George Harrison Nearly Canceled The Beatles’ 1964 Tour Out of Loyalty to Ringo Starr
In 1964, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison prepared to embark on a world tour without Ringo Starr. At this point, Starr had been with The Beatles for two years, but they planned to temporarily replace him. He was in the hospital with tonsillitis and missed part of the tour. Starr felt incredibly hurt by this, but it might have been a small comfort to know that Harrison fought hard to cancel the tour.
George Harrison wanted to cancel a tour because Ringo Starr was sick
While Starr was in the hospital, the rest of the band began working with a stand-in drummer, Jimmy Nichol.
“Ringo missed part of the tour because he was in hospital with tonsillitis,” McCartney said, per The Beatles Anthology. “We couldn’t cancel, so the idea was to get a stand-in. We got Jimmy Nicol, a session drummer from London. He played well — obviously not the same as Ringo, but he covered well.”
The decision to go on with the tour rankled Harrison. He believed that it wasn’t a Beatles tour if Starr wasn’t a part of it.
“Of course, with all respect to Jimmy, we shouldn’t have done it,” he said. “The point was, it was the Fabs. Can you imagine The Rolling Stones going on tour: ‘Oh, sorry. Mick can’t come.’ — ‘All right, we’ll just get somebody else to replace him for two weeks.’ It was silly, and I couldn’t understand it. I really despised the way we couldn’t make a decision for ourselves then. It was just: ‘Off you go.’ — ‘But Ringo must come with us.’ —’ No, sorry, you’ll get a new drummer.'”
According to producer George Martin, Harrison’s protestations nearly kept the band from going on part of their tour.
“They nearly didn’t do the Australia tour,” he said. “George is a very loyal person, and he said, ‘If Ringo’s not part of the group, it’s not The Beatles. I don’t see why we should do it, and I’m not going to.’ It took all of Brian [Epstein] and my persuasion to tell George that if he didn’t do it he was letting everybody down.”
George Harrison was right to stick up for Ringo Starr
Harrison might have disappointed fans if he hadn’t participated in the tour, but he was right to stick up for Starr. The drummer felt devastated that the band was leaving him behind.
“My illness was a real big event,” Starr said. “It was miserable … It was very strange, them going off without me. They’d taken Jimmy Nicol and I thought they didn’t love me any more — all that stuff went through my head.”
Starr had dealt with this feeling before. When he first joined the band, they replaced him with a session drummer in the studio, and he worried they were going to fire him. He was often overlooked in the group. Harrison’s anger at the thought of touring without Starr proved Starr’s bandmates valued him.
George Harrison was the Beatle who pushed the hardest for Ringo Starr to join the band
Harrison and Starr were good friends, and the guitarist often voiced his support for the drummer. Harrison even drove the campaign to get Starr in the band. They initially worked with drummer Pete Best, but Harrison liked Starr more.
“Neil [Aspinall] thinks it was George who was most to blame [for Best’s firing],” Hunter Davies wrote in The Beatles: The Authorized Biography. “He thinks John really was fairly close to Pete, and Paul, being as popular with the fans as Pete, would never have done anything like that, as he might have been suspected. Neil says they all agreed to it, but it was George who gave Brian the final push as George was the one who was the biggest admirer of Ringo.”
Starr and Harrison remained close friends until George’s death in 2001.
