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During the latter half of the summer of 2001 I was on a solo road trip crossing the United States en route to the Burning Man festival north of Reno, Nevada, running into one self-imposed fun adventure after another. August 18th found me both waking up and going to sleep in Fort Worth – having just experienced the Elvis Day midnight vigil in Memphis – and I was staying at a pretty nice place too; much nicer than the biker/hooker/murdertrap $20 motel I came this close to booking myself into for the two nights before the standing promise I have with my mother (“Don’t do anything stupid and get yourself killed”) rang in my ear and convinced me to book elsewhere. And that elsewhere was a little no-name upstairs hotel in the very touristy Stockyards area, which happened to be just around the corner from the evening’s premeditated fun adventure: Ringo Starr at Billy Bob’s.
If you haven’t heard of Billy Bob’s allow me to change that. Billy Bob’s is the world’s largest Honky-Tonk and I can’t see it losing the distinction anytime soon. It’s 100,000 square feet which is huge! So big in fact that the Ringo concert was in one corner of the bar and it wasn’t until I was leaving after the show that I noticed there had simultaneously been a full-on rodeo going on in the opposite corner of the vast room.
If you haven’t heard of Ringo Starr I can’t help you, other than to welcome you to Planet Earth.
This was my first time seeing a Beatle and it was great, made even greater by all the other non-Beatles in the band. Don’t get me wrong, of course I love The Beatles – musicians have to – and I have great respect for Ringo (he was, after all, a Beatle, so again: I have to), but I gotta say, a big attraction to a Ringo show is that All-Starr band he brings along with him. Basically, Ringo rounds up a group of world-class famous hitmakers who have been out of the public eye long enough to endure going on the road with what is basically an A-level cruise ship pop revue. In this case, Ringo’s sidemen were Roger Hodgson from Supertramp, Greg Lake from ELP, Sheila E. from Prince’s band (and more), Ian Hunter from Mott The Hoople, Gregg Bissonette from David Lee Roth’s band, and Howard Jones from Howard Jones. So in addition to backing up Ringo on a pile of Beatles songs (and quite a few Ringo solo hits too; it was a long show!) the group backed each other up as each band member fronted a couple of songs from their own career, which was pretty awesome. Especially Roger Hodgson, huge Supertramp fan that I am. I remember he did Take the Long Way Home and the other might have been Goodbye Stranger (one of my favourites), but more likely it was Give a Little Bit.
(I just found some notes I took after the show. It was indeed Give a Little Bit and he also played Logical Song. Greg Lake led them through Lucky Man and Court of the Crimson King [oh yeah, he was in King Crimson too], Howard Jones sang his hit No One is to Blame and Ian Hunter did Cleveland Rocks. My notes also confirm the following…)
The true star of the evening was actually Sheila E. who stole the show every time she wasn’t trying really, really hard not to. My word, she was fan-freakin’-tastic. Special mention also goes to the bald dude I stood behind for a while at the bar who had a pair of eyes tattooed on the back of his head.
Oh, and Ringo was great too. He was a Beatle.
Todd Man Out 