The Beatles masterpiece Ringo Starr could never enjoy: “I felt like a session man”
Some of the greatest albums ever created don’t get that distinction until years after the fact. While an artist may pour their heart and soul into a track and make a piece of music that holds up like a work of art, it’s anyone’s guess as to whether the rest of the world will actually care enough to go back to it.
And even when The Beatles crafted one of the biggest albums of all time in Sgt Peppers, Ringo Starr remembered not being that enamoured with their magnum opus.
Granted, most people already thought The Beatles’ future was up in the air the minute they quit the road. When an act didn’t have the strength to tour anymore, that was normally a sign for all of them to hang it up, but Paul McCartney was about to steer them into their next new venture.
They had already started expanding their craft on previous albums, but McCartney had a lavish concept album in mind, where every member took on the persona of a different group. While none of the songs came together in a thematic way, hearing each track expand the boundaries of what rock could do helped shift the rock scene on its axis in 1967.
After all, this was the beginning of the summer of love, and hearing the Fab Four changing with the times made them glorified ambassadors for the 1960s youth culture who wanted to tune in and drop out. Despite many being caught up in the afterglow, not many thought about taking in the more negative aspects of the record.
Because no album is perfect, and outside of its classic tunes, there are a few flaws that The Beatles themselves didn’t care for. John Lennon remembered never being taken with the concept to begin with, and outside of ‘Within You Without You’, George Harrison claimed to never have been on board with any of the outlandish ideas that Macca had talked about.
If the other songwriters were having a few issues, though, you can imagine how much fun the drummer was having. Recalling his time making the record, Starr didn’t look back on it that fondly, saying, “I never really liked Sgt Pepper. I mean, I think it’s a fine album. All the work we do is fine. But I think I felt like a session man on it. We put so much on it—strings and brass—and you’d sit ’round the studio for days, you know, while they’re overdubbing other things.”
Even with his muted presence on the final product, Starr does provide the glue to connect each song together. His three-count in the middle of ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ completely ties up the time signature changes between the pre-chorus and the chorus, and after the orchestral orgasm in the middle of ‘A Day in the Life’, his brisk cymbal work is the best accompaniment to McCartney’s account of going to work.
But when looking at it objectively, this wasn’t a case of the Fab Four striving to make the greatest record of all time. They just knew they needed to move in a different direction, and from the minute those opening guitars came screaming in on the title track, any semblance of those four mop-top kids had all but disappeared.
In many ways, Starr’s frustration reflected the broader transformation happening within The Beatles at the time. The band had evolved from a tight live unit into a studio-first collective where experimentation often took precedence over performance. For a drummer who thrived on feel and chemistry, spending endless hours waiting for overdubs and orchestral arrangements to be completed must have felt worlds away from the raw energy of their early touring years.
Even so, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band endures precisely because of that fearless reinvention. The album captured a group refusing to repeat themselves at the height of their fame, embracing psychedelia, avant-garde techniques and ambitious production in ways that permanently altered popular music. Starr may have felt sidelined during its creation, but his understated playing remained essential to holding together one of the most groundbreaking records ever made.
