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Ringo Starr was angry for years when The Beatles broke up. He dealt with his negative emotions through drugs and alcohol, but they made him feel disconnected from his art. He heard a cruel assessment of his life post-Beatles, but he thought there was some truth to it. Starr said he felt that his life had become sad.
Ringo Starr said he was angry when The Beatles broke up
The Beatles broke up in 1970 after a decade together. Starr and Paul McCartney both felt lost after the split.
“I was mad,” Starr said, per the New York Daily News. “For 20 years. I had breaks in between of not being.”
He began drinking as a way to deal with the band’s breakup. As a result, his memories from the years after the split are hazy.
“I was drunk,” he said. “I didn’t notice … some of those years are absolutely gone.”
Ringo Starr said people were cruel but correct about his life after The Beatles
By 1977, Starr was lost. He acted in a number of unsuccessful films, and he stopped playing music he took pride in.
“When I really, really got wrecked, I couldn’t play,” he said, per the book Ringo: With a Little Help by Michael Seth Starr. “For years, I just went downhill. We never made records totally derelict. You got derelict and then you made the records. Occasionally we’d have a … late night, and we’d make music and the next day you’d think, ‘What a load of crap.’”
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After several unsuccessful years, someone made a brutal assessment of Starr’s life.
“After the band broke up, I wasn’t working,” he said. “I wasn’t doing what I love, which is playing drums and performing. I ended up as just some f***ing celebrity. Someone in England put it so cruelly: They said, ‘If there’s an opening of an envelope, he’ll be there.’ That hit me. I thought, ‘S***, yeah, this is what I’m doing now.’ I’d be at movie premieres in London with my bow tie on and a bottle of cognac in my pocket mixed with some Coca-Cola, so people would think it was just soda. It got really sad.”
The drummer is now sober
Starr went to rehab, and after he stopped drinking and using drugs, he worried that his drumming would be negatively impacted.
“I was afraid at the beginning. [I thought] I don’t know how you do anything if you’re not drunk,” he told Rolling Stone. “That’s where I ended up. I couldn’t play sober, but I also couldn’t play as a drunk. So when I did end up in this rehab, it was like a light went on and said you’re a musician, you play good.”
Now, though, Starr has successfully toured for years.
“For me personally, that’s all it’s about,” he said. “I got over the mad first, second year, and now, this is how I live. It’s a normal way of living now, and I have a lot of fun.”
How to get help: In the U.S., contact the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration helpline at 1-800-662-4357.
