TRAINWRECKORDS: "Ringo the 4th" by Ringo Starr
Ringo!
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Comments (51)
Honestly, I didn't think the "Cookin' in the Kitchen of Love" song sounded that bad.
Yeah that song is fun!! Now, the Paul donation on the same album "Pure Gold," that's below bottom-of-the-barrel. And the George Harrison cover...that's its own legal debacle.
Thank you for speaking the truth that not all disco was Good Actually or empowering. For every Donna Summer or Earth Wind & Fire there was "Born To Be Alive" or "Makin' It." Not to mention peak disco was the Bee Gees shrieking every word in nasal falsetto. Everyone acts like it was okay but it was not. "Tragedy" is five minutes of sweaty hairy polyester rhinestones being crotch-thrust into your ears.
Ringo is truly the Beatle of Gen Z
saving this for me and my friend to watch! we love Ringo. please do more Beatles :D
The closest one of the other Beatles came to a Trainwreckord is probably Paul's Press to Play. He still went on to make a ton of great music and he probably could actually shoot someone on 5th Avenue and keep his legacy intact, but that album pretty much ended Paul's time as a current hitmaker and it's probably no accident that he started leaning much more on being a former Beatle afterwards.
Least it wasn't Pete the Fourth
Maybe Ringo was thinking of Jimi's "Gypsy Eyes" from Electric Ladyland? Edit: sorry Skunk, you can't censor that song name
Thank you for pointing out there were legitimate grievances against Disco. There's a great Dollop podcast about Disco Demolition night that makes the case that while racism and homophobia were part of it, they were not the main factors at all and most of the backlash was just due to Disco being massively overexposed.
I have a hard time imagining why race would've played a role in the disco backlash (homophobia I can see). African-American styles of music have been pretty consistently successful in the US since the 1960s (they've arguably punched well above their weight on the charts relative to their share of the population), so I don't know why disco of all genres would be the one to engender a racial backlash. It is far from the first style of music that comes to mind when I think of "black music". Whenever I see disco used as a punchline it is usually a Bee Gees / Saturday Night Fever parody, and I think that image of disco is what comes to mind for most of mainstream white America.
Insanely minor note, but at 21:00 it looks like there are two spaces between "and" and "see" in the caption "I look into your eyes and see."
Here's what a Rotogravure is in case anyone is wondering-it's a type of intaglio printing process, which involves engraving the image onto an image carrier. In gravure printing, the image is engraved onto a cylinder because, like offset printing and flexography, it uses a rotary printing press.
Ringo did Disco? huh you learn something new everyday. Anyways this Family Guy gag best summed up Ringo in the Beatles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhokFOP8IH0
It’s still better than the other time Vini Poncia collaborated with a singing drummer - the Peter Criss solo album. That was a bizarre Sha Na Na-style mess which just revealed Criss’ self-delusions.
Yes i'm surprised Todd didn't bring that up.
It's been said further up the comments, but "gypsy" is actually considered a racial slur nowadays. The US has been kinda slow to catch up on it since we don't have much of a Romani population, but, yeah, you probably don't want to be going around saying it on video, might want to censor it out or something.
eh i've seen mixed responses on that so i'm personally fine with Todd saying it.
I love Ringo. I remember finding "Beaucoup of Blues" in a bargain bin many moons ago and kinda not hating it
I'm a drummer and I will go to bat defending Ringo beating skins. That being said, Ringo's songs are pretty bad across the board. I tried to fast forward through or skip "Don't Pass Me By" when listening to "The Beatles" as a kid.
Great video! One thing I noticed though. There's an audio pop around 21:53.
Saw Harry Nilsson in the video for a few seconds. He's one of my favorite singer song writers. If you see this Todd, you could easily do a Train Wreckords on him too. He was best friends with John Lennon, and Ringo. Had a bunch of hits and flamed out HARD. Super interesting dude. Incredible song writer, 3 1/2 octave range in a velvety smooth voice.
Todd could probably get a fantastic episode out of Pussycats.
I thought of something while watching this. In terms of classic musicians who've been consistently famous in spite of not being the best with singing, Cher came to mind. She's not the best singer in the world, but she makes up for her strange voice by being a consummate performer who always seems like she's having a good time. Even on tracks like If I Could Turn Back Time, where she to belt out parts of it, she gets past the missed notes and strange vocal performance by giving it her all and helping the song soar with her emotion and character. Ringo, similarly, seemed to make it before with his charm and personality. Yet on this album, when he's doing disco of all things (which is usually a bouncy and fun genre), he's doing it with the same energy as The Weeknd circa Earned It and The Hills. And those do NOT mix!
Still nowhere near as humiliating as the song + video he did for the 2014 Powerpuff Girls special.
I also just saw him a couple of weeks ago (with Edgar Winter in the All-Starr Band, no less), so the timing of this one is sort of perfect. He puts on a fun show (and looks and sounds phenomenal considering that he's 82), but yeah, a big part of his appeal is that you can still see an honest to God Beatle without paying Paul prices.
"Speaking of people who criss-cross between pop culture icon and punching bag..." Wait, was this a reference to Guy Fieri, or to Lindsay?
seconded, I did a double take at that one
maybe it's cause i'm a big beatles fan but i think this is one of your best. extra points for agreeing that 'weight of the world' was a surprise triumph for post-sobriety ringo, before, at least for me, he sort of limped into nostalgist territory for the rest of his career.
I really dug "Weight of the World" when it came out and you can actually find some decent stuff in his discography if you're willing to look for it. If he wanted to drop the All-Starr Band for a tour and maybe play some theater shows where he focused on lesser-known stuff, I'd go.
I was real excited to hear him talk about Michael Franks again cause Ringo did another one of tracks, but that was on his next album not this one.......at least that one fit his range?
I can't name any Ringo Starr songs except "It Don't Come Easy"
Take a listen to "you're sixteen, you're beautiful, and you're mine."
One of the other things Ringo is famous for (besides being the narrator for Thomas the Tank Engine) is being married to Bond girl Barbara Bach. The images of him being filmed between a woman's legs and looking sad while drinking expensive booze seem like he's trying to play up that James Bond connection.
"Benny Hill-style cheeky sex pervert" - Honestly, that is a very accurate way to describe the way Ringo has come across throughout his solo career. Don't forget about 33-year-old Ringo singing "you're sixteen, you're beautiful, and you're mine"!
It's not really relevant to the vid but the Dune album you mentioned is where the sample for Rap Snitch Knishes comes from which would be a funny easter egg
In un mondo di John e di Paul io sono Ringo Starr…
From an old man on your patron list: Thank you for a little perspective on disco. I was a kid at its peak. The racial/sexual politics went completely over my head -- I thought YMCA was about, well, the YMCA -- and my dim memories pair it with AM radio and cheesy primetime variety shows. I don't deny the homophobic and racist undercurrent against it, but I was flabbergasted when I heard people say that disco was The Voice of the Oppressed. It was like hearing that Afternoon Delight was a revolutionary anthem.
Yes! I don't doubt that part of the backlash was discriminatory but as someone who wasn't alive back then, it seems that for most people, disco had become tiresome and annoying. An obvious band wagon jump for artists trying to remain relevant and the bubble just exploded. I grew up watching a lot of cartoons in the 90's and early 00's and almost all of them made fun of disco at least a couple of times. The images seemed more inspired by Saturday Night Fever, John Travolta and the Bee Gees than say, Sylvester. The suits, the open shirts, the dance moves, the medallions, the lights on the dancefloor and so on. That's what people were tired of. At the end, The Bee Gees and Travolta suffered the most during the 80's, because they were the face of the genre for the mainstream, while others like Donna Summer or Earth,Wind & Fire continued to have hits.
I would bleep over the gy*** word at 21:05. It's an easy one to forget that it's actually a slur.
Yeah, I gotta side with ditching the racial slur. I know the album is 40-something years old but we don't use that "it was the 70's" standard when discussing Richard Pryor's albums.
This was not very peace and love of Todd
My whole city loves Ringo because he teamed up with Buck Owens to cover “Act Naturally”.
I knew Ringo hit the bottle pretty hard around that time (which would explain the godawful, dog-getting-neutered singing) but even still, how the hell did he see the rise of disco and not know, right out of the gate, that he is Not That Guy??
The clips for "Wings" are also weird. They're in slow motion, and that makes it hard to tell whether they're supposed to be in sync or not.
That looks like the usual Todd trick where he plays generic live footage when he doesn't have footage for a specific song.
I agree that this is his Trainwreckord. I will also say that Bad Boy and Old Wave are actually solid rock records. Everything else after though is just mediocre.
Is the clip at 5:22 supposed to be in sync with the audio? It's unclear.
Yeah, I had to rewind a couple times to figure out what was happening there - I think it's just audio from a radio interview that has no visual component so he added one, but I think a still image might make that clearer and less confusing.
I've been keeping up an ultimate "Worst Lines of Trainwreckords" list that includes such examples as "peñius colada", "modren man" and most recently "them girls". If you are reading this, have the time, have watched this new episode, and think you know what the worst line of lyrics from the covered album is that is in this episode, I would appreciate leaving a reply with your opinion. I want to get an accurate consensus since it's been tricky so far.
I would love a full song consisting of nothing but those worst lyrics.
Wow I actually made it early this time