FOR GEORGE, JUNE 1964 would have long-standing implications, forcing him to confront—finally—the professional demons that had plagued him for nearly a decade. But first, there was the small matter of completing the soundtrack for A Hard Day’s Night. The American long-player was already slated for a June 26 release, featuring a spate of original material—the title track, “Tell Me Why,” “I’ll Cry Instead,” “I’m Happy Just to Dance with You,” “I Should Have Known Better,” “If I Fell,” “And I Love Her,” and “Can’t Buy Me Love”—along with four instrumental cover versions conducted by George and a studio orchestra. Fortunately for George and the band, they had an extra month’s cushion before the LP’s British release, which was scheduled for July 26 distribution in the United Kingdom, only a few weeks after the film premiere. But by the time the bandmates reconvened with their producer at Abbey Road on the afternoon of Monday, June 1, their backs were truly against the wall. While the US album was already being pressed at Capitol’s manufacturing plants, George and the boys were still several songs shy of completing their third studio album. As if to compound their already tight schedule, they planned to finish work on a new four-song EP to be titled Long Tall Sally and distributed on June 19 as an intermediate release before A Hard Day’s Night found its way into British record stores during the last week of July. And it all had to be completed—the album and the EP—within the span of two days, as the Beatles were scheduled to embark on their first world tour on June 4. George had found it to be increasingly difficult to cobble together time with the Beatles in the studio given the band’s demanding touring schedule. “Brian would dole out time to me like he was giving scraps to a mouse,” George later remarked. But those were the rough-and-tumble days of Beatlemania in its prime. The pressure to release new Beatles product at regular intervals was also the express result of Brian and George’s plan, hatched what seemed like a lifetime ago back in early 1963, to do everything possible to avoid a time lag in seeing new music into the arms of a ravenous record-buying public that, for the moment at least, appeared to have no bounds.1
While George and the Beatles’ time frame was indeed tight, it hardly rose to the same kind of extreme pressure under which they had recorded the Please Please Me long-player. To round out the British version of A Hard Day’s Night, the band needed to complete five additional tracks before leaving for Copenhagen on June 4. The Long Tall Sally EP merely required two new songs, to be paired with the title track and “I Call Your Name,” in order to be readied by Martin and Smith for release in three weeks’ time. Sure, they didn’t have many extra hours to spare, but by George and the Beatles’ standards during this period, it was more than manageable. They also had the added benefit that the bandmates had returned from an extended holiday in which Lennon and McCartney had composed several new tunes. But they had begun the afternoon of June 1, quite ironically, by working on a cover version—and one that they had perfected in their stage act over the years. The first song that they attempted was “Matchbox,” the old Carl Perkins tune produced by Sam Phillips at the legendary Sun Studios in Memphis. Slated for the EP, the song featured Ringo on lead vocals. The cover version was recorded in breakneck fashion given the band’s familiarity with the tune. Ultimately, the song required only five takes, with Ringo singing and playing the drums simultaneously. As it happened, Perkins was making his way across Great Britain on a promotional tour at the time, and he had met the group only the night before at a party after their show at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London’s West End. Having been invited to attend their session the next day, Perkins enjoyed the opportunity to briefly jam with the Beatles before observing them in the studio, with Martin pounding the keys, as they recorded the very composition that the American rockabilly star had originally released back in 1957.
With “Matchbox” in the can, George and the band quickly turned their sights toward “I’ll Cry Instead,” a new Lennon composition that Lester was considering for the “break-out” chase scene shot in Thornbury Playing Fields in A Hard Day’s Night, which was still in postproduction. As Beatles recordings go, “I’ll Cry Instead” was recorded in a most peculiar fashion, with George producing the song in two sections. “I’ll Cry Instead” may have been recorded as two distinct parts in order to facilitate Lester’s ability to overlay the number on the chase sequence, which lasted approximately two minutes. Working expeditiously, the band required six takes to complete “section A” and two takes to complete “section B.” Each part featured the same instrumentation and similar track arrangement, leaving George to edit them together afterward in deference to the structural requirements of Lester’s film, which existed in a rough cut by this point. As it happened, Lester ultimately opted to tap “Can’t Buy Me Love” for the chase scene, thus relegating “I’ll Cry Instead” as one of A Hard Day’s Night’s parcel of nonsoundtrack numbers. Before taking a break that afternoon, George and the group recorded a cover version of “Slow Down,” Larry Williams’s 1958 rock tune, which they intended to round out the contents of the Long Tall Sally EP. Recorded over six takes, “Slow Down” featured Lennon providing a boisterous lead vocal against a surging rhythm track. On June 4, Martin overdubbed a piano track onto “Slow Down,” but by then the Beatles were twelve hundred kilometers away in Copenhagen, where their professional lives had quite suddenly been thrown into a very unexpected state of flux.
After taking their afternoon break on June 1, Martin and the Beatles turned to another new composition during the evening session, a wistful Lennon-McCartney ballad titled “I’ll Be Back,” which Lennon had based on Del Shannon’s 1961 American chart-topper “Runaway.” That evening, the band recorded the song across sixteen takes. For the first several attempts, George and the group toyed with different arrangements and time signatures. Take two, for example, finds the Beatles trying their hand at recording “I’ll Be Back” as a waltz in 6/8 time, with Ringo awkwardly attempting to maintain the beat throughout the effort, which forced John to fumble with the lyrics during the bridge. For take three, the bandmates abandoned triple meter and attempted “I’ll Be Back” in straight 4/4 time. Without having devised an ending for the ballad yet, Lennon announced at one point that the others will know that the song is over “when I start going ‘oh oh’ about eight times.” At this juncture, Lennon and Harrison had been playing electric guitars, but by the twelfth take, they have forsaken their guitar leads for the acoustic sound that would elevate “I’ll Be Back” to a melancholy fusion of remarkable emotional power. While several of the latter takes would prove to be false starts, take sixteen would be sublime. In this final arrangement, one track featured Lennon’s acoustic guitar, McCartney’s bass, and Starr’s drums, while yet another was reserved for Lennon and McCartney’s shared lead vocals. The third track was reserved for Harrison’s acoustic, in which he played the lead riff throughout the song, while a fourth track was allotted to additional acoustic guitar layering and Lennon’s vocals for the middle eight. By the time that Martin and the Beatles retired for the evening, they had turned a subtle and very intriguing corner. Once again, they had demonstrated Martin’s axiom that their working relationship often presupposed that their songs were never finished until they had put them through their paces. With “I’ll Be Back,” they had worked through several iterations until Lennon’s exquisite tune had finally come into its own. In so doing, they had discovered new and powerful notes of beauty and sadness that had been previously unexplored in their work with the Parlophone head.2
When they reconvened the following afternoon at Abbey Road, the first tune that George and the Beatles attempted was John’s “Any Time at All,” an ecstatic rock song with a driving beat and space for a piano interlude courtesy of Paul, who suggested an innovative means for completing the number’s middle eight. For “Any Time at All,” Martin double-tracked Lennon’s vocal while recording a rhythm track consisting of McCartney’s bass, Lennon’s acoustic guitar, Harrison’s twelve-string Rickenbacker, and Starr’s drums. They recorded seven takes of “Any Time at All” before abandoning it temporarily and turning to McCartney’s new composition, an acerbic, mournful tune titled “Things We Said Today”—a bit of “future nostalgia,” in its composer’s words. Recorded over three takes, “Things We Said Today” was a masterpiece of economy, with the first take ending as a false start followed by a full realization of the song in only the second attempt. For the third take, George recorded Paul double-tracking his vocal with Ringo playing a tambourine and John on piano. Using the power of four-track recording, Martin opted to omit Lennon’s piano part, although it still existed as a remnant through leakage onto McCartney’s and Starr’s microphones.3
After a dinner break, Lennon unveiled yet another new composition, “When I Get Home,” an up-tempo rock number that the Beatles recorded in eleven takes, with the final attempt being marked as the best. “When I Get Home” would be especially remembered by seventeen-year-old Ken Scott, who was working his very first session that evening as a second engineer. Years later, he recalled being “completely and utterly terrified” at the prospect of working with George and the Beatles. As it happened, he also very nearly raised the ire of the Parlophone head, almost ending his tenure at Abbey Road in the same instant in which it began. As Scott later recalled:
At that time, four-track tape machines were so large that there was no room for them in the control room. They were sited along the corridor and the only contact you had with the session was via a talkback system. On this particular evening the Beatles were playing back their latest recordings to a few friends who had come in. George Martin was giving me the directions over the talkback and at one point I heard him say “home.” So I put the tapes away, switched off the power, put my coat on and left the room. As I was walking along the corridor I saw George standing in the doorway.
“Well,” he said, “is the tape lined up yet?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Is the tape of ‘When I Get Home’ ready yet?”
“Ah, hang on George, I’ll just check and see.”
I ran up that corridor, flicked all the switches and put the tape back on as fast as lightning, acting nonchalantly as if nothing was wrong!
With “When I Get Home” having reached a state of completion, George and the Beatles continued yet another incredibly prolific night at Abbey Road by returning to “Any Time at All.” After recording four more takes, they finished yet another original composition, rounding out the contents for the Hard Day’s Night long-player in the nick of time, although there was still some talk about recording a fourteenth track for the album the next day. In one of the song’s most interesting features, McCartney’s piano part comprised the available fourth track in which the Beatles’ bassist doubled Harrison’s Rickenbacker notes in the same fashion that Martin had devised using his windup piano technique back on “A Hard Day’s Night.” It was yet another turning point in which the apprentices were clearly and quickly learning at the hands of their master.4
But things suddenly took a turn for the worse on the morning of June 3. There would be no fourteenth song for A Hard Day’s Night after all. As it turned out, the number of tracks would be the least of their worries. As Brian and the Beatles made final preparations for the upcoming world tour, the bandmates held a photo session with the Saturday Evening Post. For several days, Ringo had complained of exhaustion and a sore throat since his return from his lengthy sojourn with Paul in the Virgin Islands. In spite of experiencing bouts of dizziness, he had struggled through the past few days at Abbey Road. After Ringo suddenly fell to his knees during the photo session, Neil Aspinall spirited the Beatles’ drummer to University College Hospital, where he was diagnosed with laryngitis and pharyngitis, throwing the upcoming world tour into a state of unexpected disarray. As Starr underwent treatment for his ailments, Epstein, Martin, and the remaining bandmates grappled with what seemed to be an untenable situation. It was an odd moment, to say the least. The well-oiled machine that Brian and George had been nurturing since the late fall of 1962 was suddenly descending into an unexpected sense of chaos. For Harrison especially, it seemed futile to even consider soldiering on without Starr. “Imagine, the Beatles without Ringo!” the guitarist remarked. According to Paul, “Brian argued with us for more than an hour to change our minds about abandoning the tour, pleading that thousands of Dutch and Australian fans had already bought tickets, and that it would be cruel to disappoint them.” According to Harrison, the Beatles’ producer was just as adamant that the group do everything possible to avoid scrubbing the tour. As Harrison contended, the band was “bullied by Brian Epstein and George Martin into accepting the situation that [they] had to go.” At one point, Harrison upped the ante, remarking, “If Ringo’s not going, then neither am I. You can find two replacements.”5
For his part, the Beatles’ producer was beside himself with anxiety. He was suddenly faced with a twelve-hour window, at most, to decide about how to proceed. The triumphs of The Ed Sullivan Show and the film shoot of A Hard Day’s Night had been masterstrokes of coordination. All of Brian’s careful preparation for their first world jaunt was suddenly awash in disarray. The idea of canceling the tour seemed unthinkable from his vantage point. And Martin intuited the attendant and myriad problems with canceling the tour in an instant, sharing the manager’s angst about the hundreds of hours and reams of correspondence that had gone into planning and executing the multinational trek from Copenhagen to Brisbane. For the past several months, Brian had been working with promoters a world away in terms of arranging for venues, hotels, motorcades, security, and merchandising. There were no out-clauses in effect, and cancellation, to Brian’s mind, meant the possibility of lawsuits—and worse yet, awakening the manager’s lingering fears about a PR disaster that might upset the band’s fame, which he was working tirelessly to consolidate worldwide.
For Brian and George, the issue of the Beatles’ capacity for sustaining their reach was at risk. At this point, they had achieved a seemingly impossible feat, having taken a regional success and transformed it into an international phenomenon. As they stood vigil with Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison at Abbey Road, they had managed to accrue an incredible record—two straight number-one albums, five chart-topping singles, and a new LP and a feature film in the offing. But there were simply no guarantees that it would all last. By mid-1964, the Beatles were one of the very few pop sensations to experience any kind of shelf life. Most acts dried up and lost their sway within a year or two—or at most, after landing a few hits along the way. Brian and George had no real reason to be confident that the Beatles would enjoy a different fate, all of their incredible success notwithstanding. But to their minds, that is exactly what it was: incredible. Both of their careers—as manager and as A&R head, respectively—had been tough going. They weren’t about to take any chances now. It simply wasn’t in their makeup. And for George, it was yet another moment that “rankled” when he felt everything suddenly slipping away, like his Fleet Air Arm days when he was demoted to midshipman or more recently, when EMI denied him the face-saving compliment of a simple bonus after he’d turned in one of the most illustrious years that the multinational company would ever see. No, like Brian, he wasn’t taking any chances. For him, the old show-business adage was never more true and seldom more prescient: the show must go on.
Not knowing how long Ringo would be in the hospital, the Beatles’ brain trust immediately set about the quick work of finding a stand-in. Years later, Martin recalled the showdown at Abbey Road and Harrison’s subsequent vitriol. “George is a very loyal person,” Martin remembered. “And he said, ‘If Ringo’s not part of the group, it’s not the Beatles. And I don’t see why we should do it. I’m not going to go.’” McCartney’s memories were surprisingly vague about the need to carry on with the tour. “For some reason, we couldn’t really cancel it,” he recalled. “So, the idea came up, we’ll get a stand-in drummer.” For the briefest of instances, the idea of recruiting Pete Best may have even been considered. Pete had only recently managed to right himself, forming the Pete Best Four and recording the band’s first single, “I’m Gonna Knock on Your Door,” produced by none other than Decca’s Mike Smith. For his part, John quickly demurred, noting that the ousted drummer now had “his own group, and it might have looked as if we were taking him back, which is not good for him.” At this point, Martin began flipping through his extensive Rolodex of London-area studio musicians—the same directory that had no doubt produced the name Andy White back in September 1962. After coming up empty on his first few tries, George phoned up an East End drummer named Jimmie Nicol, who played in the Shubdubs, a band whose only claim to fame was a minor hit single called “Humpity-Dumpity.” Years later, Nicol vividly recalled “having a bit of a lie down after lunch when the phone rang.” George knew Jimmie as a competent timekeeper, and just as important, he looked the part, with a Scouser-like appearance that would easily blend in with the Liverpool bandmates. Not leaving things to fate, George called the East Ender into Abbey Road Studios for a hasty audition.6
When Nicol arrived at Abbey Road that afternoon, Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison quickly turned back to business, clearly having acquiesced to Epstein and Martin’s admonitions to press on with the tour. For his part, Jimmie was understandably thrilled to be in their presence, perceiving the opportunity as a very big break, although clearly a “mysterious” one. “I’m fairly well-known as a session drummer in England. I do quite a bit of sessions for big artists,” Jimmie later recalled. “It was very mysterious—nobody wanted to commit themselves. So I had to go along to EMI and meet them all and just rehearsed about five numbers. And that was it.” As it happened, John, Paul, George, and Jimmie rehearsed six staples from the Beatles’ standard set, including “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “She Loves You,” “I Saw Her Standing There,” “This Boy,” “Can’t Buy Me Love,” and “Long Tall Sally.” While the session had been billed as an audition, Alistair Taylor knew the score, later remarking, “Jimmie passed the audition, although I don’t know how he could have failed as we really had no alternative.” Listening in from his well-worn place in the control booth, George was plenty satisfied with what he heard that afternoon: “Jimmie Nicol was a very good little drummer who came along and learned Ringo’s parts very well. Obviously, he had to rehearse with the others. And they (Paul, John and George) worked through all the songs here [at Abbey Road].” After Nicol left the studio for a celebratory drink and to pack his bags for Copenhagen, Martin and the remaining bandmates—ever the workaholics, in keeping with their working-class upbringing—ran through a series of demos, including Harrison’s “You Know What to Do,” McCartney’s “It’s for You,” and Lennon’s “No Reply,” which devolved into a cacophony of nervous laughter. They then carried out a few final overdubs on “Any Time at All” and “Things We Said Today,” putting the LP’s contents to bed—at least as far as the band members were concerned. There would be no fourteenth track, after all.7
As it happened, the Beatles’ inaugural world tour proved to be a peculiar affair from the beginning, leaving many of the group’s inner circle in varying states of consternation. Harrison continued to bristle at the notion of using a stand-in, while Starr himself, only barely into his recovery back at the hospital, was crestfallen. “It was very strange, them going off without me. They’d taken Jimmie Nicol, and I thought they didn’t love me any more—all that stuff went through my head.” In spite of his sudden spate of good fortune, Jimmie endured his own understandable level of anxiety at trying to fill Ringo’s shoes—and, quite literally, his clothes. “The boys were very kind but I felt like an intruder,” Jimmie later recalled. “They accepted me, but you can’t just go into a group like that—they have their own atmosphere, their own sense of humor. It’s a little clique and outsiders just can’t break in.” All told, Jimmie performed in eight concerts with the Beatles. He even donned Ringo’s suit on stage to blend in with his temporary mates. In order to complete the masquerade, the group’s roadies deployed strategically placed clothespins to ensure that his jacket fit. For Jimmie, life with the Beatles made a palpable, even surreal difference in his worldview. “The day before I was a Beatle, not one girl would even look me over,” Jimmie later remarked. “The day after, when I was suited up and riding in the back of a limo with John Lennon and Paul McCartney, they were dying just to get a touch of me.”8
If the Beatles had any doubts about Brian and George’s steadfast decision against postponing the tour, their qualms were quickly extinguished by the adulation that they enjoyed in each successive country. With Jimmie in tow, the bandmates’ motorcade was greeted by a tumult of Dutch fans upon their arrival in Amsterdam. The next morning, the Beatles made a ten-mile trek through the Amstel Canal on a specially designed glass-topped boat. “We passed at least 100,000 cheering people who lined the streets on each side of the water to wave, and sometimes almost touch, the Beatles as they passed,” NME reporter Andy Gray wrote. “Six police boats accompanied us on the water and they were kept busy, picking up dozens of boys who swam to the boat, some climbing on to shake the Beatles’ hands.” Incredibly, things became even more raucous when the group arrived in New Zealand. On June 12, as Jimmie’s time with the Beatles was nearing its end, the group rode in a convertible for a nine-mile parade along Australia’s Anzac Highway, which was lined by 250,000 people—nearly half of Adelaide’s population at the time. When they reached Adelaide Town Hall, the lord mayor welcomed John, Paul, George, and Jimmie to the city as some thirty thousand people jam-packed the square. Later, in Melbourne, they were greeted by 250,000 people, who braved the bitter cold to catch a glimpse of their idols. Local journalists reported that some 150 young women had fainted, with another 50 fans being treated for various and sundry injuries. When the band landed in Sydney a few days later, some five thousand fans withstood a severe downpour to see the band, who hopped aboard an open-air flatbed truck to make their way into the city to yet another unprecedented Aussie welcome. By then, Starr had recovered and returned to the fold, relieving Nicol of his short-lived duties and consigning him to the waiting, amnesiac arms of history. For Ringo, it was a homecoming that seemed to quickly assuage his fears about being marooned so far away from his mates: “It was fabulous in Australia, and of course, it was great to be back in the band—that was a really nice moment. And they’d bought me presents in Hong Kong.” As for Ringo’s glaring absence from the fold across those eleven days in June 1964, the fans didn’t seem to mind in the slightest, at times barely even noticing the stiff-jacketed fellow in Ringo’s usual place atop the drum riser. Like on other stops on the world tour, the fans down under were there to participate in the Beatles’ phenomenon, an experience that didn’t appear to be lessened by the temporary shift in the group’s calculus.9
When they returned to the United Kingdom in the beginning of July after playing a final sold-out show in Brisbane’s Festival Hall, the Beatles had become a truly global sensation. Brian and George’s gambit with Jimmie Nicol had proven to be a shrewd move that had paid off handsomely in terms of the massive crowds and public exposure that the band had enjoyed—particularly in Australia and New Zealand, where their fans had come out in droves merely for the opportunity to catch a fleeting glimpse of them. For George and the group, all eyes turned toward the upcoming dates of July 6 and July 10, respectively, when A Hard Day’s Night was slated for release as both the film and the long-playing album of the same name. As the Beatles plowed through the dates on their world tour, Martin and Smith put the finishing touches on the forthcoming EP and LP releases back at Abbey Road. On June 4, as the Beatles and Jimmie Nicol prepared to open the tour in Copenhagen, George supervised mono mixes of “Any Time at All” and “When I Get Home” before trying his hand at superimposing a piano part on “Slow Down.” On June 9, as the Beatles and Nicol were winging their way to Hong Kong, Martin, Smith, and Ken Scott prepared mono versions for United Artists’ American soundtrack release, which was composed of new Beatles tunes “A Hard Day’s Night,” “Tell Me Why,” “I’ll Cry Instead,” “I’m Happy Just to Dance with You,” “I Should Have Known Better,” “If I Fell,” “And I Love Her,” and “Can’t Buy Me Love.”
Meanwhile, the United Artists long-playing version of A Hard Day’s Night would be rounded out by George’s instrumental arrangements for “I Should Have Known Better,” “And I Love Her,” “Ringo’s Theme (This Boy),” and “A Hard Day’s Night.” The instrumental versions were credited to “George Martin and His Orchestra,” and they served as incidental music throughout the eventual film. As George recalled, “Later, when I was busy orchestrating the background score it was decided to use Beatles music in the background whenever possible. Hence, ‘This Boy’ became ‘Ringo’s Theme’ in the towpath sequence, and ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ was turned into a jazz waltz for Grandpa’s chase scene from the police station. ‘If I Fell’ was not used orchestrally in the film, but I liked the tune so much I did a score anyway.” As with the Beatles’ original studio efforts, George’s knowledge about musical notation had become essential to their enterprise together, although more often than not at this juncture in their career, they were baffled by it—particularly John. As Paul later remembered, “George was writing out ‘Hard Day’s Night,’ ’cause he was going to do an orchestral version or somebody wanted it in sheet music, which we of course never required. The Beatles just read each other . . . we just learned a song and if we couldn’t remember it, it wasn’t any good, we junked it. So when George was scoring ‘Hard Day’s Night,’ he said, ‘What is that note, John? It’s been a hard day’s night and I’ve been work-innnn? Is it the seventh work-innnggggg?’ John said, ‘Oh, no, it’s not that.’ ‘Well is it work-innnggg?’ He sings the sixth. John said, ‘No.’ George said, ‘Well, it must be somewhere in between then!’ John said, ‘Yeah, man write that down.’”10
The opportunity to score the soundtrack for A Hard Day’s Night had seemed to fulfill a long-standing ambition of George’s to carry out orchestral work for the silver screen. But in reality, he found Lester to be insufferable as a collaborator. The same persistently negative presence that had caused so much anxiety during the April Abbey Road session devoted to the title track had reared its unwelcome head during recording sessions for the incidental music. As Martin later recalled, Lester’s behavior ultimately “led to a nasty split between us. There was one of my scores which he particularly disliked. That I wouldn’t have minded, but he waited until the actual recording to tell me so.” For Martin, it was “A Hard Day’s Night” all over again as Lester made his presence known in a very public, irritating, and humiliating fashion. “I was on the rostrum in front of the 30-piece orchestra when he came roaring up and tore me off a gigantic strip. ‘This is absolute rubbish you’ve written,’ he ranted. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing? You’re a bloody fool. What do you call this—this—crap?’” For Martin, who had been working diligently to keep the band’s musical direction together across a tumultuous year, Lester’s outburst was just about the last straw: “I was very embarrassed, and very angry. ‘This is what you asked me to write in the first place,’ I told him. But it did no good, and there ensued one of those stupid arguments which can benefit no one. So I did some quick revision there and then, and recorded something along his new line of thinking. After that, we were hardly on speaking terms.” It was yet another one of those instances, as George would experience time and time again, in which he would alter his way of thinking in order to keep the general peace—in which he would, more often than not, be the one to acquiesce in the service of the greater good. As events would demonstrate, he was quickly burning to the end of what had once been a very long fuse.11
On June 10, as the Beatles and Jimmie Nicol played the Hong Kong Princess Theatre on the other side of the globe, Martin and Smith, with assistance from Langham, prepared a mono mix of “I’ll Be Back” that was never used. At this point, the Beatles’ producer was up to his ears working on the postproduction effort for A Hard Day’s Night, especially in terms of bringing the incidental music to fruition for the US soundtrack release. By June 22, as the Beatles played New Zealand’s Wellington Town Hall with Starr back behind the drums, Martin supervised a lengthy control room session at Abbey Road in which he and Smith, with Emerick assisting, mixed the entire UK long-player for Parlophone, along with the US LP for United Artists to be synchronized with the film’s debut. In addition to the mono and stereo mixes, the trio prepared the Long Tall Sally EP for release. It was an incredible session, to be sure, but as time would tell, it wouldn’t even come close to being the longest control room session for a Beatles album.
For the Beatles’ inner circle, Monday, July 6, made for a British replay of the Australian megacrowds that the band had experienced down under during the previous month. That evening, Brian, George, and the primly tuxedoed bandmates arrived at the London Pavilion for the premiere of A Hard Day’s Night, having jostled their way through a crowd of twelve thousand fans packing the streets around Piccadilly Circus. For their part, the Beatles adored Lester’s final cut, at least initially, and although he still maintained that James Bond was better, Lennon couldn’t help boasting that their film was better than the other rock ’n’ roll musicals that had preceded it. While Martin still felt a chill over his treatment at Lester’s hands, he had to feel buoyed, as had Epstein, that A Hard Day’s Night had been not only a commercial success at the box office but also a critical success in the London newspapers. The Daily Express lauded the film as “delightfully loony” and noted that “there hasn’t been anything like it since the Marx Brothers in the ’30s.” Meanwhile, the Times highlighted the movie’s “off-beat” quality and praised it as an “exercise in anarchy.” The Americans quickly fell in line, with the New York Times’ Bosley Crowther celebrating Lester’s film as “a whale of a comedy” with “such a dazzling use of the camera that it tickles the intellect and electrifies the nerves.”12
The film proved to be a popular success as well, with more than sixteen hundred prints in circulation at one juncture. All told, the film generated more than $11 million in receipts while also earning two Oscar nominations, suddenly thrusting Lester and the Beatles into cinema’s highbrow crowd. “The irony was that when the film came out the Americans gave it two Academy Award nominations,” George later wrote. “One was for the script, by Alun Owen. The other was for the musical direction, by me. Dick got not a mention. Perhaps it was poetic justice.” Even years later, Martin was still smarting over his treatment at Lester’s hands, as well as over what he perceived to be the director’s unseemly behavior throughout the production. In many ways, Martin was disgusted with Lester’s antics in the same way that he had blanched at Humphrey Lyttelton’s tantrum back during his days as Oscar Preuss’s assistant. As it happened, George didn’t even bother to attend the thirty-seventh Academy Awards, which were hosted by Bob Hope in April 1965 in Santa Monica, California. “When I found out what my opposition was I realized that there was no point in going,” he wrote. “One of them was André Previn’s score of the Audrey Hepburn film My Fair Lady, and another was Mary Poppins. Our little British film, Beatles or not, was lucky to get nominated really. I knew I didn’t stand a chance against those two, and I was right: André Previn won.” As it happened, the Academy Award nomination for Best Musical Direction would prove to be George’s only Oscar nod across his long career.13
For George, the idea of being right had proved to be significant throughout his professional life. He placed great stock in correctness in all its forms—not merely in terms of being accurate in his assessment of a given situation but also being morally right: demonstrating tact while showing all due deference and respect. Not surprisingly, witnessing uncouth behavior by the likes of Lyttelton and Lester tended to stick in Martin’s craw. To his mind, such people revealed a serious character flaw the moment that they began “throwing one’s own weight about” to the chagrin of others. But being right was about much more than mere comportment. For George, being right also concerned being able to ascertain the ways in which the cultural or political winds were blowing, being able to recognize the sound of the next big hit as quickly as possible—and, even more pointedly, before anyone else did.14
On Friday, July 10, as the Beatles attended the premiere of A Hard Day’s Night in the Liverpool Town Hall and Odeon Cinema, the long-player saw its first full day of release in British record stores. Up in Liverpool, the Beatles’ motorcade was met by some two hundred thousand people out to support their hometown heroes. For the Beatles, the idea of returning to their roots was disconcerting, particularly for Lennon, who later remarked, “We couldn’t say it, but we didn’t really like going back to Liverpool. Being local heroes made us nervous. When we did shows there, they were always full of people we knew. We felt embarrassed in our suits and being very clean. We were worried that friends might think we’d sold out—which we had, in a way.” After the premiere in Liverpool, the band hit the road yet again to embark upon a smattering of dates across the United Kingdom and in Sweden before meeting up with George in the United States, where Brian had booked their first full-fledged American tour.15
As for A Hard Day’s Night, the LP easily picked up the baton from the Beatles’ previous two chart-toppers, Please Please Me and With the Beatles. They even called Robert Freeman back to prepare the distinctive cover art for the album, which featured the faces of John, Paul, George, and Ringo in the form of twenty separate portraits by the famed photographer. At the same time, the new LP found Martin and the Beatles in fine form, sounding even more confident and electric than their previous efforts. For one thing, A Hard Day’s Night was the first Beatles album not to feature any cover versions, including only Lennon-McCartney originals from top to bottom. The album also saw Martin break with his own design principles while sequencing the LP. For George, the placement of the band’s songs on their long-players had been motivated almost entirely by strict commercial designs. His philosophy for structuring a recording for the pop-music marketplace dictated that an album hook its listeners with a dynamic opening track and conclude with a knockout punch. “My old precept in the recording business was always ‘Make side one strong,’ for obvious commercial reasons,” he later remarked. “Another principle of mine when assembling an album was always to go out on a side strongly, placing the weaker material towards the end but then going out with a bang.” While George cited commercial principles for his thinking in this regard, his ideas about song placement—like those of most A&R men during this era—likely evolved from a long-standing rule of thumb for song order vis-à-vis the nature and manufacturing of vinyl records. This rule of thumb held that a long-player’s louder tracks should be strategically located at the beginning of each side of a given album, where the concentric grooves of the record enjoy considerably more real estate, thus leaving the interior of a record, where the grooves are more tightly constrained, for less dynamic tracks with fewer high-frequency sounds. In any event, for the Beatles’ first two albums, George had hewn very closely to this dictum, beginning and ending Please Please Me with “I Saw Her Standing There” and “Twist and Shout,” respectively, while bookending With the Beatles with “It Won’t Be Long” and “Money (That’s What I Want).” And while A Hard Day’s Night explodes into being with the title track, the album concludes, rather poignantly—even artfully—with “I’ll Be Back.” It was a break from form, to be sure, as George opted to conclude the album with the wistful sounds of one of the band’s most heartfelt, melancholic numbers to date.16
Like their previous albums, A Hard Day’s Night took the charts by storm. In the United States, the LP topped the charts for an astonishing fourteen straight weeks, while the album enjoyed similar dominion over the British charts, where it held the number-one position from July 25 to December 1964. For Brian, George, and the Beatles, the upcoming American tour in August 1964 was designed to consolidate their fame on an entirely different and unprecedented scale. George took enormous pride in their incredible accomplishments at this juncture. And as always, “the music sold, and sold, and sold. Once the dam had been breached, the sales that first year in America were enormous, though only a drop in the ocean compared with what was to follow. To me, that brought great excitement and great pride. It wasn’t a question of the glamour, after all. I had been used to dealing with the Peter Sellers and Sophia Lorens of this world. It was more bound up with the idea that something one had made was being heard in millions and millions of homes throughout the world; that it was, literally, becoming a part of the language. That thrilled me enormously.” The month-long tour came up well short of being glamorous, with the Beatles barnstorming their way through twenty-three cities, playing thirty concerts from San Francisco to New York City. As a key indicator of both their ethics and their clout, the bandmates refused to play for segregated audiences or in venues that denied entrance to African Americans. While the group consented to press conferences in each new city, they pointedly declined, albeit politely, the opportunity to join President Lyndon B. Johnson for a wreath-laying event at the grave of John F. Kennedy, the nation’s fallen leader. Brian now uniformly refused official invitations after the incident at the British embassy the previous February. Even the likes of LBJ, it turned out, was no exception.17
George joined the band for several dates on their triumphant first American tour, which often seemed like flying in the eye of a hurricane given the tumult that invariably surrounded the band. “An American rock tour is a whistle-stop business, and you literally don’t know which town you are in,” George later wrote. “You’re whipped into a plane, you land somewhere, give a concert, go back to some hotel, fall into bed again, have a party—and then you’re fed into another plane. The boys would ask, ‘Are we in Oklahoma or Kansas? Are we in New York City or Cincinnati?’ The only way to find out was by asking someone who knew, and such people were hard to find.” For George, one of the highlights of the tour was the band’s Sunday, August 23, performance at the renowned Hollywood Bowl. George had accompanied the band for the express purpose of making a live recording of the Beatles in concert in the hallowed clamshell venue’s environs. For the purposes of the recording, he worked closely with Voyle Gilmore, the senior producer at Capitol Records whom George had met during his 1958 observation of a Frank Sinatra recording session at the Capitol Tower. While Martin and Gilmore managed to capture the recording that day, the event was filled with mayhem—particularly in terms of the unrelenting sound of thousands of screaming fans, with the official gate receipts having marked the attendance at 17,256 patrons. No stranger to live recording—Beyond the Fringe had more than prepared him for mobile production—George felt that a concert album by the Beatles should attempt to capture the excitement of their live act in spite of the overwhelming ambient crowd noise. “They were great as a live band,” he later remarked. But that August evening at the Hollywood Bowl proved to be their undoing as far as memorializing the group’s live show on record went. Despite Martin and Gilmore’s best efforts, the cacophony of thousands of screaming fans proved to be too much for their equipment. Working desperately to filter out the noise, George recognized that it was all but hopeless to expect to come away with a clean recording. As he toiled with Gilmore’s Capitol Records crew, Martin watched the recording desk’s volume-unit meters redlining throughout the band’s relatively brief twelve-song set. “It was like putting a microphone at the tail of a 747 jet,” George later observed. “It was one continual screaming sound, and it was very difficult to get a good recording.” As for Capitol Records’ plans for releasing a live album, George “rejected the original recordings as too poor to release.” Listening to the tapes, he discovered that “there were voices and instruments on every track, plus an enormous amount of screaming. It was very difficult to separate one from the other.”18
With his hopes for capturing the Beatles live on record all but dashed for the time being, George trundled on with the band to Colorado’s famed Red Rocks Amphitheatre, a breathtaking outdoor venue some ten miles outside of Denver, for the Beatles’ August 26 performance. For George, the experience in Colorado proved to be unforgettable. As he later remarked, “The only time I was really frightened was in Denver,” which “lies about 7,000 feet up, and to get into the airport the airplane has to do a fairly steep bank before it lands. George Harrison was not prepared for this, and he was scared out of his wits, alternately praying for deliverance and yelling ‘We’re going to crash!’” But as it turned out, the experience on the plane was only just the beginning. After they landed, “five Cadillacs were drawn up on the runway to meet the plane, and we piled in. But instead of going straight to the hotel, the mayor asked us if we would do a tour of the airfield perimeter. The reason was soon obvious. All the way ’round, it was packed with fans, about 10 deep, jammed up against the barbed-wire fence, like Stalag Luft III turned inside-out. We drove ’round for what seemed miles, about five feet from the fence, five feet from a sea of happy, screaming people all waving frantically.” For Martin, such moments revealed the dark underbelly of living at the heart of Beatlemania, where the screams outmatched their groundbreaking music and even a motorcade seemed fraught with peril.19
In order to make their way into the city and hunker down for the night at Brown’s Hotel, the promoters were forced to resort to a diversion in order to misdirect the horde of people awaiting their arrival. As George later recalled, the diversionary tactic “consisted of a number of people pretending to be Beatles and drawing up in limousines at the front of the hotel, while we went in at the back, through the kitchen entrance. The trouble was that all the photographers and newsmen had tumbled to what we were doing, and they piled in after us. A terrible mêlée in the kitchen resulted, with pots and pans flying in all directions. Brian, the four boys and I finally made it to a service lift, but before we could shut the doors the reporters, the most ruthless people on earth when it comes to getting a story, simply jammed themselves in with us.”20
But for George and Brian—the men who had shepherded and packaged the Beatles for stardom—the concert itself proved to be an alarming experience, “a different kind of fear” in comparison to the scene back on the hotel elevator, which “was like the Black Hole of Calcutta” after it stalled between floors given the attendant weight of so many passengers. Later at Red Rocks, George and Brian discovered firsthand how fragile the group’s lives had become in the swirling vortex of Beatlemania. A natural amphitheatre carved out of rock, Red Rocks features a stage below a rocky outcropping. On either side of the stage, two large towers contained the spotlights and amplification systems. “During the concert,” George later wrote, “Brian and I decided that we would like a bird’s-eye view of the proceedings. So we climbed one of the towers, whose summit was about level with the top of the crowd. Even beyond the amphitheatre we could see people perched on trees and so on, trying to see over. That was the moment when we realized just how vulnerable the boys were. We could see them below as little dots, but one sniper among all those people could have picked them off very simply. Nor is that some wild piece of over-dramatization. The whole thing was frenetic, fanatic, and slightly unreal, and Brian was already worried for their safety.”21
While he was rightly proud of their extraordinary accomplishments by this juncture in their career together, George felt the first chill associated with the dangers lurking just beyond Beatlemania’s edifice of ecstasy and fandom. As it turned out, he had been dealing with his own demons for quite some time—namely, his enduring issues with the EMI Group’s inability to recognize his extraordinary work as head of Parlophone, particularly in terms of the Beatles’ massive success. Indeed, unbeknownst to the bandmates, another drama had been playing itself out that would shortly impact their careers—although it had been happening in EMI House in Manchester Square while the band was thrilling audiences on their world tour back in June. At this point, George had completed the first two years of his latest three-year contract, and he was required to give a year’s notice if he did not intend to re-sign with EMI. Years later, his closest friends would credit Judy with affording the A&R head with the courage to take on EMI House and demand, after all this time, that they recognize his value. He was still understandably miffed about the lack of a December 1963 bonus. “That made up my mind, in no uncertain way. ‘Blow this for a lark,’ I thought. I’m leaving.” So in June 1964, he voiced his long-standing, pent-up anger in writing. His letter was simple and to the point: “Please take notice that in a year’s time I shall no longer be working here.”22
Oh, it was Martin’s revenge all right. He had meant what he said, and while the EMI brass may have been hopeful that he would come around, they clearly had no idea about the strength of his resolve after the last contract negotiation and, worse yet, after the year-end bonus that never managed to materialize. By August 1, 1964, his productions of the UK and US soundtrack albums, along with their high-octane title track and his incidental music, were riding atop the charts in both countries and racking up millions of sales units as A Hard Day’s Night reigned at the box office. Even during those heady days of mid-1964, many still wondered—in spite of veritable mountains of evidence—if the Beatles were a flash in the pan, as the old saying goes. But even still, it is difficult indeed to comprehend the ways in which EMI so fervently held the company line where George was concerned. It simply boggles the mind.