Starr Quality

In rock music, covering a Beatles song is like trying to repaint the Mona Lisa. Anything you change is likely to be seen as blasphemous and anything you keep the same has almost certainly been done better in its original form.

That being said, we find before us the strange case of Ringo Starr, who, though he played drums for the Fab Four through most of their existence, wrote only a handful of their songs.

And although his name does not appear beneath most of the Beatles' songs, it certainly seems that he should have more of a right to reinterpret the Lennon/McCartney catalog than numerous other artists (Fiona Apple's recent butchering of "Across the Universe" springs to mind) who are constantly pillaging it.

On "VH1 Storytellers," Starr plays two Lennon/McCartney songs, "With A Little Help From My Friends" and "Love Me Do."

On the latter, the arrangement of the song has a souped-up, classic rock feel that does not suit the song particularly well at all, and as a result, one of the catchiest tunes of the Beatles' early period loses much of its appeal.

"With A Little Help From My Friends" finds Starr playing it pretty much straight off of "Sgt. Pepper's," and the results are more successful, possibly owing somewhat to the fact that Starr actually did sing on the original recording. The music offered on "Storytellers" spans nearly 35 years, from "Love Me Do" to songs from Starr's most recent album, "Vertical Man," and includes a sampling of his past solo work and songs that he did write for the Beatles.

Starr's dry sense of humor is well suited to the Storyteller's format, in which the artist introduces songs with anecdotes about the writing/recording/performing of the song.

Beatles fans will delight in his often irreverent stories about his former band and bandmates, and will no doubt find it refreshing to glimpse a human side of a band whose reputation has been elevated to appropriately mythic heights.

As he introduces "Octopus's Garden," Starr tells the audience, "We were working on the 'White Album,' the Beatle buddies. Let's hear it for the 'White Album' - I loved it. Let's milk it for all we can get."

Starr's backing band, the Roundheads, which features Joe Walsh on guitar, is impressively tight, and the songs sound solid, but vivacious.

Several members of the Roundheads were involved in the writing of material for "Vertical Man," and the tracks from that album, such as the first single, "La De Da" show that Starr continues to improve as a songwriter.

These newer songs boast melodies that, if not equal to, are at least reminiscent of those created by his Beatle counterparts, which is no small feat, as bands have been building careers from the same skill for more than 30 years.

Ringo Starr will, of course, always be remembered as the drummer for the Beatles, and not as a songwriter. But the performance captured on "VH1 Storytellers" shows him to be not only a perfectly capable frontman, but, more happily, an artist who is comfortable with both his role in the creation of and lasting place in rock history.

Ringo Starr

HHH

Reviewed by

Daily Arts Writer

Brian Egan

Mercury Records

VH1 Storytellers

11-24-98