Not even the "infamous" crypto art affects Ringo Starr: how the Beatle avoids controversies

Ringo Starr (Liverpool, 82 years old) has frequently been called the "luckiest man in the world".

Drummer of The Beatles after the dismissal of Pete Best in 1962, his contribution to the group's compositional corpus consisted of a total of two songs and his artistic involvement has been the subject of extensive debate;

a questioning that resurfaced last year on the occasion of the premiere of the documentary miniseries

, by Peter Jackson, where, throughout the almost nine hours that summarize the sessions that would result in the album

(1970 ), he is barely heard saying a couple of sentences between the heated discussions of Lennon, McCartney and Harrison.

“I was watching Ringo the whole time [of the documentary].

I know what it's like to sit on the drum stool watching other people argue.

All you want is to touch.

Come on, fuck it, enough of the talk! ”Dave Grohl, leader of the Foo Fighters and, before, a drummer for Nirvana, said in his defense.

With a subsequent solo career of much less luster than those undertaken by his colleagues, truffled with nostalgia and references to songs by the Beatles, in addition to a brief career as an actor whose high point was the film with language based on growls and onomatopoeia

(1981), Ringo Starr remains the world's richest drummer, with an estimated net worth of $350 million.

Far from retiring, this year he has released an EP of four original songs, not composed by him, entitled EP3 (a continuation of

and

, both released last year), this September he is still on tour with his All Starr Band and has starred in his first foray into the world of

auctioning for several tens of thousands of dollars a small collection of NFT images created by him, under the title

("The creative mind of a Beatle").

The video announcing the auction, of technical quality no higher than a nightly spot on local television, caused occasional mockery on Twitter and some followers asked him if he had financial problems, without much repercussion.

“Who would have thought it would spread peace and love throughout the metaverse?” Ringo Starr asks rhetorically in the ad, where he also offers his customers the chance to meet a virtual avatar of him in a digital museum called RingoLand.

The components of the band, in its early days.

From left to right and top to bottom: Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, George Harrison and John Lennon.Reuters

“There will always be someone willing to buy them.

It wouldn't matter if the box was blank.

Ringo sells his firm”, says, in statements to ICON, the author César San Juan Guillén, who in 2017 published the book

(Ed. Robinbook).

Although his drawings made with the Microsoft Paint program, a kind of train wreck between Warholian pop art, due to its themes, and

, due to its apparent lack of knowledge and technique, are the best known of his work and have awakened Hilarious, it's hard to find someone who takes Starr's work seriously to the point of criticizing it.

In

, far from humiliating the ex-beatle, his example and his encouragement served as inspiration for Marge Simpson to deepen her career as an artist.

And the defenders of the value of these drawings, although in most cases they do so from an ironic perspective, seem to outnumber their detractors.

“Every once in a while, a Leonardo Da Vinci comes along, who is just amazing in everything he tries.

And from time to time there appears a Tommy Wiseau [director of

, arguably the worst film in history, which James Franco paid homage to in

], who... is not.

Most of us are somewhere in the middle,” claims Lizzy Chrome on the art page Deviant Art, in an essay titled

.

“They look like the drawings of a small child.

I'm not saying that's good

, but it's a good pattern."

Many others who excuse him recall that his profits go to The Lotus Foundation, Ringo Starr's charity, and his wife, Barbara Bach.

Ringo Starr and Barbara Bach, upon arrival at the opening of The London Brasserie restaurant (Georgia, United States, 1987). Courtesy of Richard Young

With his constant hippie calls for peace and love or all the humor (usually devoid of evil) generated at his expense, no one seems to have a particular dislike for the musician, to the point of making him practically impervious to criticism, whatever he wants. make.

“Ringo was the first of the Beatles who had a fan club.

He wasn't the most handsome, he didn't compose, he barely sang, but he swept the group's first steps.

All of his attraction revolved around the face of a funny boy, always smiling and somewhat roguish, but harmless, ”reflects San Juan Guillén.

The sympathy of the supposed loser

Outside of the power struggle between John Lennon and Paul McCartney, factions for which, in one case or another, many Beatles fans have been taking sides, and in the face of the growing relevance that George Harrison and his mystical influences had on the evolution of the group, Ringo Starr has always been the figure in the background, the guy with whom, in his simplicity, an ordinary person could easily identify.

In the eyes of the industry, he was the underdog: George Martin, the producer, questioned his abilities and initially disapproved of his joining the group, while his solo albums did not enjoy a very enthusiastic commercial airplay.

At the same time, he stayed away from the aftermath of fights between his former teammates, which he even tried to mitigate.

He was known, for example, for his rejection of the song

Lennon's direct invective against McCartney that featured Harrison's collaboration.

"With the mercurial egos of Lennon, McCartney and Harrison, Ringo was the emotional glue that held the Beatles together," John W. Whitehead wrote in

in 2012 , in an article commemorating the band's 50th anniversary.

Starr, moreover, was no stranger to negative remarks about his acting style.

sessions , as the

documentary collects

, the reality is that Ringo had already left The Beatles due to impostor syndrome while they were recording their previous album, the well-known as "white album".

"I left it because I felt two things, that I wasn't playing well and that the other three were very happy, while I was an intruder", confessed the drummer as part of the interviews for the ambitious multimedia project

, developed between the 90s and the 2000s.

Ringo Starr in one of the images from the documentary 'Get Back'.

In an interview on comedian Jimmy Kimmel's show in the US this year, Ringo Starr mentioned a postcard that Paul McCartney had sent him with the message "You're the best drummer in the world, really," which he laconically regretted having received. arrived “too late”.

“Ringo invents a different percussion for each of the Beatles songs, in such a way that it is easy to know what theme it is just listening to the drum track”, observes the author César San Juan Guillén, doubting that his skills were as limited as stated.

“He tends to set accents on the kick drum, which, coupled with being left-handed but using right-handed drums, makes his style very recognizable.

He was a human metronome, he marked the speed very well and his influence has been decisive in many later percussionists”.

Has Ringo Starr used that nice, naive and humble image in his favor to do what he wants without being affected by any controversy, such as his explicit support for Brexit or his appearance in the Panama papers?

"I think not consciously," thinks San Juan Guillén, who considers that the fact that his statements do not contain "any type of deep political analysis, only peace and love and better outside Europe" helps him more.

“With the Panama papers it has been enough for him to do absolutely nothing, the same as Bono, Elton John, Shakira, Julio Iglesias or Miguel Bosé, who also appear and do not exactly have that image of ingenuity that we associate with Ringo,” he says. .

His skin tough after a lifetime of criticism, it seems clear that the octogenarian Starr cares little for any reputational crisis he may have at this point, even if he hasn't really experienced any repercussions.

In the same way that his pictorial works, at least, they may finally be of interest insofar as they express something profound about their author: that the insecurities about his talent that he once felt have undoubtedly disappeared.

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