John Lennon offered ‘great and simple’ advice to Ringo Starr just a year before his death

John Lennon offered some “great and simple” advice to Ringo Starr just a year before the Imagine hitmaker died.

Lennon, who was a bandmate of Starr in The Beatles throughout the 1960s, worked with the veteran drummer on a handful of projects after the Fab Four broke up. In a postcard sent from Lennon to Starr, the Don’t Let Me Down songwriter suggested that Starr pursue a new genre for his solo career. Lennon, who often noted his avid love of Starr’s solo work, offered the advice on a postcard dated 1979. The postcard featured in the 2004 book, Postcards from the Boys, with Starr’s correspondence between his former bandmates detailed.

Lennon wrote: “Blondie’s Heart of Glass is the type of stuff y’all should do. Great and simple.” It’s unclear if Starr actively heeded this advice, with his most recent works a selection of country genre originals. Around the time he recevied Lennon’s postcard, he had released Bad Boy in April 1978, and Stop and Smell the Roses in 1981.

Though it may not be as lauded as the works of George Harrison, Paul McCartney, or Lennon’s own work, Starr received plenty of praise from his former bandmates. Lennon once claimed that Starr’s work is far superior to his own.

He said: “I’m most happy for Ringo’s success because it always went round that Ringo was dumb but he ain’t dumb. He just didn’t have that much writing ability and he wasn’t known for writing his own material.

“There was a bit of a worry, although he can make movies and he does make movies and he’s good at it, but how was his recording career gonna be? And in general, it’s probably better than mine actually.”

Lennon would argue the band was better off broken up than together, citing a number of albums made after the break-up. He said: “George is suddenly the biggest seller of all of us. I think my music’s improved a millionfold lyric-wise and everything. And Ringo’s coming out and writing It Don’t Come Easy and now he’s going to write the title song for this cowboy thing he’s in, and he’s playing a really tough guy and all that. It’s really beautiful.

“The fact is, the Beatles have left school… and we have to get a job. That’s made us work — really work harder. I think we’re much better than we ever were when we were together. Look at us today. I’d sooner have [Paul McCartney’s album] Ram, John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band, George’s album, and Ringo’s single and the movies than Let It Be or Abbey Road.”

Later in Postcards from the Boys, Starr would shed light on his relationship with Lennon post-Beatles, and that he had seen Lennon break down in tears while recording certain songs.

““I can say this now (if he was here John could tell you) but suddenly we’d be in the middle of a track and John would just start crying or screaming—which freaked us out at the beginning,” he wrote. “The relatiopnship with the other three, it was always very complicated.

“It was always up and down. At the beginning, we were like these four guys in a van, and it was very, very close. And in the end, we ended up like this family and we had, to quote the old show, family feuds.”