Ringo Starr Gave His Son 1 Single Drumming Lesson
Ringo Starr’s son, Zak Starkey, followed in his footsteps, becoming a drummer and playing for bands like Oasis and The Who. While it seems that drumming runs in the family, Starkey said he didn’t learn much from his father. Starr offered to help him play the drums, but he gave his son one lesson. He said he wanted to play the instrument because of a different drummer.
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Starkey said that when he was growing up, his father was often absent. Starkey resented him for this.
“To be perfectly honest, being Ringo’s son is the biggest drag in my life,” he said as a teenager, per the book Ringo: With a Little Help by Michael Seth Starr. “I’m always written about as Ringo’s son, always classed in with him in every single thing I do … And if I do get successful, I don’t want to live like my old man, on a big estate and all that. My old man was never there. During my puberty, Moonie was always there with me while my old man was far away in Monte Carlo or somewhere.”
Ringo Starr’s son said he only got one drumming lesson from his father
He explained that his father offered to teach him to play the drums, but he only gave him one lesson.
“Ringo gave me one lesson, just one, when I was young,” Starkey said. “Then he told me to listen to records and play along with them.”
He said that his father showed him how to play a pattern and then said he should be good to go.
“We were hanging out in the studio one day and he said, ‘So, should I show you how to play the drums?’ I said, ‘Yeah, of course.’ So he showed me that pattern,” Starkey told Modern Drummer in 2007. “The next day he showed me how to add an additional 8th note on the bass drum: dunk-kat, dunk-dunk kat. I said, ‘Well, I can do that already, Dad.’ And he said, ‘So you’re on your own.'”
Perhaps partly due to Starr’s lackluster approach to lessons, Starkey said his early inspirations were other drummers.
“Keith Moon was my first big influence, definitely,” he said. “I wanted to play the drums because of Keith. When I was very young there was music all around me in my parents’ house. You would go into the living room and find stacks and stacks of LPs. I would spend my days listening to records. My dad took me to see T. Rex when I was six. That was it for me; I wanted to be Marc Bolan. Then I got into David Bowie.”
Zak Starkey said he has a good relationship with his dad now
Though he resented his father during his adolescence, Starkey said their relationship greatly improved. He no longer minds being compared to Starr.
“It doesn’t get tiring,” he said. “I kind of rebelled against it when I was a teenager; I said some pretty stupid things. But I’ll be honest, it’s great being Ringo’s son. He’s the greatest living drummer as far as I’m concerned.”
