Ringo Starr

By BJ Heinley

Key Moments

Born in the Dingle (July 7, 1940): 9 Madryn Street, Liverpool 8 — the poorest of the four childhoods by some distance.
John meets Paul (July 6, 1957): St Peter's Church fête, Woolton. Paul, fifteen, shows John how to tune a guitar and plays 'Twenty Flight Rock' from memory.
First Hamburg residency (August 17, 1960): The Indra Club. The name has settled on The Beatles and they play something like eight hours a night.
Joins the Beatles (August 18, 1962): Two days after Pete Best was fired, for £25 a week. Cavern regulars chanted for Pete and someone gave George a black eye.
Ed Sullivan debut (February 9, 1964): 73 million Americans watch. The British Invasion begins.
Last live concert (August 29, 1966): Candlestick Park. They retreat to the studio permanently.
Sgt. Pepper's (May 26, 1967): The concept album, and the record that made the studio itself an instrument. Roughly 700 hours of studio time across five months, against the 10-hour single session that produced the debut LP four years earlier.…
Abbey Road (September 26, 1969): Recorded last. The Side B medley closes the career.
Ringo (November 2, 1973): The only post-split record all four contributed to, though never in the same room. Two US number ones came off it.
First All-Starr Band tour (July 23, 1989): A rotating cast of people with their own hits to play, so nobody has to carry the show. Still going more than thirty years later.

Every event

Born in the Dingle (July 7, 1940): 9 Madryn Street, Liverpool 8 — the poorest of the four childhoods by some distance.
Born (August 4, 1946): Liverpool. A Cavern regular and trainee hairdresser.
Year in hospital (April 1, 1947): A burst appendix leads to peritonitis and a coma. He is six, and misses so much school he never catches up.
Born (August 27, 1947): Queens, New York.
Tuberculosis sanatorium (January 1, 1953): Two years at Heswall. The ward band hands him a mallet to keep patients occupied, and he refuses to join in unless he gets a drum.
Dien Bien Phu falls (May 7, 1954): French colonial rule in Indochina ends. The country is partitioned at the 17th parallel.
Brown v. Board of Education (May 17, 1954): School segregation ruled unconstitutional. The same September, Paul meets George on a bus in Liverpool.
'That's All Right' (July 5, 1954): Sun Studio, Memphis. Three years before John and Paul met.
Rosa Parks arrested (December 1, 1955): Four days later, the Montgomery bus boycott begins.
Ravi Shankar first tours the West (January 1, 1956): A decade before a Beatle picked up a sitar, and he had been playing for thirty years before that.
'Heartbreak Hotel' (January 27, 1956): His first national number one. John Lennon bought a guitar.
John meets Paul (July 6, 1957): St Peter's Church fête, Woolton. Paul, fifteen, shows John how to tune a guitar and plays 'Twenty Flight Rock' from memory.
Sputnik (October 4, 1957): The space age opens three months after John and Paul meet at Woolton.
Gets his first kit (December 25, 1957): A second-hand set bought by his stepfather for about ten pounds.
Drafted into the Army (March 24, 1958): Two years away at the exact moment British teenagers needed something to replace him.
Rory Storm and the Hurricanes (January 1, 1959): Liverpool's biggest draw before the Beatles, and the band he was poached from.
Berry Gordy founds the label (January 12, 1959): Detroit, on an $800 family loan.
Sharpeville massacre (March 21, 1960): 69 killed at a pass-law protest. South Africa leaves the Commonwealth the following year.
Becomes Ringo Starr (June 1, 1960): For the rings, and so his drum solo could be billed as Starr Time.
First Hamburg residency (August 17, 1960): The Indra Club. The name has settled on The Beatles and they play something like eight hours a night.
First record with John and Paul (October 15, 1960): A Hamburg session backing Hurricanes singer Lu Walters, with three Beatles sitting in — two years before he joined them.
Gagarin orbits the Earth (April 12, 1961): First human in space.
Kennedy commits to the Moon (May 25, 1961): Before this decade is out.
The Berlin Wall goes up (August 13, 1961): Overnight. The Beatles are in the middle of their Hamburg years, a few hundred miles west.
First gig at the Marquee (July 12, 1962): Five weeks before Ringo joined the Beatles.
Mandela arrested (August 5, 1962): Two weeks before Ringo joined the Beatles.
Joins the Beatles (August 18, 1962): Two days after Pete Best was fired, for £25 a week. Cavern regulars chanted for Pete and someone gave George a black eye.
Replaced at his own session (September 11, 1962): George Martin books a session drummer for 'Love Me Do' without telling him. He plays tambourine and assumes he is about to be sacked.
Surfin' Safari (October 1, 1962): Released the same week as 'Love Me Do'.
Cuban Missile Crisis (October 16, 1962): Thirteen days. 'Love Me Do' had been out for eleven of them.
Please Please Me session (February 11, 1963): The whole debut album cut in one day at Abbey Road — ten hours and forty-five minutes, with John singing 'Twist and Shout' last because it would wreck his voice.
Please Please Me (March 22, 1963): Debut LP, recorded in a single 10-hour session at Abbey Road.
The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (May 27, 1963): The Beatles played it constantly in Paris the following January.
With the Beatles sessions (July 18, 1963): Recorded in snatched days between tours and TV dates.
Partial Test Ban Treaty (August 5, 1963): Atmospheric nuclear testing banned by the US, USSR and UK.
March on Washington (August 28, 1963): 'I Have a Dream'. Three months before the band's first American single.
'I Wanna Be Your Man' (November 1, 1963): Written for them by Lennon and McCartney in about twenty minutes, in front of them. Keith Richards said it was the moment the Stones decided to write their own.
Royal Variety Performance (November 4, 1963): Prince of Wales Theater, in front of the Queen Mother. John tells the cheap seats to clap and the rest to rattle their jewelry.
With the Beatles (November 22, 1963): Released at the peak of UK Beatlemania.
The Beatles cover three Motown songs (November 22, 1963): With the Beatles carries 'Please Mr. Postman', 'You Really Got a Hold on Me' and 'Money'.
Kennedy assassinated (November 22, 1963): Dallas. With the Beatles was released in Britain that same day.
A Hard Day's Night sessions (January 29, 1964): Started at Pathé Marconi in Paris, finished at Abbey Road around the film shoot.
Ed Sullivan debut (February 9, 1964): 73 million Americans watch. The British Invasion begins.
Washington Coliseum (February 11, 1964): First US concert, two days after Ed Sullivan. 8,092 people, a boxing ring stage, Ringo's kit turned by hand between numbers.
Collapses before the world tour (June 3, 1964): Tonsillitis on the morning of the photocall. Jimmie Nicol deputises for eight shows while he recovers.
Rivonia Trial: life sentence (June 12, 1964): Mandela and seven others to Robben Island. He would be there for eighteen years.
Civil Rights Act signed (July 2, 1964): Segregation in public accommodation outlawed — mid-way through the Beatles' first American tour, on which they refused to play segregated venues.
A Hard Day's Night (July 10, 1964): First LP entirely by Lennon–McCartney.
Gulf of Tonkin (August 2, 1964): The incident that produced the resolution, and with it an American war. Six months after Ed Sullivan.
'You Really Got Me' (August 4, 1964): A slashed speaker cone, and arguably the first hard rock record.
Beatles for Sale sessions (August 11, 1964): Squeezed between two tours. The exhaustion is audible and largely the point.
Supremes: 'Where Did Our Love Go' (August 22, 1964): The first of five consecutive American number ones.
Meets the Beatles at the Delmonico (August 28, 1964): New York. He introduced them to cannabis, having misheard 'I can't hide' as something else entirely.
Beatles for Sale (December 4, 1964): Written and recorded between tours.
Brian Wilson stops touring (December 18, 1964): A panic attack on a flight to Houston. He stays home to write — two years before the Beatles do the same.
Marries Ringo (February 11, 1965): Caxton Hall, London, at eight in the morning to avoid the press. It did not work.
Help! sessions (February 15, 1965): Film soundtrack first, then the rest — including 'Yesterday' with a string quartet.
Selma to Montgomery (March 7, 1965): 'Bloody Sunday' on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
First combat troops land (March 8, 1965): 3,500 Marines at Da Nang. The band is in the middle of Help!
Bringing It All Back Home (March 22, 1965): Half electric. The line between folk and rock stops existing.
Banned from touring America (June 1, 1965): Four years, for reasons never made entirely clear. It cost them the American market at the moment it mattered most.
'(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction' (June 4, 1965): The riff Keith Richards wrote in his sleep.
Goes electric at Newport (July 25, 1965): Booed off after three songs.
Help! (August 6, 1965): Second film soundtrack, contains 'Yesterday'.
Shea Stadium Concert (August 15, 1965): 55,600 people, and nobody on stage can hear anything. He kept time by watching the others' bodies move.
The Beatles visit Elvis (August 27, 1965): Bel Air. Awkward for an hour, then they played together. No recording was made, which everyone involved later regretted.
Born (September 13, 1965): London, during the band's second American tour year.
Rubber Soul sessions (October 12, 1965): Four weeks against a Christmas deadline. The studio starts becoming the instrument.
'My Generation' (October 29, 1965): Recorded four weeks before the Rubber Soul sessions ended.
Rubber Soul (December 3, 1965): The studio pivot. Sitar debuts on 'Norwegian Wood'.
Revolver sessions (April 6, 1966): Opens with 'Tomorrow Never Knows' — tape loops, Leslie-cabinet vocal, artificial double tracking.
Pet Sounds (May 16, 1966): Made in answer to Rubber Soul. Paul called it the record that made him want to make Sgt. Pepper's.
Shankar begins teaching Harrison (June 1, 1966): Six weeks in London, Srinagar and Bombay, starting with how to sit.
Nippon Budokan (June 30, 1966): First rock act to play the martial-arts hall. Nationalist protests and 35,000 police on duty.
Motorcycle crash (July 29, 1966): Woodstock, New York. He disappears from public view for eighteen months.
Revolver (August 5, 1966): Tape loops, reversed tape, Indian drone in a pop song.
South Africa bans Beatles records (August 8, 1966): Over John's remark about Christianity. The ban was not lifted until 1971.
Last live concert (August 29, 1966): Candlestick Park. They retreat to the studio permanently.
The television show debuts (September 12, 1966): Built on A Hard Day's Night, down to the running.
Arrives in London (September 24, 1966): Chas Chandler brings him over. Within weeks Clapton, Townshend and Beck have all come to watch.
'Good Vibrations' (October 10, 1966): Seven months, four studios and around ninety hours of tape for three and a half minutes.
Sgt. Pepper's sessions (November 24, 1966): Nov 1966 – Apr 1967. 700 studio hours across five months.
Four No. 1 albums in a row (January 1, 1967): 1966–67. The story that they outsold the Beatles and the Stones combined came from Nesmith, who later admitted it wasn't true.
Apollo 1 fire (January 27, 1967): Three astronauts killed on the launch pad, during the Sgt. Pepper's sessions.
Magical Mystery Tour sessions (April 25, 1967): Runs straight out of Pepper and through Epstein's death in August.
Smile abandoned (May 1, 1967): Wilson hears Sgt. Pepper's and shelves the record meant to answer it. It stayed shelved for thirty-seven years.
'Waterloo Sunset' (May 5, 1967): Released three weeks before Sgt. Pepper's and largely buried by it.
Are You Experienced (May 12, 1967): Released three weeks before Sgt. Pepper's and kept off the top by it.
Headquarters (May 22, 1967): The one they actually played on. It went to number one and was immediately displaced by Sgt. Pepper's, where it stayed for eleven weeks.
Sgt. Pepper's (May 26, 1967): The concept album, and the record that made the studio itself an instrument. Roughly 700 hours of studio time across five months, against the 10-hour single session that produced the debut LP four years earlier.…
Opens with 'Sgt. Pepper's' (June 4, 1967): Saville Theatre, nine days after the album came out, with Paul and George in the audience. Paul called it one of the great honours of his life.
Burns his guitar at Monterey (June 18, 1967): The introduction to America.
Shankar at Monterey (June 18, 1967): Three hours on a Sunday afternoon, and a standing ovation from an audience that had come for rock.
Monterey Pop (June 18, 1967): They smashed their equipment; Hendrix followed and set fire to his.
Jagger and Richards sentenced (June 29, 1967): Drug convictions, quashed on appeal. The Times: 'Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?'
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (August 4, 1967): Recorded at Abbey Road in the studio next door to Sgt. Pepper's. The Beatles dropped in.
Brian Epstein dies (August 27, 1967): Manager's death at 32 changes the group dynamic forever.
Magical Mystery Tour (November 27, 1967): Soundtrack to a widely-panned TV film. But: 'I Am the Walrus'.
Tet Offensive (January 30, 1968): The turn in American opinion. Runs through the weeks the band spent in Rishikesh.
Maharishi's Rishikesh course (February 16, 1968): Sixty students including four Beatles, Donovan, Mia Farrow and Mike Love. Around thirty songs came out of it.
Rishikesh (2 weeks) (February 19, 1968): Ringo lasts two weeks. Brought suitcases of baked beans.
Martin Luther King assassinated (April 4, 1968): Memphis. The band had returned from India eight days earlier.
Syd Barrett leaves (April 6, 1968): They stopped picking him up for gigs. He was twenty-two.
White Album sessions (May 30, 1968): May–Oct 1968. Recorded across five London studios amid fraying relationships.
Soviet tanks enter Prague (August 20, 1968): The Prague Spring crushed. 'Back in the U.S.S.R.' had been recorded ten days earlier.
Walks out of the White Album (August 22, 1968): Convinced he is the worst player in the band and unwanted. Gone a fortnight; came back to a drum kit covered in flowers.
First gig (September 7, 1968): Denmark, billed as the New Yardbirds, while the Beatles were finishing the White Album.
Head (November 6, 1968): A film built to demolish their own image, co-written by Jack Nicholson. It worked.
The Village Green Preservation Society (November 22, 1968): Out the same day as the White Album, and sold almost nothing.
The White Album (November 22, 1968): Sprawling double LP recorded amid fracturing relationships.
The Comeback Special (December 3, 1968): Black leather, back on television, seven years after his last live show.
Marvin Gaye: 'I Heard It Through the Grapevine' (December 14, 1968): Seven weeks at number one.
Get Back sessions (January 2, 1969): Twickenham then Apple. Culminated in the rooftop concert.
Led Zeppelin I (January 12, 1969): Released the same month as the rooftop concert. The decade turns over.
Yellow Submarine (January 17, 1969): Half unreleased Beatles material, half orchestral score.
Rooftop concert (January 30, 1969): Borrowed his wife's red mac against the cold.
Abbey Road sessions (February 22, 1969): Recorded after the abandoned Get Back sessions were shelved.
Tommy (May 23, 1969): A rock opera, arriving as the Beatles were recording Abbey Road.
Brian Jones drowns (July 3, 1969): Aged twenty-seven, a month after leaving the band he founded.
Hyde Park free concert (July 5, 1969): Two days after Brian Jones died; a quarter of a million people.
Apollo 11 lands (July 20, 1969): Six weeks before the Abbey Road sessions finished. Roughly 600 million people watch.
Woodstock (August 18, 1969): Monday morning, most of the crowd gone, and 'The Star-Spangled Banner'.
Abbey Road (September 26, 1969): Recorded last. The Side B medley closes the career.
Moratorium march on Washington (November 15, 1969): Half a million people. Pete Seeger leads them in 'Give Peace a Chance', written in a Montreal hotel room five months earlier.
Altamont (December 6, 1969): A stabbing in front of the stage, four months after Woodstock. The counterculture's other bookend.
Sentimental Journey (March 27, 1970): Standards his mother liked, arranged by Quincy Jones among others. His first solo album.
The split (April 10, 1970): The only one with no public position in the argument, and the one all three kept calling to play on their records.
Kent State (May 4, 1970): National Guardsmen kill four students. Three weeks after the Beatles' split is announced.
Let It Be (May 8, 1970): Recorded before Abbey Road, released after.
Lola released (June 12, 1970): Banned by the BBC until Coca-Cola became cherry cola.
Dies at 27 (September 18, 1970): London, five months after the Beatles announced the split.
Beaucoups of Blues (September 25, 1970): Cut in Nashville in three days with session players who thought he was joking.
'It Don't Come Easy' (April 16, 1971): Written with uncredited help from George. A top five hit on both sides of the Atlantic.
Sticky Fingers (April 23, 1971): First on their own label; the tongue logo arrives.
Marvin Gaye: What's Going On (May 21, 1971): Gordy thought it would fail. A soul record about Vietnam, poverty and ecology.
Concert for Bangladesh (August 1, 1971): Shankar asks Harrison for help with famine relief; the result invents the benefit concert.
Who's Next (August 2, 1971): Salvaged from an abandoned science-fiction project.
Surf's Up (August 30, 1971): The title song, shelved since SMiLE, finally surfaces.
Led Zeppelin IV (November 8, 1971): Untitled, four symbols, and one of the best-selling records ever made.
Exile on Main St. (May 12, 1972): Recorded in a basement in the south of France, in tax exile.
Aloha from Hawaii (January 14, 1973): Beamed by satellite to more than a billion people.
Paris Peace Accords (January 27, 1973): American withdrawal agreed.
The Dark Side of the Moon (March 1, 1973): Fifteen years on the American chart, recorded in the same building as everything above.
Quadrophenia (October 26, 1973)
Ringo (November 2, 1973): The only post-split record all four contributed to, though never in the same room. Two US number ones came off it.
Partnership dissolved (December 29, 1974): The legal end, nearly five years after the public one. John signs last, at Disneyland; the court makes it final on 9 January.
The drinking years (January 1, 1975): By his own account he remembers very little of it. The records got worse and then stopped selling entirely.
A drum kit from Keith Moon (January 1, 1975): His father gave him one lesson and discouraged him. The Who's drummer gave him a kit.
Blood on the Tracks (January 20, 1975)
Fall of Saigon (April 30, 1975): The war ends, twenty-one years after Dien Bien Phu.
Divorced (July 17, 1975): After ten years and three children.
Soweto uprising (June 16, 1976): Schoolchildren protest against Afrikaans-medium instruction; hundreds are killed.
Dies at 42 (August 16, 1977): Graceland. Lennon: Elvis died the day he went into the Army.
Some Girls (June 9, 1978): The answer to punk and disco in the same record.
Keith Moon dies (September 7, 1978): Aged thirty-two. He had given Ringo's son Zak his first proper kit.
Slow Train Coming (August 20, 1979): The first of the gospel records.
The Wall (November 30, 1979)
Cincinnati stampede (December 3, 1979): Eleven fans died in the crush before the show.
Meets Ringo on Caveman (February 1, 1980): Both cast in the same film in Mexico; both in a car crash in Surrey that May.
John Bonham dies (September 25, 1980): The band ends within three months.
Led Zeppelin disband (December 4, 1980): We could not continue as we were.
Marries Barbara Bach (April 27, 1981): Marylebone, with Paul and George both there — the first time three of them had been in a room together in years.
Tattoo You (August 24, 1981): Start Me Up, salvaged from a shelved reggae take.
Dennis Wilson drowns (December 28, 1983): The only Beach Boy who surfed.
The Never Ending Tour begins (June 7, 1988): Concord, California. It has not really stopped.
Motown sold to MCA (June 28, 1988): The end of Gordy's independent Detroit-born label.
Gets sober (October 1, 1988): Checks into a clinic in Arizona with Barbara. He has said everything since dates from it.
Kokomo reaches No. 1 (November 5, 1988): Their first chart-topper in 22 years, without Brian.
All-Starr Band (July 23, 1989): Sixteen line-ups and counting.
First All-Starr Band tour (July 23, 1989): A rotating cast of people with their own hits to play, so nobody has to carry the show. Still going more than thirty years later.
Steel Wheels (August 29, 1989): The reconciliation record; the tour that reinvented the stadium business.
Time Takes Time (May 22, 1992): The comeback record.
Voodoo Lounge (July 11, 1994): First without Bill Wyman.
Dies (December 30, 1994): Leukaemia, aged forty-eight. Ringo was at the hospital.
Anthology 1 (November 20, 1995): Outtakes, demos and 'Free as a Bird' — the three surviving members recording over a John Lennon cassette.
Joins the Who (June 1, 1996): Playing Keith Moon's parts.
Time Out of Mind (September 30, 1997): The late-career resurrection; Album of the Year.
John Entwistle dies (June 27, 2002): The night before a tour was to open.
Live 8 reunion (July 2, 2005): Waters and Gilmour on one stage, once.
A Bigger Bang (September 5, 2005): Followed by the highest-grossing tour yet staged.
Reunion at the O2 (December 10, 2007): One night, with Jason Bonham on drums.
The SMiLE Sessions released (November 1, 2011): The great lost album, 44 years late.
That's Why God Made the Radio (June 5, 2012): The 50th-anniversary reunion with Brian back at the center.
50th anniversary shows open at the O2 (November 25, 2012): Fifty years and four months after the Marquee.
Rock Hall, as a solo artist (April 18, 2015): The last of the four to be inducted on his own, with Paul doing the honors.
Nobel Prize in Literature (October 13, 2016): For having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.
Blue & Lonesome (December 2, 2016): Back to Chicago blues covers — where they came in.
Knighted (March 20, 2018): Twenty-one years after Paul. Peace and love, he said, and he meant it.
WHO (December 6, 2019): Townshend and Daltrey, still at it.
Rough and Rowdy Ways (June 19, 2020): A 17-minute song about the Kennedy assassination went to No. 1.
Charlie Watts dies (August 24, 2021): The quiet center of the band, 58 years at the kit.
Hackney Diamonds (October 20, 2023): First originals in eighteen years; Paul McCartney plays bass on one track.
'Now and Then' (November 2, 2023): He and Paul finished John's 1977 demo. The last Beatles record, fifty-three years after the split.
Hackney Diamonds tour opens (April 28, 2024): Houston. Still touring, sixty-two years in.
Look Up (January 10, 2025): A country album made in Nashville with T Bone Burnett, seventy years after the sanatorium ward band.

Eras

The Dingle (1940–1959): A childhood in one of Liverpool’s poorest districts, with long stays in hospital and a sanatorium.
The Beatles (1962–1970): Ringo’s Beatles years, from replacing Pete Best to the split.
Solo (1970–now): Records, films and touring under his own name, ever since.
Rory Storm (1959–1962): Drummer for Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, Liverpool’s top band for a while, playing Butlins and Hamburg.
Lost years (1975–1988): The drinking years, until he and Barbara Bach got sober in 1988.
All-Starr (1989–now): Touring with his All-Starr Band, a changing lineup of famous friends.

Ringo Starr

Key Moments

Every event

Eras

Sources

Original Horizontal (Phone) · mockup