For as ugly as The Beatles’ breakup could get, Ringo Starr always seemed to be the sympathetic member of the group. He was heartbroken to see his friends fighting and was facing the real consequences of never speaking to his friends again, but even he could get more than a little bit agitated when the sessions weren’t going as they had planned.
Then again, did it really look like anyone was having fun when first watching the Let It Be movie? Peter Jackson’s Get Back project has helped correct everything and showed that the group were still having fun when things were dire, but it also doesn’t shy away from the fact that George Harrison was getting sidelined and elected to quit the group before they got to recording. As long as the song was counted in, though, Starr was always ready to give a song a fair shot.
And even if the band felt that much of what turned up on Let It Be needed to be shelved, Abbey Road was the kind of album that they felt the fans needed to hear. They had spent the past few months doing nothing but picking at each other ever since The White Album was released, and even if they were on totally different creative pages, they wanted to make the next album of labour of love, if only for the fact that everyone knew it could be the end.
It wasn’t going to be easy, but everyone was ready to put on a happy face to get things done. There were bound to be songs that rubbed them the wrong way like Paul McCartney’s ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’, but from the sounds of Starr’s ‘Octopus’s Garden’, the band were more than happy to get lighthearted when they wanted to. If the first side was full of the hits, the medley on the flipside was going to be their magnum opus.
While John Lennon never thought much of their joint medley, all of the individual tracks have great moments in them. ‘Sun King’ is one of the most peaceful songs on the record, and the final stretch of ‘Golden Slumbers’ all the way to ‘The End’ is among the greatest moments in their career, but when Starr first started working on ‘Polythene Pam’, he thought he couldn’t take any more criticism.
Having already walked out of the White Album sessions when things weren’t working, Starr wasn’t about to be critiqued so harshly again, with engineer Geoff Emerick saying, “John wasn’t happy with the drumming on ‘Polythene Pam’. He had some problems with Ringo’s performance and Ringo got pissed off and split for a couple of days. But he came back and redid the track and John was pleased.”
Most times Starr knew how to play for the song, but listening to the final version of the track, he seemed to take a lot of that anger out on his kit. He had been used to serving what the rest of the group wanted, but since the majority of the song has Lennon playing acoustic guitar, Starr is what gives the song that unnerving pulse until it finally crashes out into ‘She Came In Through the Bathroom Window’.
If his performance on Plastic Ono Bandwas any indication, it’s not like Starr and Lennon had any hard feelings towards each other, but this was simply an illustration of why the band needed that musical divorce. They could have kept going if they wanted to, but chances are they would have had to compromise their musical visions a little too much had they been forced to stay together.
