Y'AII Come Hear Ringo

By W.B.

Like a Tennessee warbler, the electric guitar flutters downward in graceful slides and turns. The country fiddle scratches out a polite howdy. And the nasal, melancholy baritone begins to sing:

Look at me now, ain't I a sight. Eyes bloody red, face puffy white, Hair tangled up, wrinkled old clothes. I'm a living example of a big overdose. Of wine, women and loud happy songs...

Grand Ole Opry time? Shucks no. Just a new Apple LP by that latest convert to the Nashville Sound, Ringo Starr of the Beatles. Called Beaucoups of Blues, it features Drummer Ringo as the singer of twelve mostly sorrowful country ballads that are a far and dusty cry from Hey Jude, Get Back or even Octopus's Garden.

Ringo in Nashville? The idea seems as logical as Mick Jagger at Glyndebourne. In truth, Ringo poses no immediate threat to such country greats as Eddy Arnold or Johnny Cash. Yet his straightforward, unadorned singing style--customarily sure death in the quasi-Baroque world of rock--turns out to be just the thing for the classic country songs devoted to simple words, gentle irony and love gone haywire. In a song called Silent Homecoming, Ringo does emulate deep-throated Cash a bit too much. His baritone is occasionally too beery. But his cornhusky mastery of the album's title song ("I see me a man who's lonely/ Wants only to lose beaucoups of blues") more than makes up for his failings.

Corkscrew Grin. Ringo's choice of mentor and producer for his Nashville sessions was expert: Steel Guitarist Pete Drake, who not only lined up 13 of the best Nashville sidemen in town, but provided Ringo with a well-varied dozen of the best new songs from his own publishing company (Window Music). One of them, Chuck Howard's porch-swinging serenade, I Wouldn't Have You Any Other Way, has the stamp of a country classic, and Loser's Lounge is a toe-tapper that even city slickers should find a winner.

Whatever the success of Beaucoups of Blues, Ringo stands little chance of losing the affection of the millions of Beatles fans for whom he has always been something of a sentimental favorite. Who could forget the A-frame eyes, the cockney nose, the corkscrew grin or the way he had--in a moment of percussive rapture--of smiling sideways like Lauren Bacall? There was also something about him of the sad clown who knew he was only a party to greatness, not its originator. "I do sometimes feel out of it," he once said, "sitting there on the drums, only playing what they tell me to play." Obviously. Ringo need no longer worry. But no one knows just what lies at the end of a country road fur, fur away from Liverpool.

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