Excerpts from an old Ringo Starr interview
_ _m n_t tr_ndy. From SAGA Magazine:
Ringo has kept a home in LA since the mid-Seventies, luxuriating in the climate, the blissfully opulent lifestyle, and the presence of scores of fellow musicians. He even bears the self-inflicted marks of a true Californian: two tattoos, etched on to his skin in the parlours that sprinkle Sunset Boulevard....
Ringo has an altogether more active working life than you perhaps might expect, occasionally touring both Europe and the USA with his trademark All Starr Band (an ever-changing collective of rock royalty, usually taking in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties), and regularly releasing solo albums....
In between his professional commitments, he pursues the kind of lifestyle best described as “enviable”. Married to the sometime Bond Girl Barbara Bach since 1981, he largely splits his time between California, Monte Carlo and the home the couple keep in Cranleigh, Surrey. He has three children from his first marriage, to the late Maureen Cox: his daughter Lee, and two sons Jason and Zak, the latter of whom has eked out a successful career as a rock drummer – he currently plays with no less an attraction than Oasis – and fathered Starr’s two grandchildren.
Music and family aside, Ringo also has time for the odd one-off project. The latest is Postcards From The Boys, a plush hardback that collects some of the contents of his letterbox from the late Sixties and Seventies: cards sent by the three other Beatles, as they wended their way around the globe. “See you for Xmas dinner,” writes the characteristically taciturn George Harrison, on an Australian jaunt in 1978. From 1971, there’s a slightly cryptic message from John and Yoko Ono, written midway through a trip to Japan: “Doing nothing at all, the sea-slug has lived here for eighteen thousand years.” Every so often, you get a sneaking glimpse of the chemistry that held the Fabs together – as with a Paul McCartney card from early 1969. “You are the greatest drummer in the world,” it says. “Really.”...
He...relaxes by using a skill he learned during his time as a Beatle: Transcendental Meditation, the mind-calming technique they were taught on their celebrated trip to India in 1968. Back then, Ringo seemed the least keen, returning to the UK after a fortnight, while his colleagues’ stay stretched into months; these days, however, he sounds newly enthusiastic.
“Even if I’ve not meditated for months, I can do it,” he says. “It’s something I do a lot more now than I have been over the last 15 years. “For me, meditation is a break from thinking. The benefits to me are quietening my mind and soul down. At the end of a day, I can end up just totally wacky, because I’ve made mountains out of molehills. With meditation, I can keep them as molehills.”...
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