You’re Sixteen

Written by: Robert B Sherman, Richard M Sherman
Recorded: 5, 6, 28 March 1973
Producer: Richard Perry

Released: 2 November 1973 (US), 23 November 1973 (UK)

Available on:
Ringo

Personnel

Ringo Starr: vocals, drums
Vini Poncia. Jimmy Calvert: electric guitar
Klaus Voormann: bass guitar
Nicky Hopkins: piano
Jim Keltner: drums
Paul McCartney, Harry Nilsson: vocals

‘You’re Sixteen’ was the second single released from Ringo Starr’s 1973 album Ringo.

Richard Perry presented the idea of covering this fifties song, and it just worked really well. If you’re open, you try things. But I can’t do that song onstage anymore. I can’t stand there singing those lyrics about a girl being sixteen. I did it in Texas and part of the act is I would go up and point at a woman and sing ‘You’re Sixteen’ and then signal like, ‘Well, maybe not.’ This woman stood up like she wanted to stab me. I couldn’t look that direction the whole night. The video is retro, and a little psychedelic. Then again we were a little psychedelic in those days.

The song was written by brothers Robert and Richard Sherman. It was first recorded by American singer Johnny Burnette, whose version reached number 8 on the US Billboard Hot 100 in December 1960, and number 3 on the UK singles chart in 1961.

There were so many great things on that album – ‘Photograph’ was a number one single, and it’s a marvellous song where George and Ringo sang together on quite a bit of the record, but no track on the album better embodies Ringo’s spirit and personality than ‘You’re Sixteen’.

In the studio

The backing track for ‘You’re Sixteen’ was recorded on 5 March 1973, the first studio session for the Ringo album, at Sunset Sound Recorders in Los Angeles.

Overdubs were added at Sunset Sound the following day. The recording featured Harry Nilsson performing doo-wop backing vocals.

It was completed with a final overdub on 28 March 1973 at Apple Studios in London. Paul McCartney recorded additional vocals, including a kazoo-like solo.

It’s not kazoo. It sounds like a kazoo, but it’s me doing an imitation. [Does imitation of a saxophone.] It was put through a fuzz thing. It’s a bit daft, really, because it winds up sounding like a kazoo, I could have just done it on a kazoo. The idea was to make it sound like a great big funky sax.

It’s nice. I heard it a lot last night on the radio. I went down to the session one night when I was doing ‘Six O’Clock’, on the same album, at the same time. At the end of the session they were playing it back and they said ‘We need a solo here.’

The release

‘You’re Sixteen’ was first released in November 1973 as the fifth song on Ringo.

It was issued as a single in the USA on 3 December 1973, and in the UK on 8 February 1974.

The single was a smash hit, topping the US Billboard and Cash Box charts, and in New Zealand. It was a top 10 hit in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, South Africa, Switzerland, and the UK, where it peaked at number four.

In 1978 Starr appeared in Ringo a made-for-television comedy film directed by Jeff Margolis. Starr played both himself and Ongir Rrats, a fictionalised version of himself, in a modern-day retelling of Mark Twain’s The Prince And The Pauper.

The show, first broadcast in the USA on NBC on 26 April 1978, also starred Art Carney, John Ritter, Vincent Price, Carrie Fisher, and George Harrison.

During the show, Carrie Fisher, playing Rrats’s girlfriend Marquine, appeared in a sequence soundtracked by ‘You’re Sixteen’.

Carrie Fisher was a big fan of Ringo’s and she couldn’t wait to do it. Everybody came prepared and everybody worked really hard, especially Ringo. Everything was memorized – there were no cue cards. We shot it like a movie; I really wanted it to have that feel, so I only used two camera and sometimes only one camera. It was very different, for that time, for shooting a television special outside a studio.