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by Kenneth Womack


  For his part, Martin remain unconvinced, even years later, about the overarching quality of The White Album. Perhaps his recollections found their origins in the emotional highs and lows that he experienced along with the bandmates and their crew during the record’s production, although rather pointedly he opted to attribute the album’s relative merits to a host of other factors. “I didn’t like The White Album very much,” he later remarked. “They’d turned up with 36 songs after their Indian trip and they were pretty insistent that every song was to be included. I wanted to make it a single album, and I stressed to the boys that whilst they could record whatever they liked, we should weed out the stuff that wasn’t up to scratch and make a really super single album.” Over the years, George contended that there may have been a more calculated reason for the double album’s release involving the Beatles’ long-term contract, which held them under contract with EMI until January 1976. “I didn’t learn until later the reason why they were so insistent,” George remarked, but “it was a contractual one. By this time, the contractual negotiations were above my head and I didn’t know that their current contract with EMI stipulated a number of years or a number of titles, whichever was the earlier. So the boys, in an effort to get rid of the contract, were shoving out titles as quickly as they could. This was on the advice of the people governing them and there was a sinister motive behind that album.”8

  But with the new year looming ahead, George was clearly in the minority opinion about the experience that they had just shared. For his part, Ringo felt very differently than his producer, believing the record to be a sign of a new Beatles artistic renaissance: “As a band member, I’ve always felt The White Album was better than Sgt. Pepper because by the end it was more like a real group again. There weren’t so many overdubs like on Pepper. With all those orchestras and whatnot, we were virtually a session group on our own album.” From his vantage point, Harrison seconded Starr’s position, observing that The White Album “felt more like a band recording together. There were a lot of tracks where we just played live.”9

  As it happened, Harrison and Starr were about to get their opportunity to feel like they were part of a working rock band again. On the morning of Thursday, January 2, 1969, the bandmates convened at Twickenham Studios’ massive soundstage to begin working on what would come to be known as the Get Back project. Originally, the band had planned to conduct rehearsals at Abbey Road, but they were unable to book space on such short notice. When they arrived at Twickenham that morning, they were rehearsing on the very same soundstage where Richard Lester had shot A Hard Day’s Night some five years earlier.

  For George, the idea of “getting back” to the Beatles’ roots and taking a new approach to their recording practices was an idea worth pursuing. “The boys were seeking ideas for a new project,” George wrote. “We all talked about it, and someone came up with an idea to put on a live show of new songs which had never been heard before. Live recordings always featured hits that people knew, but this idea was to rehearse and develop a number of new songs and then perform them for the first time live—and make that performance the album. I thought it was a terrific idea.” But even from the outset, George could glimpse the challenges inherent in the band’s latest gambit: “The problem was that indoor venues in Britain were all too small for them by then,” he later wrote. “They also wanted to make the album in January and February, and you could not do an outside show in Britain when it was freezing cold.” But at the same time, they didn’t have many options outside of the United Kingdom either. “If they had gone to the States,” George reasoned, “they would have lost one half percent of their royalties and they didn’t want to do that. So we had some absurd ideas, like going to Tunisia and taking a lot of fans with us.”10

  As for the album itself, Martin was excited about the novel opportunity to produce a live album of original material. Lennon, in particular, was enamored with the idea of presenting the Beatles in their rawest form in comparison to albums like Sgt. Pepper, which was the express result of layers of painstaking production. As George later recalled, “John was still very determined that it should be a live album. He said that there were to be no echoes, no overdubs, and none of my ‘jiggery-pokery,’” and “if they didn’t get the song right the first time, they’d record it again and again until they did.” As if to drive his point home, John explained his perspective in the starkest possible terms, telling George, “I don’t want any of your production shit. We want this to be an honest album,” by which the Beatle meant “I don’t want any editing. I don’t want any overdubbing. It’s got to be like it is. We just record the song and that’s it.” For his part, Martin was perplexed by Lennon’s notion of honesty, later remarking, “I assumed all their albums had been honest.” With the Beatles working outside of EMI Studios, their regular production team was unavailable. McCartney suggested that the Beatles hire twenty-six-year-old Glyn Johns to serve as balance engineer. Having worked on records by the Rolling Stones, the Small Faces, Traffic, and the Steve Miller Band, Johns had already accrued an impressive resume. Not surprisingly, Johns didn’t hesitate to accept the Beatles’ offer. “When you have a hit group like the Beatles,” wrote George, you “jump at the chance. Glyn Johns was a very good engineer and producer, and he was very helpful and he got on well with the boys.”11

  For George, the idea of working with Michael Lindsay-Hogg and Glyn Johns seemed like a welcome change from his recent bout producing The White Album. With a film crew on hand to document the band’s preparation for the planned concert, Lindsay-Hogg developed a rough concept, which Martin and the director variously described as cinéma vérité and audio vérité in reference to the notion of capturing the truth behind the Beatles’ video and audio representations. While Martin embraced the concept of filming the band’s rehearsals as they unfolded, Lindsay-Hogg had something even more extreme in mind. Hoping to capture the brute, gritty truth of the authenticity of the Beatles preparing for the live concert, he deployed a pair of Nagra tape recorders and two cameramen in order to document, through audio and video means, nearly every nuance of the group’s experience at Twickenham. In order to propel his subjects into action, Lindsay-Hogg acted as a shameless participant in the proceedings, provoking the group into a series of exchanges about their plans for the live performance and the evolving nature of the songs being rehearsed.

  Martin thought that the concept was “brilliant” and that in many ways the new album might energize the band and challenge them to explore new frontiers of recording artistry. And at first, even Lennon’s jabs about “jiggery-pokery” and Martin’s “production shit” didn’t seem to bother the Beatles’ producer, who was eager to learn how the new long-player would unfold under such conditions, as well as after many years of working at EMI Studios. But for George, it wasn’t meant to be—at least not in the way that he expected things to unfold. Years later, he would claim that, given the Beatles’ stated wish to minimize the amount of production on their new project, he purposefully stayed away for several of the sessions, which was a surprise to Johns, who was with the group on their very first day of production at Twickenham. “After they had finally run through the first song a couple of times,” Glyn later recalled, “Paul turned to me and asked what I thought they should do for an intro. I nearly fell over in shock. I thought I had been employed to just engineer and here I am in the first hour of rehearsals being asked for my input into the arrangement.” And that’s when it hit him: “It was only then that I realized that George Martin was not to be involved. I assumed that was because it was a live recording and did not require the normal studio production associated with their records.” For Johns, not working with the producer who had made the Beatles’ name was a source of embarrassment. “A couple of days into the project I asked Paul where George Martin was, only to be told that they had decided not to use him.”12

  For Martin, this new normal in the Beatles’ world was a terrible blow. But he was also troubled by th
eir apparent inability to find and sustain their mettle in the film studio’s environs. During his sporadic visits to Twickenham, George could tell that something wasn’t quite right with the new project. Things started out well enough, with the Beatles rehearsing rudimentary versions of Lennon’s bluesy new composition “Don’t Let Me Down,” Harrison’s meditative “All Things Must Pass,” and a fresh pair of rock ’n’ roll tunes by McCartney, the bluesy “I’ve Got a Feeling” and the up-tempo “Two of Us,” which went under the working title of “On Our Way Home.” While the bevy of new tunes clearly demonstrated the seemingly unquenchable songwriting talent at the Beatles’ disposal, the bandmates themselves were complaining about Twickenham’s sterile recording atmosphere from the very first day. Like nearly all of the rehearsals during the Beatles’ fortnight at the soundstage, the proceedings were determined by the sporadic arrival of the bandmates, especially Lennon, who, along with Ono, would often be the last member to arrive on the scene. Lennon was particularly incensed about having to work under the watchful eyes and ears of Lindsay-Hogg’s production unit: “We couldn’t get into it,” he later remarked. “It was just a dreadful, dreadful feeling in Twickenham Studio, being filmed all the time. I just wanted them [the film crew] to go away. You couldn’t make music at eight in the morning or ten or whatever it was, in a strange place with people filming you and colored lights.”13

  In retrospect, John’s unhappy response to the conditions at Twickenham shouldn’t have been surprising given that the group had become used to working evening sessions at EMI Studios, and the sudden shift to daylight must have been understandably jarring. But as with The White Album, perception was everything in terms of characterizing the atmosphere associated with the Get Back project. For the former, Martin’s and Scott’s recollections were starkly different, with the engineer considering The White Album to be a joyous occasion. Similarly, Johns felt dramatically different than Martin about the Get Back session, which he remembered with a special fondness: “The whole mood was wonderful,” he later remarked. “There was all this nonsense going on at the time about the problems surrounding the group. . . . In fact, they were having a wonderful time and being incredibly funny. I didn’t stop laughing for six weeks.”14

  While Johns may have enjoyed the Beatles’ vibe at the Get Back sessions, Martin was experiencing something very different when he made his periodic visits to the Twickenham soundstage. As the days wore on, the bandmates had trouble focusing on the work at hand. Their malaise didn’t escape George’s notice. By the end of that first week, the producer realized that the sessions were “awful to do. We did take after take after take, and John would be asking me if take 67 was better than take 39.” To George’s mind, it was becoming increasingly clear that John was very “druggy,” that the hallucinogenic roller coaster that the Beatles had been riding since the spring of 1965 had taken a darker turn with John and Yoko. While Martin had generally kept his feelings about drug abuse to himself—working, as he had, for nearly twenty years in an industry that was rife with excess—he couldn’t help believing that artists like the Beatles “were creative enough without the drugs.” As the sessions continued, conversation was dominated by discussion about the location for the upcoming live performance, which the band planned to undertake, impractical as it may seem, by mid-January. Referring to the chaos and fanaticism of Beatlemania, Paul suggested that they could control their audience’s fanaticism by simply making a rule that no one could approach the stage. “Barbed wire might do the trick,” Martin joked. As for the performance itself, the bandmates initially considered a lavish concert at the Royal Albert Hall, with Apple recording artists Mary Hopkin and James Taylor on the bill, before settling, for a short while, on the comparatively intimate Roundhouse Theatre, the unofficial headquarters for London’s underground music scene. Other ideas included performing in a Roman amphitheater in North Africa or perhaps onboard a ship at sea or even by torchlight in the middle of the Sahara Desert. At one point, Lennon suggested, half jokingly, that a concert in an insane asylum might be more appropriate given the band’s recent spate of interpersonal problems. Ringo made it known on several occasions that he refused to go abroad, prompting Paul to tease the drummer that they would be forced to replace him with Jimmie Nicol. While Denis O’Dell suggested that they film the concert with the band performing in the middle of one of London’s renowned art museums, Yoko had become particularly intrigued by the avant-garde concept of the Beatles playing a concert before twenty thousand empty seats in order to signify “the invisible nameless everybody in the world.” In one instance, she even suggested that they reorient the documentary so as to film the Beatles’ personal activities, reality-television style, from dusk to dawn in their private homes. As Martin looked on, the group’s increasingly outrageous concert ideas began to wane rather precipitously, however, when Ono pointed out that “after 100,000 people in Shea Stadium, everything else sucks.”15

  George had to admit that Yoko had a point. And besides, in his view the innovative aspect of the live performance had almost nothing to do with the event’s outlandish circumstances but rather with the idea of recording a live album wholly composed of brand-new material. And at this point, they weren’t having very much luck in the songwriting department—the one element of their chemistry that had seemingly never failed them. In increasing fits of creative frustration, the Beatles began taking stabs at their prefame rock ’n’ roll repertoire—and often poorly at that, as they suffered through one false start after another in their attempt to recall the old songs. In this way, the Get Back sessions increasingly found the Beatles manically improvising one song after another, including a wide range of classic rock ’n’ roll numbers like “Shake, Rattle, and Roll,” “Johnny B. Goode,” “Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” “Lucille,” “You Really Got a Hold on Me,” “Mailman, Bring Me No More Blues,” “Little Queenie,” “Rock and Roll Music,” “Blue Suede Shoes,” and “Be-Bop-a-Lula,” among a host of others. For his part, Martin could only look on in dismay, occasionally breaking into snickers of exasperation as the bandmates meandered through spates of old chestnuts under Johns’s supervision while failing to generate anything in the way of new material. Worse yet, at other junctures, the Beatles fell back on their own catalog, at one point playing a ragtag version of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” with Martin lending a dispirited tambourine in accompaniment. By this juncture, George was beginning to realize that his only move was to retreat further and further into the background. During The White Album sessions, he had maintained his composure, with his daily newspapers and his chocolate as his signal diversion. But with the Get Back project, “I kind of withdrew more and more,” he later wrote. “I was getting fed up.”16

  As for the Beatles themselves, as January rolled along, they seemed increasingly unable to concentrate on the project at hand, with John and Paul reeling off occasional guitar riffs or mindlessly playing fragments of songs, mostly oldies from their days in Hamburg. Johns may have felt elated to be producing the biggest band in the world, but Martin recognized the bandmates’ current state for what it was, a growing interpersonal and chemically induced nightmare. At this point, they were even having trouble coming up with new material—the Beatles’ superpower if ever there were one. Fed up with being the band’s solitary cheerleader, the normally well-mannered Paul became unhinged during the January 7 session: “We’ve been very negative since Mr. Epstein passed away,” he remarked. “I don’t see why any of you, if you’re not interested, get yourselves into this. What’s it for? It can’t be for the money. Why are you here?” Worse yet, he attributed the band’s inability to move forward creatively as the ruinous work of their own suffocating nostalgia: “When we do get together, we just talk about the fucking past. We’re like OAPs [old-age pensioners], saying, ‘Do you remember the days when we used to rock?’ Well, we’re here now, we can still do it.” If nothing else, Paul’s angry words of wisdom served to revive his flagging songwriting partner, who seemed to be unable to
rouse the necessary creative energy to generate new material. When Paul finally confronted him about his inability to produce new compositions beyond “Don’t Let Me Down,” John responded with his classic defensive posture, a combination of sarcasm and petulance:

  Paul: Haven’t you written anything?

  John: No.

  Paul: We’re going to be facing a crisis.

  John: When I’m up against the wall, Paul, you’ll find that I’m at my best.

  Paul: I wish you’d come up with the goods.

 

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