The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Ringo Starr shares his redo wish list

- By Randy Lewis

The 50th-anniversar­y remix and deluxe reissue of the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” was greeted with almost universal acclaim upon its release in May.

Long ranked as one of the most revolution­ary and influentia­l albums in rock history, the “Sgt. Pepper” reissue scored a perfect 100 on Metacritic.com’s aggregate review website for the way producer Giles Martin, son of the Beatles’ original producer, George Martin, brought it sonically into the 21st century with help from his friends at Abbey Road Studios in London.

How did that reaction sit with Ringo Starr, one of the Beatles “principals” — along with Paul McCartney, Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison — whose unanimous approval is required for such projects to be greenlight­ed?

“I’d like to do the White Album,” Starr said recently, referring to the 1968 double album officially titled “The Beatles.” “I think Giles should redo that. I don’t know why not. And ‘Abbey Road.’

“But I love the White Album (because) we were back being a band, even though emotionall­y it was a bit weird between us for a while, and I left the band and came back, and George had all those flowers — you know that story.

“One of the great images to me to this day was the four of us, and the drums, tucked in a room that was like 8 feet by 8 feet or 8 feet by 10 feet, and we played ‘Yer Blues’ together,” he said. “We were back being a band again, and so close.

“If you ever want to talk to me about the group, no matter what was going on, after the count-in, we all did our best,” he said. “No one said, ‘That’s not my song.’”

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