As for the album’s title, it was George who came up with Blow by Blow. He devised the title as a means for connoting the notion of “blowing,” which was how Beck would describe the evolution of his solos in the studio. But “as it turned out,” George wrote, “Blow by Blow had several meanings, one of which, in my innocence, I had not thought of. I liked the idea of Jeff’s blows being his off-the-cuff solos as well as the double-entendre of a boxing match, but I never thought of anyone blowing (or snorting) cocaine. Perversely, this actually helped the sales of the album.” Did it ever. Blow by Blow enjoyed a top-five showing on the American jazz album charts, proving to be Beck’s most successful release of his illustrious career. To George’s delight, the platinum-selling LP even included a funky take on the Beatles’ “She’s a Woman.” But even after the album hit the record stores in March 1975, Beck, ever the perfectionist, asked Martin to join him in the studio for further overdubs and other guitar adornments. When he phoned Martin up, the producer didn’t know what to say, finally telling him, “I’m sorry, Jeff, but the record is in the shops!”10
Sadly for Martin, his collaboration with Beck was short-lived. In spite of the remarkable success of Blow by Blow, the producer and guitarist lost their footing on Wired, Beck’s follow-up LP. From the onset, George felt that the album was taking an unfortunate turn. For one thing, Beck wanted the LP to have a more synthesized feel to it, an aspect that saw him replacing Middleton with famed keyboardist Jan Hammer, late of the Mahavishnu Orchestra. Beck decided to call the album Wired in reference to the mechanized, electronic sound that he wanted. A second issue that confronted Martin in recording Beck’s album was the guitarist’s anxiety-riddled mind-set. For the new record, Jeff “was much more inhibited,” said George. “He had much more to lose when we made Wired. When we started Blow by Blow, he hadn’t made a solo album for a long time, and he was starting from scratch, and if it didn’t work out, people would say, ‘We told you that it wouldn’t work with those people anyway,’ so it was no real problem for him. But Blow by Blow was such a success that everyone was saying, ‘Right! What’s the next album going to be like?’ And in a way, that worried him. He got more inhibited about his solos and about the way he was playing.” Martin also felt that Hammer’s contributions constrained the previous album’s free-floating, jazzy feel, and besides, Martin later remarked, Hammer “really wasn’t my cup of tea. I much preferred the cleanliness of the Max Middleton stuff. So it wasn’t quite the kind of record that I wanted to make for the second album, and I think the sales reflected that, too.” The album managed to break into the top twenty, and it earned platinum status for Beck. But in contrast with Blow by Blow, Wired didn’t approach the critical success of its precursor. Renowned rock critic Robert Christgau took issue with the LP’s overreliance on technology, describing Wired as “mindless trickery.” Engineer Peter Henderson felt some of the sting as well, later calling his own work on the LP into question. “I listened to that a few years later and it sounded like it had been recorded direct to cassette. I don’t think it was one of my finer moments.”11
In 1976, George found himself back in the Beatles’ fold—sort of—for the first time since Abbey Road. In spite of his recent rancor with EMI, he was happy to work with the record conglomerate’s American subsidiary, and especially Capitol’s president Bhaskar Menon, of whom George had grown quite fond over the years. The project at hand was a compilation of Beatles hits to be titled Rock ’n’ Roll Music. Menon had called Martin in a desperate attempt to endorse the double album’s provenance in advance of the LP’s release. As George later recalled, “He [Bhaskar Menon] asked me if I would approve the tapes before they went out, since they couldn’t get hold of any of the Beatles, and I was the only other person of whom they could think who had been involved. So I went along to listen—and was appalled.” The real issue, as George saw it, was that “EMI were terrified of the Beatles, who had issued an edict that the tapes must not be touched in any way. No one was to ‘mutilate’ them, and if they were reissued it had to be exactly as they were recorded. EMI had taken this absolutely literally. They had put the tapes on a transfer machine and were going to issue them just as they were—but in stereo! The effect was disastrous.”12
Rolling up his sleeves, George spent two days working at Capitol to redub the tapes using state-of-the-art recording equipment. He tweaked the recording’s equalization and remastered the tapes in order to prepare the album for a June release date. At the end of his Capitol stint, George found that the tracks “really sounded quite tolerable.” George had carried out the work as a kind of labor of love, noting that “it wasn’t really my job. I’d long since left EMI, and I wasn’t getting paid—since they were early records, I was not even receiving any royalties on them; I just wanted to make sure that our work didn’t get mutilated.” In the end, EMI’s executives—fearing a Beatles backlash over the album—expressly refused to release George’s new masters in the United Kingdom, although Capitol gladly distributed the updated Rock ’n’ Roll Music in the American marketplace. The compilation proved to be a shrewd bet on Menon’s part, notching a number-two showing on the Billboard album charts—and ultimately denied the top spot by Paul McCartney and Wings’ At the Speed of Sound album, which was currently lording over the charts during the band’s triumphant Wings over America summer tour.13
Meanwhile, it turned out the EMI execs had been correct all along: the Beatles hadn’t liked the Rock ’n’ Roll Music release in the slightest, although it had little to do with the sound of its music. As Ringo Starr later noted, the more pressing issue was the cover art, which inexplicably trafficked in the 1950s-era nostalgia in promoting the sound and image of the Beatles. “It made us look cheap, and we were never cheap,” Ringo crowed to Rolling Stone about the cover art. “All that Coca-Cola and cars with big fins was the 50s!”14
With Rock ’n’ Roll Music ensconced in the record shops, Menon approached Martin with yet another opportunity. Capitol’s president was eager to counterbalance the upcoming unauthorized release of the low-fidelity Live! at the Star-Club in Hamburg, Germany; 1962, a double album’s worth of material recorded in December 1962 during the Beatles’ final West German residency. Menon’s plan involved releasing The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl to coincide with the bootleg LP’s distribution, which the band’s lawyers were attempting to block through legal means. The Beatles’ 1964 performance had been considered for release back in the mid-1960s, when George and Voyle Gilmore, the senior producer at Capitol Records, originally recorded the August 23 concert. But with thousands of screaming fans and other attendant ambient noise corrupting the recording, George found it impossible to prepare a live album for release. As Gilmore noted at the time, “There’s not much [George Martin] could do. It was recorded on three-track machines with half-inch tapes. The Hollywood Bowl has a pretty good stereo sound system, so we plugged our mikes right in there. I didn’t do an awful lot. There wasn’t much we could do. They just played their usual show and we recorded it.” In 1965, Capitol repeated the exercise, with Gilmore attempting to capture the Beatles’ August 29 and 30 return engagements at the clam-shaped venue, albeit with the same lo-fi results. In 1971, Phil Spector had been given a shot at mixing the Hollywood Bowl concerts for release, but he gave up on the recordings, which lay dormant until a bootleg, Back in ’64 at the Hollywood Bowl—which had been pilfered from the Capitol vault—began making the rounds among collectors.15
Having been tapped by Menon to prepare The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl for a May 1977 release, Martin found himself stymied by the very same sonic issues that had plagued the recordings back in 1964. As George later recalled, “We recorded it on three-track tape, which was standard US format then. You would record the band in stereo on two tracks and keep the voice separated on the third, so that you could bring it up or down in the mix. But at the Hollywood Bowl they didn’t use three-track in quite the right way. I didn’t have too much say in things because I was a foreigner, but they d
id some very bizarre mixing. In 1977, when I was asked to make an album from the tapes, I found guitars and voices mixed on the same track. And the recording seemed to concentrate more on the wild screaming of 18,700 kids than on the Beatles on stage.” At first, Martin had warned Menon that the project might not be salvageable. “As far as I could remember, the original tapes had a rotten sound,” said George. “But when I listened to the Hollywood Bowl tapes, I was amazed at the rawness and vitality of the Beatles’ singing. So I told Bhaskar that I’d see if I could bring the tapes into line with today’s recordings. I enlisted the technical expertise of Geoff Emerick, and we transferred the recordings from three-track to 24-track tapes. The two tapes combined 22 songs and we whittled these down to 13. Some tracks had to be discarded because the music was obliterated by the screams.” Emerick’s technical expertise involved deploying a vacuum cleaner to blow air onto the old three-track tape machine in order to prevent it from overheating, which, in turn, melted the magnetic tape during the transfer to the twenty-four-track machine for equalization and remixing.16
With the technical aspects of the project having been ironed out, EMI required all four Beatles’ approval before moving forward with releasing The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl. McCartney was happy to give his approval, while “the reaction of George [Harrison] and Ringo was much cooler,” Martin later recalled, although they ultimately signed off on the long-player’s release. With John Lennon still unaccounted for, Martin decided to make a personal plea for the former Beatle’s assent. By this point, John and Yoko Ono had ended their separation and were living together at the Dakota, an exclusive New York City apartment building. “I had to go to New York anyway, so I rang John Lennon and told him about the recordings. I told him that I had been very skeptical at first, but now I was very enthusiastic because I thought the album would be a piece of history which should be preserved. I said to John, ‘I want you to hear it after I’ve gone. You can be as rude as you like, but if you don’t like it, give me a yell.’” And with that, he dispatched a copy of the album by messenger for John’s review. When he spoke to Lennon the next day, Martin discovered that Lennon was “delighted” with the album. For his part, Martin himself had been won over by the 1977 remixes, especially “the electric atmosphere and raw energy” of the Beatles in their touring heyday. “Those of us who were lucky enough to be present at a live Beatle concert—be it in Liverpool, London, New York, Washington, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Sydney or wherever—will know how amazing, how unique those performances were. It was not just the voice of the Beatles: it was expression of the young people of the world. And for the others who wondered what on Earth all the fuss was about, this album may give a little clue. It may be a poor substitute for the reality of those times, but it is now all there is,” Martin wrote in the LP’s liner notes. “I am very proud to have been part of their story. Thank you John, Paul, George and Ringo.”17
The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl proved to be a surprise hit during the late spring and summer of 1977, capturing the top spot on NME’s album charts and notching the number-two spot in Billboard. Writing in the Village Voice, even the typically acerbic Robert Christgau was impressed, describing the LP as “a tribute not only to the Beatles (which figured) but to George Martin and Capitol (which didn’t necessarily figure at all). The sound rings clearly and powerfully through the shrieking: the segues are brisk and the punch-ins imperceptible; and the songs capture our heroes at their highest.”18
During that same period, George recorded albums with another pair of 1960s mainstays, vaunted songwriters Jimmy Webb and Neil Sedaka. During his work on The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl, George had temporarily relocated his family to Los Angeles, where he rented a house on Mulholland Drive in Beverly Hills. With Judy, nine-year-old Lucie, and seven-year-old Giles in tow, George took to Southern California living, tooling about the coastline in his massive Cadillac El Dorado. After years of finding renown through other artists’ recordings of his work, Webb was eager to score some hits of his own. And having already produced and recorded six albums, he was ready to turn over the reins to somebody else. To Webb’s mind, Martin fit the bill perfectly, and Webb had long admired the other man’s work as the Beatles’ producer. “Sgt. Pepper was only cut on a four-track recorder, and it is a testament to George Martin’s genius,” Webb later remarked. “The studio became more than just an organ that soaked up and preserved a performance. George Martin and the Beatles were aware of the possibilities, and so the studio came into its own.” Eager to see if he could expand his own artistic horizons through a freelance producer, Webb worked with Martin at Hollywood’s Cherokee Studios, where they cut the tracks for El Mirage. Martin assembled a group of heavy-hitters for the occasion, top-flight West Coast musicians, including the likes of ace keyboard player David Paich, slide guitar master Lowell George, vocalist Kenny Loggins, bassist Larry Knechtel, and a duo of superstar drummers in Nigel Olsson and Jim Gordon. With El Mirage, Webb hoped to jumpstart his career in order to recast his image as not merely a songwriter but a performer as well. For his part, Webb showed up, as always, with the goods: a series of powerful, well-wrought, and often-autobiographical gems. Martin answered the call by affording Webb’s tunes—the drama-laden “The Highwayman” and “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress,” for example—with lush, awe-inspiring head arrangements and soaring orchestral scores. El Mirage offered a powerful demonstration of the resounding impact of George’s early forays into writing notation with Sidney Harrison, and his later experiences at the Guildhall School, upon his craft as an arranger and orchestrator. In so doing, Martin assisted Webb in establishing new frontiers as a performer.19
Working with Neil Sedaka was another matter altogether. In contrast with Webb, finding time and space to record Sedaka was exceedingly difficult, with the singer-songwriter being invariably on the move, either writing new songs or performing in some far-flung locale. To remedy the situation, George recommended that they complete the album, to be titled A Song, in two phases. During the first, they would lay down the tracks with Sedaka’s band. This would allow Martin to spend some time with the recordings, provide orchestration where necessary, and reconnect with Sedaka to bring the project to fruition. After the first phase of the project was completed, George and Judy spent a month in Mexico City for tax purposes. Staying as guests of the British ambassador, the Martins stayed in a remote hotel some sixty miles outside of the city. With a piano having been moved into his suite, Martin scored the album, recorded the orchestration at AIR Oxford Street, and reconvened with Sedaka in New York City, where he stitched A Song together at the Record Plant. As an added bonus, Sedaka and Martin chartered a plane for a kind of whistle-stop tour in which they debuted the new record and promoted its wares across the United States. The idea had been the brainchild of Elektra Records president Joe Smith, and it certainly impacted the album’s reach. But when the project had concluded, George found himself reciting a familiar refrain: A Song “wasn’t a great hit, but it did sell moderately well, and Neil was still very, very pleased with it. We parted company at the end, having had a good time.”20
While working at the Record Plant with Sedaka, Martin came into the orbit of Malcolm Addey, the Abbey Road engineer with whom he had frequently clashed during the 1960s. Addey had lived in the United States since 1968, when he moved to New York City and made his name as a much-sought-after freelance engineer. Perhaps out of nostalgia for the old days at Abbey Road, when A&R men and their balance engineers worked several sessions a day and banged out one recording after another in close quarters, Martin invited Addey to dinner at an Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side. As Addey later recalled, sharing a meal with the famed producer gave the two men a chance to catch up on old times, as well as an opportunity to see each other in a different light after their hotly competitive days back at Abbey Road. But things came to a head, as they always seemed to do whenever Martin and Addey got together, when the engineer innocently brought up AIR Oxford Street. For his part,
Malcolm remembered asking George how he managed to make a profit in the high-rent district around Oxford Street and its environs. Quite suddenly, Martin became incensed with the engineer for bringing up the studio’s profitability. George was fuming mad, as if Malcolm were calling AIR’s entire business model into consideration. For Addey, Martin’s fury seemed to have come out of nowhere. Clearly, the engineer had touched a nerve when it came to George’s business interests. Was the vast expense associated with fitting out AIR Montserrat beginning to take its toll on the normally staid producer? For his part, Addey would never know. In short order, Martin returned to his formerly convivial self, and by the time the check arrived, the two men agreed to let bygones be bygones.21
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