A 70’s Ringo Starr recording of a Brian Cadd song could have been the “anthem for all drunks and druggies around the world” but it was never released.
“Ringo had just given it all up,” Cadd tells Undercover.fm. “He was dry and clean and fabulous and just joyous about the whole thing. So, we wrote a song called ‘Some Folks Do’ which was about drug taking and the fact that Ringo was now clean. Then he recorded it and we thought ‘this is it. It is going to be the anthem for all drunks and druggies around the world’”.
Cadd wrote the song for Ringo with John Beland from the Flying Burrito Brothers. Apple Records USA manager Ken Mansfield signed on as producer. Mansfield had worked with The Beatles from ‘The White Album’ as well as Apple artists James Taylor, Mary Hopkin and Badfinger. It would have been the first single off his next album in 1976.
“Then he changed producers to Van Dyke Parks and Van Dyke Parks virtually stopped using all the stuff he had done before and did a whole lot of other stuff,” Brian says. “But Ringo loved the song. He was quite happy for it to have been the first single”.
The album Ringo fans got instead was ‘Rotogravure’ and the Cadd song has been locked away in a vault somewhere ever since.
Brian has not used for the song for himself or anyone else but says it was pure Ringo. “It was fabulous. It’s him. It’s our demo only played better with Ringo desperately trying to remain in tune, like all his records”.
Brian Cadd recalls this story and many more in his new book ‘From This Side Of Things’, available from his official website.
Watch the Undercover interview with Brian Cadd here:
