Arguably the most triumphant week of their recording career—as the improbable moment when they wrenched victory from the jaws of defeat—George and the Beatles’ week began somewhat dismally with yet more unfocused studio jamming, as well as a loose progress through a working repertoire that now included “Get Back” and “I’ve Got a Feeling.” They also attempted a new McCartney tune titled “Oh! Darling.” With Johns and Parsons working alongside Martin in the booth, “Get Back” began to shape up considerably across eighteen takes. At one point, Lennon parodied the song with a lighthearted bit of studio chatter, singing “Sweet Loretta Fart she thought she was a cleaner, / But she was a frying pan.” At the conclusion of “Oh! Darling,” John enjoyed a moment of unrestrained delight, announcing, “I’ve just heard that Yoko’s divorce has just gone through. Free at last!” On Tuesday, the Beatles finally seemed to rediscover their mettle, recording serviceable versions of “Get Back” and “Don’t Let Me Down.” Still caught up in the notion of getting back to their roots, the bandmates performed a ragged version of their first single, “Love Me Do,” the song that had started it all with Martin back in June 1962. They also tried their hand at their old Skiffle number, “The One After 909,” which they had last attempted in George’s company back on March 5, 1963. In addition to working on two demos featuring Preston, they rehearsed McCartney’s “Teddy Boy,” a midtempo composition that the songwriter had begun back in India. As George looked on, the Beatles engaged in studio chatter about the direction of their project, which still seemed to be uncertain. Was it, in fact, a documentary in advance of a concert or a new long-player, which raised the obvious question, should they be rehearsing or recording? All the while, Lindsay-Hogg’s crew kept filming away, strolling among the bandmates with their handheld cameras running. “We got used to it after a time,” George later wrote, “but all the rows that went on were filmed as well.”28
The next day, Martin, Johns, and the bandmates continued their unlikely progress toward unexpected greatness, with Lennon trying out a new composition titled “I Want You,” which would later sport the subtitle “She’s So Heavy.” But as was their wont during this period, the recording devolved into yet another oldies jam, with the quintet lumbering their way through Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away” and “Mailman, Bring Me No More Blues,” as well as “Bésame Mucho,” another throwback to their first session with Martin back in 1962. Things took a decidedly different turn on Thursday, January 30, when the quintet made good on Lindsay-Hogg’s concept of a rooftop finale, with Martin and the group making their way upstairs on a wintry, windy day to deliver the live performance that they had been pondering, in several different forms, since taping “Hey Jude” for Frost on Sunday back in September 1968. Even at that late moment, with Mal Evans and Neil Aspinall already having set up their gear up on the roof, the bandmates considered scuttling their director’s plans at the last minute. As Lindsay-Hogg later recalled, “We planned to do it about 12:30 to get the lunchtime crowds. They didn’t agree to do it as a group until about twenty to one. Paul wanted to do it and George [Harrison] didn’t. Ringo would go either way. Then John said, ‘Oh fuck, let’s do it,’ and they went up and did it.”29
As Martin later recalled, “At the end of the day, they said, ‘Let’s go and give a performance after all. Let’s go do one on the roof.’ So they set up the equipment one very cold winter’s day, and at lunchtime started this tremendous noise from the roof in Savile Row. All the neighbors and passersby were asking what the hell was going on, and it was the Beatles broadcasting to London.” With nearly a dozen cameramen working on the roof, Johns observed the proceedings on the roof, leaving Martin six floors below in the basement studio, where he manned the converted eight-track equipment courtesy of Abbey Road. The Beatles themselves were quite a sight. With Preston working his Fender Rhodes electric piano, a bearded McCartney strapped on his Höfner violin bass for the occasion, while Lennon, having donned Ono’s fur coat to fight off the wind, played his Casino. While Harrison worked his Rosewood Telecaster, an orange rain-coated Ringo played his new drum kit, a set of Ludwig Hollywoods with a maple finish. While the rooftop concert was by no means perfect—it suffered from the same stops and starts that had plagued the band throughout the month—they managed to storm their way through five splendid numbers that day, including “Get Back,” “Don’t Let Me Down,” “I’ve Got a Feeling,” “One After 909,” and “Dig a Pony.” Finally, after some forty-two minutes above the streetscape, they concluded the show with a spirited reprise of “Get Back,” followed by John’s parting words to the assembled crowd below: “I’d like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves,” he remarked. “I hope we passed the audition.”30
While the Beatles’ performance proved to be a triumph given its seeming unlikeliness and the band’s January malaise, the rooftop concert hadn’t passed without any hiccups. For George, the most pressing dilemma had been the ominous arrival of a squad of London bobbies, who rode down Savile Row in one of Scotland Yard’s conspicuous Black Maria vans. When the police had been called to quell the noise, George was convinced “we’d all end up in jail, myself included.” Dave Harries remembered the moment when the Beatles’ producer learned about the arrival of the Black Maria van. “George Martin went as white as a sheet,” he recalled, “which I thought was hilarious.” From Lindsay-Hogg’s perspective, the bobbies’ appearance was no laughing matter. “We all thought we would probably be arrested up on the roof,” Lindsay-Hogg recalled. “I was more nervous than the Beatles were because I was an American and I thought I’d be deported or something.” For his part, Ringo was elated, later remarking, “I always felt let down about the police. I was playing away and I thought, ‘Oh, great! I hope they drag me off!’ I wanted the cops to drag me off—‘Get off those drums!’—because we were being filmed and it would have looked really great, kicking the cymbals and everything.” But it was not to be. Although Beatles lore and Lindsay-Hogg’s eventual documentary depicted the police officers as being determined to end the concert prematurely, the truth was far less dramatic and eminently predictable. As Harries recalled, one of the bobbies agreed to allow the concert to continue as long as they could watch: “When they found out who it was,” said Harries, “they didn’t want to stop it.”31
After the concert, George and the bandmates were ecstatic, feeling the adrenaline rush of the moment. “They played wonderfully,” George later wrote, clearly relieved by the Beatles’ high-energy performance and most especially by their ability to rebound from their unsettling month at Twickenham and Apple Studios only to produce a concert for the ages. “That was one of the greatest and most exciting days of my life,” recalled Alan Parsons. “It was just unbelievable.” As they rejoined Martin in the basement down below, the bandmates and their producer can be heard reveling in the excitement of the moment, with Martin imagining a “whole squadron” of speaker-laden helicopters broadcasting their output to the city and Harrison fantasizing about the Beatles uniting London’s rock bands in the spirit of a singular, communal purpose:
Martin: It’s come off actually much better than I thought it would.
Lennon: Yes, just the whole scene is fantastic!
Martin: As Michael was saying, this is a very good dry run for something else too, apart from the value of its own as it stands.
Harrison: Yeah, I think for taking over London.
Lennon: Try the Hilton tomorrow.
Martin: The idea is, we’ll have a whole squadron of helicopters flying over London with loud, mounted speakers underneath them, you see.
Lennon: That’s fantastic, yeah.
Harrison: And every rock group in the world, in London, all on top of the buildings playing the same tunes.
In many ways, the rooftop concert performed a similar function for George and the Beatles. As they made their way downstairs, with January 1969 rapidly fading into their rearview mirror, they felt, if only for the moment, as if they could do anything.32
19
Come Together
* * *
AND FOR ANOTHER DAY at least, the magic of the rooftop concert held sway. On January 31, George Martin, Glyn Johns, and the bandmates effectively concluded the principal recording sessions for the project with the production of a trio of first-rate McCartney compositions, including “Two of Us,” “Let It Be,” and “The Long and Winding Road,” three numbers that had been left off of the rooftop set list. While the session produced outstanding performances vis-à-vis the relatively new compositions, it also demonstrated that the Beatles were still susceptible to aimless jamming, as witnessed by an unruly, ragtag version of “Lady Madonna.” In spite of their occasional lack of focus, the bandmates managed to capture “Two of Us” in an economical three takes, “The Long and Winding Road” in seven takes, and “Let It Be” in nine takes. For the latter song, the Beatles finally gave up on ridding the project of any of Martin’s “production shit.” After selecting the best take of “Let It Be,” McCartney begrudgingly assented to overdubbing his lead vocal, with Lennon exclaiming to Johns, “Okay, let’s track it. You bounder! You cheat!”1
With several new songs in advanced states of production—including “Dig a Pony,” “Dig It,” “Don’t Let Me Down,” “For You Blue,” “Get Back,” “I’ve Got a Feeling,” “Let It Be,” “The Long and Winding Road,” “Maggie Mae,” “The One After 909,” and “Two of Us”—the Beatles had the makings of a new long-player on their hands. But any further progress on the Get Back project would need to be delayed, if only briefly, while Ringo took a break to join Peter Sellers on the set of The Magic Christian. Meanwhile, Johns and Billy Preston were traveling stateside. During this same period, Harrison was felled by a bout of tonsillitis, which left him in need of surgery along with a requisite hospital stay and recuperation.
On Saturday, February 22, the bandmates reconvened to work on their new project at Trident Studios with Johns. But then it happened again that Martin was the odd man out and far more ignominiously than at the beginning of January. In spite of everything George had done to help bring the Get Back project to fruition, especially in terms of outfitting Apple Studios to professional recording standards, he had been “included out,” to borrow his own words from 1965 when describing his treatment at the hands of director Richard Lester during the composition of the soundtrack for Help! For the veteran producer and the Beatles’ elder statesman, it was mind-boggling. Martin had honorably ceded Johns the requisite space to work with the Beatles, had modulated his own self-interest in an effort to elevate the needs of his clients over his own, and now he was back at square one as far as the Fab Four were concerned. For Martin, it would have been understandable to conclude that the Beatles were simply done with him at this point. Perhaps they simply didn’t have the courage to tell him that they no longer wanted to retain him as their producer.
But fortunately for George, there was plenty of AIR business to occupy his time. For the past few years, he and his partners had been raising capital to build a recording studio of their own. The idea of owning their own production made perfect sense for a variety of reasons. First, an AIR facility would greatly mitigate their expenses associated with recording, and second—and perhaps most importantly—studio fees would represent a potentially lucrative and regular revenue stream to supplement their income. For the past several years, Martin and his partners had been working out of the Park Street offices and shuttling among London’s premier studios—Abbey Road, Trident, Olympic, Decca, and Chappell, among others—where they bought recording time for their clients. From George’s perspective, this was simply no way to do business—and certainly not for the long run as far as AIR was concerned: “We had to rent whatever studio was available and suitable for the particular recording,” George later wrote. “The more work we got, the more money was being spent on other people’s studios. It didn’t take a genius to work out that if we had our own studios the trend would be reversed—not only would that money not have to be paid out, but some might even start coming in. In addition, the company was enjoying an ever-increasing income from royalties, which was likely only to be fodder for the taxman. So it made sense for us to keep our belts tightened, not pay ourselves very high salaries, and plough back the money into our own company, quite legitimately, to finance the building of our own studios.” Having been stashing away a portion of their collective royalties since 1967, George and his colleagues were ready to break ground on their own facilities by early 1969.2
In addition to raising the necessary capital, the biggest challenge was finding a suitable location. Given London’s historically vexing real-estate market, it wasn’t easy, especially when factoring in George’s desire to land a spot in Central London. “Finally, I heard about the top of the Peter Robinson building at Oxford Circus,” he later wrote. “You certainly couldn’t get more central than that. Peter Robinson is one of the big old London multi-purpose department stores. Like many of them, it had at the top a huge restaurant—a banqueting-hall, in fact—in which the gentry had been wont to take their china tea, cucumber sandwiches and cakes after making their purchases. The gentry having been whittled away, or absorbed into a world of T-shirts and hamburgers, it had fallen into disuse, and for two years the store, which still occupies the building, had been trying to let the floor as offices. Lack of success in this enterprise was hardly surprising, as conversion would have cost a fortune. To walk into that place was to step back half a century into the high Edwardian era. It had a huge vaulted ceiling with neo-classical frescoes, marble columns, and kitchens at each end. It was enormous, and very tall.”3
To their good fortune, George and his partners were able to strike a sweet rental deal. But properly fitting out the studio presented a number of difficulties on its own. First up, George later recalled, was “the fact that we were looking directly down on one of the world’s busier traffic junctions. In addition, we were in a steel-framed building directly above three Underground railway lines (which today have become four, with the new Victoria Line). There were clearly going to be acoustic problems!” To remedy the attendant matters presented by their new space, George and his partners assembled a top-flight team, including their architects, Bill Rossell Orme and Jack Parsons, as well George’s old friends from EMI Studios, Keith Slaughter and Dave Harries, who had the enviable job of designing a cutting-edge recording studio with all of the latest gear. “After all,” said George, “we didn’t want to be obsolete before we started.” But the real coup, Martin later observed, was AIR’s hiring of Kenneth Shearer, the United Kingdom’s most revered acoustics expert. “He is the man who designed all those ‘flying saucers’ in the Albert Hall. The answer to the rumble up through the building from the Underground was drastic, and dramatic. The whole works—studios and control rooms—would be made completely independent of the main building. Essentially, a huge box was to be built inside the banqueting-hall, and mounted on acoustic mounts.”4
With Shearer having dealt with Oxford Street’s noise and ventilation challenges in one fell swoop, Orme presented a bid of £66,000 to bring the project home, estimating that the studio could be completed in a year. It was a steep price tag, to be sure, but one that George and his partners felt that they could accommodate, albeit with a little more belt-tightening. But “unfortunately, it didn’t end there,” George later recalled. “A few weeks later Bill Orme rang me to say: ‘I want you to come to a meeting. I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you.’ As I entered, all the experts were sitting round a table—14 of them: quantity surveyors, sub-contractors, architects, air-conditioning people and the rest. ‘You’d better sit down first,’ said Bill, ‘because I don’t want you to take the shock standing up.’” And what a shock it was. Orme’s revised estimate had come in at £110,000. Suddenly, George later joked, “I felt as if I were on the set of the film Mr. Standings Builds His Dream House; we had been trying to build AIR on a shoestring—and it seemed the string had just snapped. The whole business shook
me to the core.” After rounding up his partners for an emergency meeting later that same day, George laid bare the awful truth. But to his great relief, they shrugged their shoulders in grudging acceptance. The bigger risk had been going out on their own back in 1965 and leaving their record company homes behind. Why stop now? Throwing caution to the wind, as he had done so many times before, the always competitive Martin was ready and raring to go. Still, he recognized that it would be an enormous undertaking to stave off bankruptcy and build out the studio at the same time. “We had to strip our company to the bone, and were in what the jargon calls a ‘serious cash-flow situation’ for a while,” he later wrote. And he knew one thing for sure: as they finally broke ground on AIR Oxford Street, “the money was going out far more quickly than it was coming in.”5
Ironically, it was during this same period that EMI offered George his old job back. For Martin, there was never a real possibility that he would give up his independence and return to Parlophone, the subsidiary that he had slaved over to fight off its extinction and render it profitable. He was proud of how the once-disparaged “third label” had gone from also-ran status to one of the most successful brands in the world—and largely on the back of George and the Beatles’ unparalleled success. But still, when the offer came from managing director Len Wood, George enjoyed a laugh of recognition as he caught a glimpse of the salary, which came in at £25,000—more than double the amount that he had rejected back in 1965 before leaving EMI and founding AIR. And to think that his only mission in the mid-1960s had been to force the record conglomerate to provide him with a few paltry residuals for his world-class efforts. In 1965, an offer of £25,000 might very well have kept him in EMI’s employ. But four years later, he barely gave it a second thought. Clearly, Wood and EMI would always remain tone deaf in terms of understanding the ways in which Martin ticked, about the role of profit sharing and individual accomplishment in his professional makeup. That February, George arrived at another crossroads when he and United Artists ended their long-term deal by mutual agreement. The British Invasion boon that had resulted in steady sales for George’s easy-listening recordings was no longer in vogue. But all of that was behind him now—EMI, United Artists, an entire era, really—and it was increasingly apparent that the Beatles were behind him, too. They had been working sporadically of late with Glyn Johns at Trident, where they were recording numerous takes for Lennon’s “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” one of the songs that they had debuted at Apple Studios.6
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