When talking about the tension between The Beatles, Ringo Starr always seemed to be the peacekeeper between them all. He doesn’t go out preaching his ‘Peace and Love’ credence by accident at his shows, considering most of the time he was caught in the middle as he watched his bandmates bicker back and forth towards the end of their career. Starr was more about creating a good vibe whenever he performed, but he did have a few thinly veiled shots at Paul McCartney when working on ‘Back off Boogaloo’.
Considering it was recorded well after the lawsuits between The Beatles had gotten underway, it was still a raw wound. The band had always looked like the best of friends, so now that they were hurling abuse towards each other in song and wasting their days away in court trying to come to a resolution, they weren’t exactly going to have nice things to say about each other.
Starr seemed to at least remain on decent terms with everybody. He had always been the backbone behind every good Beatles recording, but if you were the one picking a fight with him, chances are you were the one in the wrong half the time.
Maybe that’s why George Harrison and John Lennon convinced Starr to bring McCartney a message about the other members suing him. For Starr, this might have been a way to lay the news down gently, but McCartney wanted to hear absolutely none of it, eventually kicking Starr out of his house before he could even finish.
As Starr recalled in court later, McCartney had finally reached a breaking point, saying in Still the Greatest, “He just shouted and pointed at me. He was out of control, prodding his finger toward my face. He told me to get my coat and get out. I got brought down because I couldn’t believe it was happening to me”.
Instead of lashing out in anger, Starr took a page out of his other bandmates’ playbooks and wrote a song about it. On ‘Back Off Boogaloo’, Starr went to war against McCartney, eventually twisting the knife by calling him a “meathead” to a man who would later adopt the vegetarian lifestyle.
Then again, it’s still a Ringo song, and that means that even this version is too charming for words. Compared to John Lennon lashing out in anger against McCartney in the past on ‘How Do You Sleep’, Starr feels like the sensitive older brother who’s telling his younger brother to loosen up a little bit.
That wasn’t even the first time Starr lashed out. When talking about McCartney’s solo career, he admitted that he hated most of RAM, thinking that his old friend was going down a strange road that didn’t seem to lead anywhere.
Although there may have been some rough times ahead for every solo Beatle, it didn’t take long for Starr to mend the fences with McCartney, with Macca even contributing a song and singing backup vocals on a few songs on his breakthrough album, Ringo. The ending of The Beatles feels like one musical tragedy after another, but Starr may be one of the only living musicians who can turn a glorified diss track into a roaring good time without trying too hard.
