Ringo Starr Recalls Weed-Induced “Big” Ideas For the ‘Abbey Road’ Cover, From Egypt to Volcanoes

The new documentary If These Walls Could Sing on Disney+, which began streaming today, tells the story of Abbey Road Studios’ long history in the music world at large, including interviews with stars like Elton John, John Williams, and, uncomfortably, Kanye West. But, naturally, a significant portion of the film’s runtime is devoted to the ban who made the studio famous: The Beatles. And while it’s not a revelation for hardcore fans, If These Walls Could Talk confirms what many Beatle-heads already knew: Paul McCartney was the reason a lot of those albums got done, and the reason The Beatles’ famous final album, Abbey Road, exists at all.

The documentary’s director, Mary McCartney, was granted plenty of access to both living Beatles for her film, given that she is the daughter of Paul and Linda McCartney. Yes, she’s a nepotism baby. But she’s using her powers for good by providing Beatles fans with new interviews with her famous dad and his former bandmate, Ringo Starr. Both McCartney and Starr, who are now 80 and 82 respectively, look back on their years in Abbey Road Studios fondly. “It’s just a great studio,” McCartney enthuses with a cheeky grin. “All the mics worked!”

But as any Beatles fan who saw Get Back (also on Disney+) knows, not all of the Beatles’ recording memories are happy ones. As Giles Martin—the son of the Beatles’ beloved late producer George Martin—says in the documentary, “Let It Be fragmented and distorted them as people, and they just abandoned it. Paul McCartney phoned up Dad and said, ‘Listen, we just want to make a record like we did. It’ll be our last record.'”

McCartney remembers that phone call with Martin in his own interview. “He said ‘Yeah, but none of the messing ’round. As long as you come in and we make the album like we used to make albums, properly,'” McCartney says. “So I would just write songs and then ring [the Beatles] up. I was like, ‘Hi Ringo, how are you doing?”

In a separate talking head interview, Starr recalls getting those calls: “We knew: it’s Paul.”

McCartney says he gently prodded his bandmates to come together (pun intended) for Abbey Road. “What do you think about making a new album? Should we go back in the studio?’ Because they were quite happy sunbathing.”

Says Starr with a laugh, “If it hadn’t been for [Paul McCartney], we’d have made like three albums, instead of eight.” (The Beatles, in fact, released 12 studio albums, but Starr may be discounting Yellow Submarine, which the Beatles weren’t heavily involved in; and Magical Mystery Tour, which was released as an EP in the U.K. Also, the man is 82. Cut him some slack!)

Luckily, McCartney was there to push the other three Beatles back into the studio. Abbey Road was made, and became, in the eyes of many classic rock fans, one of the greatest rock albums of all time. And Starr has a fun anecdote for how the album cover came to be, too, describing the band’s ambitions to do a photo shoot in Egypt, or on a volcano, implying that they came up with those ideas while high.

“We didn’t think ‘Abbey Road.’ We thought, ‘The next album, we’ve got to go to like Egypt and the pyramids. We have to go to some volcano in Hawaii! We always had these big conversations,” Starr says while miming smoking a joint at the camera. “And then we went ‘Sod it, let’s just walk across the road.’”

After Abbey Road was released, the studio—which had always been referred to as the Abbey Road studio given its location, but was technically called EMI Recording Studios—officially changed its name. How could you pass up a marketing opportunity like that?