During this same period, George revisited his plan, originally hatched back in 1979 with his All You Need Is Ears memoir, to provide fledgling producers with a handbook for embarking upon a career in music. Titled Making Music: The Guide to Writing, Performing, and Recording, the resulting anthology provided insights into composing popular music, musical performance, and recording techniques and was a primer on the nature of the music industry itself. To accomplish this end, George gathered a diversity of essayists from the music business to try their hand at sharing the fruits of their labors. For his part, George recognized the growing dilemma of making and enjoying music in an age characterized by evolving technologies. “At the present time, music is available to everyone on a scale which would be incredible to anyone living 100 years ago,” George wrote. “Indeed, we have such a host of good sounds that we are liable to chronic indigestion unless we are circumspect about our consumption.” To navigate the morass, he called on the likes of Paul McCartney and Stephen Sondheim to address the act of writing music; Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Chick Corea to explore music performance; Geoff Emerick, Phil Ramone, and Quincy Jones to share their experiences with sound production; and Richard Branson and Chris Wright to comment on the trials and tribulations of working in the record industry. Making Music enjoyed rave reviews, as evinced by Steve Morse’s notice in the Boston Globe, which praised Martin’s anthology as “an extremely informative guide through the labyrinth of the music biz” that “neither insults nor panders to the reader.”19
Having accomplished his long-standing goal of providing budding musicians and record producers with an introductory guidebook, George returned to the studio with Paul in order to compile the ex-Beatle’s next solo effort. With Tug of War having proven to be an unprecedented return to form for McCartney, Martin set about the business of culling through the remaining tracks that they had recorded in the early 1980s with an eye toward future projects. Up first was Pipes of Peace, the long-player that McCartney saw as the thematic answer to Tug of War, with its accent upon the worldly tensions of everyday life. By this point, McCartney was collaborating with Eric Stewart, who had supplanted Laine as the ex-Beatle’s artistic partner. With “Say Say Say” already primed and ready for release, Martin and McCartney turned their attention to the new LP’s title track, an antiwar number penned as a counterpoint to “Tug of War.” As George later recalled, “We wanted to try and convey the sound of as many pipes as possible. The pipe is such a universal folk instrument. From China through Afghanistan through to Ireland, you’ll find pipes of one sort or another. So Paul’s thought was, ‘Can we convey this, that we can actually unite the world with music, with the pipes of peace portraying that?’” To capture the attendant sounds that Paul desired, George even tried his hand at playing the oboe, the slippery “live eel” that he had first attempted back in his Guildhall days. As he later remarked, “A lot of the pipes had to be synthesized, and for that we used a Fairlight. I used to play the oboe, and on one phrase I wanted to use an oboe lick. I haven’t played for about 20 years, but I said, ‘Rather than get an oboist in, I’ll play it.’ Arrogance itself. I got the oboe in and I was terribly depressed when I realized what sound I was producing. It was ghastly. My diaphragm was no longer what it was and nor was my lip control. I was able to produce one or two good notes, but only one or two. I didn’t have the dexterity, and I suddenly realized how inferior my technique had become.” So he remedied the situation by playing the notes on a keyboard.20
Enamored with the concept of espousing global unity, George built up several layers during the production process, including a children’s choir to imbue the song with a sense of optimism and goodness. In this way, he opted to combine the pipe sounds with “the effect of innocence and children, and in fact, we got the Pestalozzi Children’s Choir along to perform, thinking that they might add another dimension to it, and they did.” With “Pipes of Peace,” the ultimate challenge for George involved capturing Paul’s lead vocal. Now forty years old, McCartney was beginning to lose the vocal dexterity that he had enjoyed for most of his singing career. When he originally composed “Pipes of Peace,” said George, “he wrote it in C. When I heard him sing it, I said, ‘You know, it’s in the wrong key for you. You have to sing it awfully low.’ When he sang it in another key, part of it sounded awfully high. Then I realized the range was over two octaves. A lot of writers—even the most experienced ones like Paul—don’t think about how a song is going to affect their voice. They quite often write their songs so that their fingers feel comfortable with the instrument they’re playing, forgetting that it may not be the best key for their voice.” George remedied the issue by having Paul sing “Pipes of Peace” in different keys, modulating from E to C and back again. For his part, Paul was pleased with the results, saying, “Oh, that’s great. I like it, and it sounds much more interesting.”21
Released in October 1983, Pipes of Peace continued the success of Tug of War, albeit on a different trajectory. Where the latter album had been a best seller in its own right, Pipes of Peace only rose as high as number fifteen on the American album charts. But like its predecessor, Pipes of Peace resulted in a raft of hit singles, including “Say Say Say,” which was a megaseller for McCartney and Jackson, notching a number-one single on Billboard and clocking in at number two on the rhythm-and-blues charts. While “Pipes of Peace” was relegated to the B-side of “So Bad” in the US marketplace, where it charted a top-thirty single, in the United Kingdom “Pipes of Peace” proved to be a chart-topping single. With a bevy of hit singles under his belt, McCartney was ready to return to acting in the same style that he done in the 1970s with such Beatles fare as A Hard Day’s Night and Help! Having tapped George as his producer, Paul settled on a caper film, to be directed by Peter Webb on a $9 million budget, titled Give My Regards to Broad Street as his vehicle. George loved the idea of making another rock musical, but he wasn’t so sure about Give My Regards to Broad Street, recalling the Magical Mystery Tour debacle all too well. As George later described the film, “Give My Regards to Broad Street is a slightly dramatic story, a sort of day in the life of McCartney, but it has a twist to it. It’s a vehicle for his songs, and from the moment you see him at the beginning of the picture to the end, there are 14 of them—10 are old songs and four are new.” For his part, George was enchanted by the soundtrack possibilities, but the problem as he saw it was that “Paul was expecting the music to make the film a success.” The plot “was a thin one, but Paul went ahead with it regardless and spent his own money on it. He’d actually talked to quite a few directors who had turned it down—he was a bit headstrong in that respect.”22
For the soundtrack, George produced a mélange of different songs, including rocking numbers like “No Values” and “Not Such a Bad Boy,” as well as a medley of Beatles and McCartney tunes with Ringo chipping in on drums, such as “Yesterday,” “Here, There, and Everywhere,” and “Wanderlust.” In large part, the soundtrack relied on this kind of recycling, with George producing new versions of old hits, including a futuristic, techno version of “Silly Love Songs” and a jazzy take on “The Long and Winding Road.” George relished the opportunity to revisit such a variety of old songs, later writing that “‘Yesterday’ is such a unique record. I prefer the original. But I prefer the new versions of ‘Silly Love Songs’ and ‘The Long and Winding Road,’ which I think are both terrific tracks—much better than the originals.” He was particularly taken with “The Long and Winding Road,” which “starts off with a saxophone played by Dick Morrisey, then it goes into the vocal and we used a black gospel choir, the London Community Gospel Choir.” For the track, “we had a live band in the studio with Herbie Flowers on bass, with Paul and Trevor Barstow on keyboards. On ‘Silly Love Songs,’ we had most of Toto—Jeff Porcaro on drums, Steve Lukather on guitar, and Louis Johnson on bass, and it was terrific, really beautiful.”23
In the end, George’s premonition had been correct about Give My Regards to Broad Street, w
ith the movie generating a paltry $1.4 million in receipts after its autumn 1984 debut and closing shortly thereafter. Renowned film critic Roger Ebert described the music as “wonderful” while observing that the cinematic experience had been “about as close as you can get to a non-movie.” The soundtrack LP was moderately more successful, mostly riding on the strength of McCartney’s “No More Lonely Nights” single, which was the last track to be recorded for the project. The basic track featured McCartney’s bass and lead vocal, backing vocals from Linda McCartney and Eric Stewart, Herbie Flowers’s bass, Anne Dudley’s synthesizer, and Stuart Elliott’s drums. But the crowning touch was Pink Floyd mainstay David Gilmour’s searing lead guitar solo, which afforded the midtempo love song with a welcome edge. Martin took special care in arranging the backing vocals. As he later remarked, “There are choral sounds that come in on the slow ballad version of ‘No More Lonely Nights’—slightly ethereal, floaty, slightly synthetic choral sounds. I built up a lot of backing vocals with Linda, Eric Stewart, and Paul, and created a lot of sort of complex harmonic washes.” After it was released as a single in September 1984, “No More Lonely Nights” scored a top-ten showing in the UK and US marketplaces alike, with the Give My Regards to Broad Street soundtrack topping the UK album charts while settling in at a lackluster number twenty-one, at least by McCartney’s standards, in the United States.24
By 1985, George had self-consciously decided to select his production efforts with even greater exclusivity. He still hadn’t become immune to the occasional “one-night stand,” but he made a point of being more deliberate in his selection of artists after his recent bout of successes with Paul. “I think the most difficult thing, if you are successful,” he remarked at the time, “is to stay successful. And to keep coming back and keep doing good things, which I’ve always tried to do. All I’m saying is it gets harder, it doesn’t get any easier. No, I shall just gradually slip away.” The notion of gradually slipping away had clearly been on his mind in 1985—and especially as he contemplated his upcoming sixtieth birthday on January 3, 1986. In those days, rock ’n’ roll was still considered a young person’s game, and George was older than just about anyone else he knew in the industry. Having been feted for much of his adult life, he understood the precarious place that he occupied in his highly competitive and always-evolving business. And perhaps more than ever before, he knew that one day his time would come—just as it had for Oscar Preuss so very many years ago—to settle into the twilight and leave the record industry to other, younger hands. “You’re in competition still, with all these people,” said George. But “after being the Fastest Gun in the West,” he added, “you’ve got to learn when to hang up your holster.”25
24
Grow Old with Me
* * *
FOR THE TIME being at least, George wasn’t even remotely considering the idea of hanging up his holster just yet. As 1985 wore on, George took on another highly selective project—this time, with “the Gambler” himself, country megastar Kenny Rogers. Over the years, Martin had done precious little production work with country and western acts, save for the country rock of America, and he likely saw Rogers as a unique challenge. As Rogers prepared to record his thirteenth studio album, he took a chance and asked Martin to produce the long-player. To the singer’s surprise, George accepted, and before long they were working at AIR Montserrat on his new record, to be titled The Heart of the Matter. “I don’t know why he ever bothered to do an album with me,” Rogers later remarked, “but I was thrilled and touched that he did.” For the album, Martin routined a host of different cover versions at his island retreat with Rogers, including Dave Loggins’s “Morning Desire” and Michael Smotherman’s “Tomb of the Unknown Love.” As they recorded each number, Martin would score the string arrangements, which he completed back in London. For Rogers, working with Martin was “the highlight of my personal career. He brought a whole different touch to my life and my perspective on music.” For Martin and Rogers’s one-off collaboration, The Heart of the Matter proved to be a triple threat, with the album along with the “Morning Desire” and “Tomb of the Unknown Love” singles notching number-one hits on the Billboard country charts.1
For George, one of the clear highlights of the late 1980s was the much-anticipated release of the Beatles’ albums on compact disc. Codeveloped by Philips and Sony, CD technology had quickly emerged as the successor to vinyl records as the dominant music-delivery format after its introduction to the marketplace in 1982. By 1985, CD technology netted its first million-selling album in Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms, which had been recorded in the tropical splendor of AIR Montserrat. While the music industry quickly embraced the format shift from analog to digital mastering, the Beatles had been conspicuously late in joining the CD revolution. This was due in large part to EMI’s reluctance to join its industry peers in paying the requisite royalty per disc to Philips and Sony, as well as the multinational record company’s lack of manufacturing capacity as it made the shift toward CD production. And worse yet, EMI had been markedly slow in tapping George to supervise the attendant digital mastering associated with preparing the Beatles’ CD debut. In fact, by the time that the record conglomerate contacted the producer about working on the project, the first four LPs—Please Please Me, With the Beatles, A Hard Day’s Night, and Beatles for Sale—were already mastered and scheduled for release as CDs on February 26, 1987. For reasons known only to EMI management, George wasn’t contacted about assessing the mixes until December 1986. In a March 1987 interview with Richard Buskin, George suggested that EMI’s motive may have been to seek his imprimatur before beginning the cascade of CD releases. But after they brought him into the project, George assumed the mantle of custodianship for the Beatles’ music, striving at every turn to ensure authenticity and fidelity to the band’s original artistic intentions. In short, he wouldn’t simply be rubber-stamping EMI’s technical decisions but rather making certain that those decisions were made on solid footing.
In this way, EMI probably received much more than they had originally bargained for; but George made it eminently clear that he wouldn’t be going away quietly, that he was in it for the long haul as far as the integrity of the Beatles’ musical corpus was concerned. As he remarked during his interview with Buskin, the irony is that he didn’t have any complaints about the first batch of CDs—as long as they were released in their original productions, that is—noting that when “I was brought in, I couldn’t influence the first four in any way except pass my judgment on them. I actually think they’re very good.” What concerned George were the subsequent batches of CDs. With the 1987 Beatles CD releases, EMI had concocted a shrewd marketing plan that involved positioning the band’s CD debut as an “event,” with new batches being released each month. After the February 1987 release, the second batch, including Help!, Rubber Soul, and Revolver, was slated for April; Sgt. Pepper was scheduled to be released in June, marking the twentieth anniversary of the album’s original distribution; The White Album and Yellow Submarine in August; the Magical Mystery Tour LP in September; Abbey Road and Let It Be in October; and the Beatles’ singles releases and rarities, to be compiled as Past Masters, Volume 1 and Past Masters, Volume 2, in March 1988. Through this protracted scheme, EMI unveiled the Beatles’ music as a signature cultural event. As future projects would demonstrate, marketing the Fab Four as a blue-chip brand would pay dividends for EMI time and time again.2
When the initial batch of CDs was released that February, Bhaskar Menon announced that the first Beatles LPs “were actually made for mono. In very close discussions with George Martin, the Beatles’ producer, we determined that there was no question that we must preserve the original mixes—that the releases really must be in mono because stereo was not the intent of the performers.” In 1978, Menon had been appointed as chairman of EMI Music Worldwide, and he was actively taking advantage of the CD revolution as a means for leveraging the record conglomerate’s massive back catalog, with
the Beatles being the cream of EMI’s very fertile crop. During the 1970s, Menon had been the driving force behind Capitol Records’ sustained success with Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, and he was eager to position the Beatles’ music for new generations of listeners attracted to digital technology, as well as for first-generation fans of the Fab Four who were interested in authentic engagements with the music of their youth, which was where Martin came in.
During those pre-internet days, Martin’s considerable contributions to the Beatles’ story were understood most thoroughly by diehard fans, musicians and music insiders, and industry types. In contrast to the present, when literally thousands of books attempt to capture the contours of George and the Beatles’ story, there was comparatively little resource material available. That veiled state of affairs began to shift rather perceptibly after the distribution, in 1982, of The Compleat Beatles, which started life as a two-hour PBS documentary, enjoyed an MGM-backed theatrical release, and was later released on VHS home video. Until the 1990s, the documentary would serve as one of the central jumping-off points for audiophiles and new generations of fans alike. Directed by Patrick Montgomery and narrated by Malcolm McDowell, The Compleat Beatles devoted particular attention to George, who received considerable screen time in order to outline his signal role in the band’s achievements. For his part, Menon implicitly understood Martin’s central place in Beatles lore. Embarking upon a press tour in advance of the Beatles’ CD releases, Menon promised that the band’s CDs would be “an absolute replication of the masters approved by the Beatles and George Martin when the records were first put out.” Even as the first batch hit the stores, Menon avowed that “any remix that is required on any of these, we will request him [Martin] to undertake them for us.”3
Sound Pictures Page 64
