The Paul McCartney Song That Featured Ringo Starr Pretending to Be a Doorman
Ringo Starr has many quirky ad-libs that made their way into Beatles songs. This side of Ringo never left him, and he incorporated it into his later projects. During a Paul McCartney collaboration, Ringo Starr did an impression of a doorman during the recording, and McCartney decided to leave it in the song.
Paul McCartney recorded ‘Beautiful Night’ with Ringo Starr
In the mid-1990s, McCartney, Starr, and George Harrison reunited to work on The Beatles Anthology, an extensive retrospective of the band that consisted of a documentary, a book, and a new music compilation. McCartney was influenced by this return to the band and started working on his tenth album Flaming Pie. In an interview with Global News, McCartney said he invited Starr to play on a Flaming Pie track after trying to get together with him for a few years.
“I’d been saying to Ringo for years that it’d be great to do something because we’d never really done that much work together outside The Beatles,” McCartney shared. “One night, Jeff suggested, ‘Why don’t you get Ringo in?’ and I said, ‘OK!’ It just sort of happened. I had this song, ‘Beautiful Night’, which I’d written quite a few years ago. I’d always liked it but I felt I didn’t quite have the right version of it.”
Starr did an impression of a doorman that remained on the track
The Beatles’ drummer has a few musical or vocal ad-libs that made their way onto Beatles’ songs. One famous example is when he shouted, “I’ve got blisters on my fingers,” after completing “Helter Skelter”. At the end of “Beautiful Night”, Ringo Starr pretends to be a doorman, and Paul McCartney decided to leave it in the song.
“So I got this song out for when Ringo was coming in, and right away, it was like the old days. I realized we hadn’t done this for so long, but it was really comfortable and it was still there. So, we did ‘Beautiful Night’ and we tagged on a fast bit on the end, which wasn’t there before. And as we were coming away out of the studio into the control room, Ringo’s doing like an impression of a doorman… ‘All right then, on your way…’ if you listen closely, you can hear we left that in.”
McCartney ad-libbed another song with Starr
Once they finished “Beautiful Night,” Paul McCartney had a jam session with Ringo Starr and Electric Light Orchestra’s Jeff Lynne. The “Blackbird” singer recalled the jam session not having much direction, and he started to ad-lib. Fortunately, he was still able to get a song out of it that was released on Flaming Pie.
“I grabbed my Hofner bass, he started up on the drums and Jeff Lynne came in on guitar, the three of us getting a little R&B thing going,” McCartney shared. “And then I did the actor’s worst dream — he’s on stage and he doesn’t know what play he’s in — when you do a jam like that, doing the vocal is exactly that dream, you can just go anywhere, you can sing anything.”
“But you’ve really got to clear your mind, forget everything — at the same time as playing the bass — and let your head go to some mystical place,” he continued. “Just totally ad-libbing it all. Anyway, when we’d done it, I played it back to Ringo and he said, ‘It’s relentless.’ That was ‘Really Love You’.”
