Ringo Starr Told Paul McCartney Off for Looking His Age
Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney are both still performing and making music after six decades in the industry. Both men are in their 80s but have a youthful vitality. Starr once pushed his former bandmate to look younger, though. When McCartney’s hair started going gray, Starr scolded him for letting himself go.
Ringo Starr told Paul McCartney that he was letting himself go
In 1986, McCartney was in his 40s and embracing his age. He let his hair go gray and admitted he had no plans to dye it.
“Yeah, I’m leaving [the gray],” McCartney told Rolling Stone. “When you’re past forty, the game is up, you know? My wife actually likes it.”
Starr did not like it, though. He told McCartney off for not coloring it which, McCartney believed, was because it made him feel old.
“Ringo told me off about it, though – he reckoned I ought to color it,” he said. “I think he’s kind of gaugin’ himself by how old I look – like I make him feel old if I look a bit old. But what the hell, you know? This is life. We’re all gettin’ older every second. My main thing is just to try and enjoy it. And I’m very surprised to find that, more often than not, I really do.”
Ringo Starr once joked that he wouldn’t want to look like Paul McCartney
Years later, Starr insulted McCartney’s aging appearance once again.
“I was having dinner with him recently in L.A. with Dave Grohl and our wives,” McCartney told Rolling Stone in 2015. “I know Ringo has been sober for years, so I joked, ‘C’mon, Ringo, have a whiskey.’”
Starr’s response was dry but devastating.
“Ringo looked at me for a second and says, ‘What, and end up looking like you?’” McCartney recalled. “I deserved it.”
The former bandmates are good friends
Decades after The Beatles broke up, Starr and McCartney remain fixtures in each other’s lives. Their schedules do not allow them to see each other all that often, but they make time when possible.
“We don’t hang out with each other a lot,” Starr said, per Express. “But if we’re in the same country, and if we’re in the same town we always have dinner, and we say hi or he comes over here or I go over to his house.”
McCartney recently wrote the song “Feeling the Sunlight” for Starr’s album Rewind Forward and he helped campaign to get Starr inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. He said that he sees his former bandmate as family.
“It’s family,” McCartney said. “Sometimes we get pissed off at each other. I’ll want something from him, and he won’t give it to me, and I’ll get pissed off. But then it passes. Brothers fight sometimes. There’s this revisionist history that it was all John and Paul. But it was four corners of a square; it wouldn’t have worked without one of the sides. Ringo was the right angle.”
