John: I think I’ve got Sunday off.
Paul: I hope you can deliver.
John: I’m hoping for a little rock-and-roller.
Lennon’s lethargy was understandable given the band’s considerable output and activity during the previous year, not to mention his escapades with Ono and the personal tragedy of her October 1968 miscarriage. As George had surmised at the onset of the project, John and Yoko’s protracted heroin abuse, which dated back to the previous summer, may have been taking its toll—at one juncture during the Twickenham sessions, Yoko joked about shooting heroin as the couple’s form of exercise.17
Whatever the cause for his malaise, for his lack of productivity, Lennon began increasingly to focus his wrath upon Harrison. Indeed, the two Beatles’ disintegrating relationship was beginning to exert a troubling effect on the bandmates’ efforts at Twickenham. The annals of Beatles history tend to blame McCartney’s controlling behavior for the group’s interpersonal dilemmas during the Get Back sessions, a conclusion that seems to be buttressed by a January 6 quarrel in which McCartney and Harrison resumed their rancor from the previous summer involving “Hey Jude.” Apparently still smarting over McCartney’s rebuke of his creative suggestion, Harrison reacted to McCartney’s patronizing attitude about his guitar arrangement for “Two of Us”: “I’ll play whatever you want me to play or I won’t play at all if you don’t want me to play,” he told Paul. “Whatever it is that will please you, I’ll do it.” There is no denying McCartney’s increasingly proscriptive songwriterly behavior, and if nothing else the Get Back project demonstrated Harrison’s—not to mention Starr’s—second-class citizenship in the band, an aspect of their communal makeup that had been growing in intensity in recent years as the guitarist’s songwriting abilities began to improve radically. “The problem for me was that John and Paul had been writing the songs for so long,” Harrison pointed out. “It was difficult. They had such a lot of tunes, and they automatically thought that theirs should be the priority, so I’d always have to wait through 10 of their songs before they’d even listen to one of mine. It was silly. It was very selfish, actually.” As a means of blowing off steam, Harrison took to singing impromptu Bob Dylan tunes during the rehearsals, including the symbolic “I Shall Be Released” and “All Along the Watchtower,” with its prophetic opening lyric, “There must be some way out of here.” Martin, for one, was sympathetic to Harrison’s plight, although he ascribed the guitarist’s lower artistic stratum in the Beatles to a kind of natural creative order: “He’d been awfully poor up to then. Some of the stuff he’d written was very boring. The impression is sometimes given that we put him down,” Martin recalled. “I don’t think we ever did that, but possibly we didn’t encourage him enough. He’d write, but we wouldn’t say, ‘What’ve you got then, George?’ We’d say, ‘Oh, you’ve got some more, have you?’ I must say that looking back, it was a bit hard on him. It was always slightly condescending. But it was natural, because the others were so talented.”18
Unfortunately, as the sessions trudged onward, Lennon even seemed to be baiting Harrison. During a rehearsal of Harrison’s new composition “I Me Mine,” Lennon “jokes that a collection of freaks can dance along with George’s waltz,” before telling the guitarist “to get lost—that the Beatles only play rock and roll and there’s no place in the group’s playlist for a Spanish waltz.” As if on cue, Paul later took to singing “I Me Mine” while feigning a Spanish accent. The trio’s behavior tellingly reminds us that the stakes of authorship—and the divisions that it creates—had never really ebbed. They had merely been redistributed among three Beatles instead of two. Although Lennon may have been equally annoyed by Harrison’s obvious surfeit of new material, there is little question that their growing feud involved Harrison’s exasperation with Ono’s constant presence in the studio, particularly when she spoke up for Lennon while her silent boyfriend nervously plucked at his guitar. On Friday, January 10, Harrison had reached a breaking point, no longer able to hide his vexation with Ono’s unremitting presence. After enduring a morning session in which Paul goaded him about how to perform his guitar part and a heated argument with John during lunch, the quiet Beatle abruptly quit the group, making a hasty exit and uttering, “See you ’round the clubs,” as he left the soundstage. Either out of spite or ennui—or both—Lennon began improvising the Who’s “A Quick One While He’s Away” within minutes of Harrison’s departure. At one point, he sarcastically called for an absent Harrison to play the guitar solo.19
At it happened, Martin hadn’t yet arrived at Twickenham that day. Walking into the studio, Martin was beside himself, frantically looking for Harrison as he made his way inside. And that’s when he ran headlong into Harrison, who was walking brusquely towards the exit. As it turned out, Martin had every reason to be frazzled. “I remember that George Martin had just backed across the car park in his Triumph Herald and knocked a dent in the door of George Harrison’s Mercedes,” Dave Harries later recalled, “and he didn’t have time to tell him he’d dented his car before George walked out in a huff and drove off.” For his part, Martin was hardly surprised by the turn of events. He had long recognized Harrison’s subordinate place in the pecking order—a hierarchy that he himself had helped to maintain at times—and the latest episode was symptomatic of the larger malaise. “For one thing,” Martin reasoned, “there was no manager, and it was very difficult to get anybody to give a decision. They were just floundering, and I had to deal with this.” But moreover, “John would often be very late for sessions or not turn up at all,” George later wrote. “It was a very unhappy time.” While the bandmates would later claim that Lennon and Harrison had fought a war of words rather than engaging in fisticuffs that day, Martin knew otherwise, maintaining that “there was actually a punch-up.”20
When he joined the bandmates in the studio that afternoon, Martin discovered how quickly things had deteriorated since Harrison’s departure. Lennon had already begun calling for the group to replace the quiet Beatle with Eric Clapton, a caustic suggestion given Harrison’s close friendship with the renowned guitarist, whom Lennon described as “just as good and not such a headache.” As Martin looked on, the songwriter advanced his impromptu plan even further. “The point is: if George leaves, do we want to carry on the Beatles? I do,” John told Paul and Ringo. “We should just get other members and carry on.” The day’s session ended with a spate of improvised jamming, including a rendition of “Martha My Dear” in which Yoko provided a screeching solo, screaming John’s name over and over. Meanwhile, Paul played on, seemingly unfazed by the chaos around him.21
For Martin, who had already been exasperated by the Beatles’ behavior and inability to produce new material at Twickenham—not to mention his own diminished status with the group—things appeared to look up, if only briefly, when the bandmates succeeded in calling a truce with Harrison. A weekend meeting on Sunday, January 12, with Harrison and the others at Starr’s estate had collapsed after the guitarist pointedly refused to return to Twickenham. Realizing that Harrison meant business, on Wednesday, January 15, they held an afternoon meeting in which the quiet Beatle laid out his terms for restoring peace to the group. The truce involved at least two considerations: first, they would abandon Twickenham’s dour atmosphere immediately in favor of Apple’s newfangled basement studio; and second, they would dispense with the concept of a live performance, instead staging a concert for Lindsay-Hogg’s cameras without benefit of an audience. The shift from Twickenham to Apple effectively spelled the end for the television production, with the Beatles now supposedly setting their sights on recording a new album and a concomitant documentary. Although their fantasy of making a spectacular return to the stage had perished, the idea for a new studio album had been born—and if Martin and the Beatles knew nothing else, they understood implicitly how to make an LP. What the bandmates were clearly beginning to understand at this juncture was the extent to which their misspent dream of Apple Corps was transforming into a financial
nightmare, just as Martin had feared it would. In an interview published in the January 17 edition of Disc and Music Echo, Lennon admitted that “Apple is losing money. If it carries on like this, we’ll be broke in six months.”22
The Get Back sessions would have resumed on the following Monday had it not been for Magic Alex, who had promised back in July to build a seventy-two-track recording studio for the group in the basement of the Apple building at 3 Savile Row in Soho. When George arrived at the studio, he was shocked to discover sixteen speakers arrayed along the basement walls, with Magic Alex’s multitrack system nowhere in evidence. The facilities, from Martin’s perspective, “were hopeless.” As Harrison later recalled, “Alex’s recording studio was the biggest disaster of all time. He was walking around with a white coat on like some sort of chemist, but he didn’t have a clue what he was doing. It was a 16-track system, and he had 16 tiny little speakers all around the walls. You only need two speakers for stereo sound. It was awful. The whole thing was a disaster, and it had to be ripped out.” It was at this point, Johns later recalled, that “George Martin came to the rescue.” Realizing that Magic Alex’s handiwork couldn’t be easily remedied with a soldering iron and a few stray cables, George called Abbey Road in desperation. “For God’s sake,” he implored EMI’s studio techs, “get some decent equipment down here!” In short order, EMI engineers Dave Harries and Keith Slaughter were hurriedly dispatched to Apple with the requisite equipment. They were joined by a twenty-year-old tape operator named Alan Parsons. “I couldn’t believe it,” Parsons later remarked. “There I was. One day I was making tea at Abbey Road, and the next day I was working with the Beatles at their studio.”23
The first thing Alan noticed was Magic Alex’s ostensibly state-of-the-art mixing desk, which “looked like it had been built with a hammer and chisel. None of the switches fitted properly, and you could almost see the metal filings. It was rough, all right, and it was all very embarrassing, because it just didn’t do anything.” Consequently, Martin and Glyn Johns spent the next two days turning Apple’s basement into a respectable recording studio by bringing in two mobile four-track mixing consoles from EMI, as well as overhauling the basement’s amateurish soundproofing. And then there was the troubling matter of the building’s noisy heating system. “The heating plant for the entire building was situated in a little room just off the studio,” Martin later wrote. “And since the sound insulation was not exactly magical,” he quipped, in sly reference to the Beatles’ would-be inventor, “every now and then in the middle of recording there came a sound like a diesel engine starting up.”24
For his part, Johns was impressed with Martin’s easygoing demeanor and willingness to help out after being shunted aside by the band that he had driven to the top of the hit parade. As Glyn later wrote, “By the time we moved to Savile Row, George, realizing I was in an awkward position, was kind enough to take me to lunch in order to put my mind at rest, saying I was doing a great job, everything was fine, and I was not stepping on his toes in any way. What a gentleman he is.” By Wednesday, January 22, when Martin and Johns had finally managed to knock Apple Studios into semi-acceptable shape, production-wise, Harrison officially returned to the fold, performing a duet of “You Are My Sunshine” with Lennon in order to signify their renewed camaraderie. Later that day, Harrison decided to alter the band’s chemistry, as he had done so successfully with Clapton back in September 1968, by inviting ace keyboard player Billy Preston to lend his talents to the Beatles. As luck would have it, Harrison and Clapton had seen Preston performing in Ray Charles’s band on January 19. The Beatles had first met Preston back in Hamburg in 1962 when he was a member of Little Richard’s backup band. “I pulled in Billy Preston” for the Get Back sessions, Harrison later recalled. “It helped because the others would have to control themselves a bit more. John and Paul mainly, because they had to, you know, act more handsomely,” he continued. “It’s interesting to see how people behave nicely when you bring a guest in because they don’t want everyone to know that they’re so bitchy.” When Preston began playing the Fender Rhodes electric piano, “straightaway there was 100% improvement in the vibe in the room.” Harrison’s gambit had clearly worked its magic. Martin later described Preston’s appearance at Apple Studios as a much-needed “emollient” that altered the band’s calculus in just the nick of time. Even Lennon was impressed, lobbying hard almost immediately for Preston to become a permanent member of the group, although McCartney demurred at the thought of five Beatles: “It’s bad enough with four!” he exclaimed.25
For the next several days, Martin, Johns, and the five musicians rehearsed with a vengeance. Time was clearly of the essence, as Ringo was due to star in The Magic Christian with Peter Sellers in early February. Meanwhile, Johns was scheduled to record an album with the Steve Miller Band in the United States, and Preston was about to embark upon a concert tour back in his native Texas. If the Beatles were going to salvage the Get Back project, something had to happen—and soon. With George having managed to regain a toehold in the studio, the group began to rally perceptibly. From January 23 through the end of the month, Martin and Johns would supervise the production of no fewer than seven outstanding Beatles songs. With Preston working alongside the Beatles on their first full day of recording sessions at Apple Studios, they continued working on “Get Back,” which had evolved over a series of false starts and improvisations back at Twickenham. In one instance, Martin spoke to McCartney over the talkback, inquiring about the song’s title. “What are you calling this, Paul?” he asked. “Shit,” McCartney replied. Without missing a beat, George deadpanned, “Shit, take one.”26
At another point, Johns offhandedly interrupted one of the “Get Back” takes to converse with Parsons, for which the engineer was rewarded with a curt “fuckface!” from Lennon and McCartney. With “Get Back” beginning to coalesce with the affable Preston working his Fender Rhodes, Martin, Johns, and the quintet turned to McCartney’s “Two of Us,” which had been refashioned by this point into a nostalgic, acoustic guitar oriented tune. In a moment of unscripted gusto, the band took a stab at “Maggie Mae,” the traditional Liverpool ditty about a cheeky prostitute that George had recorded with the Vipers back in the late 1950s. That same day, they also took a stab at John’s “Dig It,” a lengthy, free-form, improvisational rant in which Lennon name-checked the FBI, CIA, BBC, singer B. B. King, actress Doris Day, and Manchester football coach Matt Busby. The day concluded with the quintet recording basic rhythm tracks for “I’ve Got a Feeling” and an evolving Lennon number, “Dig a Pony,” which went under the working title of “All I Want Is You.”
Working a rare weekend, Martin, Johns, and the Beatles convened at Apple Studios on Saturday, January 25, for work on a pair of new compositions, including Harrison’s “For You Blue,” which went under the working title of “George’s Blues,” and McCartney’s “Let It Be,” a piano ballad that the songwriter had been rehearsing in the morning hours at Twickenham before the others, Martin included, arrived. Before making his way to Savile Row, George and Judy drove to the Marylebone Registry Office, where Cilla Black married her manager, Bobby Willis, with the Martins as their witnesses. Afterward, they joined the happy couple and their guests for a wedding luncheon at the Ritz. That afternoon, Martin made his way to Apple Studios, where Johns and the quintet were already in full swing. While the group was finally getting down to business by this point, they were unable to resist their penchant, which was rapidly becoming commonplace during this period, for unfocused jamming. As the distractions continued, they even recorded an impromptu cover of the Everly Brothers’ “Bye Bye Love,” for which Lennon and McCartney shared lead vocals. While “Let It Be” would continue to evolve over the next few days, “For You Blue” was completed by the end of the session. With McCartney playing a note-perfect honky-tonk piano, Harrison’s twelve-bar blues effusion featured Lennon’s nifty slide guitar solo—played with a Höfner 5140 Hawaiian Standard lap steel guitar resting
on his knees. Buoyed by a spirited ad-lib from Harrison—“Go, Johnny, go!”—Lennon seemed to lose himself in the pure joy of his solo.
The weekend concluded with a Sunday session in which work continued on “Let It Be” and “Dig It,” which at one point featured John in an unlikely duet with six-year-old Heather, the daughter of Paul’s new fiancée Linda Eastman. Martin good-naturedly played a shaker part on the tune. Another seemingly inevitable bout of jamming ensued, with the Beatles quintet working through a medley of such chestnuts as “Shake, Rattle, and Roll,” “Kansas City,” “Miss Ann,” “Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” “Blue Suede Shoes,” and “You Really Got a Hold on Me,” followed by Harrison’s delivery of Smokey Robinson and the Miracles’ “Tracks of My Tears.” When the bandmates finally regained their focus, they tried their hand at a new McCartney ballad, “The Long and Winding Road,” which he had debuted back at Twickenham during his solo morning rehearsals, and Harrison’s evocative “Isn’t It a Pity?”
During the Sunday session, Martin, Johns, and the bandmates—spurred on, no doubt, by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who was searching in vain for an ending to his planned documentary—hit upon the idea of performing a concert on the rooftop of the Apple building. “At the moment, this documentary’s like No Exit,” Lindsay-Hogg complained. “There’s a lot of good footage, but no pay-off.” Like the characters in Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1944 existentialist drama, a play in which the characters torture each other endlessly, residing in a kind of living hell from which they are free to leave yet unable to escape, the Beatles’ latest filmic adventure seemed interminable. But on Saturday afternoon, the “payoff” appeared to have presented itself when Lindsay-Hogg, with McCartney and Mal Evans in tow, stepped out onto the rooftop above Savile Row. While Harrison would later cringe at the notion of performing about the “chimneys,” the rooftop’s enviable place atop the cityscape, with the whole of the Mayfair district revealing itself before them, seemed like as good a spot as any to bring the Beatles’ Get Back chapter, and Lindsay-Hogg’s film, to a close.27
Sound Pictures Page 50
