Worst Songs Ever: Ringo Starr’s “The No No Song”

Ringo Starr’s “The No No Song”
PEAK CHART POSITION: #3 in April 1975

By 1975 the little help Ringo got from friends had turned the Beatles drummer into a solo star. His second consecutive #1, “You’re Sixteen” was Ringo’s fourth consecutive top ten in America; its followup “Oh My My” made five. Several months later, hoping to duplicate the success of the eponymous album on which those hits had a home, Ringo and his buddies, which now included the legendarily sober Elton John and Harry Nilsson as well as John Lennon, recorded Goodnight Vienna. It worked: a gormless cover of the Platters’ “Only You” scraped the top five.

A meta-commentary on Ringo’s own well-publicized hedonism, Hoyt Axton’s and David Jackson’s’s “The No No Song” became biggest hit since that gross cover of “You’re Sixteen,” which he sang like a pasha forcing himself on a catamite. Interestingly, it’s the Ringo solo hit that people recognize after 1970’s “It Don’t Come Easy,” often without knowing Ringo sang it. Because it’s a novelty hit by novelty writers, fans have an affection for it exceeding its worth. The early and mid-’70s were the time of Sammy Davis, Jr.’s “Candyman” and Jim Croce; AM listeners liked novelty songs because they provided an escape from turbulence. I’ll say this about “The No No Song”: the drums and acoustic guitar offer solid rhythm; this isn’t a hack job. And there are fans who don’t mind Ringo’s — what, “tropical” accent?  “Columbia” has four syllables, with an accent on the third; “Tennessee” has four too, apparently. which cognac helped Ringo find (don’t even ask about the way he pronounces “Majorca”). The track has horns because Ringo can afford them.

If readers think I’m overreacting to a harmless number, I understand. Many things offend me, though: the sterility of the arrangement, the Dinah! approach to the lyric (the mothers of Beatles fans, smoking their cigarettes in their living rooms, would laugh), the resignation of the singing. Ringo is saying farewell to hit making, although he couldn’t have known it. All he can do is apotheosize his legend. After “It Don’t Come Easy,” “Back Off Boogaloo,” and “Photograph,” I have trouble believing, despite getting by with a lot of help from friend George Harrison as producer and uncredited songwriter, that Ringo was a spent force unless the no-no-no he never said got in the way. Paul McCartney would, of course, devote most of the rest of the decade to the oddest novelty songs ever written: songs about doorbells and farms, approached with the fealty of a Benedictine monk at a scroll. But Paul was ruthless, too professional to sing about his own habits even through a cloak of irony. A kind of embarrassed self-consciousness fed into Ringo’s hits: when they sucked, he wasn’t blamed because he was Ringo, and unlike John, Paul, and George, no one confused him for ambitious. Thus, “The No No Song” strikes me as as a dispiriting epitaph to a fun solo career.