Sound Pictures

by Kenneth Womack

  Abbey Road debuted at number one on the UK charts, eventually holding the top position for a total of seventeen weeks. In June 1970, the Beatles’ manager Allen Klein announced that Abbey Road had sold five million copies in the United States alone, an incredible feat—even by the Beatles’ lofty standards. Even EMI Studios was not immune to the LP’s runaway success. Within a matter of months, the facility had become synonymous with the album, and EMI Studios was rechristened as Abbey Road Studios in 1970. As for the album’s embarrassment of riches, critics and consumers alike lauded Harrison’s “Something” as a standout cut from the album; Martin and the group agreed, uniformly citing it as their favorite Abbey Road track. Released on October 6 as a double A-sided 45 rpm record with “Come Together,” the single marked Harrison’s first and only A-side with the Beatles. Undoubtedly hampered by the album’s runaway success, “Something” backed with “Come Together” topped out at number four on the UK charts, with both sides winging their way to the toppermost of the poppermost of Billboard’s Hot 100. Alas, this meant that “the roll” had been ended in the United Kingdom once again. But if the single’s also-ran status slipped George Martin’s notice at the time, it would have been understandable. In the few short months since they had completed work on Abbey Road, things had changed very precipitously in George and the bandmates’ universe.

  Just six days before Abbey Road’s release, everything had finally unraveled. During a September 20 meeting at Apple, Allen Klein had secured McCartney’s signature, along with the other Beatles’, save Harrison’s, on a new contract with Capitol. While McCartney had his reservations about Klein’s management, the new rate called for the Beatles to take home an incredible 25 percent of their US retail sales per unit. Klein’s gambit was simple: if Capitol didn’t pony up, the Beatles wouldn’t record for them again. But as it turned out, they wouldn’t be recording for anyone. Later during that same meeting, Lennon blurted out that he wanted a “divorce” from the band. As McCartney recalled, “I didn’t really know what to say. We had to react to him doing it; he had control of the situation. I remember him saying, ‘It’s weird this, telling you I’m leaving the group, but in a way it’s very exciting.’ It was like when he told Cynthia he was getting a divorce. He was quite buoyed up by it, so we couldn’t really do anything: ‘You mean leaving?’ So that’s the group, then. . . . It was later, as the fact set in, that it got really upsetting.” As it happened, Harrison wouldn’t sign the contract until a few days later. He was in Cheshire, visiting his ailing mother, so the Apple meeting wouldn’t be the last time that all four Beatles were together. As it turned out, that had already happened back on Friday, August 22, at John and Yoko’s Tittenhurst Park estate, where the bandmates had gathered for a photo shoot only a few days after working out the running order for Abbey Road.2

  At the end of the Apple meeting, everyone had been sworn to secrecy given the renegotiated American contract in the offing, not to mention the upcoming release of the new long-player. There was simply too much at stake. And anyway, Paul reasoned, why not give John space to change his mind and return to the fold? The Beatles wouldn’t really be over if nobody bothered to announce it as a point of fact. For Martin, the only possible solace involved the production of Abbey Road. The Get Back project “was a very uncomfortable time. I was losing control of the boys and they were losing control of themselves,” he later remarked. “I thought it was the end of everything and so I was quite happily surprised when they asked me to make another album with them.” To his way of thinking, George’s gambit of producing the new LP “like the old days” had made all the difference. “They wanted me to exert control the way I did in the Pepper days. So I did, and Abbey Road proved to be a very happy album. They’d been disliking each other and having punch-ups, but now they came together and collaborated very well. I was very pleased that the group went out on a note of harmony and not one of discord.” And on a personal note, George had been delighted with the symphonic grandeur of the medley. For this reason alone, he later remarked, “There’s far more of me on Abbey Road than on any of their other albums.”3

  When George got wind of the Beatles’ impending “divorce,” he was happy to maintain the veil of secrecy. First, it wasn’t his story to tell, and second, he was, as usual, working at all hours on a wide range of projects in various states of production. By the autumn months of 1969, one of those projects included Hey Jude, a compilation hastily arranged for American release by Capitol in order to take advantage of the new contract that Klein had negotiated in September. Originally to be titled The Beatles Again, Hey Jude was a ten-song retrospective of the band’s singles and B-sides from 1964 through the present. In early December, Martin and Emerick conducted stereo remixing sessions for “Lady Madonna,” “Rain,” “Hey Jude,” and “Revolution” for inclusion on the Hey Jude compilation, which had been slated for a February 1970 release, complete with images from the Beatles’ last photo session at Tittenhurst Park in August 1969. Years later, this period in George’s life would be memorable for the pop-cultural phenomenon that would come to be known as the “Paul Is Dead” controversy. As press officer Tony Barrow later recalled, “There were rumors all through the years that one of the Beatles had been killed in a road crash or fallen off a cliff or whatever. Some of them were from fans ringing up the press so that the press would ring me and thereby find out where the Beatles were. If the press asked me if Paul was in a crash in Edinburgh, I would say, ‘No, he’s in Paris.’ After many unfounded rumors, things came to a head when a lot of people said they could prove that the Beatles themselves were admitting that Paul McCartney had died and had been replaced. It was a fascinating story, but totally without foundation.” But as far as Martin was concerned, the “Paul Is Dead” controversy became a personal matter when fans began to track down the Beatles’ producer at home. As George later recalled, “I started getting letters about how obvious it was that Paul was dead, and why were we covering it up? Paul was round at my place one afternoon, and we had a good laugh about it, but it wasn’t so funny to be woken in the middle of the night by some little girl in Wisconsin wanting to know if he was still alive.” Eventually, McCartney was forced to quell the rumors by agreeing to pose with his family for a November 1969 Life magazine cover with the headline, PAUL IS STILL WITH US.4

  On October 3, 1969, Martin was back at Abbey Road, where he carried out the finishing touches for his old friend Spike Milligan’s World Wildlife Fund benefit LP. The charity long-player had been slated for a December 12 release date with Regal Starline, an imprint of Regal Zonophone, which dated back to the 1930s and was distributed by Parlophone. Titled No One’s Gonna Change Our World, the LP’s name had been drawn by Milligan from the Beatles’ “Across the Universe,” which would finally make its debut as the lead track for the benefit record some twenty-two months after it had first been produced by Martin back in February 1968. “Across the Universe” had proven to be a coup for Milligan, all but guaranteeing that the charity album would create a genuine benefit for the World Wildlife Fund, which had been founded in 1961 to preserve the wilderness and address humanity’s impact on the natural environment. As it happened, George had been compiling the LP for some time. “There’s a lot of work involved in these charity albums,” he later wrote. “You have to get permissions from everybody concerned, organize the cover, and so on. In this case, I had to make the record as well.” Working with John Kurlander at Abbey Road, George compiled and banded No One’s Gonna Change Our World for release. He also adorned “Across the Universe” with introductory and concluding sound effects of birds flying and children playing—both of which had been gleaned from EMI’s trusty green sound-effects cabinet. Martin rounded out the album with a number of tracks by his stable of artists—both before and after AIR—including Cilla Black’s “What the World Needs Now Is Love” and Rolf Harris’s “Cuddly Old Koala.” In addition to spoken-word novelty tracks from Milligan and “Land of My Fathers” by fellow Goon Harry Secombe,
the LP included the Hollies’ “Wings,” one of their final tracks with Graham Nash. Other standout selections for the charity compilation included Cliff Richard and the Shadows’ “In the Country,” originally produced by Norrie Paramor, the Bee Gees’ Robert Stigwood–produced “Marley Purt Drive,” and the 1966 hit “Bend It” by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick, and Tich.5

  On October 9, a few scant days after compiling No One’s Gonna Change Our World for release, George’s wife, Judy, gave birth to Giles, the couple’s second baby in two years and George’s fourth child. John good-naturedly rang George up to mark the occasion and noted that Giles had been born on the Beatle’s own twenty-ninth birthday. “Now you know what kind of asshole he’s going to be!” Lennon chortled to Martin over the phone. Never one to rest idle, George had continued working throughout this period. Over the past few years, he had begun grooming Edwards Hand, a Welsh psychedelic pop duo, for AIR. Formerly known as Piccadilly Line, Edwards Hand was composed of keyboard player Rod Edwards and guitarist Roger Hand. George had first heard their music on Piccadilly Line’s 1968 LP The Huge World of Emily Small, which featured Herbie Flowers on bass and flautist Harold McNair. Having pronounced their music to be “exceptional,” George produced Edwards Hand’s eponymous debut in 1969.6

  Recorded at Abbey Road, Edwards Hand was released by RCA Victor only to hit the charts with a thud. But George, optimistic to a fault, was not to be deterred. In recent months, he had been producing the duo’s second album, to be titled Stranded. Martin recorded the long-player at Morgan Sound Studios in northwest London, with assistance from engineer John Miller. With guest artists such as bassist John Wetton and guitarist James Litherland chipping in, Martin pulled out all the stops, even going so far as to commission cover art from Klaus Voormann. In spite of George’s enthusiasm for the project, the notices were decidedly mixed, with reviewers often being stumped by the duo’s strange admixture of styles and genres. While Stranded failed to generate any commercial waves, the album’s American release was met with controversy due to Voormann’s artwork, which featured a black-and-white drawing of a sheriff, his arms defiantly crossed above a massive belly and his sidearm, in reference to the Edwards Hand song “Sheriff Myras Lincoln.” After the album cover was banned in the United States, George was forced to substitute a more benign image of an American flag. The duo’s follow-up LP, titled Rainshine, was recorded by George for a 1971 release, although it was not to be. Frustrated by the band’s inability to generate any consistent sales, RCA Victor rejected the album out of hand, bringing George’s partnership with the group to an end.

  As 1969 came to a close, George made progress on two very different and far more commercially successful projects than Edwards Hand, which, in many ways, had been a labor of love on George’s part. The first production involved an album with legendary American tenor saxophonist Stan Getz, who was known in jazz circles as “the Sound” due to the warm, mellow tones that defined his horn playing. Produced by George with Richard Hewson providing orchestration and arrangements, the LP acted as a jazz homage to recent pop hits, including such compositions as Graham Nash’s “Marrakesh Express,” Bacharach and David’s “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” Paul Simon’s “Cecilia,” and even a nod to Lennon and McCartney’s Abbey Road track “Because.” For George, working with the jazz great had been a disheartening experience given the Sound’s recent bout with drug addiction. Years later, George would describe Getz’s Marrakesh Express as “really quite embarrassing,” given the jazz man’s failure to perform up to his previously high standards. “It was very sad to see him like that.” To George’s mind, their collaboration had helped Getz to recover. For their follow-up LP, Dynasty, Martin and a cleaned-up Getz assembled a tight band—with the Sound’s sax, Eddy Louiss’s keyboards, René Thomas’s electric guitar, and Bernard Lubat’s drums. Working with a “rather ancient amp,” Martin helped Thomas achieve a kind of “old-fashioned jazz sound” that bridged Getz’s earlier successes with Brazilian music into a new period of jazz fusion.

  But the big prize for the producer during the autumn months of 1969 was Ringo Starr’s debut album, which George had begun producing with the Beatles’ drummer in October, only a few weeks after Giles’s birth that same month. The project had first come his way after “Ringo decided to sing an album of old songs, and he asked me to produce it,” George later wrote. “His stepfather Harry, who he regarded as his father, loved old songs, and Ringo, sentimentally, wanted to make an album to please him.” But it was more than that, as Starr later admitted. “I was lost for a little while. Suddenly, the gig’s finished that I’d been really involved in for eight years.” In September, the same month in which John had asked for a divorce from the band, Ringo checked into London’s Middlesex Hospital with severe stomach pains and intestinal blockage. After his release, he hired Neil Aspinall as his personal manager and set out to make a solo album. “I called George Martin and said, ‘I’m going to do an album of standards that will get me out of bed, out of the house, and get me back on my feet.’” For the album, George worked from the concept that Ringo would rifle through the songs enjoyed by his mother, Elsie, and stepfather, Harry, all those years ago at family parties. “I was brought up with all those songs, you know, my family used to sing those songs, my mother and my dad, my aunties and uncles,” the drummer wrote. “They were my first musical influences on me.” After Ringo assembled a roster of potential numbers with his mother back in Liverpool, George hatched a plan in which Ringo would sing an array of standards, with a different arranger for each song and the George Martin Orchestra as his accompaniment.7

  In December, George took a break from Ringo’s solo album to prepare for a Yorkshire Television Christmas special to be titled With a Little Help from My Friends. Billed as a tribute to Martin, the show was filmed in Studio 4 of the Leeds Television Centre on December 14. Produced by David Mallet, With a Little Help from My Friends was set to be broadcast at seven in the evening on Christmas Eve. A host of celebrated guests from across Martin’s career participated in the extravaganza, including Dudley Moore, the Hollies, Lulu, Milligan, and the Pan’s People dancers, along with Martin himself conducting a forty-piece incarnation of the George Martin Orchestra. While Ringo performed “Octopus’s Garden” in George’s honor, the producer’s most famous clients were otherwise not in evidence.

  As for Ringo’s impending solo album, George had completed work on the lion’s share of the tracks by the advent of the new year, with a second bout of recording sessions held in February and March 1970. Many of the arrangers were personal friends of George, with the remainder being rounded up by Aspinall. With several of the arrangers joining Martin at Abbey Road for the recordings, McCartney provided orchestration for Starr’s cover version of the Hoagy Carmichael classic “Stardust,” while Elmer Bernstein delivered a stirring arrangement for “Have I Told You Lately That I Love You?” George’s old friend Johnny Dankworth got in on the act with “You Always Hurt the One You Love,” as did Bee Gees vocalist Maurice Gibb for “Bye Bye Blackbird.” George had been particularly excited about working with celebrated producer Quincy Jones on an arrangement for “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing,” although ironically that experience proved to be one of the LP’s low points. “I remember Quincy Jones’s reaction being, ‘What do I do with this song, George?’ He was terribly non-plussed; when he turned up at the studio, he’d written a score which sounded like he really wasn’t sure what to do.” Released on March 27, 1970, Sentimental Journey featured a nostalgic cover photograph of the Empress pub, located in Liverpool just a few blocks away from Ringo’s boyhood home on Admiral Grove. In spite of its throwback subject matter, the album enjoyed strong sales—notching a top-ten showing in the United Kingdom and landing at number twenty-two on Billboard’s album charts. But the critics had a field day, with Robert Christgau describing the album in the Village Voice as being “for over-50s and Ringomaniacs.” Although Harrison reacted charitably, calling Sentimental Journey �
�a great album” and “really nice,” Lennon was unable to hold his tongue. In December 1970, he exclaimed to Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner that he was “embarrassed” by Ringo’s schmaltzy effort.8

  But by that point, Sentimental Journey had already become a minor footnote in the Beatles’ unfinished, ongoing saga. In March 1970, as George conducted his orchestra while Ringo filmed a promotional video for the new album at London’s Talk of the Town nightclub, the band’s collective vitriol had come roaring back into all of their lives with a vengeance. For George, it had all started, like the Beatles’ unexpected Abbey Road renaissance a year earlier, with a telephone call: “Paul rang me up one day and said, ‘Do you know what’s happened? John’s taken all of the tapes’” and dropped them in the lap of maverick American producer Phil Spector. The latest bout with the wayward Get Back project had actually begun back in December 1969, when Allen Klein had sold the rights to Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s documentary to United Artists, who reincarnated the project as a feature film. The Beatles subsequently altered the title of their album from Get Back to Let It Be in order to synchronize the marketing of its release with the movie of the same name. Angus McBean’s EMI House photograph of the band was used in a March 1970 mock-up for Let It Be’s cover art, although it was later replaced by American photographer Ethan Russell’s January 1969 still photographs of the group in various states of rock ’n’ roll performance.9

  As far as Martin had known at the time, the recording sessions for the Beatles’ misbegotten LP had ended a few months earlier, after he had worked with Harrison, McCartney, and Starr in the studio to complete “I Me Mine” and add a bit of polish to “Let It Be” for the documentary’s imminent soundtrack release. With the estranged Lennon on a lengthy vacation with Ono in Denmark, Martin supervised Harrison, McCartney, and Starr in a remake of “I Me Mine” at EMI Studios on Saturday, January 3, 1970, the producer’s forty-fourth birthday. As they prepared to record “I Me Mine,” Harrison acknowledged Lennon’s absence with a wry reference to the popular British band Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick, and Tich: “You all will have read that Dave Dee is no longer with us, but Mickey and Tich and I have decided to carry on the good work that’s always gone down in Number 2.” The recording session for “I Me Mine” had been necessitated because of the song’s appearance in Lindsay-Hogg’s forthcoming documentary. Recorded across sixteen takes, the basic rhythm track featured Harrison’s acoustic guitar and guide vocal, McCartney’s bass, and Starr’s drums. At one point, the trio broke into an instrumental jam that morphed into Buddy Holly’s “Peggy Sue Got Married.” After selecting take sixteen as the best, the group recorded electric guitar, electric piano, and lead and harmony vocal overdubs to bring the relatively short song, which clocked in at one minute and thirty-four seconds, to fruition.10