Ringo Starr to auction over 800 personal items in December

PanARMENIAN.Net - Over 800 items owned by Ringo Starr and his wife, Barbara Bach, are going to auction, including rare Beatles memorabilia like his three-piece drum kit used in over 200 performances and a Rickenbacker guitar known as the "Beatle-Backer" that John Lennon owned and later gave to Ringo, the Associated Press reports.

The unprecedented number of Beatles-owned objects will be offered Dec. 4-5 at Julien's Auctions in Beverly Hills, California.

"We have so much stuff and a lot of it we haven't seen in 20 to 30 years," Starr, 75, said in a phone interview with Bach from London.

He said the idea for the auction came after The Grammy Museum in Los Angeles asked to do an exhibition about his life and music in 2013-2014.

"It started with me looking at storage units we have all around the world it seems. ... We found we had so much stuff," he said.

Then another project — an upcoming book and an exhibition currently at London's National Portrait Gallery of photographs Starr took of his former bandmates — turned up "boxes of negatives from the '60s onward," he said.

Like his book "Photograph by Ringo Starr," coming out later this month, a portion of the proceeds will benefit the couple's Lotus Children Foundation that focuses on social welfare issues around the world.