(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Sun 14 September 2025 18:15, UK
For someone who was in one of the biggest bands in the world, Ringo Starr has never seemed to carry himself as such.
The Beatles were simply one piece of his life, and even if everyone had grown tired of Beatlemania by the end, Starr never wanted to do anything else but play the drums. And while he did get by with a little help from his friends in the early days, The All-Starr Band is practically a rite of passage for any rock star.
The idea of the massive travelling group made up of rock and roll legends feels like it’s almost too good to fail, but Starr never seemed to view it as a marketing stunt. He was always a fan of music, and if he heard someone that caught his ear, it made sense for him to jam with them every now and again. But Starr wasn’t going to surround himself with people that only had a few chops under their belt, either.
Looking through each incarnation of the band, nearly everyone who’s shared that stage with him has had massive hits of their own. No one was going to come to one of Starr’s shows only to hear him sing ‘Yellow Submarine’ and ‘Octopus’s Garden’, so it was nice to have Steve Lukather on hand to sing songs like ‘Rosanna’ or Gregg Rolie of Santana to do a version of ‘Evil Ways’ back in the day.
But even if most people know Beatles songs like the back of their hand, there was going to be something special going on when the technicians were brought in. Lukather will forever be one of the greatest session guitar players in the world, but Joe Walsh was always looking at the big picture. He could write, play, and sing whatever he wanted to hear, and it didn’t take him long to endear himself to the crowd whenever he played tracks like ‘Life’s Been Good’.
The same could be said about Todd Rundgren. His production credits speak for themselves when working with people like Sparks, Meat Loaf, and The New York Dolls, but when he’s left to his own devices, he was pumping the kind of tracks that could match what The Beatles had done. He was never going to write his own ‘She Loves You’ by any stretch, but songs like ‘I Saw The Light’ and ‘Hello It’s Me’ did come pretty damn close.
Both Walsh and Rundgren know that they’re in the All-Starr Band to serve Starr at all times, but even the former Beatle had to give them their flowers. When asking about his favourite songs to play live that aren’t from his catalogue, he went back to them without even thinking about it, saying, “My favourites – anything with Joe Walsh or with Todd Rundgren was great. If it was too challenging, then I would leave it to the other drummer.”
Then again, the greatest songs Starr ever played drums for aren’t the ones that require a lot of dexterity. He didn’t have to be a prog extraordinaire to be able to feel the groove of a song, and sometimes all he needed was to get the idea of what a tune should be before he played in whatever tune he was working on.
But given the fact that Walsh is now Starr’s brother-in-law and Rundgren has been in and out of his band for over 30 years, both of them are more than hired guns for him. They are practically family, and no matter what tune they might be calling out, Starr is more than happy to play along to a track like ‘Funk #49’ with the same enthusiasm he has when singing ‘Photograph’ or ‘Boys’.
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