When the Beatles broke up in 1970, each member faced the daunting task of establishing a career outside the biggest band in the world. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr all found varying degrees of post-Beatles success, but the transition wasn’t always easy.
Harrison, who had spent his Beatles years struggling to break through the Lennon-McCartney stronghold, came out of the gates quickest, with 1970’s All Things Must Pass a reputation-reaffirming smash. McCartney initially floundered away from the band, while Lennon and Starr also went on to enjoy solo success.
But according to Todd Rundgren, only one of the four truly managed to leave the Beatles behind.
“Ringo was maybe the only one who survived the Beatles,” he tells Vulture in a new interview. “All the other guys had some sort of issues they had to deal with. Paul McCartney, even today, is so afraid that people forget who he is that he’ll show up at a mall opening.”
While McCartney initially floundered away from the band, even questioning whether there was some truth to the ‘Paul is dead’ rumors after all, Lennon and Starr also went on to enjoy solo success. With this year’s Long Long Road his 22nd solo album, it’s hard to argue that Starr’s output over the last 56 years has been anything but tireless.
As a member of the Ringo Starr All-Star Band, Rundgren saw the drummer’s operation up close, and he felt the shadow of his former glories never hung over him.
“Ringo finally got over being a Beatle and became Ringo,” he notes. “[But] there was a time early on during the All-Starr tours where he was afraid that, if he stopped anywhere in public, he’d be mobbed to death. So he would ignore everybody.”
That had changed, Rundgren adds, by the latter years of his All-Star Band tenure, which stretched from the early 1990s to 2017. Even the first shows he played, in 1992, were some 22 years after the band’s breakup, so Rundgren concedes that Starr’s wounds and worries didn’t heal overnight.
“After the Beatles were done, he recorded some stuff but didn’t go out on tour,” the guitarist says. “He was too stage shy. Cut to 10 years later, and Ringo decides that as part of his rehabilitation he’s going to start playing again. He got into real big trouble because when he stopped playing, he didn’t know what to do with himself.
“He started hanging around with [American singer-songwriter] Harry Nilsson and getting into all sorts of mischief, and he realized that he was probably going to die unless he got into rehab. Part of the rehab was to start the All-Starr Band.”
Countless tours and eight All-Star live albums later, it’s clear the rehabilitation worked for the drummer. Rundgren has been in the news recently for a much less complimentary assessment of Taylor Swift’s songwriting, which he called “the apotheosis of mediocrity” in a recent interview.
Still, it’s not the only time Rundgren and the Beatles have crossed paths. He saved one recording session after Harrison stepped away. He’s also worked with Meat Loaf, David Bowie, and, much to his disdain, nearly jammed with Hendrix, but never quite got that feather in his cap.
