When a Beatle talks, people listen. Especially when it is an announcement of a new album that will feature former bandmate Paul McCartney.
That maxim was proved true anew on Friday as Ringo Starr drew hundreds of fans and dozens of fellow musicians, including Jenny Lewis, as well as friends and family members to his annual ‘Peace and Love’ birthday celebration, centred this year once again in Hollywood.
Starr’s 19th solo album Give More Love will be released on September 15 and will include McCartney on two tracks — We’re on the Road Again and Show Me the Way, which is dedicated to Starr’s wife, Barbara Bach.
“We are still mates,” Starr said of his former bandmate. “He’s out on the road, he’s got his own life. I’m out on the road a lot making records and he was in town so I called him and I said, ‘I’ve got this track for you to play on.’”
“I love him, of course,” Starr said while seated at the mixing board in Capitol’s Studio A, “but I also love the way he plays bass. He’s the most melodic bass player in the world.”
PEACE AND LOVE
On the day he turned 77, the senior member of the Fab Four acknowledged the violence that continues to erupt around the world as well as the rancourous tone of much the day’s political discourse. But he insisted that his yearly exhortation for more peace and love in the world is not falling on deaf ears. “The great thing is that it’s continuing to grow,” Starr told The Los Angeles Times a few minutes before stepping outside the Capitol Records tower to lead the crowd in chanting “peace and love” precisely at noon, repeating a ritual that was carried out in each time zone across the globe.
“When this started in Chicago in 2008, there were maybe 60 or 100 people,” he said. “But it keeps getting bigger every year. My dream — my fantasy — is that one day in the future everyone on the planet will stop at noon and say, ‘Peace and love.’
“A few days before my birthday I was being interviewed and someone said, ‘What would you like for your birthday?’ I don’t know where it came from, but I said, ‘I’d like more peace and love, and I’d love it if at noon on my birthday everyone would say, ‘Peace and love.’”
LITTLE HELP FROM FRIENDS
The international flavour was reflected in performances that preceded his arrival by Haitian singer Emmanuel Jal and South Sudanese rapper Paul Beaubrun. Jal served up a reggae-soaked rendition of Starr’s 1971 hit It Don’t Come Easy, with its occasion-friendly refrain, “Please remember peace is how we make it.”
Between Jal’s sung verses of Starr’s 2010 song Peace Dream, Beaubrun, who introduced himself as “an ex-child solder,” rapped about some of the horrors he has witnessed.
Then the stakes were raised as singer-songwriter Lewis led a quartet featuring composer-arranger Van Dyke Parks on accordion, superstar session drummer Jim Keltner, bassist-record executive Don Was and keyboardist Mike Bearden in Walk With You, a ballad from Starr’s 2010 album Y Not that Starr and Parks co-wrote.
A raft of music and entertainment world luminaries turned out, among them: filmmaker David Lynch, Starr’s actress-wife Barbara Bach, musician-producer Peter Asher, Eagles guitarist-singer Joe Walsh (who also happens to be Starr’s brother-in-law), comedian Richard Lewis, singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams, ex-Guns N’ Roses drummer Matt Sorum, actor Ed Begley Jr, producer songwriter Glen Ballard and longtime Breakfast With the Beatles radio show host Chris Carter.
Many current and former members of Starr’s touring All-Starr Band also appeared: guitarist Nils Lofgren, drummer Gregg Bissonette, and guitarists-singers Richard Page and saxophonist Edgar Winter.
“The world has always been violent,” he said. “All you can do is your part; all I can do is my part, and part of that is to keep saying, ‘Peace and love.’”
