Ringo Starr Was the Only Beatle Who ‘Never, Ever Bothered’ the Band’s Fixer With His Problems
Due to the enormity of their success in The Beatles, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr had an entire staff of people to support them. One of these people was Alistair Taylor, who worked as the assistant to Beatles manager Brian Epstein. The band began to refer to Taylor as “Mr. Fixit” because of his skill at finding solutions to their problems. According to Taylor, Starr was the only one who never bothered him with his problems.
Ringo Starr never asked The Beatles’ assistant to help him
Taylor grew accustomed to dealing with The Beatles’ problems. McCartney, for example, asked Taylor to track down a waitress he met and invite her on vacation with him. Taylor did jobs like this for Lennon and Harrison as well, but he said Starr never asked him for help.
“[T]he one person that never, ever bothered me was Ritchie [Ringo],” Taylor said in the book All You Need Is Love: The Beatles in Their Own Words by Peter Brown and Steven Gaines. “He was always apologetic, and he never bothered me. I’d find he’d done something. And I used to say to him, ‘Look, why on earth didn’t you ask me to fix that for you?’ ‘Oh, no. I don’t want to bother you.’”
Taylor said the only time Starr asked him for anything was when he wanted assistance getting home from a vacation in Italy. The rescue mission did not go over well and left Starr stuck in an airport for hours.
“I mean, we joked about it, but he used to say, ‘Oh yeah, great. The only time I ring you —’” Taylor said. “I was sick as a pig over it, because it was one of the rare occasions he ever asked me to do anything for him.”
Ringo Starr had his guard up while in The Beatles
Starr may not have asked for help because, according to Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick, he always had his guard up. While Harrison had the reputation as the Quiet Beatle, Emerick said Starr was the most reserved.
“In all the years we worked together, I honestly don’t remember having one memorable conversation with Ringo,” Emerick wrote in the book Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles. “He simply was not outgoing and neither was I, so we never really got to know each other.”
He believed that Starr’s insecurity led him to keep a wall up.
“I always felt he used sarcasm as a defense mechanism to cover his insecurity, like the way some people have a nervous laugh,” Emerick wrote. “But Ringo, like George Harrison, always seemed to have his guard up, and so there was a personal wall between us that I could never quite broach.”
Alistair Taylor said he was closest with Paul McCartney
While Taylor said he liked each of the Beatles, he felt closest to McCartney. He looked to him as a friend, and they went on vacations together over the years.
“Well, I mean, I never really thought of them as employers, to be honest,” he said. “They employed me, but they were great friends. Particularly Paul, because Paul used to come home with me sometimes, and he’d ring me up and say, ‘Look, come on up to Cavendish Avenue, you know, I’m fed up.’ We went on holiday where I used to go up to the farm [in Scotland] with him and Jane in those days. And I went on holiday to Greece with them.”
