Ringo Starr at Humphrey’s By The Bay

Ringo Starr
Humphrey’s By The Bay, San Diego – July 27, 2008

This Summer’s All-Starrs

Ringo Starr

Ringo has been doing a fine job of pumping new life into the careers of rockers of a certain age.  Over the past decade, he has assembled ten different posses of musicians whose time in the sun (or spotlight) has faded.  They hit the road and play the summer shed circuit with a fairly tired and true routine.  “Everybody onstage is a star in his own right!” asserts Ringo at the evening’s outset.

Ringo bounds onstage to a medley of his songs, he runs through a few of his hits and then takes his place behind the drums on a riser.  His position is understandably the highest point onstage, allowing him full reign over the proceedings.  He introduces the first “All-Starr” who runs through one or two of his most famous hits, who then steps back out of the spotlight after introducing the next rocker. 

In dialogue with my buddies a few days later, I decided that the fun way to have them figure out the roster of All Stars was to run through the evening’s setlist.  See how well you do; your success is probably correlated with how attuned you were to music in the 1970s:

Lonely Is The Night, The Stroke
Free Ride, Frankenstein
Land Down Under, Who Can it Be
Dream Weaver, Love is Alive
Pickin’ Up The Pieces, Work To Do

Edgar, Colin and Gary

I’ll ease the tension, this summer’s line-up is: Billy Squier, Edgar Winter, Colin (Men At Work) Hay, Gary Wright and Hamish (Average White Band) Stuart.  It has been a long time since I have seen one of those keyboard-cum-guitar set-ups onstage, but both Winter and Wright sported one before the night was over.  Winter pulled out his sax for the addictive riff in “Who Can It Be”  and to fill out the funkiness of the AWB songs. Ringo took a break during Winter’s sax solo in “Frankenstein.”  Invariably, Ringo was unable to get much of a rise out of the crowd when he played selections from his pretty good new release Liverpool8.

Stuart has toured with McCartney, where he actually had more room to stretch out.  Wright was a childhood friend of Harrison, whom he mentioned onstage.

Prior iterations of the All-Starr Band read like a veritable who’s who of classic rockers, and this summer’s incarnation keeps the music alive: