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It's a sad world out there, full of kids who don't have a shadow of a clue how to rock. Fortunately, I do.
This is where all music goes to die.
~ Rock'n'Roll Requiem ~
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Night 2 - Wish Upon a Starr
Please feel free to continuously click the parenthesized links for some relevant background music.
Catholics, Jews, Muslims… They have all got it wrong. To hell with Heaven and all that crap. Who wants to be a part of some big gay community for eternity? To me, stuff like that is what nightmares are made of. Like being perpetually stuck in a split second of Woodstock - with Jim Jones on stage, handing out the Kool Aid.
No, the Buddhists have it right.
Rebirth.
Rewards in the here and now (or, rather, hereafter – but still here – kind of…)
They still need to tweak their religion (or philosophy – is it a religion if you don’t even have a God or at least some commandments?), because the ultimate goal of rebirth is not yet taught at the temples of Buddha. What is that goal, you ask, with eyes shining with a yearning to know? Be still, poor simple-minded disciples of Grace… I will tell you.
The ultimate goal is to be reborn as Ringo Starr.
Think about it.
As far as cool lives go, the rock stars lead the best ones. All the fame and fortune you can dream of, with all the fast cars and the hot chicks, and still you get away with being an absolute asshole, without a care in the world. The only problem is that you actually have to produce something worth noting in the history books – otherwise you won’t make it to rock star status to begin with. As Hendrix you had to actually make your guitar gently weep in the face of a generation who needed to learn what playing the guitar was all about. As David Lee Roth you had to work those splits and high jumps, no matter how much your old aging body cramped with groin hamstrings and Chlamydia. As Madonna you had to travel to Africa, at the risk of life and limb at the mercy of tropical diseases, to adopt the son of some village idiot to finally raise some controversy in a century when everything else has already been said and done a hundred times over. Well, at least it pissed some people off, right?
If you were Keith Richards you suffered from a bad liver, a busted skull and the stench of formaldehyde following you around, much like the IV you had with you on stage.
If you had the misfortune to be Marvin Gaye you got to taste the sweet nectar of the good life for but the briefest second, before your jealous father shot you dead in a drunken stupor.
All those rock stars… struggling like little bees to stay on top by committing their hearts and soul to a chosen profession of entertainment, breaking their backs to be bad-ass and professional – all at the same time. And yet they all still flicker and die in the end. Often bent and broken by years of decay.
But not Ringo Starr.
He can’t drum. He never wrote a good song. He is ugly as fuck. He never broke a sweat to do shit for himself. Yet he is one of the most successful rock stars this planet has ever seen.
Look at the rest of them. The guys in The Beatles, I mean…
John Lennon struggled so hard to be everybody’s friendly neighborhood hippie that some jealous guy shot him for being too famous. After all those sappy happy songs about world peace, a dose of reality shoved it up his ass with a silver bullet. The Gentle Werewolf of Hugs and Happiness… gone.
George Harrison turned into a musical garden gnome and kept squealing away at that Sitar that Mesmerized the Western World, and meanwhile had most of India in laughing fits, I’m sure. Fame scared him to the point of becoming a hermit recluse, in his big old castle refuge (being stabbed by a fan didn’t help), and then he died from some fucked up disease, a grey old ghost.
Paul McCartney got drunk with The Power, now that all the serious contenders for the rights to the old stuff are dead and gone, and he has switched the epithet “Lennon/McCartney” around to “McCartney/Lennon” on all the songs. Just look at the sleeves of later live albums. To retain a shred of dignity he has to tour the world on a constant basis, in front of ancient fans, desperate for a spark of nostalgia in a world of broken dreams. Finally those eyebrows actually look worried, rather than just like a cheap stage prop.
They all struggled or died for their art.
Not Ringo.
He just coasts through life, riding the winds of a Champagne supernova, collecting the revenues of a life well spent in the spotlight… a life he earned by just being there. The wrong guy in the right place at the right time.
We should all strive to be that guy. To live that life of absolute carefree fulfillment and wealthy bliss.
Think about it.
Ringo Starr never rallied the masses through serious political engagements. Ringo Starr didn’t sit naked in a bed to protest the war. Ringo Starr never had to write timeless classics to stay in the hearts and minds of dwindling legions of fans. Nobody wants to stab Ringo in his lung. Ringo Starr never did shit, and yet lives like a king. Ringo Starr wasn’t even the best drummer in The Beatles.
Ringo Starr wrote “Octopus Garden” and sang on “Yellow Submarine”.
High as fuck and with a big grin on his face.
Do you think John Lennon would have written “Octopus Garden”?
Do you think McCartney would have sung on “Yellow Submarine”?
The public would have slayed them. The media would have eaten them like the raisins out of a Swedish Lucia Cake.
Throughout the history of rock’n’roll, only Ringo Starr could ever do that shit and get away with it.
He’s in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Alice Cooper and Peter Gabriel are not. Neither is Metallica, and Black Sabbath just sailed in on a banana peel last year.
Ringo Starr is nominated for Knighthood by the English Queen, and is a member of the Order of the British Empire. Something the Brits wish they could kick Prince Charles the hell out of.
Decades later, after all the rest of The Real Beatles have struggled and died, or struggled and lived, Ringo Starr still has the most fun. He decides to record an album on a whim, invites his old buddies Clapton, Edgar Winter, Peter Frampton, Jack Bruce and Billy Squier, gets them all high as kites in his mansion, and as soon as they start jamming, a humble man servant places a bunch of microphones on the table in the living room, and, voila… “The Ringo Starr Jam Sessions” hit the stores a few months later. All while Ringo sleeps through the whole damn thing, drunk off his ass on the sofa in the pool room.
Ringo Starr.
The ultimate rock star.
The ultimate liver of life.
The perfect ratio of input and reward.
Fuck Heaven.
Wish upon a Starr.
