"Ringo" by Ringo Starr – ****

First released: 1973
The quintessential Ringo Starr album. It is very good, but I actually like "Goodnight Vienna" better. Strange, I know. Ultimately, if you get this and "Vienna" on CD, then you really don’t need much more from Mr. Starr if you are looking for big hits. My history with this album is that I purchased the three singles from the album (first Beatles solo album to feature three hits from one album) as I am a huge 45 rpm record fan. Still am. In the 70s, when this album came out, more than one or two singles from the same album was unheard of. By the 80s, it was commonplace to find artists issuing five or six singles (or even seven or eight if you were Michael Jackson) from the same album. By the 90s, this all went away, which is partially why Ringo could never reclaim his early 70s position even with better material as the 90s and the new century rolled around because Ringo was and is basically a singles artist. He rarely had more than one vocal on a Beatles album and except for this package, most people could not tolerate more than a couple songs with adenoidal Ringo on vocals. He is an acquired taste, not unlike Dylan’s vocals.

You may read elsewhere that this is the only Beatles solo album that actually contains performances by all three former Beatles, etc. and so it is. It happened again with "Ringo’s Rotogravure", at least compositionally, but unlike here where McCartney, Harrison and Lennon actually wanted to help Ringo out, in the latter case, Ringo seemed to have been given throwaways.

When this album was finally issued on CD in 1991, it was a welcome return of the “Apple” logo on a Beatles-related album and it also added "It Don’t Come Easy", "Early 1970" and "Down and Out" as bonus tracks.