Ringo Starr reveals his thoughts on The Beatles’ ‘Now and Then’
Ringo Starr chats with USA TODAY’s Melissa Ruggieri about his “brothers” in The Beatles and the band’s final song “Now and Then.”
Adam Levine is looking back on an awkward run-in with music royalty.
The Maroon 5 frontman said during a Thursday appearance on “The Howard Stern Show” that Beatles vocalist Paul McCartney once cracked a joke about Levine’s performing skills, then over-corrected after fearing the quip had fallen flat.
“I told you I’ve been scared a handful of … times in my life, that was definitely one of them,” Levine said of a performance he did alongside bandmates to honor 50 years of The Beatles. The televised tribute show, to mark 50 years since the British band had appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” saw Maroon 5 cover “All My Loving” − one of the group’s signature hits.
Footage of The Beatles themselves playing the iconic tune was projected behind them, Levine recalled, then paused to allow Maroon 5’s performance halfway through to finish the rest of the song.
“I’m sorry man, you can be too cool, but not always,” Levine recalled of performing in front of his heroes. “It’s Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney.
“Afterwards I see Paul, and Paul kind of took me in close and he goes, ‘You know we did it better.’ And I thought it was so funny,” Levine told Stern. “I cracked up and I was like ‘Yeah, … you’re Paul McCartney, you’re the Beatles.”
Three or four months later, Levine recounted that he was at a party where McCartney was trying to get his attention. He had approached to apologize, the singer said, recalling McCartney telling him: “Hey man, I just wanted to let you know that if that bothered you, like I’ve been thinking about this. I didn’t want to insult you.”
Levine, who said he had not ever taken the joke to be rude, described the moment as formative in understanding how human your heroes can be.
“It kind of shattered in a great way this whole thing about your heroes being who they are,” he said. “He’s a human being with a beating heart and a really beautiful soul who was actually thoughtful enough to even take that into account that maybe for some reason my feelings might’ve been hurt, but of course, they were not.”
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