Ringo Starr’s Nashville friends and fans share memories and birthday wishes

Ringo Starr performs at the Ryman Auditorium on Saturday, July 7, 2012 (photo: Rob Shanahan)

Nashville may be an ocean away from Liverpool, but in our estimation, few places on Earth could make Ringo Starr feel at home on his birthday quite like Music City. The former Beatle, who will celebrate his 72nd birthday onstage at Ryman Auditorium on Saturday, has had a lifelong connection to Nashville, through its music and its musicians.

As we look forward to Starr’s birthday, we asked some of his many Middle Tennessee-based friends, collaborators and admirers to share their thoughts, memories and birthday wishes for the world’s most famous drummer.

Nancy Lee Andrews (Photo courtesy of Denny Adcock)

As a former girlfriend, Nancy Lee Andrews celebrated several of Ringo’s birthdays with him, including his 35th in Los Angeles. That year, Starr’s friend Keith Moon (late drummer for rock greats The Who) told Andrews he had a special surprise for Ringo: He had hired a skywriter to write “Happy Birthday Ringo” over the Hollywood hills. It was Andrews’ job to get Ringo outside.

“The sun was going down and there was a beautiful blue sky,” the now-Nashville-based photographer recalls. “I said, ‘Honey, let’s go out by the swimming pool, take it easy and have a drink.’ He said, ‘OK.’ So we’re out there, and all of a sudden you hear (engine noise), and we see this single-engine plane. It starts to make an ‘H.’

Ringo’s birthday surprise ended up taking longer than expected. With its engine blaring, the plane spent more than an hour composing its three-word message, and by the time it reached its final letter, most of the preceding ones had faded. Still, the stunt generated excitement in L.A. — a local radio station had picked up on Moon’s plan, and the couple listened as the D.J. played Ringo records and told listeners to look to the skies.

“He loved birthdays, especially when his 37th birthday came around,” Andrews says. “It was 7/7/77. That was a really big one for him.”

‘The Beatle beat’

Award-winning Nashville songwriter Gary Burr has penned songs with Starr for several of his recent albums and has frequently shared the stage with him, including at his most recent Nashville concert at the Wildhorse Saloon in 2008. Burr says having Starr as a collaborator and friend is “one of the major thrills of my life.”

Gary Burr (photo: Jeanne Reasonover/The Tennessean)

“I’ve played with him a lot, and every once in a while, he would play one of those ‘Ringo beats,’ and all of us would turn around and look at him, not believing that the drummer playing the Beatle beat is the actual Beatle who did it. At one point, he said to me, ‘You know, I do that on purpose, because I know all of your heads will snap around.’ ”

Burr was onstage with Starr for his 70th birthday celebration in 2010 in New York City — the famed gig where Starr and former bandmate Paul McCartney performed a few Beatles classics together — and he’s sure Saturday’s will be a special occasion, as well.

“He has wonderful memories of working in Nashville. ... I’m sure he thinks that this is a really nice stroke of luck to be in a town that he digs on his birthday.”

‘Nicest guy in the world’

When the time came to shoot photos for Starr’s Nashville-made 1970 album, “Beaucoups of Blues,” producer Pete Drake called up a friend, blues/country singer Tracy Nelson, and asked whether they could use her farm in Mt. Juliet. An hour later, she was serving a Beatle and company tuna fish sandwiches (“the only even marginally vegetarian food I had”) in her home. After that makeshift meal, she led Starr outside, introduced him to the horse in the pasture, and left them to their photo shoot.

Tracy Nelson

“He seemed pretty shy about approaching the horse and her foal, but she won him over by coming straight up to the fence and nuzzling his outstretched hand,” she says. “I don’t believe he’d been around farm animals much before that.

“Not long after that, I watched them pull away ... feeling pretty mind-blown, elated and bemused at my brief encounter with the legend.”

What did the crack team of Nashville musicians that played on his “Beaucoups of Blues” album think of Ringo Starr? Well, in one respect, he didn’t live up to expectations.

DJ Fontana (photo: Mandy Lunn/The Tennessean)

“Everybody kind of expected him to be a jerk, but he was the nicest guy in the world,” says D.J. Fontana, who’d been drumming for Elvis Presley for more than a decade when he played on “Beaucoups.” “He was polite to everybody, always said nice things. He knew everybody in the studio already, by listening to all of the records.”

Charlie Daniels was still a few years away from stardom when he played on “Beaucoups,” but he was an in-demand session musician — in fact, a month before working on Starr’s album, he was jamming with George Harrison and Bob Dylan at a fast-and-loose studio session that included a cover of the Beatles’ “Yesterday.”

Charlie Daniels

“Beaucoups” was a little more rigid. Daniels recalls “hardcore Nashville sessions — four songs per session.”

Starr, while jovial, was serious about the sound he was exploring.

“He had a great respect for country music,” Daniels says. “He recorded (Buck Owens hit) ‘Act Naturally’ way back in the early days."

"I think Ringo had a fascination with a lot of different kinds of music. I thought it was great that he was as into country music as he was.”

‘Treated me like a peer’

Jonell Mosser

Jonell Mosser is a revered Nashville singer and accomplished backing vocalist, working with the likes of Etta James, Wynonna Judd and Delbert McClinton. She also has some exclusive bragging rights — she was once a bandmate with a Beatle. In the early ’90s, famed producer Don Was chose Mosser as the frontwoman for his new band, The New Maroons, and among the band’s other accomplished members was Ringo, on drums. The group played a handful of shows (including Farm Aid in 1993) and recorded an unreleased album. Mosser was told to “totally be herself” when she first met Starr in the studio, so the singer decided to open with a joke.

“I had just come back from Japan,” she recalls. “You know how Japanese products are sometimes given arbitrary English names? They had ‘Rhythm’ toothpaste. I had this little tube of Rhythm toothpaste, and when I met him, I had it and I said, ‘Oh, here, I brought this, but you won’t really need it.’ He laughed and said, ‘Oh, you’ve been to Japan.’ We started talking about Japan first, and I never had a moment, ever, where I felt weird with him. He was always the sweetest man alive to me, and always treated me like a peer.”

‘A great drummer’

Nashville singer-songwriter and rock ’n’ roll savant Bill Lloyd has never met Ringo, but he “shares particles” with him on a record: He was asked to play acoustic guitar on Ringo and Buck Owens’ 1989 “Act Naturally” duet. He’s also helped re-create countless Beatles songs onstage — playing in Cheap Trick’s “Sgt. Pepper Live” show as well as his Nashville full-album cover band, The Long Players — so he knows what Ringo’s signature drum style brings to a Beatles groove.

Bill Lloyd (photo: Kevin Walters)

“A lot of people talk about how he’s the luckiest man to be in the Beatles, but he really was a great drummer,” he says. “He had a great swing to his feel. Even when he was forced to take a drum solo on ‘Abbey Road,’ he did it with ... style and drama.”

Ringo was “essential in making the Beatles the Beatles,” he says. “McCartney once said that his favorite zen quotation was, ‘Why are there four Beatles? Because there are four.’ Meaning you can’t take one away, I guess. It had to be those four.”

‘Everyone loves Ringo’

Dennis Scott of Nashville-based Beatles tribute band The Wannabeatles says Ringo “would have made a great Nashville studio session player.”

The WannaBeatles: Bryan Cumming, left, David Toledo, Dennis Scott and Nathan Burbank (photo: Martin O'Connor Photography)

“He understands better than anyone how to play a drum part that complements a song,” he says.

The Wannabeatles haven’t just studied the Fab Four’s music, they’ve also explored their impact, producing the Grammy-nominated spoken-word album “Fab Fan Memories — The Beatles Bond.” Among the things they learned while interviewing Beatles fans, friends and family: “Everyone loves Ringo.”

Scott was no exception. He remembers watching the Beatles’ Saturday morning cartoon, and one segment being a particular highlight. “I couldn’t wait for the bit where Ringo came into the scene and (would) say, ‘I’m the substitute prop man, yeah.’ I remember working my vocal impression of Ringo and, at the time, thought I got that line down pretty good.”

"He brought energy to their music, always playing the right thing to make it come alive," says Wannabeatle Bryan Cumming. "Ringo brought happiness to the world, and we wish it back to him on his birthday."

Fandom never dies

How did Vicki Williams decide that Ringo was her favorite Beatle? The organizer of the Nashville Beatles Fans Meetup Group, who was 12 when the Beatles came to America, chalks it up to Starr’s positive outlook, sense of humor and her fascination with the drums. But there was another reason.

Ed Sullivan, center, stands with members of the Beatles during a rehearsal for the group's first American appearance, on the "Ed Sullivan Show," in New York Feb. 9, 1964. From left; Ringo Starr, George Harrison, Sullivan, John Lennon and Paul McCartney. (AP Photo/file)

“I had two good friends at that time — Betty and Barbara. Barbara loved Paul, and Betty loved George. Well, John was married, so I took Ringo by default. Because, of course, you didn’t want to fight with your best friends over which one of you was going to get a date with a Beatle.”

Williams grew up in Memphis, where she saw the Beatles perform in 1966 — emphasis on “saw,” as the crowd’s screams made it all but impossible to hear anything coming off the stage. She’s since seen (and heard) her favorite Beatle in concert twice and is looking forward to Saturday’s concert.

“I can’t believe that I’m this excited about going to see a 72-year-old man in concert,” she says with a laugh.

Contact Dave Paulson at dnpaulson@tennessean.com or 615-664-2278.