Their relationship began to fire on Monday afternoons, which she took off work. He introduced her to his Madryn Street friend and mentor Marie Maguire and took her home to meet Harry and Elsie. Harry was still happily singing at the local pubs and clubs, with Cole Porter’s “Night and Day” one of his favorite numbers—it became Richy and Mitch’s “special song.”†
Finding a steady relationship helped Ringo settle, because jumping into the Beatles—earning place and space in the tightest, brightest band—was a formidable challenge. John, Paul and George had been ultraclose since schooldays, sharing everything from outlook to income. They were of one mind on life, and all the stronger for arriving at their unanimity from individual perspectives. Ringo knew he had to tune in, as would they to him. Two years later he told Melody Maker:
I was lucky to be on their wavelength when I joined the group. I had to be or I wouldn’t have lasted. They all have strong personalities and unless you can match it, you’re in a bit of trouble.
I’d sat in with them before they offered me the job fully, so I knew them. But those sit-ins were really for kicks—as a stand-in. When I finally joined them I had to join—join them as people as well as a drummer.21
The three Beatles were keen to accommodate a fourth. It wouldn’t be plain sailing but they wanted it and had chosen him. They were bringing in not just a drummer but an attitude, something fresh into the mix. What they knew of Ringo, they liked. He was a risk-taker, hungry for new experiences, forthright, never afraid to stand up for himself; he was funny and courageous and had a Big Time ego, as shown by his first-night row with Neil. (It lasted a few weeks before Neil “got over it,” Ringo says.) The Beatles’ chemistry with Pete had never been right because they needed boldness, brashness, openness, someone with strengths and vulnerabilities similar to theirs, a tough-minded individual and a team player with personality. It was a heavy load for slender shoulders and Ringo felt his way gradually. “Emotionally,” he’d say, “I had to earn my way in.”22
He took a friend around with him in these initial weeks, someone he could lean on while he found his feet. Step forward again Roy Trafford, his best mate since their time as apprentices at H. Hunt & Son: Richy the fitter, Roy the joiner. Their careers had taken different tracks but the friendship endured, and it so happened that at the time his pal joined the Beatles, Roy and his fiancée had broken off their engagement and he was free in the evenings. Richy grabbed him.
It was useful for Richy to have me there, because he was new in the group and felt a little bit on edge because of the Pete Best thing. Pete was a good-looking lad and Richy struggled—with himself, I think—to be accepted. He wanted people to accept him but felt uncomfortable for a while. Not that he was shy—he was older than them and the other Beatles looked up to him in a way. They also didn’t know which way to take him: although he was very funny he could also be a bit feisty at times, and he’s nobody’s fool.23
Roy was sitting alongside Richy in the Zodiac when Maureen Cox tapped on the window and asked for an autograph, and he rode with the Beatles—in their cars and in the van with them and Neil—for a few weeks from the end of August. “I didn’t know them much before that. I’d had no contact with them since the Quarry Men days, and not much then. I thought Paul was a gentleman, I hardly heard George speak, and John was just great—we’d be in the back of the car and he was reading out his poetry. He was such a funny man, changing the names of things as he went along. Some of that stuff was hilarious.”
Though Richy to Elsie and Harry, and to his local cluster of aunts, uncles and cousins—also to Roy and now to Mitch—he was Ringo to the other Beatles. In time, sometimes, they’d call him by his family name, but it never came as easy, and when they had occasion to write it they failed to notice the way he wrote it, using instead Richie or Ritchie (which would also be the way everyone else assumed it was written). He was also their “Dingle Boy,” a name they teased him with if he was exhibiting behavior a little more salty than theirs, but it was more endearment than indictment. He was from the south end of Liverpool like them, and to some extent they could talk the same streets, shops, pubs and parks, which they’d not been able to do with Pete.
Still, he was different. Where the Beatles had been four grammar-school boys, now they were three and one who’d hardly been to school. Where they’d been four musicians all using their real names, now they were three and one with a stage name. Where they’d been four standing an inch or two short of six feet, now they were three and a dwarf (as John called him, at least once), Ringo being some three inches shorter. And yet, while firing Pete lost the Beatles a few uniformities, taking Ringo gave them a different and more appealing feature—contrast.
Brian Epstein was soon 100 percent behind it. “Ringo’s coming into the group was one of the Beatles’ most brilliant doings,” he said in 1965. “It was something they wanted and that I carried out. It was, for so many reasons, a quite brilliant move.”24
It was a move brought about by George, and consequently his and Ringo’s friendship was a viscerally close and fundamental bond. “Ringo’s relationship with George was always vastly different to what he had with Paul or John,” Neil Aspinall said. “He felt he owed George.”25
Neil would often emphasize (sometimes finger-proddingly) that there was one essential key to understanding the Beatles’ psychological constitution, as true in 1962 as it would be in the twenty-first century. He called it “the Chain.” John brought in Paul, and Paul brought in George, and George brought in Ringo. John, Paul, George and Ringo doesn’t just trip nicely off the tongue, it was (is) a natural order, and connections of great intricacy wend within and without its links.
It was vital the newcomer quickly acquire a sense of John Winston Lennon—the temperaments, crips and the exquisitely or brutally facetious humor. Actually, though, the leader of the gang viewed Ringo with some sense of awe. Their patience with fools was similarly brittle and their verbal dispatches likewise brusque. Both had survived the trauma of absent fathers, and where John had been churned through the grammar-school system and come out the other side with no tangible reward, he was impressed by Ringo’s innate intelligence and a sharpness that belied his missed classroom years. As John put it, “To be so aware, with so little education, is rather unnerving to someone who’s been to school since he was fucking two onwards.”26
It took only a little time for Ringo to revere, respect and love John the same way Paul and George did. They were all close, but John was the glue, the one each had his best relationship with. Paul was much closer to John than he was to George, and George was a fair bit closer to John than he was to Paul. George’s girlfriend Marie Guirron saw it. “There was something strong between George and John. Paul was always bouncy but John and George were deeper together.”27
“Ringo was intimidated by the rest of the Beatles at the beginning,” says Paul.28 On the one hand, a big one, Paul was full of admiration for the kind of man Ringo was and what he’d achieved, and the fact he was 22 (the Beatles had sequential ages when Ringo joined, with John 21, Paul 20 and George 19). Age was an important yardstick for Paul and first impressions were always the ones that stuck: he looked up to John because he was older, and he looked and talked down to George because he was younger. Ringo was even older than John, by three months, and Paul would always see him in this light: “He’s a grown-up, Ringo—always is, always has been. I suspect when he was about three he was a grown-up.”29 On the other hand, while venerating Ringo’s age and worldliness, Paul paraded the preeminence he felt from being a Beatle, and from being an O- and A-Level achiever when Ringo’s education had been ruined by illness. As Paul would say a few years later, “When Ringo joined us I used to act all big time with him because I’d been in the business a bit longer and felt superior. I was a know-all. I’d been in the sixth form and thought I’d read a bit, you know. I began putting him off me, and me off me.”30
Dates aren’t detailed for many of the anecdotes and episodes fro
m Ringo’s opening weeks in the Beatles: they float unfixed between his joining and the end of the year, glimpses of a wider story that will never be known. It was, for example, sometime in this period that he showed them his first song. John and Paul both wrote songs, now Ringo came up with one—the Beatles’ third songwriter. Showing real guts, he revealed for their approval a little country and western ditty he called “Don’t Pass Me By.”
Roy Trafford started it, unwittingly. He and Richy had always been big fans of country music, sharing an array of favorites like Hank Snow, Buck Owens, Ernest Tubb and Merle Haggard—names Ringo now began to introduce to the other Beatles, who, being more into C&W than pure country, were mostly unaware of. Roy had an American album called Midnight Jamboree by Grand Ole Opry star Ernest Tubb and His Texas Troubadours, and among the guest vocalists was Linda Flanagan singing a new number called “Pass Me By.” She sang with the accompaniment of Tubb’s band, including a country fiddle player. Roy liked it so much, he learned it and played it at a party at Richy’s house in Admiral Grove.
In “Pass Me By,” a girl asks her former sweetheart not even to say hello to her—“don’t you stop and make me cry”—because her heart would break all over again. “Don’t Pass Me By” was thereabouts: from its earliest days it had the chorus “Don’t pass me by / Don’t make me cry / Don’t make me blue.” Ringo’s song probably didn’t last more than a minute, and its melody was pure country; he wrote it on a piano (he knew a few chords as well as boogie-woogie), which might account for his comment that when he played it to John, Paul and George they had hysterics and said it was a rewrite of a Jerry Lee Lewis B-side.
Ringo making John, Paul and George laugh was essential in cementing his place. They loved oddballs and eccentrics and he certainly was one. They didn’t always know which way to take him, but they made light of his gruffness or dour countenance (“I’m quite happy inside, it’s just the face won’t smile”) because they could pick on his big nose and that weird streak of gray in his hair. They were fascinated by his strictly simple diet and all the things his weakened stomach couldn’t tolerate; they were amused by the fallout from his fractured education, like his phonetic spelling and enjoyment of the weekly kids’ comics; they laughed when he signed LOVE AND LUCK above his autograph—his latest winning phrase; and they always cracked up at his strange sayings, like when he asked a restaurant waiter for “slight bread” because he wanted only a small portion. They came to call these things Ringoisms and, in time, as Paul would remember, “keep tabs on them, almost like writing them down: they were quite handy.”31
He also popped Prellies with them, smoked with them, swore with them, womanized with them and enjoyed late starts and late nights with them, hanging out after work at the bowling alley or Blue Angel, Joe’s caff or Ma Storm’s. Their religion was different—John, Paul and George all had Irish blood and were the not-so-common fruit of Catholic–Protestant marriages; Ringo was pure Protestant—but his antipathy toward church-going was identical. And where Pete had been solidly into sport, with his boxing background and rugby talent, in Ringo the three of them found just about the only other male on Merseyside utterly indifferent to it. The Beatles now beat sport 4–0.‡
But though they didn’t give a toss about football, all four of them started doing the football pools when Ringo joined. Every week of the soccer season, from August 1962 to May 1963, they each gave five bob to Ringo’s stepdad Harry, who filled in their coupons and posted them off.32 It was done for laffs (they never won a penny) and symbolizes how fast the Beatles’ revised lineup fell into the habit of doing all things all together. Three was turning into four, at last. They were on their way to becoming the closest of brothers—and Ringo, the sick only-child who’d stared through the window, longing to go outside and find someone to play with, couldn’t get enough of it.
They made him their equal from the start, on a full quarter share of the money, just as Pete had been. It made no difference that they’d established reservoirs of goodwill before Ringo joined, that they’d got themselves a management contract and record contract and, uniquely, were paid London-type fees in Liverpool: Ringo was in the band, he was one of them, he got the same.
This was his first experience of management. The Hurricanes’ recent chaotic episode in France was fairly typical of their adventures, and suddenly now he had Brian sorting everything for him, a measure of organization impeccable by any standards. Along with his pay, accounted for with honesty and transparency, came instructions telling Ringo where to be and at what hour, how to look his best, what to do and sometimes what not to do. There were also short- and long-term itineraries plotting the excitingly progressive opportunities for them all. Ringo’s fantasy of playing the London Palladium—an impossible dream in 1957, but he dreamed it all the same—came sharper into focus; he was with Brian Epstein and he was with the Beatles, and if any mates could help him get there, it was them.
Ringo knew Brian hadn’t warmed to him at first, but they soon got beyond an initial wariness to find a mutually appreciative relationship. It made a deep and lasting impression on Ringo, and while he could be as sparse with praise as his new bandmates, a compliment such as “Brian was great: you could trust Brian” speaks volumes.33
Ringo would describe the four as being “three-and-one” for some time to come, such is the nature of insecurity and such was the complexity of these relationships. In many ways, though, his integration occurred with remarkable speed, and John, Paul and George clearly invested heavily in making it happen. One of them was thinking with particular wisdom: George brought Ringo into the group but chose not to room with him when they stayed at hotels in order to avoid the possibility of the Beatles falling deeper into two divisions, with them in one and John and Paul the other. He suggested Ringo share with Paul, and then, after a period of doing this, with John.34 They all accepted it and had brilliant times in every combination. Core robust relationships were critical to the Beatles’ strength and durability, every permutation of allegiance binding them tight.
It was also George who took a black eye for the pleasure of having Ringo in the group, or so the two of them readily believed. The Cavern (alcohol free 1957–70) was a friendly place; the few difficulties that arose were dealt with quietly and non-violently by one of the door staff—but at the lunchtime session on Friday, August 24, six days after Ringo joined, there was an altercation by the bandroom and George was smacked in the face. The result was a bruise across the bridge of his nose and around his left eye, one that stayed many days and went multicolored.
Several saw or heard the fracas but accounts differ in the key details. George himself said he was hit after losing patience with a few people in the audience who were still calling out “Pete forever, Ringo never”; he told them to “bugger off” (or two other words to that effect), and later, as he stepped out of the bandroom, someone dealt him a head-butt, the popular Liverpool move that Paul once saw George himself deploy in the Institute playground. Others are doubtful. “George was bopped in the Cavern by some guy jealous for his girlfriend,” Paul says, and at least one other person agrees. And it does seem that the assailant—19-year-old Denny Flynn—hit out not for Pete but because he enjoyed it. One of the Cavern regulars, Dave Spain, is certain it had nothing to do with drummers: “Denny Flynn wasn’t a relative or friend or even a fan of Pete Best, he probably just wanted to stretch his muscles. He was notorious in Liverpool as a hard-case.”35
Yet while it’s unclear if George sticking up for Ringo did lead to someone sticking one on him, it didn’t matter to the two of them—they were certain of the connection and it became another of the thousands of layers in their kinship. “George fought for me!” Ringo would say, proud and laughing.36
George’s big-blue-job shone beacon-like through a long period without a break. The Beatles worked solidly from August 28 to September 17, setting foot in towns and counties they’d not been before, where the concept of who they were and what they were trying to achieve wa
s alien not only to their paying customers but also to the promoters who booked them. It sometimes happened that a single vocal mike was set up for them, because this was all acts usually needed. One place the Beatles weren’t playing was London: Brian’s experiences of pushing the Beatles in the capital were so consistently bleak, he’d resolved to make no London bookings until they had a big hit record, when there would be demand. His focus instead was on a continuing push out of Liverpool into new regions. Wherever they went, audiences expected to hear or dance to songs they knew, songs from the charts, so while “Don’t Ever Change” and “I Remember You” were highspots, the Beatles faced a downturn when they went into their obscure American R&B numbers. Liverpool audiences had come to appreciate these songs but no one else knew them. As Neil would remember, “People would be shouting out for Cliff Richard songs as if the Beatles were just another fuckin’ covers band, and we wanted to give them things they’d never heard of. ‘You want Cliff Richard? OK, well here’s If You Gotta Make A Fool Of Somebody by James Ray.’ ”37
The toughest call was when one of them—almost always Paul—stepped forward and announced, “Here’s a number we’ve written ourselves.” But no matter their reception, John and Paul were back writing and not stopping. They all had another Cavern rehearsal the afternoon of Monday, September 3, the day before their hugely anticipated EMI return, and Paul had a new number for them to learn. John wrote “Please Please Me” with this recording session in mind, Paul had “Tip of My Tongue.” It was an upbeat and bubbly song written first-person: the singer is struck by shyness but knows one day he’ll get the words out, romance his girl and take her to the altar. It had an interesting verbal trick—where the last word of one line, lonely, rhymed with the first of the next line, only—but otherwise “Tip of My Tongue” was a thin creation, its hooks never quite catching.
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