On Sunday, January 4, George and the Beatles’ trio reconvened in Studio 2 to complete work on “Let It Be,” which had now been recast as the title track for the documentary, as well as the A-side for a planned March single. With Phil McDonald and Richard Langham assisting, Martin conducted a whirlwind session, nearly fourteen hours long, in which Harrison overdubbed yet another lead guitar solo for the song, with Harrison, McCartney, and Linda McCartney later adding a new harmony vocal to the Beatles’ January 31, 1969, performance of the song. At this point, Martin conducted a brass orchestral overdub involving two trumpets, two trombones, and a tenor saxophone. As the night wore on, Martin carried out additional overdubs with percussion from Starr and McCartney, along with another, more sizzling guitar solo from Harrison for the song’s middle eight. Working “on heat” of his own that long evening, Martin added a cello score at the end of the recording. As the trio wrapped up work on “Let It Be,” Glyn Johns waited in the wings to gather up the latest addition to his wayward project. Working at Olympic Studios the next day, Johns concocted a third and final attempt at mixing the Get Back sessions into a cohesive whole, albeit without the recently recorded “I Me Mine,” only to be shortly rebuffed yet again. For all of their bluster about getting back to their roots with the original Get Back concept, the bandmates—especially John, in a moment of great irony—simply couldn’t fathom their sound without a healthy dose of production. Lennon had also blanched when Johns demanded a production credit for his efforts over the past year. Lennon may have known by this point, of course, that he had already planned to engage Phil Spector in just such a capacity, which may explain his reluctance to accede to Johns’s request. And then there was also the matter of Martin’s participation at key, albeit sporadic instances throughout the production.
Meanwhile, with EMI clamoring for new Beatles product as always, the band and their management had opted to release “Let It Be” as the group’s next single. With Lindsay-Hogg’s documentary in the offing, it made sense to build up buzz for the film and the soundtrack—however and whenever it would materialize, which was still in jeopardy at this point. Released on Friday, March 6, the “Let It Be” single’s B-side featured the thirty-four-month-old, long-gestating “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number),” which lent a welcome bit of comedy to what would amount to the Beatles’ final UK single. Writing in NME, Derek Johnson observed that “as ever with the Beatles, this is a record to stop you dead in your tracks and compel you to listen attentively.” Stateside, the “Let It Be” backed with “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)” single easily notched Billboard’s top spot. But alas, in the United Kingdom it was simply not to be. The Beatles’ twenty-second and final single’s release in their homeland would climb no further than number two. Sure enough, “the roll” that Martin had worked so hard to sustain was over and out.11
But until McCartney’s phone call, Martin had been unaware of Spector’s professional involvement on the Beatles’ behalf. In late March and early April, Spector had been cloistered away at Abbey Road, often in Room 4, working on remixing the songs slated for the Let It Be soundtrack. For his part, Martin could understand Spector’s motives in jumping at the opportunity to work with the Beatles in spite of the group’s current disarray. “Spector is the kind of person who was in the doldrums for a long time,” Martin observed. “He made a tremendous name for himself many years ago as a producer with a particular sound. I mean, he became an original, and a characteristic of his sound was that of a big, spacious work, you know, enormous, putting everything but the kitchen sink in, and which worked frightfully well” with hitmaking acts like the Ronettes and the Righteous Brothers. Spector’s postproduction work with Let It Be culminated in a massive overdubbing session in Studio 1 on April 1 for “The Long and Winding Road” and “Across the Universe,” with orchestrations provided by the ubiquitous Richard Hewson. During the session, Spector applied his famous “wall of sound” echo-laden recording technique to the tracks. In the case of “The Long and Winding Road,” Spector overdubbed a thirty-three-piece orchestra, a fourteen-member choir, two studio musicians on guitar, and one drummer—ironically, Starr, the last Beatle to join the band and the last member to play on a Beatles session. At one point, Ringo was forced to step away from his drum kit to quell one of the volatile producer’s notorious temper tantrums. Meanwhile, the choral voices belonged to Beatles-session mainstays the Mike Sammes Singers, who had no compunction about working outside of Martin’s earshot. As Sammes himself later remarked, “It wasn’t our problem. We just went in and did what Phil Spector wanted.”12
For his part, Martin was infuriated by the results of Spector’s intervention, later writing that “through Allen Klein, John had engaged Phil Spector and done everything that he told me I couldn’t do: he overdubbed voices, he added choirs and orchestras. I could have done that job easily, but he [John] decided to do it that way, and I was very offended by that. Paul was livid at what was done to ‘The Long and Winding Road.’” At one point, McCartney even attempted, albeit unsuccessfully, to block the album’s release. “I’m not struck by the violins and ladies’ voices on ‘The Long and Winding Road,’” he complained. Meanwhile, McCartney’s estranged songwriting partner vehemently defended Spector’s efforts on the disintegrating band’s behalf: “He worked like a pig on it,” Lennon recalled. “He’d always wanted to work with the Beatles, and he was given the shittiest load of badly recorded shit—and with a lousy feeling to it . . . and he made something out of it.” Not surprisingly, Glyn Johns, like Martin, didn’t see things that way, later writing that “after the group broke up, John gave the tapes to Phil Spector, who puked all over them, turning the album into the most syrupy load of bullshit I have ever heard.” But Johns also understood that in his own way, he (and, at times, Martin) had failed to capture the Beatles’ vision for the project, however poorly communicated: “My master tape, perhaps quite rightly, ended up on a shelf in the tape store at EMI.”13
With Martin and McCartney seething in advance of the Let It Be soundtrack’s release, the cute Beatle took advantage of the moment to announce the band’s breakup on April 10, 1970, as well as the upcoming release of his eponymous debut solo album. Rather than make the pronouncement via news conference or press release, Paul concocted a set of questions and answers with Apple’s Peter Brown in order to drive home his point about the finality of the Beatles’ disbandment:
Q: Did you miss the other Beatles and George Martin? Was there a moment when you thought, “I wish Ringo were here for this break?”
A: No.
If Martin felt any sting from McCartney’s words, he never revealed it, preferring to understand the end of the Beatles in a more philosophical light. Readily admitting that “it’s pretty obvious that without the Beatles I wouldn’t be where I am,” George felt a momentary glint of sadness after Paul’s April 1970 announcement. “I felt a little bit of emptiness, but on the other hand it was almost a relief because I had gained my freedom,” the producer later wrote. “I had devoted eight years of my life to them; they were always Number One in my book, and all my other artists had to understand they took second place to the Beatles. After Brian [Epstein] died, I felt some responsibility for their careers, too. I didn’t want to fail them; I wanted them always to be successful. Suddenly, that responsibility was removed.”14
But what really rankled George at the time was what he believed was the shoddy release of Let It Be, an album that might have benefited from the producer’s allegiance to the high-fidelity sound of the Beatles’ legacy. To Martin’s mind, Spector’s postproduction work fell far short of this dictum. For Martin and Johns, the album’s liner notes proved to be especially unsettling, casting Let It Be as “a new phase Beatles album. Essential to the content of the film Let It Be was that they performed live for many of the tracks; in comes the warmth and the freshness of a live performance as reproduced for disc by Phil Spector.” Martin was patently disgusted, later remarking that “the album credit r
eads ‘Produced by Phil Spector,’ but I wanted it changed to ‘Produced by George Martin. Over-produced by Phil Spector.’” For his part, Spector couldn’t help taking pot shots at Martin—especially after the press had panned the American producer for “ruining the Beatles,” among a host of other criticisms. “They don’t know that it was no favor to me to give me George Martin’s job, because I don’t consider myself in the same situation or league,” Spector remarked at the time. “I don’t consider him with me. He’s somewhere else. He’s an arranger, that’s all. As far as Let It Be, he had left it in a deplorable condition, and it was not satisfactory to any of them [the Beatles], they did not want it out as it was.”15
Released on May 8, 1970, the Let It Be soundtrack proved to be an international best seller, easily topping the charts in the UK and US marketplaces alike. But in spite of the LP’s commercial success, the critics understood the project for what it represented. Writing in NME, Alan Smith observed that “if the new Beatles soundtrack is to be their last, then it will stand as a cheapskate epitaph, a cardboard tombstone, a sad and tatty end to a musical fusion which wiped clean and drew again the face of pop.” In a moment of utter damnation, Smith concluded that the LP revealed a “contempt for the intelligence of today’s record-buyer” and derided the bandmates for having “sold out all the principles for which they ever stood.” Rolling Stone’s John Mendelsohn was equally acerbic, writing that “musically, boys, you passed the audition. In terms of having the judgment to avoid either over-producing yourselves or casting the fate of your get-back statement to the most notorious of all over-producers, you didn’t.” Offering a minority opinion among a sea of critical voices, the Sunday Times’s Derek Jewell described Let It Be as a kind of “last will and testament, from the blackly funereal packaging to the music itself, which sums up so much of what the Beatles as artists have been—unmatchably brilliant at their best, careless and self-indulgent at their least.” If nothing else, more than one critic observed, the Let It Be soundtrack surpassed the quality of Lindsay-Hogg’s documentary, which had been soundly rebuffed.16
In contrast with the earlier Beatles film premieres, in which Martin and the bandmates paraded for the press, none of the principals, save for Lindsay-Hogg, appeared at the London Pavilion debut on May 20. That same month, the Beatles’ final American single, “The Long and Winding Road” backed with “For You Blue” was released, quickly ascending to Billboard’s top spot. In a final note of nostalgic sadness, “The Long and the Winding Road” netted George and the bandmates’ record-making twentieth number-one song in the American marketplace. For Martin, it may not have kept “the roll” alive, but the success enjoyed by “The Long and Winding Road,” even with Spector’s window dressing, amounted to something along the lines of solace during those bewildering post-Beatles times. In spite of all of the attendant critical rancor, Let It Be would be remembered fondly during awards season, when the soundtrack took home an Academy Award for Original Song Score, with Quincy Jones accepting the statuette on the absent bandmates’ behalf. As it happened, in a great moment of irony, McCartney would be on hand to accept Let It Be’s Grammy Award for Best Original Score.
In contrast with the days and weeks following Abbey Road’s release, when he felt a sense of relief at having brought the album home under seemingly impossible interpersonal constraints, the finality associated with Let It Be gave way to new and much-earned feelings of optimism and goodwill for Martin. “I was unshackled to a certain extent, and that was good,” he later wrote. “I was in great demand now because I was a successful and well-known producer, and for the first time in my life I was able to accept work from all over the world without a long-term commitment. If I were asked to produce one album with an artist, I could agree to it provided I didn’t have to do any more than that. If I enjoyed it and liked the result, I might want to do another album, but I didn’t have to. And that was great.” And as George soon discovered, “life after the Beatles was like a series of flirtations after being divorced.”17
21
The Emerald Isle of the Caribbean
* * *
FORTUNATELY FOR GEORGE, one of his very first and most successful flirtations involved the completion of AIR’s Oxford Street Studios, which enjoyed a gala send-off in October 1970. In spite of the facility’s enormous cost overruns and architectural challenges, the grand-opening party was held in fine style on October 7, with George and his AIR partners officiating. Delivered in “true showbiz tradition,” the event was attended by “all our friends and enemies from EMI,” Martin later wrote, “people from other record companies, and—with a certain magnanimity, I thought—the architects, with whom we had had a major falling-out over the spiraling costs.” During the two-day party, the AIR team and their guests dispatched with more than four hundred bottles of Bollinger champagne.1
But the real story during that memorable week in the life of George’s career was the studio itself. In addition to Martin’s own dogged perseverance, the new facility had been well served by the contributions of Jack Parsons, who had worked tirelessly for the past few years on bringing the complicated project home, especially given the unusual specifications associated with establishing a working recording facility in the bustling heart of London. “It was one of the noisiest places you could choose to build a recording studio,” Dave Harries later recalled. “When Geoff [Emerick] first showed me the pictures at Abbey Road I said that simply can’t work. It will never work. But work it did!” As Simaen Skolfield, one of the studio’s first tape operators, later recalled, musicians adored working at Oxford Street, which, given its Central London location, was seemingly in the middle of everything. “It was a very, very busy spot,” Skolfield later recalled, “but a wonderful spot because you could look out of the windows of Studio 1 and look straight down Oxford Circle. We were actually five floors up, but everybody looked like little people coming in and out of the tube station.” At one juncture, the studio had become “so successful that George and John [Burgess] who had built it primarily for themselves couldn’t get in there and had to go back to Abbey Road. We were certainly one of the pioneering independent studios—and among the first to go 16-track. When we opened, our studio rates were £35 per hour.” Indeed, almost from the beginning AIR Oxford Street emerged as the most successful arm of the partnership. While AIR had begun life with the express intent of producing records by the partners’ clients, AIR Oxford Street demonstrated that there was an even more lucrative market for providing top-drawer production space outside of “dependent” studios and their record company overseers like Abbey Road and EMI. Not long after opening its doors, AIR Oxford Street became especially well known for its spacious Studio 1, which had formerly been a banquet hall. “The main studio was actually quite large and had a quite live sound,” Harries later remarked. “The idea was originally that we would do film scoring in there, with the smaller No. 2 studio which had a much drier sounding aspect and was built for pop. They both had basically the same equipment in the control room.” But in spite of AIR’s original intentions, Studio 1 enjoyed wide appeal among artists of all stripes. “As it turned out,” said Harries, “the main room for a number of reasons, including its great drum sound, got booked out by bands. It just worked. Film people couldn’t get in. We had good equipment and good technicians. We were in the right place at the right time. George once again picked out the right thing. Throughout, he had the Midas touch with artists and with studios, as the hits kept coming on both sides of the Atlantic.”2
On October 9, 1970, with the debris from the raucous opening gala still in evidence, George supervised the inaugural recording session at AIR Oxford Street, an honor that he accorded to Cilla Black. With the Beatles having been consigned to the history books, she was his longest-standing and most successful client, with the exception of occasional sessions devoted to old friends like Johnny Dankworth and Spike Milligan. While Cilla’s television series continued to exceed all expectations, her recording career was
in need of a commercial hit. Her latest long-player for Parlophone, Sweet Inspiration, had fared poorly, peaking at number forty-two on the UK album charts, and George and Cilla were determined to stem the tide, just as they had done with “Surround Yourself with Sorrow” backed with “London Bridge” back in 1969. And for a while, it appeared as if they might just do exactly that. With “Something Tells Me (Something’s Gonna Happen Tonight)” backed with “La La La Lu,” Cilla enjoyed a 1971 holiday hit with the A-side, penned by Roger Greenaway and Roger Cook, notching a top-five showing on the UK charts in the bargain. As it turned out, “Something Tells Me (Something’s Gonna Happen Tonight)” was easily Cilla’s biggest hit since her heyday in the mid-1960s. But in the years since the release of Sher-oo! in 1968, her long-players had fallen into a steady decline in terms of her ability to find commercial success. For George and Cilla, this was a continuing source of frustration—particularly given the fact that she enjoyed regular face time with a massive audience courtesy of her variety show. With George in the producer’s chair, Cilla’s long-players continued to fade, with Images (1971) and Day by Day with Cilla (1973) failing to find a steady listenership, and the two longtime collaborators decided to go their separate ways. As Cilla later wrote, “Probably as a way of trying to be positive and keep my life moving along, we’d decided it was time for a new beginning on the musical front.” Besides, she pointed out, “George Martin was an enormous international artist himself, and it was getting more and more difficult for the two of us to find time when we were both free to work together.” Her first Martin-free album, 1974’s In My Life, found her working with Australian record magnate David Mackay, who had set the world afire with the New Seekers’ global hit (and the Hillside Singers’ blockbuster Coca-Cola jingle) “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing (in Perfect Harmony),” coauthored by none other than David and Jonathan themselves—Greenaway and Cook.3
Sound Pictures Page 56
