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 that producer Giles Martin, the son of the Beatles’ original producer, George Martin, brought it sonically into the 21st century with more than a little help from his friends at Abbey Road Studios in London.

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

“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 — there was no separation …

“I’ve told you this before: 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.’ Everyone was in after the count-in. I love that — that was the great thing about us.”

Producer Giles Martin (son of original Beatles producer George Martin) sits at the mixing console at Capitol Records in L.A. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)


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