkey houses might well have been interchangeable in the way the occupants shuffled back and forth between them all day long.
Richard and Elsie had met at Cooper’s, one of Liverpool’s larger commercial bakeries, where he worked near the ovens, methodically icing cakes. To him, Elsie was “the cherry on top,” an attractive, risible woman, with lovely, big, clear eyes and a wonderful singing voice. She had been raised in neighboring Toxteth Park, the youngest of fourteen children, and at an early age was bundled off to her grandmother’s, where she spent most of a happy, if somewhat alienated, childhood. Elsie Gleave learned early that a woman should be self-sufficient, that independence meant getting a job, that spare time was devoted to the piano, and that evenings were for going out on the town. “Dancing feet,” she would say, needed a regular workout.
Indeed, dancing was her only salvation from the hardscrabble Dingle life, and the fleet-footed Richard Starkey, who liked swing and seemed born to perform it, proved a kindred spirit. Most of the time, Elsie and Richard joined the crowds at Reece’s, a cafeteria-style restaurant where some of the strongest dancers capered into the early dawn hours. It was a raucous, ebullient scene. Vendors circled through the hall dispensing cheap, red wine they called plunk from jugs, and when Elsie felt especially gay, she would say, “Make it a big one—a plunk plunk.”
For three years, the Starkeys were a fixture on the ballroom circuit, but eventually Elsie’s thirst grew parched for other desires. Working-class tradition dictated that newlyweds have a baby within a year of marriage—if not sooner. Elsie tried everything necessary to conceive, but without results. “Elsie was nervous that she’d never have a child,” recalls Marie Maguire Crawford. “She never asked for much, but that was all she really wanted.”
Just when Elsie got accustomed to the idea that children might not be in the cards, she became pregnant and gave birth to a son, named Richard after his father, on July 7, 1940. There was much celebration on sleepy Madryn Street, whose houses were unusually dormant thanks to the escalating war with Germany. Relatives stopped by at all hours to gaze upon the baby “with the big, soulful eyes,” who everyone agreed was the “spitting image of his mum.” He had his mother’s long face and sensuous mouth, to say nothing of the thick, dark hair that would serve him handily twenty years hence. Ritchie, as he was called, bore hardly any resemblance to his father, who was “quite a handsome man, with curly hair and a thin, narrow smile.” This was Elsie’s boy, from head to toe, and she doted upon him to the point of preoccupation.
Richard Sr.—subsequently renamed Big Ritchie, to his great amusement—wasn’t used to sharing the spotlight. It didn’t suit his large personality, an ego that had blossomed under Elsie’s absorption. He was ill-prepared for fatherhood and even less willing to sacrifice for it, especially those wonderful nights on the town, which had dwindled to an occasional pub crawl. It wasn’t just the dancing that captivated Richard. “He liked going out,” says a Dingle acquaintance, and enjoyed the whole process, which began with getting dressed up and extended to the quick stares he drew as “one of the smartest,” best-groomed men on the scene. Those looks hadn’t impressed him so much during Elsie’s constant companionship, but on his own they began to take a toll.
Within months after Little Ritchie’s birth, things started to unravel for the Starkeys. Richard, supplanted by his son, withdrew further and further from the family. His attention began to drift. With most able-bodied men off fighting the war, this sharpie with a hot smile and the latest moves became a hot commodity at the dance halls, where lonely wives often congregated to escape an empty house. His nights on the town became more and more frequent, sometimes stretching on for days. No matter how Elsie pleaded, “he just put on his suit and went.” Sometimes, to avoid making a scene, he didn’t even bother coming home from work, instead heading straight to a pub and then off somewhere crowded, wherever the action happened to be.
Elsie Starkey didn’t surrender her husband without a fight, but by 1943 she realized it was a battle she was going to lose and consented, rather agreeably, when a separation was proposed. Richard moved out of the house, and in no time—no more than a year at the most—they were divorced. Some stories claim that Starkey left Liverpool and went to sea with one of the luxury passenger liners that berthed in Liverpool; some that he remarried and settled “over the water,” in the Wirral. But in all likelihood, he remained close to his work. Throughout the war, with staples growing ever more scarce, he supplied his parents with “bags of icing sugar,” which they, in turn, distributed to families on Madryn Street.
For his part, Ringo, who says he has “no real memories of dad,” always knew how to reach him, if he wanted to: his grandparents, John and Annie, remained just a few doors up the street and, to their credit, never stopped treating Elsie and Little Ritchie as members of their immediate family. But Ringo never made any attempt to locate his father. Elsie “filled me up with all the things about him,” he recalled, poisoning the waters, while Richard drifted in and out of the picture maybe five times in as many years, never making an attempt to care for, or even get to know, his son.
Elsie was resourceful enough to pull through. Richard provided support, but only a paltry thirty shillings a week, so she took a number of menial jobs, doing mostly housework—scrubbing floors and laundry—until discovering her calling as a barmaid. Pub work was easy to come by and the hours were suitable; she could work as much or as little as she wanted. Elsie, a gregarious woman by nature, enjoyed pubs and the people who came to them. There was a sense of community inside—it felt familiar to her, much the way it felt on Madryn Street—and for the next twelve years she was a well-liked fixture in some of Liverpool’s best public houses, beginning at the Wellington, in Garston, and concluding at Yates’s Wine Lodge, in city center, near Marks & Spencer.
No matter how much Elsie made, however, there wasn’t enough to cover the house on Madryn Street. While living in a three-up, three-down was comfortable, it was too big—and certainly extravagant—for just her and Ritchie. This was the situation she described to her friends Muriel and Jack Patterson one night as they sat outside on the sidewalk, getting some air. The Pattersons, who lived just behind Elsie, on Admiral Grove, grappled with their own housing problems. With three children, their two-bedroom terrace house was bursting at the seams; the trouble was, the housing market was tight; there were no bigger places available. It’s not clear who came up with the idea to swap houses, but before the night was out both families agreed it posed the perfect solution: the Pattersons reaped more space, Elsie got rent relief, whereas no one was forced to leave the neighborhood. A week later Elsie packed up the house and paid the Maguire boys to carry her belongings around the block. It was no more difficult than that.
Like most congested inner-city ghettos, the Dingle was dangerous terrain. There was a homey, community character to it, but under the gauzy facade lay an atmosphere bleak and treacherous. Any street was relatively safe—as long as you lived on it. Stray fifty yards in any direction, however, and your safety came to an abrupt end. The friendly faces gave way to glares and tough talk. Bullies, looking for a fight, made it impossible for anyone to walk away. Even Ringo, who always counted the Dingle as home, never underestimated its reputation for violence. As Ringo recalled: “You kept your head down, your eyes open, and you didn’t get in anybody’s way.” Or else.
As a result, Ritchie, like other Dingle boys, quickly developed intuitive street smarts. But that was small comfort to a mother who was off working during the day. “Elsie was always terrified that something dreadful would happen to him,” says Marie Maguire Crawford. “With Richard gone, Ritchie was her ‘all,’ as she called him, and as a result, she made sure there was always an extra set of eyes watching him.”
His grandparents did what they could to help out. Of the immediate family, John and Annie Starkey gave Ritchie the attention he craved. They “fussed over” him almost every morning. Then, about noon, Marie would collect Ritchie and bring him down the street to her house so that her mother could look after him until Elsie returned. Ritchie’s joyous hours with Marie offset the traumatic uprooting he experienced by being shuffled from house to house. A pale, fair-haired little girl who was “born responsible,” Marie was put “in charge” of entertaining him. They spent most nice days outside in Prince’s Park or went roller-skating on High Park Street, whose surface was freshly paved and icy slick. As the days grew warmer, they crept “further and further afield.” Mrs. Maguire made sure they always had enough money to come home on the tram, but as it usually got spent on ice cream, Marie, who was four years older, often had to carry Ritchie back in her arms.
“Ritchie and I would play for hours on our own,” Marie recalls. They might camp out at Elsie’s piano and “belt away,” harmonizing to “You Are My Sunshine,” “Where Are You All,” “Bobby Shaftoe,” and “There’ll Always Be an England.” There were movies—children’s matinees at the Gaumont, or the Mayfair or the Rivoli in Aigburth Road—followed by a greasy treat at Eric’s Chip Shop. Or they’d simply walk. Liverpool was a great walking city in the days before two-car families and congested highways. Afterward, Marie would dutifully bathe him in a tin tub in front of a fire in the back room.
All this attention eased Elsie’s fears, but there was nothing that could safeguard Ritchie from the chance grip of illness. A few days before his seventh birthday, on July 3, 1947, Ritchie complained about an upset stomach, and later sharp pains in his side. Elsie fretted at dinnertime about what to do. Calling the doctor seemed like a fairly extreme step for a case of what she assumed was indigestion. But by bedtime, as the pains persisted and his temperature soared, she sent for an ambulance and bundled him off to Children’s Hospital. It was a “straightforward appendicitis, a little slit and it was out.” But in the aftermath, Ritchie developed peritonitis, the deadly inflammation of the membrane lining the abdomen, and lapsed into a coma. For three days, it was touch and go. Elsie, who had for years watched her son make the most out of life, was told by his doctors to prepare for the worst. Ritchie’s condition deteriorated, so much so that on July 7, Marie’s mother, Annie, accompanied Elsie to his hospital room, where both women resigned themselves to say their good-byes. As it turned out, Ritchie opened his eyes a few times—the first encouraging sign, they were told to great relief.
Ritchie “was very lucky to survive” the ordeal, which necessitated a long rehabilitation in a crowded hospital ward. As late as December, six months after being admitted, Ritchie was restless to go home. Convinced that his symptoms had more or less improved, the doctors planned to release him in time to spend Christmas with his family. But a relapse a week or two before the holidays forced him back to bed, where he remained, barely mobile, for another six months.
Back on Admiral Grove, Ritchie’s efforts to reintegrate at school were quickly undermined by his well-meaning but overprotective mother. Elsie, who “doted on him and was very lenient” to begin with, allowed him to sit out the rest of the year—for “convalescing”—which put him so far behind in his academic development that it became impossible for him to catch up. Now in the fourth grade, he couldn’t read or write; math was like a foreign language he didn’t speak. No one seemed to take an interest in tutoring him. School became a great and terrifying burden—he felt ostracized there—making it easier to simply stay away. So, each morning, after wedging a stack of books under his arm and saying good-bye to Elsie, he’d detour into the park and kill time, bumping around with other truants until it was time to return home.
All of this made Ritchie something of an outcast in his neighborhood. Families in the Dingle may have been dirt-poor and largely uneducated, but they placed a serious emphasis on self-improvement.
Until almost the end of his twelfth year, at his mother’s prodding, Ritchie was tutored by Marie Maguire in an effort to teach him the basics and to help him function. Twice a week Marie supervised classes at a table in the back room of Admiral Grove, where Ritchie, who resented such regimentation and attended against his will, struggled over the simple exercises—“the cat sat on the mat”—found in the little brown-backed editions of Chambers Primary Readers. Despite his intense objections, however, the results proved encouraging. “He made incredible progress,” Marie recalls. “It seemed like we were that close to bringing him up to proper school standards when he got sick again.”
It was a disastrous setback. This time, it was tuberculosis, and it came as no real surprise, considering the epidemic that raged through the filthy Dingle streets; everywhere one turned, people wheezed or hacked or coughed into their fists. Kids, especially, were susceptible, their tender immune systems unable to stand up to the infection.
This time, Elsie wasted no time in getting him to the hospital. Ritchie spent the first few days at Children’s, undergoing tests and observation, after which he was transferred to Royal Liverpool Children’s Hospital, in Heswall, on the Wirral peninsula. “It was a huge old sanitarium off the main road, leading to the Welsh coast,” a frequent visitor recalls, “providing a much less polluted atmosphere, so the kids could begin to breathe in good health again.” The vaulted wards were packed with children in various stages of the disease, and most of them, terrified by the strangers in white coats who performed a battery of nonstop tests and treatments, cried and hollered throughout the beginning weeks of their long confinements.
A veteran of hospitals, Ritchie wasn’t fazed by the medical staff. He understood the procedure and swung right into the routine, making instant friends with the nurses who provided various therapies and, whenever possible, supervised classes throughout the day. Normally intimidated and socially awkward, Ritchie thrived. “He was like the mayor of the ward,” says a visitor, who marveled at the easy self-confidence he demonstrated. There were plenty of playmates to choose from, and girls in the next room. Over the weeks, then months, they organized games and informal social gatherings to help the kids pass the time. To keep their minds occupied, a wide assortment of therapeutic activities disguised as recreation helped spur recovery. Ritchie taught himself to weave and knit, but it was nothing compared with an activity that would ultimately change his life.
In a move intended to stimulate motor activity and soothe enduring bouts of anguish, young patients were encouraged to join the hospital band. Inside the ward, “instruments” were distributed so that participants, even those without a whiff of musical experience, could play along with prerecorded songs. You didn’t need chops to handle a triangle or tambourine or cymbal or any of the percussion instruments that made up the hospital band. Improvisation and free expression ensured that everyone participated. Ritchie played the drums, using “cotton bobbins to hit on the cabinet next to the bed.” It made a flat, dull sound, but there was an energy unleashed in his execution, an instinct for the intricate rhythms and dynamics that were essential to keeping a beat. Good coordination also allowed Ritchie control over these seemingly simple but exacting mechanics. There was something familiar in the process, a natural feel to the way he held his hands, the impact of the sticks on the wooden surface, and the colorful patterns that emerged. He didn’t just make noise; there was more to it than that, there was a complex range of sounds he could produce just by experimenting with his wrists. The more he played, the more he discovered—about cadence, syncopation, movement, drive, precision, none of which he could articulate, of course, or even attribute to traditional technique. But that didn’t interfere with his intense enjoyment. For him, the drumming process was organic. He relied on the pure kinetics of it, letting the energy take over. And somewhere in the thick of things, he’d stumbled on true love.
“That was all he talked about, so much interest in the drums,” recalls Marie Maguire Crawford, who on a subsequent visit brought him a copy of “Bedtime for Drums,” a rather flashy, if overwrought, solo recording by veteran swingman Alyn Ainsworth. “Someday, I’m going to play just like that,” he bragged after listening to the record over and over again.
Following his recovery from tuberculosis, Ritchie returned home to the Dingle in the late fall of 1953, having “grown into a young man, but much frailer than other boys his age and somewhat disoriented.” Behind him was the painful memory of his debilitating illness; ahead, the dim prospect of returning to school, where he’d fallen even further behind. Another year of absence had left him woefully ill prepared; he was hopelessly lost in class, unfairly ostracized. As a result, “he played on his illness to avoid school,” says a friend, hatching a dozen excuses not to attend. Ultimately, he never went back to school, staying home instead, languishing in the back room of Admiral Grove, listening to music and rapping along on “biscuit tins” with a pair of sticks. There was also a new development there that knocked him slightly more off his stride: another man had become a fixture in what had always been a strong, matriarchal household.
For the past few years, Elsie had been dating Harry Graves, an unusually warm and even-tempered ex-Londoner who had “come to Liverpool for a change of air” when his first marriage had “gone wrong.” A conspicuous presence at the little gatherings that were customary in the Dingle homes, Harry was a gamer with a lovely voice who never hesitated to break into “Star Dust” or “That Old Black Magic”—his so-called party pieces—whenever someone was seated at a piano. In fact, Harry had been roaming the periphery for some time, dating Ritchie’s widowed aunt, Edie Starkey, while Elsie was romantically involved with a local man named Joe Taylor. For some time, the couples had been eyeing each other’s partners, trying to devise a way to make their restless feelings known. Finally, one night it all came tumbling out—everyone confessed—and without any awkwardness, they coordinated “a swap,” whereby both half-baked relationships now fell neatly into place.
Ritchie was drawn to Harry the moment he laid eyes on him. “He was a really sweet guy,” Ringo remembered, ruggedly handsome, with elfin eyes and an easy, engaging smile that hid a pent-up melancholy. As a painter at the American army base in nearby Burtonwood, Harry had access to all the luxuries that captivated poor Scouser boys brought up on wartime rationing: comic books and American magazines, exotic chewing gum, toys, and, every Valentine’s Day, big red hearts stuffed with rare, scrumptious candy. Best of all, music was an essential part of his makeup. Having grown up around London, where he ferreted out live music, Harry had acquired a consuming passion for big bands and their vocalists—Dinah Shore, Sarah Vaughan, and Billy Daniels, among his favorites—whose records he collected and played incessantly for Ritchie.
Much like Paul’s father, Harry helped introduce Ritchie to the intricacies of popular music, pointing out how the classic stylists expressed themselves and why their music had the power to touch listeners. The new wave of lowbrow pop singers such as Frankie Laine, Johnnie Ray, and Eddie Fisher had not yet managed to claim the airwaves, though they were clearly on the horizon. In the meantime, Harry taught Ritchie to appreciate the old crooners and the relationship between their voices and the instruments. In countless interviews after the Beatles became famous, Ringo would always insist he had had no formal musical training, but the shaping of his ear—this introduction to sophisticated syncopated rhythms, along with the ability to identify a scattering of tempos—provided a root foundation that forged his talent in ways no formal training could duplicate.
Harry was also the perfect answer for an emotionally needy adolescent who’d somehow coasted through a broken home and two life-threatening illnesses. As a role model, he was a world apart from the absentee Richard Sr., exuding understanding, reassurance, and unerring commitment to the strictures of a conventional family life. Harry bent over backward to connect with Elsie’s son, and Ritchie quickly succumbed to the favor of his “great gentleness.” Whatever misgivings he may have had about his mother’s remarriage, in April 1954, they were quickly erased by Harry’s abiding—some might say blind—support for Ritchie’s scattered pursuits.
Indeed, from the day he quit school until his break with Rory Storm, Ritchie Starkey’s experience in the workforce was an unfolding disaster. Having grown up free of any real discipline or accountability, he had learned indifference, not ambition. He took a job at British Rail for the uniform, “because they give you suits.” Unable to pass the physical, Ritchie was eventually laid off and forced onto the dole until he signed on as a waiter, serving drinks on a day boat from Liverpool to North Wales. It was light, agreeable work that appealed to his happy-go-lucky nature and ostensibly served as an apprenticeship, a jumping-off point to his dream job, working at sea on a succession of international luxury liners. Unfortunately, reality got in the way. With the effects of war still prominent on every street, it was the responsibility of all able-bodied British men, if called, to do active duty in the armed forces. Ritchie, fresh from a hospital lie-in, was unnaturally “terrified” that he’d be drafted. Had he stopped to consider his pathology, of course, he’d have known there was no way the army would induct such a run-down specimen. Nevertheless, he immediately set about ensuring that the possibility would not occur. For starters, that meant quitting his job on the day boat. If he was fit for seafaring work, he believed, it remained likely that before very long he’d attract the navy’s interest. Instead, he cast about for some kind of engineering work, based on a rumor that the armed services weren’t taking apprentices that year.
Fortunately, Harry had a contact at Henry Hunt & Sons, a gymnastic-equipment company in the south end of Liverpool, and in the summer of 1956 Ritchie began working there as an apprentice fitter. It was steady, if unstimulating, work, just a short daily commute from Admiral Grove. At first, Ritchie was “the altar boy,” dispatched “to fill the glue pots and to fetch chips during the breaks.” There wasn’t much else for him to do all day long. “But it was a great gang of people,” recalls Roy Trafford, a gangly dropout from Toxteth, who worked side by side with Ritchie as an apprentice joiner and, in no time, became his closest friend. “Eventually, we were taught to finish the wooden parts—all the balancing beams for the gymnasium bars. There was only thirty-eight and six in our pay packets—no more than a handout—but at the time the money was secondary. We were learning a trade, which was more than most guys in our situation, and as we well knew, it was considered a job for life.”
It wasn’t long before the boys discovered a shared love of music. The two of them would spend dinner breaks at Hunt’s in the downstairs shaving shed, earnestly talking about trad jazz and blues while their coworkers rummaged through brown-bag lunches. Trafford’s conversation was filled with the snappy jargon of skiffle, which he’d gravitated to via weekly guitar lessons. Stirred by the spontaneity and directness of it, Ritchie became an ardent fan, and before long they began “working some songs in the cellar” during lunch. “I played guitar, and [Ritchie] just made a noise on a box,” Trafford recalls. “Sometimes, he just slapped a biscuit tin with some keys, or banged on the backs of chairs.” It was a strictly rudimentary but joyous affair. Eventually, Ritch invited his neighbor and workmate, Eddie Miles, to sit in, and a little band began to take shape.
Eddie, with his bird’s-eye maple Hofner cutaway and its homemade pickups, was something of a guitar dynamo in Liverpool. He had a vigorous, impatient way of strumming that went wildly astray; strings snapped like rubber bands as he picked at simple leads. When, instead of polishing off phrases, he bulldozed straight through mistakes, it gave songs a loose but heated energy that was like nothing else they’d ever heard. A twelve-bar break would become a tangle of chords and flourishes. A traditional folk song would be transformed into a jazzy Big Bill Broonzy–like interplay of whoops and hollers. Eddie impressed the boys with his flamboyant ability, to say nothing of his enthusiasm, and over the next few months they developed a band around him.
What began as the Eddie Miles Band soon evolved into Eddie Clayton and the Clayton Squares, named after a landmark in downtown Liverpool. It had a revolving-door cast of anywhere from five to seven musicians, all of whom (aside from Eddie, of course) were interchangeable. At Ritchie’s insistence, they featured him on percussion. When the accompaniment kicked in behind Eddie, Ritchie tucked an old washboard under his arm, leaned back at a slight angle, and raked thimbles across the bevels—slashing at them, really—to produce a driving, clattering sound. On skiffle standards such as “Walking Cane” and “Rock Island Line,” he could rap out a beat at a reasonably steady clip. It was still fairly unsophisticated, but he didn’t care—and neither did anybody else. He was in his element.
When they put down their instruments (never for long), it was usually to dance. “We really loved the whole idea of dancing and wanted to learn properly,” remembers Trafford, who, on more than one occasion, dragged Ritchie to Skellen’s Dance School on the corner of Lark Lane for lessons. Later, they tried another dance school on Aigburth Road, where Ritchie was partnered with a policeman—“a bloody big fella, about six-two”—resolved to teach him the waltz. It was a short-lived disaster, but enough of an introduction to the basics for them to eventually end up dancing rather capably at the Winter Gardens, the Rialto, and Wilson Hall.
Every Friday they would “meander around town,” beginning at the pub where Elsie worked “for a couple of freebies, a few large whites to give us the glow.” After that, they stopped at the Lisbon Pub on Victoria Street to meet friends, retank the engines, and then head over to the Cavern, where trad jazz still ruled. “We loved trad jazz,” says Trafford, “almost as much as we loved to dress up.” The boys always went out “immaculately groomed.” Like twins, they wore matching outfits purchased at Yaffe’s: black-and-gray-striped jackets, crepe trousers with red-and-black half-inch stripes, a red-and-black-striped shirt, studded belts, and string ties from the haberdashery counter at Woolworth’s. Their overcoats came from Eric’s, the Quarry Men’s local tailor. “I got a black one and Ritch’s was blue,” recalls Trafford. “We thought we were the bee’s knees.” To complete the effect, they plastered down their hair with gobs of brilliantine, which melted in their hands, then “went hard like a helmet” in the cold night air.
That Christmas of 1957, Harry presented Ritchie with a secondhand drum set he’d found in a shop near his old home in Romford. It was just a snare with plastic heads and a big old bass, “like a Salvation Army drum,” that bore the marks of past ownership. There was also a cymbal, a big garbage can lid with nicks and dings on it, that made a clangorous sound. At the time, it was merely something durable, something that he could pound on to keep him engaged, but the gift enthralled Ritchie—and changed his life.
Before, they had only played at being a band, but now with a drummer, the Eddie Clayton group powered its way into the world of small-time show business. Drums set them apart from the hundreds of other amateur bands vying for precious stage time. The boys, having sharpened their act, began hustling for gigs on the skiffle circuit and, in no time, won a number of impressive bookings that gave them a definite glow. The pay was pitifully small—“just buttons”—but they kept regularly engaged.
Nevertheless, before too long skiffle ran out of steam. Unable to compete with the visceral kick of rock ’n roll, its practitioners defected en masse, trading in their washboards and tea chests for instruments that sizzled with electricity. Ritchie continued to play behind Eddie Clayton but moonlighted with other bands as well. One of the best-known local skiffle groups making the transition to rock was Al Caldwell’s Texans, who were desperate to snag a sideman with his own drum kit. “We knew him pretty well. He’d gotten a snare drum, a high hat, and a cymbal by then,” Johnny Byrne recalls. “When we told him we were going into rock ’n roll full-tilt, he said he was interested.” With Ritchie keeping the beat, they reemerged in the clubs in November 1958 as the Raging Texans, and shortly thereafter as Jet Storm and the Raging Texans, and finally Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, a name that might easily have rolled off the Larry Parnes assembly line of stars. Ritchie borrowed £46 from his grandfather to buy an Ajax drum kit with “lapped” pigskin instead of plastic heads, designed to resemble the pricey Ludwigs favored by professional drummers.
Formerly a diehard blues fan (he even considered emigrating to Texas so he could “live with Lightnin’ Hopkins”), Ritchie was lit up by rock ’n roll. He spent all his spare time gorging on it, listening to Radio Luxembourg’s staticky broadcasts, and on Sundays religiously tuning in to Alan Freed. As a drummer, he played along with whatever came over the airwaves, beating time to one song after the next, even running through the commercial breaks.
Almost immediately, the simple rat-a-tat-tat patterns evolved into ever more complicated, exuberant wrist work. This would eventually help set him apart from drummers like Pete Best and Johnny Hutch. Everyone else at the time was emulating the bangers who relied on bruising upper-arm strength to power an arrangement, but Ritchie developed a discipline for playing shuffle rhythms that made the drums a more integral part of songs. He could punctuate what the other instruments were doing musically instead of just keeping strict time. Largely unschooled as a drummer—he claimed he “had about three lessons” as a beginner—he only knew how to play by ear. But however he approached the drums, no matter how reflexive or improvisational, the patterns he played were distinguished by an overriding degree of control. Perhaps, barring other explanation, this was an outgrowth of his unusually broad musical tastes. Whereas other teenagers jumped right into bands from a steady diet of uptempo pop, Ritchie was influenced by exacting country artists and modern jazz exponents such as Chico Hamilton and Yusef Lateef, who relied heavily on their knowledge of composition. Intuitively—and beyond explanation—he captured an energy and ease of expression that eluded other young drummers trying to find the right groove.
Alone in the Dingle, Ritchie had been a distant, almost maddeningly backward introvert. As part of the Hurricanes, he developed “a bubble of personality.” Playing with the band seemed to invest him with confidence, the attention and exposure acting like a spark plug, stimulating an ego and identity that, up to then, had gone largely uncultivated. Onstage, he located a hidden charm—grinning earnestly at girls; casting enigmatic, brooding stares into the dark distance, playing with his eyes closed and head tilted to one side, trancelike, as though listening to the drum’s inner beat; making lunges and parries at the cymbals. Ritchie savored the glow, and Rory, “who liked to take care of the other guys in the band,” made sure he shared the spotlight. Now, under Rory’s tutelage, he began creating a role for himself that reached beyond the act. Ritchie had experimented with images that he used to offset his inadequacies; now he streaked his hair silver and dressed up in a long duster and cowboy hat. The teddy boy outfit he had shared with Roy Trafford disappeared for good late that year, but he began wearing rings, not just one but many, simultaneously, an affectation that arose from his mother’s passion for flashy jewelry. Elsie bought him several tawdry costume pieces studded with cut-glass “gems,” which he wore along with a man’s signet ring that had belonged to Grandpa Starkey. “He always loved his rings,” recalls Marie Maguire Crawford. “It was a kind of attention-getter—something flashy to offset the idea that he was sickly and not well educated, perhaps distancing him from the Dingle.”
Inspired by his popularity with the Hurricanes, Ritchie immersed himself in the company of adoring young women who began following bands from gig to gig. Illness had wreaked havoc on Ritchie’s shaky self-confidence, but the band offset all that and, before long, he had two serious girlfriends, Pat Davies, a schoolmate of Cilla Black’s, and later a Jacaranda waitress named Geraldine McGovern, to whom he eventually became engaged. But a band was no place to nurture a relationship. Besides, Gerri was Catholic—a fact that never sat well with Elsie, who “was nominally of the Orange lodge” and, with a few drinks under her belt, would break into “The Sash My Father Wore” as a swipe at her “sworn enemy.”
Ultimately, Ritchie carved out a niche as a free agent. Like many teenagers who grow up in a ghetto, he was in a terrible rush to move onward—and upward. Dingle boys were drilled to place security above all else. The Ritchie Starkey who had never amounted to much at school and seemed doomed to the family fate of being yet another in a long line of menial laborers and soldiers was determined “to say [he] was actually something,” a professional, as opposed to a working stiff. Working at Hunt’s, with its boisterous crew, rustling of machinery, and long silences interrupted occasionally by the camaraderie of Roy Trafford and Eddie Miles, was deathly dull, but it provided both security and self-esteem.
Still, Ritchie wanted more—he wanted fulfillment—and the only way to get it was through music. And a choice would have to be made.
Sometime that spring of 1962, Rory and the Hurricanes learned they’d been hired for the summer residency at Butlins in Wales. Throughout April and May, Ritchie remained undecided whether to accept, furiously turning over in his mind the impact of such a move. “It was a difficult decisionfor him,” recalls Johnny Byrne, who himself reluctantly ditched a good job as an invoice clerk at the Cotton Exchange to go. “Ringo never counted on music interrupting his apprenticeship, but Rory painted a picture of it that was impossible to ignore.”
One can only imagine how tempting he made it sound. Ritchie accepted the offer and announced his decision shortly thereafter at a family gathering. To his aunts and uncles, he was foolishly risking a solid future on such an ill-considered scheme. But playing with the Hurricanes had shown him that nothing—and no one—could compete with the thrill of the stage. Even his mother’s objections fell on deaf ears.
Somehow, decisions like this one always proved clear-cut for Ringo. He never doubted that leaving Hunt’s and joining Rory Storm and the Hurricanes was a worthwhile opportunity, just as he later left Rory in 1962 to play in Hamburg with Tony Sheridan, and just as, later that year, he rejected Kingsize Taylor’s offer to become a member of an outstanding outfit like the Dominoes. When the Beatles made their play, Ringo hesitated only long enough to discuss it with Roy Trafford, who encouraged him to move on—and up—with a better band. “Why not?” Roy recalls telling his mate. “You’ve got nothing to lose.”
For the Beatles, the significance of a first-class drummer was essential to their survival. “Our career was on the line,” Paul recalled, and the band knew that the only surefire way of taking it to the next level was by adding a world-beater to the mix. It was evident they’d found their man from the moment that Ringo took over the beat. Immediately they recaptured a spark that had eluded them for so long. The energy, the cleverness, the right groove—the magic—breezed back into their overall sound. At last, after six years, stardom seemed possible to the Beatles.