As messy a break-up as it was for The Beatles, Ringo Starr perhaps had the best analogy for the mental toll it took on the group. Starr, along with John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison, provided some of the most beloved and highly regarded pieces of music to ever be released. The band would go their separate ways in 1970, but had effectively ended the year before.
While the four would work together on solo projects in the future, though never as a four-piece, the emotional cuts ran deep for the band, which never quite seemed to heal. Starr would liken the whole process to his divorce and noted that individual changes for him and his wife made the relationship untenable, as had changes in The Beatles.
He said back in 1977: “It’s like the breakup of The Beatles. At one time we used to change together, then we started changing separately in different directions. There’s no, like, ‘Well, she cut my throat so we have to have a divorce.’ There’s no one snap thing that did it. It spread out over a year till you found yourself at the end of that year saying, ‘What are we doing here? This isn’t a marriage anymore.’ And I had a fine marriage for eight-and-a-half years. I really had a fine marriage – which I worked for, and she worked for it too. And it just started slipping away.”
Starr would eventually call time on his marriage to Maureen Cox, with the pair divorcing in 1975. Starr added: “It wasn’t being married, it was trying to be married. It’s just like a limbo situation, and I just found it was doing my brain in, as well as her’s. And so I wanted it ended.”
Though The Beatles would never reform, Starr would work with all three of his former bandmates on various solo projects. He joined up with Harrison on a number of occasions, notably on When We Was Fab, a solo song from Harrison reflecting on his time in The Beatles. Starr also worked with McCartney recently, providing the first-ever duet between the two on The Boys of Dungeon Lane song Home to Us.
Lennon would also help Starr with his 1973 song I’m the Greatest, which served as the opening song to Ringo. Harrison also featured on the song playing electric and slide guitar, while The Beatles collaborator Billy Preston provided organ and electric piano.
Lennon would also explain the meaning of the song’s title, which in Starr’s hands is a tongue-in-cheek expression. The Imagine hitmaker shared: “I’m the greatest? It’s the Muhammad Ali line… I couldn’t sing it, but it was perfect for Ringo. He could say, ‘I’m the greatest’ and people wouldn’t get upset. Whereas if I said ‘I’m the greatest,’ they’d all take it so seriously.”
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