At this point, Martin passed the finished track on to Saltzman and Broccoli. Not long afterward, Saltzman invited the producer to a meeting in Jamaica during which, to Martin’s surprise, the idea of the producer composing the film score for Live and Let Die seemed to be a foregone conclusion, “even though nothing had been agreed,” he later wrote, “and no one had yet said anything to me about time or money or arrangements.” And that’s when the meeting took an even stranger turn, with Saltzman praising Martin’s arrangement for the title track and then asking, “Who are we going to get to sing it in the film? What do you think of Thelma Houston?” George was flabbergasted. “But you’ve got Paul McCartney,” he countered. Undeterred, Saltzman suggested Aretha Franklin. “Aretha’s very, very good,” George answered. “But you’ve already got Paul McCartney.” At this point, with nothing left to lose, Martin delicately explained that Saltzman could only have the song if it was attached to the Wings’ recording that he’d recently produced in London. With Saltzman finally coming around to Wings’ version of “Live and Let Die,” Martin began composing the score. Working with director Guy Hamilton resulted in a great partnership for Martin. Even still, “writing a film score is a race against time,” George wrote, “it is hard graft, but it makes it a lot easier when the director is not a musician but trusts you to do the job well.” Hamilton “was very articulate in his instructions, and as we went through the film reel by reel, he would give me his thoughts, explaining what my music would do to heighten the tension and effect.”11
While working with Hamilton had proven to be a tremendous boon for Martin, the Live and Let Die project soured precipitously for him when it came to negotiating with EMI. After Paul contacted him about working with Wings, “I was delighted, and at the outset didn’t think about the money,” George later recalled. “I never do; I get too excited about the prospect of work that interests me.” The trouble began after the fact, when George contacted Len Wood, his former supervisor at EMI, to discuss his royalty associated with the forthcoming single, “Live and Let Die” backed with “I Lie Around,” which was released in June 1973. George requested a 2 percent royalty, which was below his typical 3 percent rate. “My dear fellow,” Wood replied, “you’ve forgotten that you signed a document saying you would operate on the same terms and conditions for a period of 10 years from 1965, and we’re still within that period.” For George, the retort was ineluctably simple: “But Len, the Beatles don’t exist any more.” Wood’s rejoinder would stick in Martin’s craw for years to come. “You look at the wording on your contract,” he answered. “It says that you will be available to record the Beatles or any one of them.”12
At this rate, George’s effective royalty would be 0.15 of a cent per record. Realizing that the B-side, “I Lie Around,” would be a McCartney-produced Wings track, Martin’s percentage would be halved yet again. Wood ultimately struck a compromise in which he agreed to compensate Martin as if he had produced both sides of the single. “What you mean to say is that you’ll pay me double a pittance,” George soberly replied. At this rate, AIR would receive $310 for every one hundred thousand copies sold. “It was the last straw,” George later wrote. “My relations with EMI were at their lowest ebb.” But amazingly, “worse was to come” when George realized that after three years, he hadn’t been paid at all for the Let It Be LP given his lack of an official production credit. From thenceforward, George had learned his lesson and would never attempt to “negotiate” with Len Wood again. He had resolved in all future disputes to get “bloody-minded” and work through his attorney. Just as George had predicted, “Live and Let Die” became a worldwide smash, notching a number-two US hit in the process. In short order, the “Live and Let Die” backed with “I Lie Around” single earned a gold record from the Record Industry Association of America for having sold more than a million copies, which meant a paltry $3,100 flowing into the AIR coffers on the back of a legitimate blockbuster. Fortunately for George, the soundtrack proved to be far more lucrative, becoming a best seller, as well as netting him a tidy profit for his Live and Let Die score. George had the last laugh of sorts when “Live and Let Die” was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song (only to lose out to “The Way We Were”), marking the first time that a James Bond theme had accrued such an honor. In 1974, George earned a Grammy Award for Best Arrangement, Accompanying Vocalist(s), for his work on “Live and Let Die,” marking his first statuette since Sgt. Pepper. Buoyed by the success of the soundtrack, he conducted a series of concerts under the punning title of Beatles to Bond and Bach, including a December 1974 performance with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. That same year, he released his first album-length collection of instrumentals since British Maid. Distributed by Polydor, Beatles to Bond and Bach included selections from Yellow Submarine, Live and Let Die, and Bach’s Air on the G String.13
For George, the episode with “Live and Let Die” had returned him to the vanguard as one of rock’s most preeminent producers. During this period, he would often meet with up-and-coming or established artists who captured his fancy. One of those bands was the American blue-eyed-soul duo Hall and Oates, who had recently released their Abandoned Luncheonette LP, which had received strong praise from the British music press. Taking the initiative, George invited the duo to lunch at New York City’s Plaza Hotel. He was clearly attracted to the duo’s soulful, bluesy ambience, much as he had been with the Beatles’ harmonica sound during his first session with the beat band in June 1962 after hearing their performance of “Love Me Do.” In their early recordings, Hall and Oates revealed a similar aspect of their evolving sound. “We joined him in the posh, stately, silver-service Edwardian Room,” John Oates wrote, “with its massive windows overlooking a wintry, postcard-perfect, Currier and Ives Central Park. Over a reserved and polite conversation without a lot of musical details discussed, the meeting felt more social and more an opportunity to get to know one another. Perhaps it was the style of the luncheon, held in such an imperial, somewhat stuffy venue, which put us off. There was no doubting this master’s golden, elegant touch in the studio, but Daryl and I were now infused with the energy, grit, and edge of downtown New York, which I believe led us to thinking that George Martin simply was not right for us. At least in that moment.” And with that, George politely withdrew his offer to produce the duo. Years later, Oates would admit that “it was probably a musically life-changing moment that we let slip through our fingers,” but the meeting typified Martin’s attempts to grow his roster of artists during that period.14
Not long after releasing “Live and Let Die,” George tried his hand at producing Stackridge, an up-and-coming Bristol rock band that was riding on the heels of a recent BBC Two television spot and a winter tour. Attempting to build on this momentum, George brought the sextet into Oxford Street to record their third album, The Man in the Bowler Hat. George threw himself into the project, assisting the band in reshaping their rock sound into a progressive admixture of chamber pop and baroque musical stylings. George scored the album’s lush orchestral arrangements and even chipped in with piano parts for “Humiliation” and “The Indifferent Hedgehog.” But the LP’s clear highlight was “Fundamentally Yours,” a song brimming with rich melodies, a nifty synthesized harpsichord, and a driving beat from Billy “Sparkle” Bent. George tapped a wide range of musicians for the Stackridge project, including the Kinks’ Ray Davies, who played trumpet on the album, as well as George’s old Beatles compadre Derek Taylor, who laid down a horn solo for “To the Sun and the Moon.” While the album may have been a one-off for George, The Man in the Bowler Hat proved to be a middling seller for Stackridge after its release in February 1974, clocking in at a respectable number twenty-two on the UK charts. The album cover was devised by John Kosh, the veteran art designer behind Abbey Road and Let It Be. But George didn’t completely leave Stackridge behind. Within a year, Sparkle would retire his drum kit, leave Stackridge, and work as George’s personal assistant.
In 1974, George also enjoyed the unexpected opportunity to right one of the most notorious wrongs of his career—a “big goof,” in the producer’s own words, that saw him passing on the chance to work with Tommy Steele, the musician who would emerge as the United Kingdom’s first legitimate rock ’n’ roll star. After years of working on the cabaret circuit, Steele had developed a beloved stage persona, and Martin was eager to assist the former teen idol in transforming his career yet again. The result was an LP titled My Life, My Song that hit the charts with a thud. It was a “brave attempt” at “an autobiographical experiment,” George wrote, “that did not quite work.” It was also, alas, an outcome that the producer had encountered throughout his long career in the record business. While acts like the Beatles prove to be commercial evergreens, the majority of George’s clientele were victims of circumstance, good or bad, as well as prisoners of the longitude of their own talent. With Steele—and clients before him like Judy Garland and Ella Fitzgerald—the producer had come to learn that late-career encounters were just that: glowing opportunities and sometimes desperate efforts to recapture the contemporary musical consciousness and, more often than not, old glories.15
While acts like Hall and Oates couldn’t see their way clear to working with George, one band that didn’t decline his entreaties was America, the Anglo-American folk-rock trio that featured Dewey Bunnell, Dan Peek, and Gerry Beckley. America had broken onto the music scene in the early 1970s with their best-selling eponymous debut album, which scored a pair of top-ten US hits, including the chart-topping “A Horse with No Name.” While their second album, Homecoming, had continued the band’s success, including the top-ten hit “Ventura Highway,” America’s third album, Hat Trick, had barely cracked the top thirty, failing to go gold where the first two LPs had achieved platinum status. As with Homecoming, America had handled their own production duties for Hat Trick, and by the time they met George, they were understandably in a panic over their recent commercial slide. For his part, George was delighted to help them try to reverse their “nosedive.” “Let’s have a go,” the producer told them. “We’ll work quickly and efficiently.” And did they ever. The bandmates joined him at AIR Oxford Street, where they worked for just over a fortnight from April 17 to May 7, 1974. The album, which was titled Holiday, was released in June 1974, in keeping with George’s plan to work expeditiously with the band. But the speed at which he produced the record belies the intensity of their efforts together. George made a point of working with America like he would have back in his Parlophone days. With Geoff Emerick in tow as the project’s engineer, George had met with them in London in mid-April and began routining their latest material. And for their part, they met George’s challenge with a steely resolve. “They were very well-organized in the studio,” he later wrote, which made it easier for him to score their songs, when necessary, and overdub the instrumentation with great precision. In addition to featuring America’s new drummer Willie Leacox, Holiday also found George providing keyboards on several songs. The bandmates were thrilled to be working with the legendary producer. As Bunnell later remarked, it “was great working with George. It was like we knew each other. We were familiar with the Beatles, of course, and we had that British sense of humor.” Buckley was equally pleased, later describing Martin as “such a hot arranger,” which made their latest tracks even stronger. Their new collaboration proved to be a boon, with Holiday generating a pair of top-five singles in “Tin Man,” with Martin chipping in on piano, and “Lonely People.” The latter composition had been composed by Dan Peek and his wife, Catherine, who self-consciously composed an optimistic rejoinder to the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby.” Instead of resigning itself to the fate of a solitary existence, the Peeks’ “Lonely People” pointedly counseled its audience, “Don’t give up until you drink from the silver cup, / And ride that highway in the sky.”16
For George, the mid-1970s had already seen an incredible turnaround in terms of his professional fortunes. With the twin successes of “Live and Let Die” and America’s new best-selling album, he was rightly chuffed about the state of his career after the post-Beatles malaise. And for the latter release, he was now enjoying a full producer’s cut of 5 percent, which meant that he was being appropriately compensated as a professional, and that meant a great deal to George after dealing with EMI’s conservative ways over the years. “For the first time in my life,” George later wrote, “I was starting to earn some good money.” On a personal front, George was no doubt pleased to learn that John had begun softening his post–Let It Be hard-line stance, as communicated in interviews with Jann Wenner and others, in which he diminished the contributions of folks like Martin to the Beatles’ success. By 1974, Lennon had been explicitly reframing his commentary about Martin’s role. As May Pang, John’s girlfriend during his “Lost Honeymoon” period of estrangement from Yoko, later recalled, “John liked and admired George,” remarking that the producer challenged John to work “beyond his norm” and helped him to imagine seemingly impossible sounds, which George would capture and make real in the studio. In a March 1975 BBC television interview with Bob Harris, John took great pains to clarify his association with George over the years, going so far as to admit that “it’s hard to describe a relationship. They either say that George Martin did everything or the Beatles did everything. It was neither one, you know. We both. . . . George had done little to no rock ’n’ roll when we met him, and we’d never been in a studio, so we did a lot of learning together.” With a conciliatory perspective in stark contrast with his remarks to Wenner, Lennon observed that Martin “had a very great musical knowledge and background, so he could translate for us and suggest a lot of things, which he did.” Lennon concluded that Martin and the Beatles “grew together, and so it’s hard to say who did what. He taught us a lot, and I’m sure we taught him a lot by our sort of primitive musical ability, which is all I have still. I still have to have somebody to translate what I’m trying to say all the time. So it was a ‘mutual benefit society.’”17
During this same period, George made a point of meeting with John during one of the producer’s periodic West Coast visits. It marked the first time that he had seen the former Beatle in the flesh since August 1969 at the tail end of the Abbey Road sessions. For his part, George didn’t mince words when it came to the Rolling Stone and Melody Maker episodes back in the early 1970s. “You know, you were pretty rough in that interview, John,” George remarked. “Oh, Christ,” said John, “I was stoned out of my fucking mind,” adding “you didn’t take any notice of that, did you?” George replied, “Well, I did, and it hurt.” But the producer also knew John well enough to understand that this was the closest he would ever get to receiving an apology for John’s insensitive remarks. For his part, George understood the source of his friend’s malaise, reasoning that John had gone “through a very, very bad period of heavy drugs, and Rolling Stone got him during one of those periods. He was completely out of it.” In his heart, George knew that “John had a very sweet side to him. He was a very tender person at heart. He could also be very brutal and very cruel. But he went through a very crazy time.”18
Meanwhile, George had become inspired by the incredible success that AIR was enjoying with its Oxford Street studios. The project had succeeded, as he imagined it might, in becoming the cornerstone of AIR’s income. As George later wrote, the partnership had begun to take a multiplicity of functions. “We have our own record label. We have our own artists, whom we record. We record artists for other labels. We hire out our studios to other producers—who may either use our own recording engineers, or bring their own as is current practice in America; and we hire out producers and engineers to others. But most often, because we now have a world-wide reputation, people come to us not only for the studios themselves but also to use our staff, knowing they are backed by AIR’s training and high standards. That may sound like a sales pitch, but it happens to be true, to the extent that we have a very live agency which a
ctually exports the talents of AIR’s creative people.” By this juncture, Emerick had joined Martin and his partners on a full-time basis, with the Apple Studios project having fallen into disarray after the engineer had spent years turning it into a world-class facility. At one point in late 1973, AIR’s London studios had become so popular that Emerick couldn’t even book studio space to mix Paul McCartney and Wings’ Band on the Run LP, which he was forced to complete at the comparatively remote Kingsway Recorders. Buoyed by AIR Oxford Street’s runaway success, George began hatching a plan for a “total environment” studio. The idea had started percolating after he had recorded America’s Hideaway LP at Jimmy Guercio’s Caribou studio in the Rocky Mountains, some fifty-five miles northwest of Denver. “I loved the creative freedom it gave,” George wrote. “You were there to make an album, and the studio was yours for as long as you wanted it, any time of the day or night. It was very comfortable, with individual homely log cabins and a good studio with a Neve console. The only thing wrong was the time of year that I was there. In February, Colorado can be pretty cold, and a macabre sense of humor could easily label it as an expensive labor camp! Our nickname for it was Stalag Luft III.”19
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