George Martin Regretted This Aspect of the Beatles’ White Album, Ringo Starr Had an Expectedly Goofy Suggested Remedy

Just under six decades ago, on May 30, 1968, the Beatles went into the studio to begin recording their eponymous “White Album,” a double-album full of career-defining hits but one that did not come without its fair share of regrets from those involved, including producer George Martin and musicians Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney. For as creative and inspired as the album was, the dynamics in the studio were fraught at best. The Fab Four was fast approaching the end.

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Seemingly just as quickly as they burst onto the scene several years earlier, the Beatles seemed to be departing from their time as one of the greatest, most popular rock bands in the world in a similarly impressive blaze of glory. As for Martin’s regrets? Starr posed an interesting solution that was just as goofy and lighthearted as one might expect from the affable percussionist.

George Martin Regretted This Aspect Of The White Album

The Beatles’ 1968 “White Album” is a massive beast of a record. The double album release featured cuts like “Blackbird,” “Helter Skelter,” “Happiness is a Warm Gun,” “Rocky Raccoon,” and many, many more. While not all 30 tracks would become the band’s most popular songs, it was a particularly impressive collection of writing styles, creative inspiration, and musical arrangements. But producer George Martin had his doubts about including that many tracks at one time.

“I thought we should probably have made a very, very good single album rather than a double,” he said in Anthology. “But they insisted. I think it could have been made fantastically good if it had been compressed a bit and condensed. A lot of people I know think it’s still the best album they made. I later learned that by recording all those songs, they were getting rid of their contact with EMI more quickly.”

Drummer Ringo Starr had a laughable solution to Martin’s qualms with the album: “I agree that we should have put it out as two separate albums,” Starr said. “The ‘White’ and ‘Whiter’ albums.” In a testament to the different wavelengths the band was operating on at the time, not everyone agreed that there was too much on the double record. (We’d wager a bet that you can guess which try-hard Beatle was okay with the lengthy tracklist.)

Not Everyone In The Beatles Thought It Was Too Long

Unsurprisingly, Paul McCartney, who often pushed the band to the limits of their creative and musical abilities, didn’t have a problem with the number of songs on the Beatles’ “White Album.” In fact, he argued that the tracklist was part of the record’s appeal in Anthology. He said it was a “fine album,” albeit one that “wasn’t a pleasant one to make.” And while producer and musician George Martin might have worried about chart performance, McCartney and the rest of the band notably weren’t. They were the Beatles, after all.

“With the Beatles, I can’t ever remember scouring the charts to see what number it had come in at,” McCartney recalled. “I assume we hoped that people would like it. We just put it out and got on with life. A lot of our friends like it, and that was mainly what we were concerned with. If your mates liked it, the boutiques played it, and it was played wherever you went. That was a sign of success for us.”

Even if McCartney had been nervous about how the album would perform, the charts would soon prove he had no reason to be. The Beatles’ eponymous album hit No. 1 in the U.S., U.K., Spain, Sweden, Norway, France, Finland, Canada, and Australia. Indeed, McCartney’s friends weren’t the only ones who enjoyed this magnum opus.

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