Sound Pictures

by Kenneth Womack

  As Skolfield later observed, the idea of escaping to a “residential studio”—where artists and their production team could “get out of the city, go play tennis, and go horseback-riding”—was becoming fashionable by the mid-1970s. During this same period, Richard Branson had built a pioneering studio that came to be known as “the Manor,” a Virgin Records facility in a historic Oxfordshire manor house. Such studios, according to Skolfield, are “more homely, more personal, and, most importantly, more private.” For George, even studios like Caribou and the Manor seemed constrictive. He imagined something even more daring, a studio space that would be available wherever and whenever a recording artist desired. “I had the temerity to think of building a studio on a ship,” George later admitted. “It could go anywhere—preferably the Mediterranean or the Caribbean—and it would certainly give the groups their get-away-from-it-all feeling.” George assigned AIR’s Keith Slaughter with the task of locating a suitable vessel—which the producer had taken to calling the “AIR Ship”—and Slaughter finally narrowed down his search to two options: the Albro, a spacious and luxuriously appointed 120-foot yacht fashioned out of a converted Scandinavian freighter, or the Osejeuik, a 160-foot Yugoslavian passenger ferry. The latter was a twin-engine vessel that offered even more spacious potential recording facilities than the Albro, which could only be fitted out by placing the studio in the ship’s comparatively cozy hold. But the real issue, as with Oxford Street, concerned the exorbitant expense of converting the space, whether on land or sea, into a state-of-the-art recording studio. “Running costs would obviously be high, power supplies had to be stable, and the acoustic problems presented by a large steel box made the building of AIR London a picnic by comparison,” George later wrote. When the specs had been completed, Slaughter predicted that it would cost some £400,000 to convert the Osejeuik to meet AIR’s needs. With a mid-1970s economic crisis in full swing in the United Kingdom and an oil crisis impacting the world over, George lost his nerve. “So it became an unrealized dream,” he wrote, “and I turned my thoughts to a land studio.”20

  With his shipbuilding aspirations having come to naught, George’s terrestrial visions immediately turned to a tropical locale. Over the years, he had come to adore Hawaii, valuing the archipelago’s relaxed tropical climate. Feeling that Hawaii was too far away from the old United Kingdom, George settled his sights on the Caribbean, which was geographically situated between the United States and Europe, where the vast majority of AIR’s jet-setting clientele was based. “I knew the Caribbean fairly well, but never seriously considered it because of its political instability,” George wrote. “There always seemed to be undercurrents in the Bahamas and Virgin Islands, and beautiful Jamaica is sadly an unhappy place.” And that’s when George discovered beautiful, tranquil Montserrat, the British colony that hailed itself as the Emerald Isle of the Caribbean. “I was struck by the natural friendliness of the place, which I am sure has a lot to do with the lack of progress in ‘civilized’ developments. I am happy to say Montserrat does not have a casino, high-rise hotels, or concrete sunbathing pads beside huge chlorinated swimming-pools. But it does have a fresh charm of its own.” George’s problems were finally solved when he found a thirty-acre farm nestled five hundred feet above the Caribbean Sea. As George scanned the landscape, he began to imagine cutting-edge, multitrack studios, with nearby villas where his artists could relax and find inspiration without sacrificing their privacy. For George, Montserrat more than fit the bill. In his eyes, the studio would become nothing short of a tropical paradise.21

  22

  “A Series of

  One-Night Stands”

  * * *

  BY THE MID-1970S, AIR’s success in the recording industry had clearly surpassed George’s expectations by a wide margin. Indeed, the partnership’s original mission to produce independent recordings had given way to a much larger profit sector associated with booking studio time in state-of-the-art facilities. A few years earlier, Management Agency Music (MAM) founder Gordon Mills offered £2 million to purchase AIR, lock, stock, and barrel. As chairman of the partnership, George’s first inclination was to turn down the offer. The company was just short of a decade old. “It’s silly, after all the effort to build up our own company,” George reasoned. But “on the other hand, none of us had a penny to his name, and it was hard to resist the temptation of a cool half a million pounds each.” Negotiations broke down with Gordon after AIR’s leadership realized that it wouldn’t entirely be a cash deal. Worse yet, “there was a cat’s cradle of strings attached, all of which added up to the fact that we wouldn’t be our own bosses.”1

  In 1972, Dick James Music made a bid for AIR. In recent years, George’s relationship with the music publisher had deteriorated—largely over the tangled web associated with the Beatles’ publishing interests. George was well aware that Dick had been the beneficiary of George’s goodwill in the group’s early years, that Dick was the person to whom he had “given” the Beatles and who had become a multimillionaire in the process. “I think the truth of the matter is that he had never forgiven me for that,” George later wrote. “After all, it is a bit of a burden to carry around. He once said to me: ‘How many times must a man say “Thank you”?’ I never wanted him to say ‘Thank you’; I didn’t want it to get in the way of our relationship.” With AIR in play, James didn’t waste any time offering a million pounds in cash to purchase AIR outright. As George later recalled, “Since ours was a private company, the decision to sell had to be unanimous among the four of us. But we were all still penniless, and with a quarter of a million each being dangled in front of our noses we decided to talk. The fact was that, apart from our individual problems, we had no capital assets except for the company itself, into which we had been ploughing back everything we made. We wouldn’t have minded selling a bit of the company in order to raise some capital. But that was the problem; a little bit wasn’t enough. From Dick James’s point of view, it had to be what would eventually become a controlling interest.”2

  For his part, Martin was wary about dealing with James given their long history together. As the years wore on, George and his partners soured on the offer, which finally collapsed in early 1974 in a heated boardroom discussion between the two businessmen. “The truth was that I got extremely annoyed,” said George, “because I realized that he was trying to buy not only the company, but also me and my future work.” At this point, the negotiations became “acrimonious,” with James banging his fists on the table and Martin shouting back in kind over the provenance of AIR. “We went our different ways,” said George, and all the producer could think about, even as he argued with his old friend, was “a nagging sense of guilty gratitude which went back to the day I suggested to Brian Epstein, ‘Why don’t you get Dick James as your publisher?’” While a deal with Dick James was off the table, George and his partners were still liable for their attorneys’ fees, which meant that they actually lost money over the whole “non-deal.”3

  In October 1974, George and his partners received a very different kind of offer from Chris Wright and Terry Ellis, the visionary founders behind Chrysalis Records. “It was a different bag of tricks altogether,” Martin later recalled, as they only wanted to purchase a small portion of the company. And why not? For Chrysalis Records to have ready access to a world-class London studio was reason enough for Wright and Ellis to make the offer, which promised to afford Martin and his partners with the capital that they so desperately desired. While the deal provided Chrysalis with the option to buy a controlling interest in AIR, Wright and Ellis avowed that they would not interfere in the company’s day-to-day operations. “To all intents and purposes,” George wrote, “it was to remain ours.” For George, the Chrysalis merger portended an “ideal marriage.” As far as he was concerned, “the brilliant thing about the deal is that it has not cost me my freedom. I can do exactly what I want. I’m as free as the wind. If I want to write music for a film, I can. If I want to go away and write
a symphony, I can.”4

  As it happened, though, the Chrysalis deal wasn’t consummated without any casualties for George and his partners. Ron Richards, in particular, felt the sting of the negotiations. Richards had preferred the earlier cash offers, especially the most recent deal with Dick James. As chairman, Martin held sway in spite of his stated belief in pure democracy, leaving Richards, as AIR’s managing director, to maintain a sense of unity among the partners. The attendant stress associated with the Chrysalis negotiations left Richards in ill health, and shortly thereafter he left the company. It was an unhappy ending for Martin and Richards’s long-standing partnership—an association that went back to the Beatles’ first days at Abbey Road and long before that during their Parlophone years together. While Richards had remained a viable producer into the 1970s—he had supervised the Hollies’ international hit “The Air That I Breathe” in the spring of 1974—his enthusiasm for the recording industry had waned considerably during his post-AIR years. Richards produced his last long-player, the Hollies’ Five Three One–Double Seven O Four, in 1979.

  In 1976, as George began making plans to launch his ill-fated “AIR Ship,” he was dealt another blow from his old nemesis EMI. As it was, AIR had only just begun to chart a new path without Richards in the fold, and John Burgess was still finding his sea legs as AIR’s new managing director. The trouble with EMI started when each of AIR’s original partners, Richards included, received a registered letter from the record conglomerate announcing that EMI was terminating its original contract with AIR. This was the very same contract that George had negotiated with Len Wood back in 1965 during his earliest days as an independent producer. George described receiving the registered letter as a “shock, the nature of which could truly be described as incredible. Because that’s what it was: unbelievable.” While EMI was entitled to terminate the original contract, that agreement stated that the company would be liable to pay royalties for twenty-five years, which would take them through 1990. But astoundingly, EMI’s letter proclaimed that royalties would cease with the contract’s termination date. “We were shattered,” George wrote—and especially after AIR’s lawyers unearthed an ambiguous clause in the contract.5

  Apparently, the whole business had started after George and his partners became suspicious that they had been underpaid in terms of their quarterly royalties. When they demanded an audit into EMI’s business affairs after having not received royalty statements for some eighteen months, the clause allowed EMI to terminate the contract without cause. It was pure gamesmanship on EMI’s part to avoid having to provide the statements, which would, in turn, presumably demonstrate the deficits. To George’s mind, it was but one more example of the record conglomerate’s callous disregard. And for George, it was the height of incivility. “There was no question of anyone ringing us up to say: ‘Look, old boy, this is what we’re doing.’ Just a registered letter.” In the end, the matter was resolved in AIR’s favor, but as far as George was concerned, he had been duped yet again by the record company. In spite of the recent past, he hadn’t seemed able to learn that attempting to effect cordial relations with his former employer was a lost cause. Resolving to redouble his efforts, he decided, once and for all, to no longer find himself ensnared by Wood.6

  While he may have been frustrated by the financial challenges that he and his partners had encountered of late, George had entered a post-Beatles heyday in which he felt liberated enough (and, after the Chrysalis deal, more fully capitalized) to take risks and follow his fancy as far as his production activities were concerned. After the success of America’s Martin-produced comeback with Holiday, the producer was eager to get the band back in the studio for yet another go. Recorded at the Record Plant in Sausalito, California, America’s follow-up album, Hearts, picked up where Holiday had left off, generating yet another top-five US album, as well as three hit singles, including the chart-topping “Sister Golden Hair.” For George, America’s “Sister Golden Hair” was a milestone that marked his first American number-one hit since the Beatles’ “Let It Be” five years earlier. With America, George had finally discovered his first bona fide mainstay since the Beatles. While they could never hope to approach the Fab Four’s commercial and critical accomplishments—in truth, who really could?—America afforded Martin with a steady band to shape and reshape for the music marketplace. In many ways, it was like the old days, when he would routine an act in his role as A&R head and take aim at the hit parade in competition with the likes of Norrie Paramor. Only in the 1970s, Martin found himself on a proving ground with such production powerhouses as Brian Eno, Quincy Jones, Roy Thomas Baker, Eddie Kramer, and Tony Visconti.

  In addition to Wings and America, George’s mid-1970s renaissance would be founded on a series of sizzling, guitar-oriented long-players with the likes of classical wizard John Williams, the virtuosic John McLaughlin, and Jeff Beck, one of rock’s preeminent guitar gods. Over the years, Williams had emerged as one of the world’s most celebrated classical guitarists. Working with the Australian prodigy was an opportunity for Martin not only to produce Williams’s latest LP, The Height Below, but also to try his own hand at performance, which he truly relished. Williams was joined on the album by a host of luminaries, including Brian Gascoigne and Tristan Fry on percussion; Charlotte Nassim on koto, the traditional Japanese stringed instrument; and George’s old friend Dudley Moore on organ.

  With John McLaughlin, George was able to assist the talented guitarist in redirecting his career after years of excess. When Martin met him in 1974, McLaughlin had “cut his hair short, renounced drink and drugs, became vegetarian, and took to wearing all white clothes. A complete change of life.” Working with McLaughlin’s second incarnation of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, which included Jean-Luc Ponty on the electric violin, Martin produced Apocalypse, a tour de force that resulted in a top-ten jazz album in the American marketplace. With Geoff Emerick handling the engineering duties, George was dazzled by the music that they captured at AIR’s London studios. It was, George wrote, “a flowing lyrical sequence of beautiful sounds bound together with a driving rock sound that almost brutalized the sweetness of the conception.” For George, one of the highlights of recording Apocalypse occurred when he conducted simultaneous sessions in two different AIR studios, with the Mahavishnu Orchestra in one and the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) in the other. “The scale of decibels between one and the other was ridiculous,” he later recalled. “Michael Waldon’s drumming was louder than any instrument in the LSO, much louder. So we had to put them in separate studios. The sections of music that required the bands together, we did that way. We laid down tracks and overdubbed the LSO: we laid down LSO and overdubbed the band, which is a strange way of doing it, but there were long colla voce or legato sections which the LSO were recording that didn’t require a rhythmic emphasis. That could be laced in afterwards. John McLaughlin worked very closely with Mike Gibbs, who was the orchestrator, and he in turn worked very closely with Michael Tilson Thomas, who is a classical conductor. It was really quite complicated, but beautiful music.”7

  With Jeff Beck, George enjoyed one of the most vital collaborations of his post-Beatles career. During his 1960s heyday, the guitarist had experienced an illustrious run with the Yardbirds before forming the Jeff Beck Group, which featured the likes of Rod Stewart, Ron Wood, and Nicky Hopkins. A November 1969 automobile accident in which he fractured his skull had launched Beck on a tortured path that placed his career in a series of fits and starts. His early 1970s malaise eventually led him to AIR Oxford Street, where he began recording instrumentals with George at the helm in late 1974. For Martin, the collaboration didn’t seem to make sense, and he was surprised that Beck wanted to work with him at all. “I think timing is always important,” George later commented. “I think that when people start working together, whether you have a sort of mystical thing about it, and you say the gods are looking down on you in the right way, or whether the timing is just right. That you’re in the r
ight mood for each other, and your talents do actually complement each other.” But still, Martin recognized that he and Beck “were rather unlikely bed partners, in a way. In fact, a lot of people told me that I shouldn’t do it, but I loved his guitar work and I did want to work with him. And I was quite flattered and surprised when he asked me to produce a record. So it was a coming together of his wonderful sense of guitar work, the way he can handle a guitar, like nobody else I know of—including the really great ones. He has a style; he has something which is unique to him.”8

  The first album that resulted from Martin’s collaboration with Beck was Blow by Blow, a masterwork of jazz-rock fusion. Martin produced the album with Denny Bridges as engineer. Martin was confident in Bridges’s abilities, although he “hadn’t done a tremendous amount of work at the time, but he was very enthusiastic and he wanted to experiment with a clean sound with Jeff. There was really nothing clever about it, just straightforward recording.” With George handling scoring duties and Max Middleton turning in a noteworthy keyboard performance, Blow by Blow proved to be one of George’s most carefully plotted productions. “The subject matter we were recording had to be chosen very carefully,” he later remarked. “And I did very much want to make a good modern rhythmic record. In other words, I wanted to take influences from black music, which Jeff was very keen on anyway and had a great affinity to.” Generically and philosophically, Blow by Blow was vastly different from nearly all of the albums Martin produced across his career. “I wanted to make it very much a foot-tapping party kind of record so I ran a lot of the tracks together except in cases where it wouldn’t work,” said George. “It was almost like a disc jockey exercise. Jeff really used to paint music with his guitar, too. He thought of it in that way, with sounds as well as notes. And the extraordinary thing was he used to be able to do it with the most primitive of weapons, too. His axes weren’t the best in the world sometimes, but he just used to make them sing.” George’s favorite track on the album was “Diamond Dust”: “I scored an accompaniment for strings,” he later wrote, “a duologue with Jeff’s guitar. To his credit, he agreed, and we both jumped into the deep end, and I loved the result. His amazing guitar sound was the perfect front for a string orchestra.”9