And it was only a few months later, in December 1979, when George managed to finally catch up with an old friend, perhaps the most elusive relationship across his many years as a working producer in the record industry. During a holiday visit to New York City, Martin met John Lennon for dinner at the Dakota. Together, the old friends had dinner in the kitchen of John’s apartment. “Yoko quite tactfully kept out of the way for the whole evening,” said George, “and we just reminisced about the good old times.” There they were, “mulling over past glories like a pair of old codgers.” At one point, “I tackled him about the Rolling Stone interview. I said, ‘What was all that shit about, John? Why?’ He said, ‘I was out of my head, wasn’t I?’ And that was as much of an apology as I got.” But for George, the most incredible aspect of that special evening occurred much later. As George later wrote:
John suddenly looked up at me. “You know what, George,” he said. “If I had the chance, I’d record everything we did again.”
“What?” I replied. “Even ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’?”
“Especially ‘Strawberry Fields Forever,’” he said.
George was flabbergasted. “It shocked me,” he later recalled. But then, upon reflection, he began to remember John in a fonder light, thinking back about the gifted singer and songwriter who was never quite satisfied with the sound of his own voice, the person who was always striving for something better—something more powerful and more meaningful just beyond the horizon. “For John, the vision was always better than the reality,” George wrote. “Everything inside him was greater than its expression in the outside world. That was his life.”32
23
Here Today,
Gone Tomorrow
* * *
ON JANUARY 3, 1980, George turned fifty-four years old. It had been nearly three decades since he’d first tried his hand at the record business as Oscar Preuss’s assistant at Parlophone. He was ready, no doubt, to try something new, to attempt to set his sights beyond the one-night stands of his recent musical forays. The opportunity he was looking for had arrived, it seemed, at the hands of Cheap Trick, a hard-driving rock band out of Rockford, Illinois. Cheap Trick had exploded from a regional band into an international phenomenon through their Cheap Trick at Budokan and Dream Police LPs, both of which were released stateside in 1979. At this point, the band’s four studio albums had been produced by Tom Werman with their live album having been mixed by Jack Douglas. Cheap Trick at Budokan and Dream Police had been massive sellers, registering top-five showings on Billboard and going platinum in the process. The group was clearly poised for even greater things to come, and by any measure it made sense to continue working with Werman behind the console. And that’s when Cheap Trick threw caution to the wind and invited George into the control booth for their next album, appropriately titled All Shook Up. To a person, the bandmates were all confirmed Beatlemaniacs, as evinced by At Budokan’s “I Want You to Want Me” and by Dream Police’s “Voices,” a slow, Lennonesque burn if ever there were one. For his part, George was happy to oblige the hard-rocking midwesterners, having recently recorded the gritty No Place to Run by British heavy-metal stalwarts UFO with great results.
While Cheap Trick was committed to throwing their lot in with George, their label bosses at Epic Records weren’t so sure. “The record company didn’t want George Martin,” drummer Bun E. Carlos later recalled. “They thought the stuff was working with Werman, so why change it?” But the group—which included Carlos, vocalist Robin Zander, guitarist Rick Nielsen, and bassist Tom Petersson—was determined to experiment with the rocking sound that they had developed over the years, and Martin, the man who had produced their heroes’ masterpieces, perfectly fit the bill. Working at AIR Montserrat with Geoff Emerick sitting in as engineer, George took to the bandmates almost instantly. “Cheap Trick were charming people, great fun and good musicians.” Just as George had hoped, the band lost themselves in the warmth and remoteness of the Caribbean. “The group loved the island,” he later wrote. “Rick Nielsen brought his family with him, and I used to take them up to Rendezvous Beach in my boat for a picnic when we had a day off. One never saw Rick without his trademark baseball cap—I swear he must sleep in it. I have a memory of Rick diving in to the sea, still clutching his baseball cap to his head as he went below the waves.”1
Taking the group at their word, George pushed them to the limit with every track that they had prepared for All Shook Up, challenging them to try new things at every turn. With “Stop This Game,” the album smoldered into life with the portentous drone of a piano chord, played by George no less, echoing the sound of apocalypse that concluded the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life.” With “World’s Greatest Lover,” Cheap Trick evoked the Fab Four to the nth degree. As one of George’s favorite tracks from the latter part of his career, “World’s Greatest Lover” found Cheap Trick evoking drama at every turn. Described as being “very Lennon-ish” by George, the song’s tension was ratcheted up even further still by the producer’s heartrending orchestral score. In one of the album’s strangest, most avant-garde moments, George provided a spirited, spoken-word accompaniment for the heavy-metal infused “Love Comes a-Tumblin’ Down.” As Nielsen’s thundering guitar soars ever forward, Martin’s posh accent fades into view, gleaming above the mix with the sounds of optimism and pure joy:
I’m wishing to live longer aided by the supreme healing force of music. It most definitely overcomes all weakening aspects of the body. I have felt quite lost and distraught without those wonderful vinyl productions. I’m convinced it’s an addiction, too. I feel just great again!
In many ways, it makes for George’s strangest, most bravura moment on record, a moment of unexpected gusto laid afloat by its speaker’s buoyant thirst for living. In addition to “Stop This Game” and “World’s Greatest Lover,” the long-player was rife with Beatles references, including “Baby Loves to Rock,” which finds Zander singing “Not in Russia!” above the sound of a roaring jet airliner à la “Back in the USSR.” And then there’s “Who D’King?” the album’s rousing conclusion. With obvious echoes of Ringo’s rumbling drum solo on Abbey Road’s “The End,” Carlos ends the album by quite figuratively beating the band’s listeners into submission.
For Martin and Emerick, All Shook Up was one of their favorite productions during their post-Beatles years together. And while the album had proven to be the explicit departure from the group’s previous sound that Cheap Trick had envisioned, it didn’t necessarily translate in sales. In terms of its commercial success, All Shook Up was a far cry from the personal bests that the group had established with Cheap Trick at Budokan and Dream Police, with their latest LP topping out at number twenty-four in Billboard magazine and narrowly earning a gold record for Martin and the bandmates. But the critics raved. Writing in Rolling Stone, David Fricke praised “the dense, pseudo-ELO orchestration in the Whostyle ‘Stop This Game’; the gonzo, post–Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band psychedelia of ‘Go for the Throat (Use Your Own Imagination)’; and vocalist Robin Zander’s impassioned singing of a John Lennon–like ballad, ‘World’s Greatest Lover,’ complete with Martin’s Imagine-style arrangement.” As “not just another ‘new’ Beatles,” Fricke concluded, “Cheap Trick are the latest in a long line of spiritual heirs to the Fab Four’s Anglo-pop tradition, traceable back through the Move, the Electric Light Orchestra and such hard-rock tangents as the Who and the Yardbirds.”2
For George, working with Cheap Trick had been an exceedingly joyful collaboration, although by the time they got around to their next album, he was fully ensconced with a not-so-new client in need of his own change of musical scenery. But for Cheap Trick, the thrill of working with Martin didn’t quite end with All Shook Up. During the summer of 1980, John Lennon had ended his self-imposed retirement to head back into the studio with veteran producer Jack Douglas, with whom the former Beatle was working to produce his new Double Fantasy LP with Yoko Ono. Knowing that Cheap Trick was worki
ng with Martin at Montserrat, Douglas called him up to see if Nielsen and Carlos might be interested in backing Lennon on a new number titled “I’m Losing You.” “I had to call Martin at his island studio to book my players,” Douglas later recalled. “I called him and said, ‘Can I borrow some of my guys to play with your guy?’” Without missing a beat, Nielsen and Carlos hitched a ride on the next plane to New York City, where they recorded a bone-crunching rendition of “I’m Losing You” with Lennon at the Hit Factory on August 12, 1980. Their version of the song didn’t make Double Fantasy’s final cut when the LP was released in November, but for Nielsen and Carlos, it was the thrill of a lifetime.3 For George, working with Cheap Trick had been a much-needed shot in the arm. His robustly delivered words in “Love Comes a-Tumblin’ Down” were more than mere window dressing. It was as if George were announcing his manifesto for living, his fondest wish for a new renaissance aided by the pure truth that he could only discover through song. There would be more one-offs in his future, to be sure, but he felt more directed and enthusiastic than he had in years. With two world-class studios in operation and turning over enviable revenue for AIR, his financial life was in fine shape. He and Judy and their young family had left their home in London’s Hyde Park Crescent and settled into the Old Rectory, a fifteenth-century church that had been converted into an estate by a pediatrician. Some eighty miles west of London, the sprawling home was nestled in the tiny English village of Coleshill. When the Martins saw the Old Rectory advertised as being for sale in the Times, they jumped at the chance to buy the place. “The lovely old house was in a bad way,” George later wrote. It was “riddled with dry rot, woodworm, even death-watch beetle and every kind of vermin, but all these things can be eradicated, and buying it was one of the best things we ever did.” After living out of suitcases for years, shuttling from one place to another, George was happy to find a place to call home.4
While the summer of 1980 had proven to be one of his happiest in years, George’s reverie had been tinged with an unexpected sadness after he learned that Peter Sellers had succumbed to a heart attack in London on July 24. Sellers had been in town for a reunion dinner with his old Goon mates Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe. But on the day of their reunion, Sellers was rushed to the hospital, where he died a few days later at age fifty-four. A private funeral was held on July 26 at Golders Green Crematorium, where mourners were treated to the funnyman’s final joke as they were serenaded by Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood,” a song that Sellers deeply detested. George and Judy attended a memorial service for Sellers at St. Martin-in-the-Fields on September 8, which would have marked the comedian’s fifty-fifth birthday.
In October 1980, George’s life took yet another turn when he was approached by none other than Paul McCartney to try his hand at producing the soundtrack for a short film to be titled Rupert and the Frog Song, a pet project of McCartney’s based on the popular British cartoon character Rupert Bear. “After the breakup of the Beatles, I saw more of Paul [and Linda] than the others,” said George, “but I never thought for a moment we would work together again. Paul had been through his Wings records and proved himself to be an excellent producer, so I was surprised when one evening, after the four of us had enjoyed a good dinner, he asked me to produce him again.” Although he had enjoyed producing “Live and Let Die,” George was reticent at first about the prospect of working with Paul. Why would the ex-Beatle want to sacrifice his artistic independence after so many years of producing himself? But Paul persisted, and George began to realize that the other man was at a turning point of sorts. In January, Wings’ most recent tour had been cancelled after Paul’s arrest for cannabis possession. He spent ten days in a Tokyo jail before being deported back to the United Kingdom, where Wings had been languishing ever since. Even in their inactivity, the band had scored a sixth number-one US hit with a live version of “Coming Up” during the spring of 1980.5
Concerned about the potential pitfalls of returning to their producer/artist relationship of days gone by, George made a single demand of the former Beatle, saying, “It will only work if you accept what I have to say as being valid, because there’s no point in having a yes man, you can get somebody else. If you want somebody to agree with everything you do, that’s destructive.” At the same time, George was worried about his own psychological challenges in working with Paul again. He was well aware of his own at times porous ego boundaries, later observing that “it’s all too easy for the producer to get smart and start disagreeing with the artist so as to look big. That’s fatal, too. That’s stupid and ridiculous.” In short, George reasoned that the only way their new partnership could work would be with unremitting honesty in all of their dealings. “If the producer really thinks the artist’s song isn’t good enough, he’s got to say so unequivocally, and the artist has got to trust him,” said George. “If you don’t have that relationship, then you’re done.” But at the heart of it all was George’s realization that Paul was no longer the much younger man who struggled to find his way back at Abbey Road nearly two decades earlier. Things had changed precipitously in the ensuing years. “Paul’s probably the greatest living songwriter in the world and here I am, a producer who’s never written a hit song in his life,” George later remarked. “So what temerity do I have to go to the guy and say a song is not good enough? It’s a terrible thing to do, but it’s absolutely necessary.”6
After George agreed to try his hand at producing Paul again, the two old friends held recording sessions for “We All Stand Together,” the planned theme song for the Rupert Bear animated film, at AIR Oxford Street. Explicitly written for children, “We All Stand Together” featured McCartney on lead vocals and harmonies, along with the King’s Singers and the St. Paul’s Cathedral Choir providing additional backing vocals. Working from Martin’s choral arrangement and Kenneth Sillito’s orchestration, the instrumentation featured flautist Elena Durán. With Emerick chipping in as engineer, “We All Stand Together” was recorded in October and November 1980, but not released until 1984 to coincide with the Rupert and the Frog Song film debut, charting a top-five UK hit in the process. During this same period, Paul had begun holding rehearsals for a new Wings album involving a raft of new material that he had accumulated since his return from the Far East. As rehearsals moved forward that fall at Finchden Manor in Kent, guitarist Laurence Juber was surprised to learn from McCartney that Martin would be producing the new LP, and that Martin “does not want it to be a Wings album. He wants it to be a McCartney album and use session players, casting it on a per-song basis.” For his part, Juber was caught unawares, although “looking back, I think he was passing the buck onto George.” At that point, Juber and drummer Steve Holley departed the scene, leaving longtime Wings sideman Denny Laine and Linda McCartney to begin working on Paul’s upcoming solo album with Martin.7
By the late fall, George and Paul were devoting considerable studio time to the solo LP, which was to be titled Tug of War. As it turned out, there may have been a hint of fact to Juber’s insight about McCartney’s motives. “The idea of working with Wings again,” said Paul, “in truth, it would have just been limiting, I thought. And George agreed. I slightly blamed it on him a bit. Only a bit, though.” For his part, George felt that Wings had been an unnecessary facade during Paul’s post-Beatles career. Throughout the group’s successful 1970s run, McCartney had clearly been the star. But Paul had felt he needed the edifice of a working rock group. “I like being in a band, you know?” he once remarked. “I don’t like being out of work, and, in a way, when you’re just recording, you can get to feel a bit out of work. You like to have a strum and sing. So that’s the main reason behind it.” In a September 1980 interview, Lennon had made special note of Wings. “I kind of admire the way Paul started back from scratch, forming a new band,” he observed. “I kind of admire the way he got off his pedestal,” adding that “he did what he wanted to do.” For his part, George appreciated the success that Paul had created with Wings wh
ile recognizing that Paul no longer needed the structural device of a band in his life. He was Paul McCartney, after all.8
By early December 1980, George and Paul were routining new material at AIR Oxford Street, with Geoff in tow. The two old colleagues were working under a single proviso: “We decided not to be as restricted,” Paul later commented in the LP’s liner notes, “so we started a new era, working with whoever we thought was most suitable for the tune.” For Paul, it was like turning over a new leaf in his storied career. “As if it was a film,” he added, “once we had decided that this wasn’t going to be a Wings album, George and I chose the right performers for every track. I wanted to play with Stevie Wonder and we did two together instead. I wanted Steve Gadd on drums and Stanley Clarke on bass simply because they’re the best, and I wanted the best. Why not?” On December 7, they tried out a host of new numbers, including “Ballroom Dancing,” a particular favorite of George’s, and “Keep Under Cover” before tackling “Rainclouds” and the whimsical “Ode to a Koala Bear” on December 8. But on the morning of December 9, Martin and McCartney were awakened to the tragic news of John Lennon’s senseless murder at the hands of twenty-five-year-old Mark David Chapman in the archway of the Dakota the night before. The ex-Beatle was only forty years old, leaving behind Yoko, seventeen-year-old Julian, and five-year-old son Sean.
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