Sound Pictures

by Kenneth Womack

  Not surprisingly, Cilla’s In My Life LP prominently featured a cover version of the Lennon-McCartney composition of the same name, but by then George was long gone. Running a world-class studio had proven to be a great boon for AIR, but it was not without its challenges. In one such instance, George and his partners rose to the occasion—and, in so doing, established a niche in spoken-word recording, the very same genre in which George had found success with Parlophone back in the 1950s. AIR Oxford Street’s foray into spoken-word recording occurred after Argo Records approached George about becoming the company’s regular vendor for spoken-word projects. Argo was particularly interested in learning about the studio’s capabilities—namely about the “acoustics of the studio, with its floor ‘floating’ two feet above the original floor and its walls and ceilings suspended from acoustic mounts.” Argo had become flustered by the relative ineffectiveness of Decca Studios during recent sessions devoted to a spoken-word recording of Julius Caesar starring Laurence Olivier. During one key passage during the Decca sessions, Olivier’s performance had been spoiled after studio mics captured the sound of a jet flying overhead. Now “it’s well-known and generally found acceptable that there are certain anachronisms in Shakespeare, such as cannons going off when cannons hadn’t even been invented,” Martin later joked, “but it was felt that a Boeing 707 was taking things a little too far!” Determined to test the fidelity of AIR studios, Argo’s chief engineer visited Oxford Street and put the facility through its paces, variously turning up the gain on all of the amps and listening for ambient sound like air-conditioning or the like. With AIR having passed the test, Argo subsequently shifted the Olivier sessions to Oxford Street. “So they were satisfied,” George wrote, “and we gained the first of many customers for recording the spoken word.” But “there was only one embarrassment. Their first session with us was to record a jet-less version of Julius Caesar. Just as Olivier was delivering a speech from the steps of the Roman Forum, he moved, and we discovered to our horror that we had a squeaky floorboard!”4

  George spent much of the early 1970s trying his hand with a wide array of artists—with the single proviso, of course, that working with them appealed to his sense of adventure and that he admired their work. This meant that at times George would shuttle from one client to the next as he searched for that same elusive something that had eluded him in his pre-Beatles years. Given the growing success of AIR Oxford Street, for the first time in his life, George enjoyed the kind of financial freedom that allowed him to follow his own whimsy wherever it might lead. As Skolfield later remarked, by this juncture “there were four studios operating at AIR Oxford Street—and those studios were operating pretty much 24/7.” One of Martin’s earliest post-Beatles acts was Seatrain, an American roots-fusion band that ended up drawing the ire of John Lennon, in a backhanded way, when he took issue with Martin’s contributions to the Beatles’ achievements during his 1970 Rolling Stone interview with Jann Wenner. At one point, John began criticizing supporters of the Fab Four like Dick James, whom the former Beatle denigrated as “another one of those people who think they made us. They didn’t. I’d like to hear Dick James’s music, and I’d like to hear George Martin’s music, please, just play me some.” In a 1971 interview with Melody Maker’s Richard Williams, Martin was asked to respond to Lennon’s claims. In a rare moment of unvarnished candor, Martin didn’t mince words, saying, “That’s silly, of course. I guess I feel sorry for him, because he’s obviously schizophrenic in that respect. He must have a split mind—either he doesn’t mean it, or if he does mean it he can’t be in a normal state of mind at that time. The contrary thing is that in June of last year I was in the States, and I did the David Frost Show, [and] obviously, we talked about the Beatles. . . . Then about six weeks after I got back, I had a postcard from the Beverly Hills Hotel, written by John in his own fair hand, saying that he caught the Frost show, thought it was great, and it was so nice of me to say such nice things about him and how he hoped that my wife and children were well and love from John and Yoko. That was the last time I heard from him, and that’s the other side of the coin. He’d probably hate people to know that he was that sentimental.”5

  And that’s when John upped the ante, further trivializing George’s role in shaping the Beatles’ sound. In a 1971 open letter to Martin and Williams published in the pages of Melody Maker, Lennon replied with a vengeance:

  Here I am again! For a start, I don’t see anything “schizoid” in having more than one emotion, though obviously you do. When people ask me questions about “What did George Martin really do for you?” I have only one answer, “What does he do now?” I noticed you had no answer for that! It’s not a put down, it’s the truth. I sent the postcard about the David Frost Show because you did say nice things about “Across the Universe.” I reciprocated in kind, okay? Schizoid, my arse. . . . Of course, George Martin was a great help in translating our music technically when we needed it, but for the cameraman to take credit from the director is a bit too much. . . . Don’t be so paranoid, George, we still love you.

  John (and Yoko, who was there)

  P.S. And as for Let It Be, just listen to the two versions, the bootleg “original” and the Spector production.

  P.P.S. I think Paul and I are the best judges of our partners. Just look at the world charts, and by the way, I hope Seatrain is a good substitute for the Beatles.

  For George, the Melody Maker exchange was a vivid reminder of the producer’s own dictum about working with highly creative musicians and songwriters. “You have to be careful,” Martin had once written. “If the artist feels threatened, it can raise a barrier between producer and artist, and make it harder to work together.” While Martin and Lennon were obviously no longer working together, the producer’s public remarks had clearly left Lennon feeling threatened about the degree of his own achievements, which, by Martin’s every admission, had been superlative. By the early 1970s, George had developed a number of stock phrases for explaining his production efforts with the Beatles. And one of these oft-repeated descriptions about “painting pictures in sound” had clearly gotten under John’s skin—so much so, that the former Beatle disparaged such thinking as “pure hallucination.” For George, it was the summer of 1967 all over again after Time magazine had singled out the producer as the unobtrusive genius behind Sgt. Pepper. But even still, George should have known better. The result of the Melody Maker squabble was almost exactly the same, with the artist—in this case, Lennon—taking conspicuous issue with any suggestion that the supporting players who made their work possible held a larger stake in the artist’s success.6

  As for Seatrain, George had relished the opportunity to record the American band, even going so far as to temporarily relocate his family to Marblehead, Massachusetts, in 1971 in order to immerse himself in the production of their work. “Working with Seatrain was interesting because it was such a varied group,” he later recalled, “a mixture of so many different talents. I loved the homespun, folky feel of the band.” With AIR’s in-house engineer Bill Price in tow, George traveled to Marblehead, where he “discovered that there were houses to rent in the summer, and I started working on the notion of equipping our own studio in one of them. I soon found the ideal house. It was huge, empty, almost derelict, and stood in its own grounds on Marblehead Neck, which was effectively an island, connected to the town by a causeway. It had a very large sitting-room, about 25 feet by 16, which we could use as a studio, and right next door to that was another room which was suitable for a control room.” Not missing a beat, Martin and Price rented a recording desk from 3M’s Rhode Island office, along with a sixteen-track machine. With Dolby Laboratories throwing in some hardware and having shipped his own loudspeakers over from London, George was ready to go. For the Martins and their young family, life in Marblehead was idyllic. Living in a rented house near the makeshift studio, they “would spend most mornings on the beach. Then we would start recording at two in the afternoon, with a brea
k at seven, when I would cycle home for supper, returning to work until about two in the morning.”7

  As for Seatrain, George had difficulty getting the group off the ground. He consciously shifted the band’s sound from its roots-music origins into a more folk rock–oriented aesthetic. At one point, George and Seatrain even enjoyed a minor hit with “13 Questions” backed with “Oh My Love,” which cracked Billboard’s top fifty. For The Marblehead Messenger, the group’s much-anticipated second album with George, he directed them toward an even edgier sound, which the bandmates supplemented with subtle lyrics about the Vietnam conflict and other activist issues like the environment. While Seatrain succeeded in landing a British tour as the supporting act for Traffic, their high mark proved to be “13 Questions,” and George bowed out as their producer. But by that point, he had already pivoted to another artist, Paul Winter, whom he had met in Marblehead during his Massachusetts sojourn with Seatrain. With his band, the Paul Winter Consort, Winter had made his name as a top-flight soprano saxophonist with a penchant for “chamber pop,” a genre whose classical origins meshed nicely with Martin’s background. Wanting to take advantage of his makeshift recording facility, which had come to be known as “Seaweed Studios,” Martin suggested that the Paul Winter Consort take advantage of AIR’s investment and undertake an album with him during his stay in Marblehead. According to oboist Paul McCandless, the band didn’t hesitate to take George up on his offer. “Paul Winter was dying to work with George Martin because Paul was looking to find the most powerful, smartest producer he could to help get his music, and instrumental music in general, out to the wider public,” McCandless later remarked. “George’s signature was putting all these unique-sounding instrumental breaks on the Beatles records. They weren’t the normal guitar solos: sometimes there was a string quartet or a Salvation Army brass band or you name it.”8

  For the band’s members, working with George was a revelation. Together with Price, Martin was able to challenge them to expand their soundscapes and take risks. As McCandless later recalled, “I remember there was one piece [‘Whole Earth Chant’] for which we were looking for a big tamboura sound. George had the whole band come out, and we held down a chord and the middle pedal of the piano, which effectively creates a harp. Then he had the band strum the piano, and they recorded it but with the tape turned around so they were recording it backwards. So there was this big crescendo, and the engineer, Bill Price, faded it before it actually hit the attack. It had the effect of this swarming, swirling kind of thing.” George later described the resulting album, Icarus, as “probably one of my favorites of all of the albums I have made,” including those with the Beatles. While “sales were nothing special,” George wrote, “the title song has the distinction of being the first record to fly around the moon.” While it may have been apocryphal, the story went that the band’s cellist, David Darling, talked a relative, Apollo 15 astronaut Joe Allen, into taking the recording with him on a NASA mission, during which the astronauts supposedly listened to the song as they circumnavigated the moon. “Part of the mission was to plot the location of unrecorded craters,” George wrote. “Joe spotted a particularly fine one and named it Icarus after our record. So we are now part of the history of our planet’s nearest neighbor.”9

  With the recording sessions for Icarus under his belt, George returned to the United Kingdom in late 1971 to mix the album at AIR Oxford Street. In recent months, he had also accepted a commission for the soundtrack for Pulp, a 1972 British comedy starring Michael Caine and directed by Mike Hodges, the filmmaker behind Get Carter. Film and TV work had emerged as a regular income source for George, as witnessed by his composition of the theme for Mister Jerico, a television series starring Patrick Macnee of The Avengers fame. Sung by Lulu, George’s catchy number featured lyrics by Don Black, John Barry’s frequent collaborator on the popular James Bond soundtracks. George also entered into a new collaboration with the King’s Singers, a vocal group founded by six King’s College, Cambridge University, choral scholars. As one of the first groups to apply a choral approach to pop tunes, the a cappella vocal ensemble had formed in 1968 and were clearly on the verge of commanding a much larger audience given their growing popularity on the concert circuit. Under George’s tutelage, the King’s Singers made their first extended forays as recording artists. With Jack Clegg serving as his engineer, George recorded their debut LP, The King’s Singers Collection, at AIR Oxford Street in 1972, which featured a range of cover versions, including the producer’s arrangements of Lennon-McCartney’s “She’s Leaving Home” and his own composition “The Game.” Martin’s old friend Ron Goodwin chipped in with lyrics and arrangements for “Watch Me” and “Building a Wall.” The producer’s association with the choral group continued in 1973 with a follow-up LP, A French Collection, an album of French-language tunes, and Deck the Hall, a live recording of religious numbers, which George supervised at St. John’s Church in Hyde Park Crescent in February 1973. Years later, the King’s Singers would evoke their collaboration with George, and their recordings of Lennon-McCartney compositions in particular, with their long player titled Madrigal History Tour.

  In March 1973, George received an unusual blast from his past with the release of Pink Floyd’s blockbuster LP The Dark Side of the Moon. In many ways, The Dark Side of the Moon was a brilliant extension of the multitrack achievements of Martin and the Beatles at the height of their studio years together. Working at Abbey Road, Pink Floyd enjoyed access to a sixteen-track machine—an incredible technological leap from the Beatles’ EMI Studios heyday only a few years earlier. The Dark Side of the Moon was helmed by a number of George’s associates, including Alan Parsons, who engineered Pink Floyd’s masterwork, and Chris Thomas, who was brought in to supervise the album’s complex mixing sessions. Over the years, the album would become one of the best-selling LPs of all time, with sales estimated at forty-five million copies. The Dark Side of the Moon would spend a record-setting 741 weeks on the Billboard album charts from 1973 to 1988. Not surprisingly, audiophiles flocked to the multilayered masterpiece, studying every nook and cranny of the record in much the same fashion as the most zealous Beatlemaniacs do with the intricacies of Sgt. Pepper and The White Album. Ardent listeners to The Dark Side of the Moon’s stirring conclusion—as the song “Eclipse” segues into a beating heart—found themselves treated to a sonic Easter egg in the form of the faint sounds of music lingering deep in the heart of the mix. It was none other than a snippet of George’s 1965 orchestral arrangement, as performed by the George Martin Orchestra, of the Beatles’ “Ticket to Ride.” Back in the predigital days of the early 1970s, tape was often recycled for later use. Had Parsons and his team failed to effectively wipe the tape that was used to record the heartbeat sound effect? Or, more likely, was the George Martin Orchestra’s “Ticket to Ride” playing somewhere in the extreme background when the sound of the heartbeat was captured at Abbey Road?

  For George, 1973 proved to be a significant turning point in his post-Beatles career, the anomalies of Pink Floyd’s legendary LP notwithstanding. After his success with the Pulp soundtrack, George landed the opportunity to score an even bigger film, Live and Let Die, the latest installment in the James Bond movie franchise. But for George, the soundtrack hadn’t fallen into his lap so easily. The opportunity had first come available after the series’ stalwart composer John Barry had feuded with Harry Saltzman during the production of the previous Bond film, Diamonds Are Forever. Still stinging over his falling out with the producer, Barry decided to go on hiatus for Live and Let Die, opting to work on a stage musical instead. In need of a title song for the new film, Albert Broccoli, Saltzman’s coproducer, contacted Paul McCartney about composing the theme song. McCartney’s star was on the rise, having landed a pair of hit singles with his new band Wings in the form of the top-ten US hit “Hi-Hi-Hi” and, most recently, the number-one single “My Love.” As with previous Bond movies, the title track for Live and Let Die was a much-sought-after
commercial vehicle for pop singers, and McCartney jumped at the chance, inviting Martin to produce and orchestrate the song. For his part, George was delighted to be working with the former Beatle for the first time since the January 1970 sessions in advance of Let It Be.

  To Paul’s mind, George’s participation made perfect sense, having previously produced Matt Monro’s and Shirley Bassey’s hit theme songs for From Russia with Love and Goldfinger, respectively. After reading Ian Fleming’s novel, McCartney made short work of the project. “I read it and thought it was pretty good. That afternoon, I wrote the song and went in the next week and did it,” McCartney later recalled. “It was a job of work for me in a way because writing a song around a title like that’s not the easiest thing going.” During sessions for Wings’ Red Rose Speedway, George and the band convened at AIR Oxford Street to record what the producer thought would be a demo for the Bond producers’ consideration. At Paul’s urging, George had booked an orchestra to accompany the band, whose instrumentation included Paul on piano and lead vocals, his wife Linda on keyboards, former Moody Blues member Denny Laine playing bass and singing harmony vocals with Linda, lead guitarist Henry McCullough, and drummer Denny Seiwell. George had secured ace percussionist Ray Cooper to round out the recording. By this point, AIR’s London studios were in high demand, emerging as one of the city’s preeminent locales, and Paul and his contemporaries were eager to record there. As Simaen Skolfield later recalled, “AIR just took off straight away. It was huge. We had them pulling in big orchestral pieces for films so we had the screen, with projectors and all this kind of stuff. So Studio 1 was busy all the time. It would be Stevie Wonder, and if it wasn’t Stevie Wonder it would be Paul McCartney and Wings.” When Wings had finished playing “Live and Let Die” in the former banquet hall, with the song’s inherent spine-tingling drama on full display, George said to Paul, “We seem to be making a real record, not a demo. Are you sure about that?” he asked, concerned that they were going beyond the producers’ request. “The hell with demos,” Paul replied. “Let’s give it the works!”10