Ringo Starr: Stop and Smell the Roses : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Like George Harrison's Somewhere in England, Ringo Starr's Stop and Smell the Roses (originally titled Can't Fight Lightning) was substantially completed in 1980. Whereas Harrison's record company held out for revisions, Starr was left in the even more undignified position of finding no major label interested in his product–until Sixties "bubble gum" mogul Neil Bogart finally came to the rescue with Boardwalk.

In 1982, it's hard to imagine even the most rabid Beatlemaniac awaiting a new Starr album with bated breath. By surrounding himself with third-rate hacks on Ringo the Fourth and Bad Boy, the artist allowed his old "lovable schlemiel" persona to disintegrate into an increasingly sad joke. Stop and Smell the Roses, however, is quite a pleasant surprise.

Here, Starr is back in the congenial superstar company of such friends as George Harrison, Paul McCartney, Ron Wood, Stephen Stills and Harry Nilsson, each of whom penned and produced at least one number. "Private Property" and "Attention" are McCartney's most charmingly whimsical ditties in years, and his crisp production of Carl Perkins' "Sure to Fall (in Love with You)" is sure to please Beatles cultists. Though it was Paul McCartney who sang this rockabilly classic onstage with the Beatles some two decades ago, Ringo Starr delivers it now in the deadpan Liverpool-cowboy accents he once used for Perkins' "Matchbox" and "Honey Don't," while Lloyd Green's pedal steel guitar adds an "authentic" country atmosphere. Unfortunately, George Harrison's "Wrack My Brain" is the complaint of an ex-Beatle about having to "play the game/Up and down old memory lane." Beatles fans are left with lyrics like "there's no way I can see coming up with something you'd enjoy as much as TV."

On Stop and Smell the Roses, Starr has given his own modest muse a well-deserved rest. The Starkey byline turns up on only two new songs: the title track (written with Nilsson) and "Dead Giveaway" (a collaboration with Wood). The latter is a catchy singalong about a superstar turned obnoxious bore – a fate the singer himself seems at last to have averted.

Stop and Smell the Roses concludes with a remake of the artist's 1972 hit, "Back Off Boogaloo," which sounds like "Starrs on 45" as it quotes offhandedly from about a dozen Beatles milestones. Though such a treatment may not add much to the Beatles' legacy, neither does it reduce Ringo Starr's past to the level of sheer exploitation or travesty. The same might be said of the rest of this altogether innocuous and intermittently engaging LP.