Ringo Shows His Postcards

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"If I got postcards from the boys, I always just threw them in a drawer," Ringo Starr says. "As the years go, you move house and you lose track. Four moves later, I found a trunk of stuff that had this box -- no idea what it was. I found my outfit from Magical Mystery Tour that I thought was gone, too."

Those postcards, written from the Sixties to the Nineties -- during both the good times and the bad times with the Beatles -- are collected in a new book, Postcards From the Boys (Chronicle Books), with proceeds going to the Lotus Foundation, which raises money for women's and children's causes.

"This book shows that a battle did go on, but that's not all that was happening," Starr says over lunch at a Beverly Hills hotel. "There was still a lot of love and friendship among us all."

Starr, who is recording a new album, picked the fifty-one postcards from a collection of more than a hundred. Rediscovering these memories of John Lennon and George Harrison was "a double-edged sword, because you wish they were still here and that you were getting more cards," he says.

Paging through the book, Starr turns to a postcard from Lennon written in the wake of the Beatles' breakup that reads, "Who'd have thought it would come to this?" "It was as painful to John as it was to me that it all came to that," Starr says. "It was a great job -- a lot of love and a lot of friendship -- and then suddenly it's gone."

In other Beatles news, Starr will introduce rare performance clips on the American Music Awards, Sunday, November 14th, on ABC. The footage was originally aired on the network November 15th, 1964, as part of the Around the Beatles special.

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Song Stories

“V.T.T.L.O.T.F.D.G.F.”

Fishbone | 1985

Quite a few musicians have utilized initials for song titles -- Michael Jackson's "P.Y.T.," Abba's "S.O.S.," Donald Fagen's "I.G.Y.," etc. But the more curiously initialed tune has to be "V.T.T.L.O.T.F.D.G.F.," short for "Voyage to the Land of the Freeze-Dried Godzilla Farts." Fishbone's original guitarist, Kendall Jones, explained to Rolling Stone, "When Norwood [Fisher] wrote it, he introduced it to the band saying, 'Man, I've been hearing about all these Nazi right-wing groups on the news saying the Holocaust was staged. So what if America said it never dropped two atom bombs on Japan, that it was actually Godzilla popping a couple off?' Only Norwood would come up with something that out." The same year "V.T.T.L.O.T.F.D.G.F." was released, the film Godzilla 1985 appeared in North America.

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