Ringo Starr has had an incredibly successful career with his music. Still, he admitted his life could have turned out much differently. Starr explained that when he was growing up in Liverpool, he, like many other people his age, joined a gang. He spoke about the shocking violence he witnessed while growing up and noted how lucky he felt that music came into his life when it did.
Ringo Starr said he used music as a way out of a gang in Liverpool
According to Starr, most people he knew growing up were in gangs. It was either join them or put a target on your back.
“We were by the docks in Liverpool and each and every area had its own gang,” he said in The Beatles Anthology. “It was like New York or Hamburg. I was a Teddy boy; you had to be. Where I lived, you had to associate with some gang, otherwise you were ‘open city’ for anybody. The choices were: you could either be beaten up by anybody in your neighbourhood, or by people in other neighbourhoods (which I was, several times).”
Starr adapted to this lifestyle. While he wasn’t good at fighting, he was good at running. Still, he saw shocking violence in his youth.
“We were into area fights. I wasn’t a great fighter, but I was a good runner, a good sprinter — as I still am — because if you were suddenly on your own with five guys coming towards you, you soon learnt to be,” he said. “There was no messing about; it was, ‘You! Come here!’ — bang, bang. I didn’t knife or kill anyone, but I got beaten up a few times — mainly by the people I was with. It’s that terrible gang situation where if you’re not fighting an outsider you get crazy and start fighting among yourselves, like mad dogs. It was quite vicious. I have seen people lose their eyes; I have seen people stabbed; I have seen people beaten up with hammers.”
He began looking for a way out, and music provided him with that.
“I wanted to leave all that, and I started moving out of walking with the lads when I started playing,” he said. “Roy and I wanted to be musicians, and we started leaving the gang life. Music possessed me and I got out. I was nineteen when I finally made it out, thank God.”
The Beatles drummer said his bandmates had harder lives because they avoided gangs
While Starr felt he had to join a gang, none of his Beatles bandmates did. He said he believed their lives would have been harder because of this.
“There was a terrible thing in Liverpool where you’d walk past somebody and they’d say, ‘Are you looking at me?’ If you said ‘no’ they’d say, ‘Why not?’ and if you said ‘yes’ they’d get you anyway. So you couldn’t win. There was no answer to that question,” he said. “If you were in a gang, you were safe. It must have been difficult for John, Paul and George because they were never in gangs. None of them were Teddy boys, really.”
Once Ringo Starr started playing music, he had a hard time practicing
While Starr saw music as a way out, he didn’t have an easy time becoming a musician. To begin with, he couldn’t handle his music lessons.
“I had about three lessons once I got interested,” he said. “I thought, ‘Every night I’ll read music and learn how to play.’ I went to the house of a little man who played drums, and he told me to get some manuscript paper. He wrote it all down and I never went back! I couldn’t be bothered; it was too routine for me, I couldn’t stand it.”
He decided to teach himself, which his neighbors detested.
“Once I’d got my drum kit, I set it all up in my bedroom, the back room, and off I went, banging away,” he said. “And then I heard from the bottom of the stairs, ‘Keep the noise down, the neighbours are complaining!” I only ever did it twice and got shouted at both times, so I stopped and never practised at home. The only way I could practise was to join a group.”
He played in a number of bands around Liverpool before settling in with The Beatles.