FOR GEORGE, 1965 began with, of all things, a broken foot.
On January 25, George and Judy joined John and Cynthia Lennon for a gala ski trip at St. Moritz in the Swiss Alps. The couples had been friendly for quite some time by this point. In addition to sharing the experience of the Beatles’ triumphant first American visit, the couples would often socialize, with John being particularly taken with Judy’s upper-class demeanor. When he was composing his first book, In His Own Write—a collection of essays, experimental fiction, and other miscellaneous writings and cartoons—John would ask Judy to recite from his motley assortment of puns and word games. As George later remembered, “I thought they were terribly funny. I showed them to Judy, and she read one line out loud. ‘Read some more, Judy,’ said John, and he made her read a whole excerpt. She had the boys rolling around laughing at her cut-glass accent, pronouncing all those invented words John used.” During this period, George was much closer to John than to Paul, who “was very much the avant-garde man, spending his time in art galleries with John Dunbar and people like that, listening to Stockhausen and so on. John seemed much more the pipe-and-slippers man, at home with Cyn in stockbroker belt Weybridge.”1
As it happened, George’s ski trip with Judy and the Lennons was off to a promising start—but only after the Beatles’ producer quelled the media posse that had trailed them to St. Moritz by giving them a few hours of unfettered access to John in which they peppered him with questions and took a number of photographs. After a hearty day of skiing, the two couples retired to their luxurious suite at the Palace Hotel. Ever the prankster, John emerged from the shower wearing his black skiing tights. With his mussed hair, he fell into a comical “Max Wall walk” and left everyone in stitches. “Not to be outdone,” George later wrote, “I donned my black tights and on top of them a pair of boxer shorts fluffed out a bit to look like a skirt, and put a bandeau ’round my head.” With his costume in place, George executed a “Nureyev-type leap with an entrechat in the middle.” But as his audience broke into laughter, George flubbed the landing. Suddenly, “there was a sharp noise like a twig breaking, and I collapsed in agony.” With a fortnight of skiing left to go, George had to deal with the ignominious reality of having broken his foot—not on the pristine slopes of the Swiss Alps but in the relative safety of a hotel sitting room.
Years later, George would remember the trip for another reason altogether. In one unforgettable moment, he enjoyed the rare opportunity to witness John in the act of composing a new song “while we were all gathered around, nursing my broken foot”: “I distinctly remember him strumming away on the guitar, singing, ‘I once had a girl, / Or should I say, / She once had me.’” To George’s mind, it sounded like “a very bitter little story.” After playing “This Bird Has Flown,” as he called it at the time, John turned to another new composition called “Ticket to Ride,” which he debuted for the Beatles’ producer. “I liked it straightaway,” George remembered. “John said he would get together with Paul as soon as he got back to London and finish it off.”2
On February 7, the couples made their return from the Swiss Alps, with George hobbling his way through customs with his leg encased in a plaster cast up to his knee. Scarcely a week later, George and the Beatles were back in the studio. As with their work on A Hard Day’s Night a year earlier, they were under the gun to produce a spate of new songs for their upcoming feature film. On Monday, February 15, they convened at Abbey Road to begin six full days of recording sessions before flying out to the Bahamas, where they were set to begin principal photography with Richard Lester. As the bandmates prepared for their first session of the new year, John posed for photos in George’s automobile in the EMI parking lot in front of the studio. The Beatle had just received his license after passing his driving test. By the time that George and the bandmates had assembled in Studio 2 that afternoon, it had been more than three full months since they had worked together. For his part, George was teeming with butterflies, later remarking, “When the sessions begin, my heart is usually in my mouth. I wonder, sometimes, whether they can keep it up time after time, but they do! They’re terribly workmanlike in the studio.” By this point, Abbey Road had become a safe haven for the group. As Ken Scott observed, “They were all so close, I think anywhere that all of them were away from the crowds was a refuge for them.” But just as important, the Beatles were “fearless,” in Scott’s words. “They didn’t mind change—every record changed slightly. Obviously, as it went along it changed more and more, and faster and faster. More often than not when someone is worried about getting the next hit they keep on exactly the same formula. They didn’t.”3
For the occasion of the February 15 session, George pointedly instructed Ken to leave the tape machine running as the Beatles rehearsed their latest material for the upcoming feature film. In so doing, George established a shift in the band’s recording practices that would leave an indelible mark on their sound. As the tape ran unabated, the Beatles would focus their attention on perfecting the bedrock of a particular song—often concentrating purely on the backing or rhythm track. After laying down the basic track, George and the group would then overdub additional elements to the song, ranging from lead and backing vocals to guitar solos and other instrumental ornamentation. In this way, the band often resorted to many fewer takes to complete a song—although that very same recording might have been subjected to numerous additions and subtractions along the way as they tried out different sounds through processes of trial and error. With “Ticket to Ride,” their first recording of the new year, the shift in George and the band’s studio practices netted a quick and very palpable result. Produced during an afternoon session, “Ticket to Ride” was an electric, driving rock song. Martin arranged the first two tracks of the recording with Starr’s drums and McCartney’s bass on one track and Lennon and Harrison’s rhythm and lead guitars, respectively, on a second. With Harrison executing the distinctive twelve-string Rickenbacker riff, Lennon taped his lead vocal on a third track, along with McCartney’s backing vocal. In this way, Martin and the Beatles were literally building “Ticket to Ride” from the ground up. The remaining fourth track allowed McCartney to overdub guitar fills and a solo on his hollow-bodied Epiphone Casino, as well as tambourine and handclaps to afford the song extra punch.
With “Ticket to Ride,” the Beatles’ sound had changed in a hurry. Leaving the tape running and nailing down the song’s relentless forward momentum allowed George and the bandmates to capture the recording in an economical two takes, with take one being a false start. As a result, the production teems with a clear sense of energy and immediacy, imbuing “Ticket to Ride” with a live, crisp sound that finds the band barreling ahead of their most recent work on Beatles for Sale. Rehearsing the song with the tape running in the studio also provided the creative space for several innovations—namely, the spirited coda that brings the song home in fine style. As McCartney later remarked, “I think the interesting thing was a crazy ending; instead of ending like the previous verse, we changed the tempo. We picked up one of the lines, ‘My baby don’t care,’ but completely altered the melody. We almost invented the idea of a new bit of a song on the fade-out.” As McCartney pointed out, “it was quite radical at the time.”4
With “Ticket to Ride,” the Beatles proved how truly fearless they could be in the studio, to borrow Scott’s characterization, and Martin made a conscious effort during this period to provide the bandmates with a wide berth in which to exercise their evolving imaginations. As the producer later observed, “A two-way swing developed in our relationship. On the one hand, as the style emerged and the recording techniques developed, so my control—over what the finished product sounded like—increased. Yet at the same time, my need for changing the pure music became less and less. As I could see their talent growing, I could recognize that an idea coming from them was better than an idea coming from me, though it would still be up to me to decide which was the better approach. In a sense, I made a sort of tactical withdrawal, recognizing that theirs was the greater talent.” “Ticket to Ride” explicitly demonstrated this point, with the Beatles taking advantage of their free rein in the studio to develop new sounds and musical textures. But the group’s latest track also found George devoting more of his energies to postproduction efforts—particularly in terms of enhancing the finished product. With “Ticket to Ride,” these efforts involved taking great pains in honing the song’s ultimate presentation to a waiting world. Two days later, Martin, Smith, and Scott conducted a control room session to engineer the song’s inventive fade-out while also adding a healthy amount of reverb. In so doing, they took “Ticket to Ride” to even greater heights.5
The February 16 session continued after the dinner hour with two new compositions for the feature film, including McCartney’s “Another Girl” and Harrison’s “I Need You.” With the tape running, the Beatles established a rhythm track for “Another Girl,” which McCartney had written during a recent Tunisian vacation while Martin and Lennon were in St. Moritz. After nailing down a basic track, the group added numerous edit pieces—by now a near-specialty of Martin’s in the Beatles’ mid-1960s heyday. Later, on February 17, McCartney would overdub a new lead guitar solo for “Another Girl.” Up next was “I Need You,” a new Harrison composition, an acoustic version of which was recorded over five takes that evening. The next afternoon, Martin and the band remade the song, supplying it with a more electric sound. Martin later saw “I Need You” as a significant milestone for Harrison, who had long toiled in the shadows of Lennon and McCartney. As the producer later remarked, “‘I Need You’ worked out very well. George got a bit discouraged some time ago when none of us liked something he had written. He has got something to say as a songwriter, and I hope he keeps it up.”6
As the sessions progressed that week, Martin and the studio personnel prepared production acetates to share with Lester and his producer, Walter Shenson, who were gearing up for principal photography on the feature film. That evening, Martin and the band devoted fourteen takes—the most that they would carry out for any song during the whole of that year—to “Yes It Is,” a tender ballad written by Lennon. As with “This Boy,” the song featured close harmonies, which Martin helped to perfect in the studio. Harrison’s distinctive guitar sound on “Yes It Is,” as with “I Need You” earlier that afternoon, was deployed using a foot-controlled tone pedal. Connected to the guitar’s volume controls, the tone pedal generated volume swells with each passing chord. Harrison’s plaintive guitar work imbued Lennon’s wistful ballad with even greater depths of meaning.
Earlier that day, the Beatles had been honored by EMI chairman Sir Joseph Lockwood in a ceremony at the company’s Manchester Square offices. With Brian and George looking on, Sir Joe, as the Beatles affectionately referred to him, presented the band with dozens of awards, including numerous commemorative gold records that they had earned the previous year. The event concluded with a series of photographs depicting the Beatles, George, and Brian posing with Sir Joseph, their gold discs arrayed in the foreground. With the clock clicking ever down on George’s EMI contract, the images reveal the group’s brain trust in a coming state of flux. As the EMI chairman well knew, George’s stubborn inclination to leave his employment with the company promised to deliver a number of unknown outcomes should he indeed hold fast to his position and resign from the EMI Group. With the Beatles’ initial contract with the British juggernaut coming due in sixteen months, George’s change in status seemed to augur a period of great uncertainty not only for Martin and the bandmates but also for EMI. Brian was only just beginning to negotiate the Beatles’ EMI contract, which after the fourth option year, was set to expire in June 1966. Not surprisingly, the rumors began to spiral in the trade papers. In an April 1965 Billboard article titled “Beatles Seen Recording for Own Company,” Sir Joseph was quoted as saying that he “strongly regrets that the group was originally signed to such a comparatively short contract.” Spoken with the genuine benefit of hindsight, Sir Joseph’s words belied the reality of the situation back in May 1962, when George himself had little inclination to sign the band, which in all fairness, was nothing more at the time than an unknown regional act out of Liverpool with no industry track record.7
On Wednesday, February 17, George and the Beatles tackled two more songs under consideration for the feature film, including McCartney’s “The Night Before” and Harrison’s “You Like Me Too Much.” The band completed both songs in a pair of afternoon and evening sessions. While “The Night Before” emerged in two takes, much like “Ticket to Ride” on Monday, George and the group spent some five hours adding a series of overdubs to the basic rhythm track, including Paul’s double-tracked lead guitar and Ringo’s maracas. The song is notable for John’s performance on a Hohner Pianet C electric piano, which he would reprise for “You Like Me Too Much” that same evening. Harrison and McCartney turned in layered lead guitar solos, courtesy of an overdub, with each playing in a different octave. “You Like Me Too Much” proved to be the greater challenge that day, requiring eight takes and a number of overdubs. After recording the basic rhythm track, Martin supervised a series of overdubs, including the double-tracking of Harrison’s lead vocals, Harrison’s lead guitar solo, and McCartney and Martin playing the studio’s Steinway piano at the same time.
With six new songs under their belts, George and the Beatles returned to Abbey Road on Thursday, February 18, which would prove to be a banner day in their collaboration, even going so far as to set the stage for a slew of future innovations to come. Lennon arrived at the session armed with a new, folk-oriented composition titled “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away.” He was joined by a guest that day—his childhood friend Pete Shotton. “That’s me in my Dylan period,” Lennon later remarked about his new composition. “I am like a chameleon, influenced by whatever is going on. If Elvis can do it, I can do it. If the Everly Brothers can do it, Paul and me can. Same with Bob Dylan.” As George and the band essayed the song that afternoon, the tape was left running as the Beatles recorded a basic rhythm track with Ringo gently brushing his snare while John sang and played his twelve-string Framus Hootenanny. For the first few takes, the band suffered a series of false starts when Lennon paused to adjust a microphone and, later, after McCartney accidently broke a drinking glass. After several attempts, Martin marked take nine as “best.”8
During the first few complete run-throughs, John continued to refine his gruff vocal stylings. At one point, George recalled, “I asked him not to sound too much like Dylan. He wasn’t doing it deliberately. It was subconscious more than anything.” As Shotton later recalled, by this time, Lennon had inadvertently incorporated a new lyric into the tune, having discovered that he had accidentally sung “feeling two-foot small” instead of the original phrase, “feeling two-foot tall.” As Shotton looked on, Lennon said, “Let’s leave that in, actually. All those pseuds will really love it,” referring to the pretentious “pseudo-intellectuals” of the day. George sweetened the take with a number of overdubs, including Ringo on tambourine, Paul on maracas, and John rerecording his lead vocal. By this juncture, “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” was already another Beatles classic in the making. And that’s when John shared his vision for the coda: a flute solo to bring his splendid Dylanesque composition to a close. For George, it was a sudden opportunity to draw upon his experience as composer and arranger for a Beatles recording. According to George’s production notes, they were joined in the studio two days later by flautist John Scott, a regular hired musician around the Abbey Road corridors. With Martin’s arrangement in hand, Scott recorded a double-tracked flute solo. As Scott later remembered, “They told me roughly what they wanted, ¾ time, and the best way of fulfilling their needs was to play both tenor flute and alto flute, the second as an overdub.” Not only was Scott the first outside musician to appear on a Beatles track since Andy White back in September 1962, but also the recording of “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” found Martin and the band expanding their musical horizons considerably by augmenting their standard four-part sound. For Norman Smith, a clear shift in the Beatles’ work was palpable. As he observed at the time, “They’re absolutely determined not to duplicate tempos or intensity of sound. They want to come up with something different each time in the studio.”9
Unfailingly industrious, they attempted two more songs after the dinner break on February 18. Always on the lookout for a vehicle for Starr to sing, Lennon and McCartney unveiled an up-tempo rock number titled “If You’ve Got Trouble.” George and the band captured the song in a single take and added a few overdubs before abandoning the lackluster tune. In addition to double-tracking Starr’s vocal, the overdubs included McCartney on his Epiphone Casino and Harrison playing the solo on his Fender Stratocaster. At one point, Ringo shouted “Rock on, anybody!” in a halfhearted attempt to breathe life into the song. The day concluded with yet another new composition, “Tell Me What You See,” which found the group members playing a range of instruments, including Paul on the electric piano and Ringo working the guiro, a Latin American percussion instrument shaped like an open-ended, hollow gourd. Journalist Ray Coleman was in the studio during the song’s production, and he later afforded readers of Melody Maker a rare glimpse into Martin and the band’s working relationship: “Martin is perched on a high chair, and the four Beatles are around him, singing lightly and playing acoustic guitars. Martin sings a song with them.” After further rehearsing “Tell Me What You See” with the group, George reveals the exacting attention to detail that typified his approach to making Beatles records:
Martin: “Let’s have one more go at the backing, then we’ll record your voices separately. This time, we’ll get it exactly right.”
McCartney: “Why—what was exactly wrong?”
Martin: “The tuning sounded wrong. And you, George, should be coming in on the second beat every time instead of every fourth beat.”
Harrison: “Oh, I see.”10
In its essence, this brief exchange demonstrated what people in the Beatles’ inner circle understood implicitly: namely, that George was possibly the single most influential person in their world, really the only one who could impinge upon the nature of their music. Even Brian, whom they held in extraordinarily high esteem, held little, if any, sway in terms of influencing the direction of their creative lives. At one point, when Brian dared to offer an opinion about their efforts in the studio, John coolly replied, “You look after your percentages, Brian. We’ll take care of the music.”11
With only a few days remaining before the group had to leave for the Bahamas, George and the Beatles attempted two more potential songs for the soundtrack. First up was “You’re Going to Lose That Girl,” which they recorded on the afternoon of February 19. With the tape running, they produced the song in two takes, with the second (erroneously marked as take three) being complete. The basic track consisted of John’s rhythm guitar, Paul’s bass, and Ringo’s drums. With Harrison turning in a guitar solo, McCartney overdubbed an electric piano part on a second track, while Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison shared lead vocals on a third. The fourth track found John overdubbing his vocals. A new guitar solo, with bongo and acoustic piano accompaniment, would be added at a later date. With “You’re Going to Lose That Girl” relatively complete, Martin and the Beatles took their leave from Abbey Road, as EMI chairman Sir Joseph Lockwood was holding a gala dinner party that night in the Beatles’ honor at the Connaught Hotel. The group was rightly being feted, but it is impossible not to believe, given the confluence of events regarding George’s and the Beatles’ contracts, that they were also being not-so-subtly wooed by the EMI brass.
On February 20, George and the band spent their last afternoon in the studio before the Beatles’ departure. On the docket was a new McCartney tune titled “That Means a Lot,” which the group slaved over throughout the session. As was their usual practice at this time, they recorded four rehearsal takes with the tape running before capturing a basic track consisting of McCartney’s bass, Lennon’s rhythm guitar, Harrison’s acoustic guitar, and Starr’s drums. A second track was composed of additional bass from Paul, Ringo’s echoed tom-tom, and additional guitar courtesy of John’s Fender Strat. At this juncture, Martin combined tracks one and two onto track three, thus freeing up space on the second track for backing vocals from Lennon and Harrison in support of McCartney’s lead vocals on track four. With track one now available, Martin overdubbed a piano part, along with enhanced vocals from McCartney, Lennon, and Harrison, as well as Ringo’s maracas, which were featured during the song’s coda. In so doing, Martin and the bandmates had created one of their busiest recordings to date. Yet in spite of their incredible efforts that afternoon, they opted to abandon the track, which they considered to be unsatisfactory, for a later date.
Before the Beatles made their departure for a faraway film set in the Bahamas, John was interviewed by journalist Ray Coleman about their latest bout in the studio. Describing the material that they had just completed with George, John remarked, “They’re just songs. If they fit the story and the sequences, some of them will be in. It’s up to the film bosses. Not us. We’ve just concentrated this week on making records. There are a couple of obvious songs for the film, at least we think so, but nothing’s been decided.” In keeping with Brian and George’s rudimentary plan, established during the previous calendar year, of releasing new Beatles product in the form of a new single every three months, two albums per year, and a feature film to boot, the bandmates winged their way to the Bahamas via New York City to rendezvous with the “film bosses” themselves, Richard Lester and Walter Shenson.12
Principal photography on the Beatles’ new feature film commenced on February 23 on New Providence Island. The Beatles stayed at the Balmoral Club as the guests of their financial advisor, Dr. Walter Strach, who had taken up residence in the Bahamas as a tax shelter. Currently being filmed under the working title of Eight Arms to Hold You, Lester’s follow-up to A Hard Day’s Night had originally been written as a vehicle for Peter Sellers, who turned the screenplay down in favor of the frivolous What’s New Pussycat? After being rewritten to accommodate the Beatles’ silver-screen personae, the script for Eight Arms to Hold You attempted to capture the zany humor of A Hard Day’s Night in the guise of a Marx Brothers film. And this time around, Lester would be armed with a considerably more expansive budget of $1.5 million, enabling him to shoot in brilliant Technicolor as opposed to the previous film’s low-budget black and white. But in spite of such robust resources, Lester’s sophomore effort was relatively pedestrian from the start. Where A Hard Day’s Night offered a fresh take on the jukebox movie genre, the latest screenplay was fuelled by high camp, deploying a James Bond–inspired spy narrative as its central conceit. While the Beatles publicly lauded their new movie as a “mad story,” they would be forgiven for having any misgivings about a screenplay in which Ringo, it seems, has managed to come into the possession of an exotic diamond ring that is sought after by desperate people of all stripes, including a cult of Eastern mystics, hit men, and mad scientists. As the madcap movie unfolded, the drummer’s mates attempted to rescue him from his life-or-death predicament while negotiating a veritable maze of car chases and skiing shenanigans.13
Years later, the Beatles would freely admit that their time in the Bahamas was nothing short of a “haze of marijuana.” Since making Dylan’s acquaintance back in August 1964, the group had emerged as potheads of the first order. In Ringo’s memories, the Beatles’ cannabis habit was purely recreational. “A hell of a lot of pot was being smoked while we were making the film. It was great. That helped make it a lot of fun,” he later recalled. “Dick Lester knew that very little would get done after lunch. In the afternoon, we very seldom got past the first line of the script. We had such hysterics that no one could do anything.” But for John, the Beatles’ psychotropic turn had deeper implications involving the virtual prison of their fame. “The Beatles thing had just gone beyond comprehension,” he later recalled. “We were smoking marijuana for breakfast. We were well into marijuana and nobody could communicate with us, because we were just all glazed eyes, giggling all the time. In our own world.” As for George, who was back in England waiting on the precipice of momentous, highly personal events in the offing, the Beatles’ pot smoking had been evident for quite some time. He hadn’t failed to notice their increasingly frequent trips to Abbey Road’s washroom, from whence they would return, like the foursome that they were, “grinning all over their faces.” Admittedly, George hadn’t noticed the change coming over his charges at first. But then he began slowly but surely to perceive the ways in which marijuana was “affecting the boys in front of my very eyes, yet my own brand of naïvety had prevented me from seeing the whole thing for what it really was. I hardly knew what pot smelled like, although it was right under my nose!”14
On February 25, the third day of filming on the set of Lester’s feature film, the Beatles hammed it up for the camera in and around Interfield Road in Nassau. Later, John and Ringo played various scenes at the Bahamas Softball Association’s stadium, while Paul was being filmed within the dank recesses of local limestone quarry caves. On that same day back in England, George learned that his divorce from Sheena had been finalized after many years of personal struggle. For George, it had to have been a bittersweet victory at best, as the competing worlds of his past and present continued to collide even after his divorce had become official. Finally, the charade that he and Sheena had concocted was coming to an end—but only at a hefty price. It was especially burdensome for George’s young son, Gregory, now nine years old, who had suddenly become privy to his parents’ breakup, which his older sister, Alexis, had known about for years. Even decades later, it was painful for Gregory to recall the first time he cast his eyes on Judy, who was sitting in the back of a Rolls-Royce. “Naturally, it was a difficult situation,” he remembered, “for a boy who’s very passionate, and very intelligent, and who was in love with his mother and his father.” For Gregory, his family’s predicament had become transfixing. “All I saw was my mother’s enormous pain, and I saw my father living in this world that was fantastic,” he recalled. “And you know it was very difficult because I was constantly being shuttled back and forth between a very, very modest lower-middle-class semi-detached house in Hatfield and a luxury townhouse and a Rolls Royce every other weekend.”15
As principal photography on the film moved forward, the Beatles shifted from the sun-kissed beaches of the Bahamas and the snow-covered slopes of Obertauern in Austria to the remote Salisbury Plain, Greater London, and, finally, back to Twickenham, that cavernous movie studio that they knew so well from their days shooting A Hard Day’s Night. For George Harrison, life on Lester’s moveable feast of a movie set would have larger implications for his musical and spiritual lives alike. During a break in filming, Harrison first cast his eyes on a sitar, the fretted instrument of Hindustani music. As Harrison later recalled, “We were waiting to shoot the scene in the restaurant when the guy gets thrown in the soup, and there were a few Indian musicians playing in the background. I remember picking up the sitar and trying to hold it and thinking, ‘This is a funny sound.’” In short order, Harrison’s budding interest in the exotic instrument led him into the orbit of Ravi Shankar, the influential Hindustani classical composer. “I went and bought a Ravi record,” Harrison later remarked. “I put it on and it hit a certain spot in me that I can’t explain, but it seemed very familiar to me. The only way I could describe it was: my intellect didn’t know what was going on and yet this other part of me identified with it. It just called on me.”16
Eventually, Harrison began taking lessons from Shankar after making his acquaintance through London’s Asian Music Circle. By this time, the quiet Beatle had bought a sitar of his own from Indiacraft, a shop on Oxford Street: “It was a real crummy-quality one, actually, but I bought it and mucked about with it a bit.” While Harrison enjoyed his first brush with the challenges and rewards of Hindustani music, Martin was an old hand at working with sitar- and tabla-playing musicians. Back in 1959, he produced a sidesplitting track by Peter Sellers and the Goons in which they lampooned My Fair Lady’s “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly” to a disquieting Indian soundtrack. Meanwhile, as Lester and the Beatles continued their globe-trotting ways, Martin was left to his own devices back in London, as the director had pointedly hired British film and television composer Ken Thorne to write the incidental music while thumbing his nose at the Academy Award–nominated musical director of A Hard Day’s Night. As George later wrote, “Since the director was Dick Lester again, it was hardly surprising that, to quote Sam Goldwyn, I was included out. The music was done by Ken Thorne, a buddy of Lester’s.” While George may have been miffed by the turn of events, he could tell that their relationship had soured: “Dick Lester and I didn’t hit it off too well on A Hard Day’s Night, and the fact that I got an Academy Award nomination for musical direction probably didn’t help either.”17
On April 9, only a scant few days after Harrison discovered the sitar on Lester’s film set, the band’s latest single, “Ticket to Ride” backed with “Yes It Is,” was released to great fanfare. In short order, the record skyrocketed to the top of the UK charts, notching the group’s eighth consecutive number-one single. In his review of “Ticket to Ride” in NME, Derek Johnson took special note of the song’s “depth of sound” and “tremendous drive.” As for George and the Beatles, “Ticket to Ride” marked a clear departure from the group’s early sound. Years later, Lennon would go so far as to claim that “Ticket to Ride,” with its relentless, high-octane guitar, “was one of the earliest heavy-metal records made.” Fewer than two weeks later, “Ticket to Ride” would be released in the United States, where the single’s A-side label announced that the song hailed “from the United Artists Release Eight Arms to Hold You.”18
But by that time, the feature film’s working title had been scrapped in favor of a new moniker. In addition to Eight Arms to Hold You, a number of titles had been bandied about on the set, including Lester’s suggestion of calling the feature film Beatles 2, Harrison’s tongue-in-cheek suggestion of Who’s Been Sleeping in My Porridge, and Shenson’s oddly forlorn recommendation of The Day the Clowns Collapsed. But as McCartney later recalled, everyone recognized the moment in which the eventual title finally emerged. “I seem to remember Dick Lester, Brian Epstein, Walter Shenson, and ourselves sitting around, maybe Victor Spinetti was there, and thinking, ‘What are we going to call this one?’ Somehow Help! came out. I didn’t suggest it; John might have suggested it or Dick Lester. It was one of them.” Regardless of the title’s source, Lennon and McCartney suddenly found themselves in the very same quandary that produced “A Hard Day’s Night” under duress the year before.19
For John, composing the title track was a burden, on the one hand, but on the other, an opportunity to continue in the introspective vein that he had begun on Beatles for Sale and continued with “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away.” As John sat down to bring the title track to fruition, he was in the act, he would later recall, of making a literal call for help through the auspices of his music. Indeed, in its original incarnation “Help!” was a downbeat, piano-oriented tune. As John later recalled, “When ‘Help!’ came out in ’65, I was actually crying out for help. Most people think it’s just a fast rock and roll song. I didn’t realize it at the time; I just wrote the song because I was commissioned to write it for the movie. But later, I knew I really was crying out for help. It was my fat Elvis period. You see the movie: He—I—is very fat, very insecure, and he’s completely lost himself. And I am singing about when I was so much younger and all the rest, looking back at how easy it was. Now I may be very positive—yes, yes—but I also go through deep depressions where I would like to jump out the window, you know. It becomes easier to deal with as I get older; I don’t know whether you learn control or, when you grow up, you calm down a little. Anyway, I was fat and depressed and I was crying out for help.” On April 11, with the title of the feature film now in place, Lennon and McCartney put the finishing touches on “Help!” at Lennon’s Weybridge estate. As with “A Hard Day’s Night” a year earlier, John and Paul composed the song to order. With John’s original lyrics in place, along with the up-tempo melody concocted during their latest writing session, “Help!” was born.20
On Tuesday, April 13, with only a scant few weeks left before the completion of principal photography, George and the bandmates reconvened at Abbey Road to record new material for the first time since March 30, when they had taken another crack at “That Means a Lot.” As the March 30 session proceeded, they attempted to remake the song across several successive takes. In spite of their efforts, “That Means a Lot” failed to materialize to anyone’s satisfaction. At one point, it seemed to fall apart, with Lennon abandoning his guitar in favor of banging on a studio piano. For George and the Beatles, songs like “That Means a Lot,” where the magic simply wasn’t happening, were remarkably few and far between. At this point in their career together, almost every new song resulted in a finished track that would be released for public consumption. Only a handful of songs—“That Means a Lot,” “If You’ve Got Trouble,” and “Leave My Kitten Alone”—would be consigned to the studio vault during this period. Generally, they were able to harvest almost every idea at this point, with songs like “That Means a Lot” being rare examples of the frustration that they might experience when nearly everything else worked so effortlessly for them in the studio.
But as events would have it, “That Means a Lot” was not destined for the rock ’n’ roll graveyard just yet. Only eight days after the band had given up on the track, George invited P. J. Proby, a singer-songwriter from Houston, Texas, to Abbey Road to take his own shot at recording the orphaned tune. Proby had found his way into Epstein’s stable via Jack Good, the British television producer behind such fare as ITV’s Ready Steady Go!, as well as the TV special Around the Beatles. Proby had become fast friends with the bandmates on the set of Around the Beatles, which featured Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr vamping it up in a scene from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. After Martin and the band had come up empty with “That Means a Lot,” Epstein wasted precious little time getting the song into Proby’s hands. Ron Richards produced Proby’s session, while Martin arranged and conducted the orchestration for the would-be teen idol’s version. In addition to the orchestration, Richards and Martin also slowed the song down perceptibly. When it was released in the United Kingdom in September 1965, it charted at number thirty, Proby’s weakest showing since breaking into the British music scene the previous year.
In contrast with the Beatles’ work on “That Means a Lot,” the April 13 session would be a dream, with George and the band bringing “Help!” to fruition in workmanlike fashion, albeit with several bumps along the way. That evening, they recorded the basic track first, with McCartney’s bass and Starr’s drums on one track, while Lennon played his twelve-string Framus Hootenanny and Harrison worked his Gretsch Tennessean on the other. The Beatles required several attempts to get the backing track in place, as Harrison ran into repeated difficulty attempting to capture the distinctive descending guitar figure. At one point, Martin suggested that Harrison overdub his guitar part later that evening to make things easier. Meanwhile, Lennon had begun to find his mettle with the song only to experience his guitar going out of tune. At this point, Martin halted the proceedings so that Lennon could tune his Framus Hootenanny. By take eight, Paul tried to buoy his bandmates’ spirits, saying, “This is it. It’s the swinging take!”—only to see their latest attempt aborted after a few seconds. To everyone’s great relief, take nine offered a stellar run-through, and after the tape was rewound, the vocal tracks were recorded, along with Ringo playing tambourine. After several false starts, Harrison succeeded in overdubbing the descending guitar figure, which he finally conquered on take twelve. Clocking in at just over two minutes in length, “Help!” not only provided the title track for the feature film but also found Martin and the Beatles at the top of their game.21
While the Beatles were globe-trotting with Lester from one location to another, Martin enjoyed very few opportunities to work with the band in the studio. By this point, they were under the gun to complete the soundtrack album given that Help! was set to premiere on July 29. As far as George was concerned, they were suffering from the very same lack of continuity that had plagued the Beatles for Sale sessions. As George later recalled, “If it was time for a new single or album, I’d have to get in touch with Brian. He’d look through his diary and say, ‘I can give you May 19th and perhaps the evening of the 20th.’ I had to grab them whenever I could.” As it happened, Lester’s protracted shooting schedule finally came to an end during the week of May 11. But as it turned out, the Help! album would have to wait. Capitol Records was desperate for new material to round out the American Beatles VI LP. To assuage the insatiable US marketplace, Capitol execs—including Dave E. Dexter Jr., in spite of his well-known misgivings back in 1963—were demanding new Beatles product at every turn. To fill out Beatles VI, the band turned their attention to a pair of Larry Williams compositions, “Dizzy Miss Lizzy” and “Bad Boy,” longtime staples of their Hamburg and Cavern Club stage acts. With their deep knowledge of both songs, the Beatles captured the recordings in a handful of takes. But the May 10 session was not without an unusually tense moment, heightened, no doubt, by the long day of filming that the band had endured before making their way to Abbey Road that evening. As McCartney later recalled, Martin himself was at the epicenter of the Beatles’ angst. “We did occasionally get pissed off with him,” Paul admitted. “As time went by, things crept in. In an out-take I heard recently—recording ‘Dizzy Miss Lizzy’—John is saying, ‘What’s wrong with that?’ and George Martin says, ‘Erm . . . it wasn’t exciting enough, John,’ and John mumbles, ‘Bloody hell’—that kind of thing was creeping in a bit. ‘It wasn’t exciting enough, eh? Well, you come here and sing it, then!’ I think that’s just pressure of work. When you’ve been working hard for a long time, you really start to need a break.” Although John may have been perturbed by George’s remonstration, the subsequent take found the Beatle raising his game and whooping it up considerably. Long after the group retired for the night, Martin, Norman Smith, and Ken Scott languished behind at Abbey Road in order to mix the tunes and airmail them stateside. Things were moving at such a breakneck pace that within forty-eight hours, the Beatles were reviewing proofs of the Beatles VI album cover.22
By the time that George and the Beatles reconvened in the studio on Monday, June 14, their worlds had been turned upside down yet again. After taking some much-needed time off, the band returned from their vacations only to learn that they had been selected by the queen to receive MBE awards designating them as members of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. Prime Minister Harold Wilson made the announcement, later remarking, “I saw the Beatles as having a transforming effect on the minds of youth, mostly for the good. It kept a lot of kids off the streets. They introduced many many young people to music, which in itself was a good thing. A lot of old stagers might have regarded it as idiosyncratic music, but the Mersey sound was a new important thing. That’s why they deserved such recognition.” When Martin and the Beatles resumed work on the Help! long-player on the afternoon of June 14, they took the Mersey sound to places that none of them could have imagined back in June 1962, just three years earlier when Harrison had the nerve to pipe up about Martin’s tie.23
For Martin and the Beatles—McCartney especially—the June 14 session would be one for the ages, as the group laid down three top-drawer tracks, including a pop classic that in many ways would shift the band’s musical direction for the duration of their career. For Martin, June 14 would mark the beginnings of a clear shift in his role in the group’s creative calculus. Up until that point, George had acted as the bandmates’ highly skilled editor, shifting verses and choruses, changing tempos, offering structural suggestions. On June 14, his role would begin to alter, slowly but surely, into something more.
But first the Beatles grappled with a pair of new, widely divergent McCartney compositions, “I’ve Just Seen a Face” and “I’m Down,” a folk-tinged ditty and a Little Richard–inspired scorcher, respectively. The acoustic “I’ve Just Seen a Face” was captured in six takes, along with a percussion overdub in which Ringo played maracas. As Paul later recalled, “It was slightly country and western from my point of view. It was faster, though, it was a strange up-tempo thing. I was quite pleased with it.” In many ways, the fiery “I’m Down” served as the diametric opposite of “I’ve Just Seen a Face.” At the end of take one, an ebullient McCartney uttered, “Plastic soul, man, plastic soul.” After perfecting a raucous rhythm track in seven takes with Paul turning in a searing lead vocal, John overdubbed a tantalizing organ solo, complete with Jerry Lee Lewis–like keyboard runs.24
But “I’ve Just Seen a Face” and “I’m Down” were mere appetizers on that fateful day. With “I’m Down” having come to fruition in fine style, George and the Beatles took a well-deserved dinner break. Some ninety minutes later, with Paul’s voice having recovered from the larynx-tearing experience of singing “I’m Down,” the group turned to a composition that had been ruminating in Paul’s synapses for months, possibly even longer. As George later recalled, “I first heard ‘Yesterday’ when it was known as ‘Scrambled Eggs’—Paul’s working title—at the George V Hotel in Paris in January 1964.” For his part, Paul was smitten with the melody, but the Beatle was quite certain that he had heard it somewhere before. “It came too easy,” he later recalled. “I didn’t believe that I had written it. I thought that maybe I had heard it somewhere before, it was some other tune. I went around for weeks playing the chords of the song for people, asking them, ‘Is this like something? I think I’ve written it,’ and people would say, ‘No. It’s not like anything else, but it’s good.’” At one point, he even tested the song out on Alma Cogan at her Kensington flat. By this point, he had appended the words “Scrambled eggs, / Oh, my baby, how I love your legs” to the mysterious melody. Whenever he’d play it, “Scrambled Eggs” would invariably elicit a laugh over the song’s puerile lyrics. A fortnight before the June 14 session, McCartney—like the other Beatles, who had just concluded principal photography for Help!—went on vacation. As he and Jane Asher drove from Lisbon down the coast to the small fishing village of Albufiera, the lyrics finally came to him: “Yesterday / All my troubles seemed so far away.” When he arrived at his lodgings, Paul got his hands on a Martin acoustic guitar—which the left-handed Beatle strummed upside down—and he merged the newfound words with the tune that had dominated his thinking for so long. With a full-fledged composition now in hand, McCartney shared the song with Martin upon his return to London. At first, the Beatles’ producer questioned the idea of titling the song “Yesterday” as it was mindful of “Yesterdays,” the Jerome Kern–Otto Harbach standard popularized by Peggy Lee. But beyond the similarities of their titles, the songs had little else in common. At last, “Yesterday” was ready for its Abbey Road debut.25
After the dinner break on June 14, George and the Beatles prepared to record “Yesterday” for the first time, although the evening session progressed fairly awkwardly given the uncertainty about what the other bandmates would contribute to the composition. “I brought the song into the studio for the first time and played it on the guitar,” Paul later recalled, “but soon Ringo said, ‘I can’t really put any drums on—it wouldn’t make sense.’ And John and George said, ‘There’s no point in having another guitar.’ So George Martin suggested, ‘Why don’t you just try it by yourself and see how it works?’” And with that, Paul “sat on a high stool” in Studio 2 with his Epiphone Texan and sang “Yesterday,” the producer remembered, recording the song in two swift takes, with the second being marked as “best.” For the remainder of the session, Martin and the group pondered what to do with the track, which seemed rather slight in comparison with their body of work at this point. Finally, George recalled, “We agreed that it needed something more than an acoustic guitar, but that drums would make it too heavy. The only thing I could think of was strings, but Paul was unsure. He hated syrup or anything that was even a suggestion of MOR [‘Middle of the Road,’ in radio format lingo]. So I suggested a classical string quartet. That appealed to him but he insisted, ‘No vibrato, I don’t want any vibrato!’” George finally quelled Paul’s concerns about using a string quartet, saying, “If we hate it, we can take it off. We’ll just go back. It’s very nice just with the solo guitar and your voice.”26
The next day, Paul joined George at his London residence, where they sat down at the piano to compose the orchestration for “Yesterday.” As Paul later recalled, “People tend to think that we did the music and George did all the arrangements. The thing people don’t generally know was that me or John or whoever it was involved in the orchestral angle would go ’round to George’s house or he would come ’round to ours, and we would sit with him, and I did on this. I went ’round to George’s house and we had a pleasant couple of hours, had a cup of tea, sat there with the manuscript paper on the piano.” On this day, George was clearly moving into uncharted territory with the Beatles, uniting his long-honed knowledge of orchestration with the pop band that had turned his world upside down. Sitting together at the piano, George and Paul shaped the score as the Beatles’ producer handled the notation. “Paul worked with me on the score,” George later recalled, “putting the cello here and the violin there. There is one particular bit which is very much his—and I wish I’d thought of it!—where the cello groans onto the seventh the second time around. He also liked the idea of holding the very high note on the first [upper] violin in the last section. To be honest, I thought that was a bit boring, but I acceded to his request. The rest of the arrangement was pretty much mine.” When they completed their work, the Beatle hastily scrawled “by Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Martin, Esq., and Mozart” across the original orchestration.27
As promised, George arranged for a string quartet to join the Beatles in Studio 2 on the afternoon of June 17. George had booked four session players from the Top of the Pops orchestra, with Tony Gilbert and Sidney Sax on violin, Kenneth Essex on viola, and Francisco Gabarro on cello. After walking the musicians through their parts, George headed for the control room, only to be intercepted by Paul, who was still concerned about the vibrato sounds with which the session men were liberally ornamenting their parts. For Paul, “it sounded a little too gypsy-like.” After George instructed the musicians thusly, Paul was satisfied, feeling that the accompaniment now “sounded stronger” than before. With the string quartet’s work having been completed, “we overdubbed the strings,” George remembered, “while Paul had another go at the vocal. But because we didn’t use headphones there was leakage from the studio speaker into his microphone, giving the impression of two voices or double-tracking.” Afterward, George supervised a pair of mono mixes of the song with Norman Smith and Phil McDonald. The next day, McCartney’s twenty-third birthday, Martin, Smith, and McDonald carried out the stereo mix, and “Yesterday,” for all intents and purposes, was complete. For his part, George was brimming with pride at the finished product. He had not only assisted Paul in bringing his creation to life but also succeeded in concocting a score that accented the Beatle’s composition without being overly obtrusive. To George’s mind, the string accompaniment was “utter simplicity” itself.28
While George had finally captured Paul’s wayward song in the studio—and ultimately, for inclusion on the Help! long-player—“Yesterday” would have long-standing implications for the group and their producer. As the Beatles’ brain trust rounded out the album, George took Brian aside, telling him, “You know, this isn’t the Beatles. This is Paul McCartney.” George even went so far as to suggest that they release the song under the bass player’s name. “Shall we call it Paul McCartney?” George asked, to which Brian replied, “‘No, whatever we do we are not splitting up the Beatles. This is the Beatles—we don’t differentiate.’ So even though none of the others appeared on the record,” George added, “it was still the Beatles—that was the creed of the day.” But as for releasing “Yesterday” as their next British single, the Beatles simply weren’t having it, feeling that the song’s classical pretensions didn’t fit their image. As it happened, they played the song on an August 14 appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show before a live audience of some seventy-three million viewers, with McCartney accompanied by a string quartet culled from the Ed Sullivan Orchestra. When it was released the next month as a Capitol single, “Yesterday” soared to the top of the Billboard charts. As the song reigned over the American airwaves that fall, the Beatles managed to do the unthinkable, expanding their demographic considerably beyond teens and young adults. Paul’s fears about the Beatles falling prey to radio’s MOR format had become a reality—but in ways that even he could scarcely have imagined. Now, everyone was listening to the Beatles—from children and preteens all the way through the middle-aged and beyond.29
For Brian, “Yesterday” was proof positive that the Beatles were the most daring and original act of their era, that there were quite literally no boundaries that they couldn’t traverse. The Beatles’ manager chalked up their unbroken string of successes to George and the group’s tireless, unrelenting work in the studio. “This hasn’t happened by accident,” Brian wrote, “and it can only be sustained by taking the greatest care, for though success breeds success we could easily topple if we tried to flood the market with shoddy goods. The public is no fool.” Perhaps George himself had finally learned this most valuable of lessons after so many years of trying to ride the latest fad to the top of the charts. It had only been a matter of months since he had played his most recent gambit with Cilla Black’s cover version of “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” only to come up just short in an international showdown with Phil Spector and the Righteous Brothers. And besides, George was barely removed from so many years of knee-jerk moves like the “Earth Angel” and “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” fiascos.30
But things were different now. For George especially, “Yesterday” was a watershed moment in his creative life with the Beatles. “That was when, as I can see it in retrospect, I started to leave my hallmark on the music, when a style started to emerge which was partly of my making,” he later wrote. “It was on ‘Yesterday’ that I started to score their music. It was on ‘Yesterday’ that we first used instruments other than the Beatles and myself. On ‘Yesterday,’ the added ingredient was no more nor less than a string quartet; and that, in the pop world of those days, was quite a step to take. It was with ‘Yesterday’ that we started breaking out of the phase of using just four instruments and went into something more experimental, though our initial experiments were severely limited by the fairly crude tools at our disposal, and had simply to be molded out of my recording experience.” With “Yesterday,” the Beatles’ producer was finally making the “sound pictures” that he had longed to create in the studio since his earliest days with the EMI Group. And the lesson of the “Yesterday” episode, if one were to be gleaned, was that—in the world of musical artistry, at least—quality and originality trump everything. It was a lesson that George would not soon forget.31