By early March, Lennon and McCartney had set their sights on completing and releasing a Get Back long-player. As Glyn later recalled, “I got a call from John and Paul asking me to meet them at Abbey Road. I walked into the control room and was confronted by a large pile of multitrack tapes. They told me that they had reconsidered my concept for the album that I had presented to them in January and had decided to let me go ahead and mix and put it together from all the recording that we had done at Savile Row. I was thrilled at the idea and asked when they would be available to start. They replied that they were quite happy for me to do it on my own as it was my idea. I left feeling elated that they would trust me to put the album together without them, but soon realized that the real reason had to be that they had lost interest in the project. I went straight into the mix room at Olympic and spent the next three nights mixing and editing the album and, having finished, presented it to the band at the session we had at Olympic the following day.”7
When Johns played back his new creation for the group’s inspection, it was soundly rejected. In all likelihood, Johns had taken Lennon and McCartney’s notion of “getting back” to the raw rock ’n’ roll sound of their roots far too literally. Brimming with studio banter and false starts, Johns’s version of the album was clearly designed to seem rough and spontaneous in contrast with the band’s previous LPs. If nothing else, Johns had succeeded in adhering to Lennon’s dictum against the slick “jiggery-pokery” of professional studio production.
As if to compound Martin’s pain, the Beatles released their follow-up single to “Hey Jude” on April 11 in the form of “Get Back” backed with “Don’t Let Me Down.” For EMI, it was difficult to account for who had produced the record—was it Martin or Johns or both?—so the release pointedly didn’t include a production credit. Attributed to “the Beatles with Billy Preston,” the single may not have featured George’s usual byline, but it succeeded in continuing “the roll,” which was alive and well at five consecutive number-one singles on its way to a global commercial onslaught. Likely referencing the bandmates’ desire for a raw sound, the “Get Back” backed with “Don’t Let Me Down” single was advertised, borrowing a phrase from McCartney, as “The Beatles as Nature Intended.”
As if George needed any further cues, the group’s latest record served as an obvious reminder that he was no longer on the Beatles’ radar in quite the same fashion that he had been as recently as the Magical Mystery Tour project and, on a good day, The White Album. Still trying to meet Lennon and McCartney’s vague expectations for the new LP, Johns had shared his Get Back mixes with Martin, and the elder producer assisted him with compiling yet another version of the record. Working with Johns at Olympic, Martin tried to “put together an album which captured this documentary approach and included their [the Beatles’] mistakes and interjections.” But still, George knew that even though “the sessions were over, not one of those titles was perfect. They needed more work on them, but John wouldn’t have that at all. So in the end because EMI wanted something, Glyn Johns and I put together a kind of cinéma vérité album,” just as they had conceived back in early January. Having adopted the title Get Back, Don’t Let Me Down, and 12 Other Songs, the Beatles went so far as to commission Angus McBean to shoot a cover photograph for the album. On May 13, the group convened at EMI House, where McBean positioned the bandmates in the same fashion as they had appeared six years earlier for the cover of Please Please Me. In retrospect, it was a clever idea—a means of bookending their career, as well as underscoring their intent to return to the unadulterated rock ’n’ roll sound that brought them fame and fortune in the first place. And in many ways, that was Johns’s error back in March, and Johns and Martin’s misinterpretation of the Beatles—namely, Lennon’s and McCartney’s motives—in much the same fashion in May. Perhaps they weren’t so disdainful of George’s glossy production after all.8
For his part, George wasn’t surprised by the group’s inability to embrace Get Back and release another album. As with its predecessor, Martin and Johns’s latest mix was “warts and all, with the mistakes and count-ins and breakdowns and so on. That was the album. I thought it was a write-off. I didn’t hear any more, and I thought that was the end of our days. I thought, ‘Well, that’s the finish of the Beatles. What a shame.’” As it happened, George wasn’t very far off the mark. First there was Allen Klein, who had made good on his boast to Johns back in 1968 that he would one day manage the Beatles. At the time, Johns flatly informed Klein that he was “bonkers.” But within a matter of months, the brash American businessman had succeeded in wooing Lennon, Harrison, and Starr to the fold, only to be thwarted temporarily by McCartney, who wanted his new in-laws, father and son attorneys Lee and John Eastman, to handle his affairs. Outvoted by the other Beatles, McCartney had little choice but to ultimately assent to Klein’s management, even as he refused to sign their new contract. During this same period, Apple Corps’ woes had begun to spiral further out of control, only to be compounded by Lennon and McCartney’s powerlessness to purchase Northern Songs when Dick James placed it on the open market. As historian Brian Southall has observed, the Beatles were confronted with a perfect storm in the form of Apple’s financial turmoil coupled with the Beatles being cash poor at the worst possible moment. “Dick James was of the old school and had had enough of it,” Southall wrote. “He saw the Lennon and McCartney partnership falling apart and he and his partner Charles Silver, who founded the company with him, decided to sell their stake in Northern Songs. They sold their shares to Lord Grade at ATV. Dick James didn’t tell the Beatles what he was doing. He felt that they would never bid themselves as they were in disarray.”9
While Klein structured a new deal that would have allowed Lennon and McCartney to maintain their holdings in Northern Songs, it eventually began to collapse when Lennon learned that McCartney had been secretly buying up shares of their publishing behind his back. At the same time, they recognized that their artistic freedom would be mitigated by faceless businessmen in suits, as opposed to the homegrown organization that Brian Epstein had created with NEMS. “John Lennon wasn’t going to be told what to do by ‘fat arses,’” Southall later observed. John “walked out of the room and that was the end of their bid.” The business consortium that Epstein and Martin had established back in 1963 with James, one of Martin’s oldest friends, was suddenly in tatters, leaving the Beatles’ own partnership in the direst of straits.10
And so it was a genuine surprise for Martin when McCartney called him later that spring and announced that the Beatles were going to make another record. “Would you like to produce it?” he asked George. “Only if you let me produce it the way we used to,” Martin countered. “We do want to do that,” said Paul. “John included?” asked George. “Yes,” Paul replied. “Honestly.” That was all the assurance that George needed. In truth, there was very little that he wouldn’t do for them. The Beatles had been the making of him, and he knew it. But he had been the making of them, too, and that meant he was emotionally involved in their destiny, just as he had been back in November 1962 when he threw his lot in with them behind the strength of their first single and the great promise of “Please Please Me,” the composition that they had reconfigured to his specifications. As for this new Beatles album, George knew that it would require a bit of juggling to pull off the scheduling; his commitments were stacked up for the next several weeks. But as it turned out, the Beatles were ready and eager to regain the mettle that they had revealed during their heyday. They would show George Martin yet.11
As if to make good on their new energy and commitment, in short order Lennon and McCartney also talked Geoff Emerick back into the fold, via Peter Brown, as they made preparations for recording a new composition titled “The Ballad of John and Yoko.” A song about the notorious couple’s international escapades, much of the tune concerned the hijinks surrounding their recent marriage; just as Paul and Linda Eastman did, John and Yoko Ono had enjoyed a March 1969
wedding. Recorded under the working subtitle of “They’re Gonna Crucify Me,” the song’s production was supervised by George on Monday, April 14, in EMI’s Studio 3. With Harrison traveling abroad in the United States and Ringo still working on the set of The Magic Christian, the Beatles’ personnel was limited to John and Paul. While Lennon handled the lead and rhythm guitar parts, McCartney provided the song’s rhythm section. In addition to his pounding bass lines and assorted piano flourishes, Paul kept a steady beat on Ringo’s Ludwig Hollywoods. McCartney achieved a distinctive cracking drum sound courtesy of Emerick, who placed microphones both above and below the snare. In contrast with their recent, lengthy bouts in the studio, Lennon and McCartney recorded the song in eleven workmanlike takes. For his part, Emerick was overwhelmed with relief: “The two Beatles seemed remarkably relaxed, despite the horror stories I had heard about the rows and bad feelings engendered by the [Get Back] sessions,” he later wrote. “On this one day, they reverted to being two old school chums, all the nastiness of recent months swept under the rug and replaced by the sheer joy of making music together.”12
For Emerick, the whole experience had been a whirlwind. Only days before, he had been offered the opportunity to oversee the renovation of Apple Studios in the wake of Magic Alex’s shenanigans. Geoff had jumped at the chance to leave EMI and Alan Stagge behind. As it happened, he was part of a mass engineer exodus that also included Ken Scott, who took a job at Trident, and Peter Vince, who went to work for Norrie Paramor, George Martin’s old rival. In a moment that surely resonated with Martin, Emerick later recalled the day he walked out of EMI Studios with Vince. “Despite the fact that we had worked on some of the biggest-selling albums of all time,” he wrote, “no one said thank you, no one said goodbye. No one said anything, in fact.”13
A few days later, Martin was back in Studio 3, where he recorded Harrison’s bouncing, electric “Old Brown Shoe,” a composition that the quiet Beatle had demoed back in February with Johns in the producer’s seat. Having captured a series of overdubs for “Old Brown Shoe” on Wednesday, April 16, complete with a nifty jangly part from McCartney, Martin turned to another Harrison composition from February, a romantic ballad titled “Something,” which Harrison had debuted for Chris Thomas during The White Album sessions. “It took my breath away,” said Martin, “mainly because I never thought that George could do it—it was a tremendous work and so simple.” Rehearsed with the tape running, the bandmates recorded a basic track for “Something” that included Harrison’s electric guitar, McCartney’s bass, Starr’s drums, and Martin’s piano. For the producer, it was a revelation to be playing on a Beatles track again when just scant days earlier he had all but given up on the notion of working with them in any capacity.14
On Friday of that same week, Chris Thomas stood in for Martin, completing work with the bandmates on “Old Brown Shoe” before turning back to Lennon’s “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” one of the February Trident recordings with Glyn Johns. As it turned out, “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” would be the first track recorded for the new Beatles’ long-player. Later that same evening, Thomas supervised a session, with Jeff Jarratt and John Kurlander working as engineers, in which Harrison and Lennon recorded layer after layer of lacerating electric guitars for the song’s Wagnerian finale. “John and George went into the far left-hand corner of Number 2 to overdub those guitars,” Jarratt recalled. “They wanted a massive sound so they kept tracking and tracking, over and over.” By this point, the Beatles had rebounded from their winter funk with a vengeance. For the balance of April 1969, they worked several more dates with Thomas in which they continued working on the loose ends of the new compositions that they had debuted in recent months, including McCartney’s “Oh! Darling” and Starr’s “Octopus’s Garden.”15
As Martin continued working to disentangle his schedule from other projects in advance of producing the new Beatles long-player, Thomas carried out yeoman’s duty on his AIR colleague’s behalf. During the Saturday, April 26, session, he recalled being “thrown into the deep end. George Martin informed me that he wouldn’t be available. I can’t remember word for word what he said, but it was something like ‘There will be one Beatle there, fine. Two Beatles, great. Three Beatles, fantastic. But the minute the four of them are there that is when the inexplicable charismatic thing happens, the special magic no one has been able to explain.’” Sure enough, Thomas later recalled, that inexplicable thing was present and accounted for—and arguably for the first time in nearly two years. Later that same evening, Richard Langham worked a Beatles session for the first time since the early 1960s, when he had departed Abbey Road to work abroad. With Kurlander assisting, Langham conducted a remix for “The Ballad of John and Yoko” in advance of the song’s release as the next Beatles single.16
Meanwhile, Martin was working at breakneck speed with Cilla Black, whose career had continued at full throttle since the debut of her blockbuster television series. Together, George and Cilla were making good on the opportunity to further consolidate her fame, recording a pair of hit singles and putting the finishing touches on a new album in a matter of only a few months. The first single, “Surround Yourself with Sorrow” backed with “London Bridge,” had catapulted into the number-three spot on the UK charts first, following closely by “Conversations” backed with “Liverpool Lullaby,” which also scored a top-ten hit. As for the long-player, George and Cilla had been plying away at the new album, to be titled Surround Yourself with Cilla, since late 1968, with George routining songs and scoring the orchestrations along the way. With EMI having scheduled a firm release date for the LP in late May, George had no time to lose.
With Glyn Johns in tow, Martin rejoined the Beatles at Olympic Studios on Monday, May 5, when they took up Harrison’s exquisite “Something” for additional overdubs, including Harrison’s electric guitar, which he filtered through a Leslie speaker, and McCartney’s fluid bass work. By Tuesday, May 6, a framework had begun to emerge in terms of the new album’s structure, with many of the early tracks already slated for side one of the LP, a distinction that was necessitated by the musical suite that had been conceived for side two of the record. The notion of a pop opera was very much in vogue during this period in popular-music history, as evidenced by works from the Who (“A Quick One While He’s Away”), Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention (Absolutely Free), Keith West (“Excerpt from a Teenage Opera”), and the Small Faces (“Happiness Stan”), among others. That same month, as the Beatles began working on an extended suite of their own, the Who released Tommy, the album that would come to define the rock opera as a musical form. Hence, George and the Beatles were not acting as trendsetters, which was typically their wont, but rather as trendfollowers. But given that Martin and McCartney were highly competitive—witness McCartney’s clear motive to one-up the Who’s “I Can See for Miles” with the even more raucous, explosive “Helter Skelter”—the idea of besting the field with their own “huge medley” or “the long one,” as it came to be known among EMI staffers, was temptation enough.
As always, Martin welcomed the opportunity to expand the Beatles’ generic considerations. “I wanted to get John and Paul to think more seriously about their music,” said George. “There would be nothing wrong with making a complete movement of several songs, and having quotes back from other songs in different keys. And even running one song into another contrapuntally, but thinking of those songs in a formal classical way.” To this end, George pointedly “tried to instruct them in the art of classical music, and explain to them what sonata form was. Paul was all for experimenting like that.” And at the time, apparently so was John. As the Beatles began working in earnest to accrue new material, Lennon could barely contain his excitement during an interview with NME. “Paul and I are now working on a kind of song montage that we might do as one piece on one side,” he remarked. “We’ve got about two weeks to finish the whole thing, so we’re really working on it.” During the May 6 session, Martin s
upervised thirty-six takes of a complex new composition called “You Never Give Me Your Money,” an obvious reference to the bandmates’ ongoing financial and legal woes associated with Apple Corps. With take thirty having been selected as the best, the song’s instrumentation featured McCartney’s piano and guide vocal, Lennon’s distorted Casino, Harrison’s chiming electric guitar filtered through a Leslie speaker, and Starr’s drums.17
On May 30, the bandmates released “The Ballad of John and Yoko” backed with “Old Brown Shoe.” To mark the occasion, Lennon and Ono celebrated the release in Room 1742 of Montreal’s Hôtel Reine-Elizabeth with one of their notorious “bed-ins” in which they deployed their celebrity as a vehicle for promoting world peace. That same weekend, John met with Timothy Leary, who asked the Beatle to compose a song based on the slogan for Leary’s 1970 California gubernatorial campaign, COME TOGETHER—JOIN THE PARTY! On June 1, John and Yoko famously recorded “Give Peace a Chance” in their bedclothes. Strumming his Jumbo, Lennon was joined on vocals by Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Murray the K, and Derek Taylor, among others. The embryo for the song had been born the day before, when Lennon told a reporter that “all we are saying is give peace a chance.” Meanwhile, with “The Ballad of John and Yoko” unseating the group’s own “Get Back” atop the UK charts, “the roll” now stood at six consecutive number ones, for a total of seventeen Beatles chart-toppers since 1963, an incredible feat that left Martin understandably chuffed—and certainly putting to rest any doubts about who held the upper hand in his rivalry with Norrie Paramor. Notably, “The Ballad of John and Yoko” was the first Beatles single released solely in stereo without the availability of a simultaneously released mono mix. Stereo’s domination among consumers had been on the rise since the early 1960s—with stereophonic sound being widely marketed to music fans as a richer, more satisfying aural experience. But in 1968, the tables began rapidly turning against monaural sound. In January of that year, a banner Billboard magazine headline trumpeted the format’s death, which it attributed to the major record manufacturers working in collusion to bring mono to its knees. For his part, George wasn’t bothered in the slightest. Despite being admittedly very “twelve-inch” in his thinking, he had long preferred the stereo format to monaural sound’s lack of definition. As he later recalled, “I like to sit right in front of the desk, right within the triangle of the optimum stereo. So that you get the real feeling of sitting in a theatre or cinema, then shutting your eyes and hearing things. One of the fascinating things I used to find was when you panned something from left to right, it didn’t just go straight across, it goes up in an arc above you. It was like going through a proscenium arch in a theatre. And you could then see—very vividly in your mind—what the sounds were doing as a stereo picture.”18
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