Photo: Arnold Jerocki/Getty Images
To balance out the peace and love, sometimes there’s got to be a performance-improvement plan and hate. Ringo Starr and the All-Starr Band, your supergroup’s favorite supergroup that is approaching 40 years as a touring unit, aren’t immune to the idea of that one guy in the office who stands at the water cooler trying to make himself look important. In a new Los Angeles Times interview, Starr admits he’s had to let go of a few starr pupils over the years when it came to bad behavior or technique. “I had some members in the ’90s who didn’t really get the system,” he explains. “One of them came to me and was complaining about another player. He said, ‘I’ll have to leave,’ and I said, ‘OK — you’re not gonna blackmail me.’ He didn’t leave.” Starr won’t name names. “There’s been the odd musician who felt — well, they didn’t feel bigger than me because they weren’t — but felt like they had the right to change things,” he adds. “If we do a tour and it’s been too rough: ‘I’m afraid you’re out the band.’ Or if it’s just really bad taste. We had one player that just played crap.”
Any guesses? We can at least try to narrow it down: From an official-member perspective as opposed to a “special guest” who occasionally joined the band on the road, the musicians who debuted in the ’90s and never returned in any capacity were the Band’s Rick Danko, the Guess Who’s Burton Cummings, Randy Bachman, and the Who’s John Entwistle. But the shade, risen from the octopus’s garden, could be more nuanced than that.
