ON THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, George mailed a postcard addressed to Ken Scott and the bandmates at 3 Abbey Road, London. At the time, he was writing from the northern coast of Sicily, not too far from the vicinity of Villa Blanca, a rustic resort town. “I have found the perfect spot for a recording studio,” he wrote. “Only hang up is that there is no electricity. Heavenly weather and swimming, completely cut off—no papers or radio. We chalk the days on the wall and cross them off one by one. Sorry I am not with you while you are working hard.” By then, Chris Thomas had shared the news with the other members of the Beatles’ production team that George had taken a breather, leaving his AIR protégé with a simple instruction: “I’m going on holiday. You take over the Beatles for a while.” Over the years, George had begun to perfect the art of tactical withdrawals in terms of his role with the band, but this may have been his boldest move yet. Other than his terse instruction to Chris, he hadn’t bothered to inform the group about his plans. Still a virtual outsider to the Beatles’ circle, Chris was about to undergo a trial by fire. When Paul McCartney encountered him at the first session after George’s unexpected departure, Chris explained that George had suggested he assist the Beatles with production during his absence, to which Paul replied, “Well, if you want to produce us, you can produce us. If you don’t, we might just tell you to fuck off.”1
For George, his Italian holiday was laden with risk. For six breathtaking years, he had done everything he possibly could to consolidate his place in the Beatles’ world—to bring their musical aspirations to life in the studio but also, just as surely, to enrich himself, both artistically and financially. Like the Beatles, he had desired an opulent lifestyle. He had made no bones about it years earlier, when he set his sights on finding a beat band to ride to the top of the hit parade. His goal, plain and simple, had been to lay his hands on a new E-Type Jaguar like the one owned by Norrie Paramor, his archrival at EMI. And in recent years, with the success or failure of AIR in the balance, the stakes had grown even higher. There were his partners to think about, of course. On a personal level, George knew that his decisions held larger implications beyond himself. He had an ex-wife and two children in the suburbs who depended on him and a growing family with Judy in the city. But still, George took a leap of faith in his relationship with the Beatles. That long summer of despair had left him in a state of doubt about his place in the band’s chemistry—and about whether they even needed him at all at this juncture outside of the occasional orchestration or some such musical arrangement.
When George finally rolled back into London on September 26, with Judy and baby Lucie safely ensconced at home, he was met with a set of acetates for the songs that Chris and the Beatles had completed during his absence. The bandmates had clearly been working on heat, George discovered. “Cry Baby Cry” and “Helter Skelter” had progressed considerably during his absence, and “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” had seen a tremendous transformation, with its latest incarnation sporting a searing guitar solo from Eric Clapton. Meanwhile, Lennon’s impressive pace had continued, with a strange, satirical effusion called “Glass Onion” nearing completion, along with an intricate, multilayered song that had been inspired back in the summer after George had presented John with a magazine, its cover emblazoned with the unsettling words HAPPINESS IS A WARM GUN. And then there was “I Will,” a romantic acoustic ballad from Paul, and “Piggies,” an acerbic political critique from Harrison. Thomas and the Beatles’ efforts during Martin’s absence were rounded out by “Birthday,” a high-octane number that they had improvised in the studio. But most importantly, what George discovered upon rejoining the Beatles at Trident Studios on Tuesday, October 1, 1968, was that they were acting like a band again.
As he played the acetates, George was ecstatic, telephoning Chris to congratulate him on a job well done. His protégé, it seemed, had been exactly the caretaker that George hoped he would be—and more. “George Martin couldn’t believe it. He phoned me up so excited and happy,” Thomas later recalled. “When George came back from holiday the whole thing gathered more and more momentum. We were working in different studios with different guys and it all became sort of a factory.” Ken Scott later chalked up the Beatles’ reversal of fortunes to Ringo’s return to the fold. “Once Ringo left, suddenly they realized that they couldn’t quite take this all so much for granted,” Ken later remarked. “When he returned, that was really the sort of high spot when they became a band again. All four would be down in the studio working hard. We got more done during that period of time when George Martin was on holiday and Chris Thomas took over for him. It was phenomenal.” But Scott also recognized what Martin had observed amid the group’s calculus over the past year. With the Beatles’ most recent studio practices, “once the basic was put down, the songwriter was the one that would be in charge for the rest of the recording, and the others might not even show up for days on end until the song was finished,” Scott wrote. “If Paul had to come in to put a bass track on one of George’s songs, Paul would come in that day, do his thing, and then leave. Every song was very much like that. The individual songwriter took control of the process.”2
George was absolutely blown away. The Beatles may not be a working unit, yet they had found a way to work together, even if their approach meant elevating the desires of the individual over the group. But at the same time, as George played the acetates yet again, he could hear a space, just as he had done in years gone by, where he could make the bandmates’ latest batch of songs even better. When he arrived at Trident on October 1, George was presented with a new number from Paul, a jazzy throwback called “Honey Pie.” That evening, the bandmates rehearsed a basic rhythm track with McCartney’s piano and guide vocal, Harrison’s bass, Starr’s drums, and Lennon’s electric guitar. By the end of the session, McCartney had begun to imagine a brass and woodwind arrangement. And Martin was all too happy to oblige, taking home an acetate of “Honey Pie” in order to concoct a score. But as it happened, the Beatles wanted to welcome him back to the studio in fine style. Only for George, the celebration wouldn’t involve flowers but rather a prank. That night, Jimmy Webb, the budding songwriter behind “MacArthur Park,” was also working at Trident. Spotting Webb, McCartney took a break from rehearsing “Honey Pie” and invited the American into the studio, where he introduced Webb to Martin as “Tom Dowd from Atlantic Records.” As Jimmy later recalled, “I was so terrified and so overawed by where I was that I did not correct this impression, and they proceeded to treat me as though I were Tom Dowd. They were asking me what I thought of this guitar solo and that guitar solo, and I was doing the best I could. I didn’t want to disappoint them by telling them that I was only Jimmy Webb! Finally, after what I thought was entirely too much of it, George Harrison tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘By the way, man, I loved those strings on “MacArthur Park.”’” Realizing that they’d been had—that the Liverpudlians had had a laugh at their expense—Martin and Webb joined in on the merriment. During that same period, a young Birmingham musician named Jeff Lynne also found himself in the bandmates’ orbit when he was performing with the Idle Race. “To be in the same room as the four of them caused me not to sleep for, like, three days,” Lynne later recalled.3
A few days after work had convened on “Honey Pie,” Harrison presented a new composition titled “Savoy Truffle,” a hard-driving confection that found its roots in Mackintosh’s Good News chocolates, his friend Eric Clapton’s favorite dietary vice. With Harrison imagining a “beefy” sax sound to accompany his song, Martin dutifully began preparing a score, just as he would begin doing the following week after McCartney debuted a piano ballad, “Martha My Dear,” which had been inspired by his sheepdog. That same evening, Friday, October 4, Martin recorded his score for “Honey Pie,” which called for seven session players, including a raft of saxophones and clarinet. And with Paul working on heat with “Martha My Dear,” George readily obliged the songwriter’s wishes, conducting fourteen musicians for his hastily prepared brass and string arrangement. At the end of the night, George even managed to engage in the kind of sound trickery that he adored. Given the Jazz Age feel of “Honey Pie,” they had decided to record the sound of an old phonograph record being cued up at the start of the song. With McCartney singing “now she’s hit the big time in the USA!” Martin clipped the high and low ends of the frequency range associated with the Beatle’s vocal and recorded the sound of a scratch 78 rpm record to complete the sonic picture.
As mid-October approached, the songs were coming in a deluge. In short order, Martin supervised lengthy sessions devoted to Harrison’s somber “Long, Long, Long,” as well as to Lennon’s breezy “I’m So Tired” and yet another number from Rishikesh, the crowd-pleasing “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill.” For the latter, everyone got in on the act, with Chris Thomas contributing an elegant Mellotron part and Yoko Ono making her Beatles singing debut. Meanwhile, McCartney continued working in the margins—this time, as he made progress on a bluesy rocker titled “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road.” In short order, Martin’s orchestral work had returned with a vengeance. Up first was “Glass Onion,” which, in Thomas and the Beatles’ production, featured an avant-garde outro involving the sound of breaking glass and the voice of football commentator Kenneth Wolstenholme screaming, “It’s a goal!” Martin replaced the song’s bizarre ending with an understated string arrangement played by an octet of studio musicians, which imbued the coda with a much-needed sense of irony. With the same players in tow, Martin turned to Harrison’s “Piggies,” with his score affording the song a buoyant dose of English pomp and circumstance. That same week, the producer completed work on Harrison’s “Savoy Truffle” with a heavy sax overdub. As Brian Gibson later recalled, “The session men were playing really well—there’s nothing like a good brass section letting rip—and it sounded fantastic. But having got this really nice sound, George [Harrison] turned to Ken Scott and said, ‘Right, I want to distort it.’ After Scott complied and doused the track with ADT, Harrison announced to the sax players, ‘Before you listen, I’ve got to apologize for what I’ve done to your beautiful sound. Please forgive me—but it’s the way I want it!’”4
By the week of October 15, Martin and the Beatles were entering the home stretch. In the days since George’s return, his production team had been carrying out mono remixing sessions even as he supervised new material with the Beatles, including “Julia,” John’s heartrending ballad memorializing his late mother, who had died in July 1958. And with that, the long-player was all but complete, save for a few housekeeping duties such as Chris Thomas’s work on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” to ensure that, at Eric Clapton’s request, the guitar solo was appropriately modulated to sound more “Beatley.” “I was given the grand job of waggling the oscillator on the ‘Gently Weeps’ mixes,” Thomas later recalled. “So we did this flanging thing, really wobbling the oscillator in the mix. I did that for hours. What a boring job!” Meanwhile, Ken Scott often worked closely with the bandmates, usually McCartney, in order to carry out the mono and stereo remixing sessions. With Paul shifting the faders up and down, Ken observed as the Beatle pointedly mixed two different versions of “Helter Skelter.” For the stereo remix, Paul included Ringo screaming “I’ve got blisters on my fingers!” during the coda. Yet for the mono version, he purposefully omitted the non sequitur. When Scott asked McCartney about his decision, he told the engineer that Beatles fans were listening for the different versions of songs, so Martin and the Beatles had begun trying to make mono and stereo different. That way, die-hard fans would buy both the stereo and mono versions of the album. At this juncture, all that was left were the attendant sequencing activities for the voluminous and often-enigmatic collection of songs. But as it happened, only two Beatles would be available to see the album through to fruition. That very week, Ringo had gone abroad for a family vacation in Sardinia, where he lounged on Peter Sellers’s yacht. On one occasion, the yacht’s captain spoke movingly about octopuses. “He told me that they hang out in their caves,” Ringo later remarked, “and they go around the seabed finding shiny stones and tin cans and bottles to put in front of their cave like a garden. I thought this was fabulous.” A few days later, Harrison flew out to Los Angeles, leaving Lennon and McCartney alone with Martin at Abbey Road to bring the long-player in for a landing.5
At five o’clock in the evening on Wednesday, October 16, Martin, Lennon, and McCartney, along with a production team that included Ken Scott and John Smith, assembled at Abbey Road for the most remarkable mixing and sequencing session of the Beatles’ career—perhaps of any career. Commandeering Studios 1, 2, and 3, along with Rooms 41 and 42 in EMI’s complex, George held a twenty-four-hour session in order to sequence, band, and cross-fade thirty-one Beatles tracks, including the McCartney snippet “Can You Take Me Back?” recorded in mid-September but omitting “Not Guilty” and “What’s the New Mary Jane,” which were no longer in contention for the album. Not surprisingly, assembling the long-player’s running order took some figuring out, given the motley assorted songs’ wide-ranging genres and styles. Eventually, they settled on a thematic approach in order to remedy the situation while still attempting to adhere to Martin’s long-held notion that the best approach is to begin each long-playing side with a stirring, upbeat track. In order to accent the LP’s sense of variety, Harrison’s songs were spread out across all four sides of the double album. With “Back in the USSR” launching the record into action with a rock ’n’ roll punch, side B was devoted to the numerous animal songs that had been accrued—namely, “Blackbird,” “Piggies,” and “Rocky Raccoon”—with side C serving as the site of the album’s heavier rock numbers, including “Birthday,” “Yer Blues,” “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey,” and “Helter Skelter.” In perhaps the LP’s brashest move, they opted to conclude the album with the eerie snippet “Can You Take Me Back?” and the experimental, apocalyptic “Revolution 9,” followed closely on its heels by the intentionally syrupy closer “Good Night.” Even stranger still, “Revolution 9” now sported a spoken-word introduction in the form of a conversation between Martin and Apple office manager Alistair Taylor, who begs the producer’s forgiveness for some unknown slight:
Taylor: . . . bottle of claret for you if I’d realized. I’d forgotten all about it, George. I’m sorry.
Martin: Well, do next time.
Taylor: Will you forgive me?
Martin: Mm, yes.
Taylor: Cheeky bitch.
With the running order having been decided, George took a page out of his own book and began sequencing the songs together using a series of cross-fades, just as he had done on Sgt. Pepper. Working as a team, Martin, Lennon, and McCartney identified key moments between songs in order to weave them together—and often in highly innovative fashion, such as the manner in which “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill” explodes into “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” or later when Jack Fallon’s meandering fiddle collides with the blues power of “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?”
Years later, audio tech Alan Brown recalled the sight that welcomed him to EMI Studios on the morning of Thursday, October 17. “I remember arriving at the studios to find the Beatles still there,” said Brown, “They had been there all night, finalizing the master tapes. . . . They were all over the place, room 41, the front listening room—anywhere—almost every room they could get. It was a frantic last-minute job.” Martin, too, must have felt that the effort was slapdash, that it paled in comparison to the painstaking work that had concluded Sgt. Pepper. At some point, he took Ken Scott aside and “did something that will endear him to me forever,” the engineer later wrote. “Ken, I have to be honest,” said Martin, standing alone with Scott in the studio corridor. “I don’t want you to feel bad about this, and I don’t want you to take this personally, but I don’t think that this album is going to win a Grammy,” Martin said, before adding that “it’s no reflection on you.” To Scott’s mind, Martin “meant it in all kindness because the Beatles were expected to do something even greater than Sgt. Pepper and keep on winning Grammys. It was obvious that this one wouldn’t because it was such a different album from what they’d done previously. George was looking after me in a fatherly way.” Scott would never forget that moment when the most celebrated record producer in the world took a few minutes to reassure a young engineer. “Just the fact that he made the effort blew me away,” he wrote.6
By the time that Martin, Lennon, and McCartney wrapped things up that night, the album was ready to be mastered and shipped off to the manufacturing plant. As frantic and chaotic as things had seemed at times, they had succeeded in completing the long-player with plenty of time to spare in order to ensure a holiday release. For several months, the group considered naming the album A Doll’s House at the suggestion of Lennon, who wanted to pay homage to Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. They even went so far as to commission a cover illustration by Scottish artist Patrick (John Byrne). But with the July 1968 release of Family’s Music in a Doll’s House, the Beatles were forced to go back to the drawing board. At the suggestion of Robert Fraser, McCartney met with pop-art designer Richard Hamilton, who proposed that the cover effect a dramatic contrast with the colorful albums of the band’s recent psychedelic past. Hamilton recommended a plain white cover imprinted with individual numbers in order to assume the exclusive quality of a limited edition—although in this case it was a limited edition composed, quite ironically, of some five million copies. At Hamilton’s urging, the bandmates decided to name the album The Beatles, a deliberately simple title in relation to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. But as the album’s title, The Beatles never really stood a chance. With its stark white cover art, the two-record set became known as The White Album within scant days of its release. The White Album’s packaging included four individual color shots of the Beatles taken by John Kelly, the photographer behind Cilla Black’s recent album Sher-oo!, along with a poster-sized lyric sheet adorned with a collage of additional photographs.
Released on November 22—exactly five years after With the Beatles—The White Album quickly ruled the charts. With eighteen months having passed since the Beatles’ last studio album, the new LP was easily the most anticipated rock release of the year. In the United Kingdom, The White Album debuted in the top spot, eventually lording over the charts for eight weeks. Stateside, the long-player was even more successful, with Capitol turning over receipts for 3.3 million copies in the album’s first four days of release. All told, the album held Billboard’s top spot for nine weeks. The critical response nearly, but not quite, matched the records’ overwhelming commercial success. Writing in the Sunday Times, Derek Jewell observed that “of course, the new Beatles double LP is the best thing in pop since Sgt. Pepper. Their sounds, for those open in ear and mind, should long ago have established their supremacy. . . . They have misses, but there aren’t many. It’s a world map of contemporary music, drawn with unique flair. Musically, there is beauty, horror, surprise, chaos, order. And that is the world; and that is what the Beatles are about. Created by, creating for, their age.” Meanwhile, the Times’ William Mann was less generous, writing that “the poetic standard varies from inspired (‘Blackbird’) through allusive (‘Glass Onion’) and obscure (‘Happiness Is a Warm Gun’) to jokey, trite, and deliberately meaningless. There are too many private jokes and too much pastiche to convince me that Lennon and McCartney are still pressing forward,” he argued, but at the same time, “these 30 tracks contain plenty to be studied, enjoyed, and gradually appreciated more fully in the coming months.” Writing in Rolling Stone, which had just celebrated its first anniversary, Jann Wenner hailed The White Album as the Beatles’ best work to date, as well as a portrait of “the history and synthesis of pop music.” Intuitively understanding the Beatles’ aesthetics vis-à-vis 1968, Wenner added that the group’s multigenre, hybridized approach to rock music is “so strong that they make it uniquely theirs, and uniquely the Beatles. They are so good that they not only expand the idiom, but they are also able to penetrate it and take it further.”7
For his part, Martin remain unconvinced, even years later, about the overarching quality of The White Album. Perhaps his recollections found their origins in the emotional highs and lows that he experienced along with the bandmates and their crew during the record’s production, although rather pointedly he opted to attribute the album’s relative merits to a host of other factors. “I didn’t like The White Album very much,” he later remarked. “They’d turned up with 36 songs after their Indian trip and they were pretty insistent that every song was to be included. I wanted to make it a single album, and I stressed to the boys that whilst they could record whatever they liked, we should weed out the stuff that wasn’t up to scratch and make a really super single album.” Over the years, George contended that there may have been a more calculated reason for the double album’s release involving the Beatles’ long-term contract, which held them under contract with EMI until January 1976. “I didn’t learn until later the reason why they were so insistent,” George remarked, but “it was a contractual one. By this time, the contractual negotiations were above my head and I didn’t know that their current contract with EMI stipulated a number of years or a number of titles, whichever was the earlier. So the boys, in an effort to get rid of the contract, were shoving out titles as quickly as they could. This was on the advice of the people governing them and there was a sinister motive behind that album.”8
But with the new year looming ahead, George was clearly in the minority opinion about the experience that they had just shared. For his part, Ringo felt very differently than his producer, believing the record to be a sign of a new Beatles artistic renaissance: “As a band member, I’ve always felt The White Album was better than Sgt. Pepper because by the end it was more like a real group again. There weren’t so many overdubs like on Pepper. With all those orchestras and whatnot, we were virtually a session group on our own album.” From his vantage point, Harrison seconded Starr’s position, observing that The White Album “felt more like a band recording together. There were a lot of tracks where we just played live.”9
As it happened, Harrison and Starr were about to get their opportunity to feel like they were part of a working rock band again. On the morning of Thursday, January 2, 1969, the bandmates convened at Twickenham Studios’ massive soundstage to begin working on what would come to be known as the Get Back project. Originally, the band had planned to conduct rehearsals at Abbey Road, but they were unable to book space on such short notice. When they arrived at Twickenham that morning, they were rehearsing on the very same soundstage where Richard Lester had shot A Hard Day’s Night some five years earlier.
For George, the idea of “getting back” to the Beatles’ roots and taking a new approach to their recording practices was an idea worth pursuing. “The boys were seeking ideas for a new project,” George wrote. “We all talked about it, and someone came up with an idea to put on a live show of new songs which had never been heard before. Live recordings always featured hits that people knew, but this idea was to rehearse and develop a number of new songs and then perform them for the first time live—and make that performance the album. I thought it was a terrific idea.” But even from the outset, George could glimpse the challenges inherent in the band’s latest gambit: “The problem was that indoor venues in Britain were all too small for them by then,” he later wrote. “They also wanted to make the album in January and February, and you could not do an outside show in Britain when it was freezing cold.” But at the same time, they didn’t have many options outside of the United Kingdom either. “If they had gone to the States,” George reasoned, “they would have lost one half percent of their royalties and they didn’t want to do that. So we had some absurd ideas, like going to Tunisia and taking a lot of fans with us.”10
As for the album itself, Martin was excited about the novel opportunity to produce a live album of original material. Lennon, in particular, was enamored with the idea of presenting the Beatles in their rawest form in comparison to albums like Sgt. Pepper, which was the express result of layers of painstaking production. As George later recalled, “John was still very determined that it should be a live album. He said that there were to be no echoes, no overdubs, and none of my ‘jiggery-pokery,’” and “if they didn’t get the song right the first time, they’d record it again and again until they did.” As if to drive his point home, John explained his perspective in the starkest possible terms, telling George, “I don’t want any of your production shit. We want this to be an honest album,” by which the Beatle meant “I don’t want any editing. I don’t want any overdubbing. It’s got to be like it is. We just record the song and that’s it.” For his part, Martin was perplexed by Lennon’s notion of honesty, later remarking, “I assumed all their albums had been honest.” With the Beatles working outside of EMI Studios, their regular production team was unavailable. McCartney suggested that the Beatles hire twenty-six-year-old Glyn Johns to serve as balance engineer. Having worked on records by the Rolling Stones, the Small Faces, Traffic, and the Steve Miller Band, Johns had already accrued an impressive resume. Not surprisingly, Johns didn’t hesitate to accept the Beatles’ offer. “When you have a hit group like the Beatles,” wrote George, you “jump at the chance. Glyn Johns was a very good engineer and producer, and he was very helpful and he got on well with the boys.”11
For George, the idea of working with Michael Lindsay-Hogg and Glyn Johns seemed like a welcome change from his recent bout producing The White Album. With a film crew on hand to document the band’s preparation for the planned concert, Lindsay-Hogg developed a rough concept, which Martin and the director variously described as cinéma vérité and audio vérité in reference to the notion of capturing the truth behind the Beatles’ video and audio representations. While Martin embraced the concept of filming the band’s rehearsals as they unfolded, Lindsay-Hogg had something even more extreme in mind. Hoping to capture the brute, gritty truth of the authenticity of the Beatles preparing for the live concert, he deployed a pair of Nagra tape recorders and two cameramen in order to document, through audio and video means, nearly every nuance of the group’s experience at Twickenham. In order to propel his subjects into action, Lindsay-Hogg acted as a shameless participant in the proceedings, provoking the group into a series of exchanges about their plans for the live performance and the evolving nature of the songs being rehearsed.
Martin thought that the concept was “brilliant” and that in many ways the new album might energize the band and challenge them to explore new frontiers of recording artistry. And at first, even Lennon’s jabs about “jiggery-pokery” and Martin’s “production shit” didn’t seem to bother the Beatles’ producer, who was eager to learn how the new long-player would unfold under such conditions, as well as after many years of working at EMI Studios. But for George, it wasn’t meant to be—at least not in the way that he expected things to unfold. Years later, he would claim that, given the Beatles’ stated wish to minimize the amount of production on their new project, he purposefully stayed away for several of the sessions, which was a surprise to Johns, who was with the group on their very first day of production at Twickenham. “After they had finally run through the first song a couple of times,” Glyn later recalled, “Paul turned to me and asked what I thought they should do for an intro. I nearly fell over in shock. I thought I had been employed to just engineer and here I am in the first hour of rehearsals being asked for my input into the arrangement.” And that’s when it hit him: “It was only then that I realized that George Martin was not to be involved. I assumed that was because it was a live recording and did not require the normal studio production associated with their records.” For Johns, not working with the producer who had made the Beatles’ name was a source of embarrassment. “A couple of days into the project I asked Paul where George Martin was, only to be told that they had decided not to use him.”12
For Martin, this new normal in the Beatles’ world was a terrible blow. But he was also troubled by their apparent inability to find and sustain their mettle in the film studio’s environs. During his sporadic visits to Twickenham, George could tell that something wasn’t quite right with the new project. Things started out well enough, with the Beatles rehearsing rudimentary versions of Lennon’s bluesy new composition “Don’t Let Me Down,” Harrison’s meditative “All Things Must Pass,” and a fresh pair of rock ’n’ roll tunes by McCartney, the bluesy “I’ve Got a Feeling” and the up-tempo “Two of Us,” which went under the working title of “On Our Way Home.” While the bevy of new tunes clearly demonstrated the seemingly unquenchable songwriting talent at the Beatles’ disposal, the bandmates themselves were complaining about Twickenham’s sterile recording atmosphere from the very first day. Like nearly all of the rehearsals during the Beatles’ fortnight at the soundstage, the proceedings were determined by the sporadic arrival of the bandmates, especially Lennon, who, along with Ono, would often be the last member to arrive on the scene. Lennon was particularly incensed about having to work under the watchful eyes and ears of Lindsay-Hogg’s production unit: “We couldn’t get into it,” he later remarked. “It was just a dreadful, dreadful feeling in Twickenham Studio, being filmed all the time. I just wanted them [the film crew] to go away. You couldn’t make music at eight in the morning or ten or whatever it was, in a strange place with people filming you and colored lights.”13
In retrospect, John’s unhappy response to the conditions at Twickenham shouldn’t have been surprising given that the group had become used to working evening sessions at EMI Studios, and the sudden shift to daylight must have been understandably jarring. But as with The White Album, perception was everything in terms of characterizing the atmosphere associated with the Get Back project. For the former, Martin’s and Scott’s recollections were starkly different, with the engineer considering The White Album to be a joyous occasion. Similarly, Johns felt dramatically different than Martin about the Get Back session, which he remembered with a special fondness: “The whole mood was wonderful,” he later remarked. “There was all this nonsense going on at the time about the problems surrounding the group. . . . In fact, they were having a wonderful time and being incredibly funny. I didn’t stop laughing for six weeks.”14
While Johns may have enjoyed the Beatles’ vibe at the Get Back sessions, Martin was experiencing something very different when he made his periodic visits to the Twickenham soundstage. As the days wore on, the bandmates had trouble focusing on the work at hand. Their malaise didn’t escape George’s notice. By the end of that first week, the producer realized that the sessions were “awful to do. We did take after take after take, and John would be asking me if take 67 was better than take 39.” To George’s mind, it was becoming increasingly clear that John was very “druggy,” that the hallucinogenic roller coaster that the Beatles had been riding since the spring of 1965 had taken a darker turn with John and Yoko. While Martin had generally kept his feelings about drug abuse to himself—working, as he had, for nearly twenty years in an industry that was rife with excess—he couldn’t help believing that artists like the Beatles “were creative enough without the drugs.” As the sessions continued, conversation was dominated by discussion about the location for the upcoming live performance, which the band planned to undertake, impractical as it may seem, by mid-January. Referring to the chaos and fanaticism of Beatlemania, Paul suggested that they could control their audience’s fanaticism by simply making a rule that no one could approach the stage. “Barbed wire might do the trick,” Martin joked. As for the performance itself, the bandmates initially considered a lavish concert at the Royal Albert Hall, with Apple recording artists Mary Hopkin and James Taylor on the bill, before settling, for a short while, on the comparatively intimate Roundhouse Theatre, the unofficial headquarters for London’s underground music scene. Other ideas included performing in a Roman amphitheater in North Africa or perhaps onboard a ship at sea or even by torchlight in the middle of the Sahara Desert. At one point, Lennon suggested, half jokingly, that a concert in an insane asylum might be more appropriate given the band’s recent spate of interpersonal problems. Ringo made it known on several occasions that he refused to go abroad, prompting Paul to tease the drummer that they would be forced to replace him with Jimmie Nicol. While Denis O’Dell suggested that they film the concert with the band performing in the middle of one of London’s renowned art museums, Yoko had become particularly intrigued by the avant-garde concept of the Beatles playing a concert before twenty thousand empty seats in order to signify “the invisible nameless everybody in the world.” In one instance, she even suggested that they reorient the documentary so as to film the Beatles’ personal activities, reality-television style, from dusk to dawn in their private homes. As Martin looked on, the group’s increasingly outrageous concert ideas began to wane rather precipitously, however, when Ono pointed out that “after 100,000 people in Shea Stadium, everything else sucks.”15
George had to admit that Yoko had a point. And besides, in his view the innovative aspect of the live performance had almost nothing to do with the event’s outlandish circumstances but rather with the idea of recording a live album wholly composed of brand-new material. And at this point, they weren’t having very much luck in the songwriting department—the one element of their chemistry that had seemingly never failed them. In increasing fits of creative frustration, the Beatles began taking stabs at their prefame rock ’n’ roll repertoire—and often poorly at that, as they suffered through one false start after another in their attempt to recall the old songs. In this way, the Get Back sessions increasingly found the Beatles manically improvising one song after another, including a wide range of classic rock ’n’ roll numbers like “Shake, Rattle, and Roll,” “Johnny B. Goode,” “Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” “Lucille,” “You Really Got a Hold on Me,” “Mailman, Bring Me No More Blues,” “Little Queenie,” “Rock and Roll Music,” “Blue Suede Shoes,” and “Be-Bop-a-Lula,” among a host of others. For his part, Martin could only look on in dismay, occasionally breaking into snickers of exasperation as the bandmates meandered through spates of old chestnuts under Johns’s supervision while failing to generate anything in the way of new material. Worse yet, at other junctures, the Beatles fell back on their own catalog, at one point playing a ragtag version of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” with Martin lending a dispirited tambourine in accompaniment. By this juncture, George was beginning to realize that his only move was to retreat further and further into the background. During The White Album sessions, he had maintained his composure, with his daily newspapers and his chocolate as his signal diversion. But with the Get Back project, “I kind of withdrew more and more,” he later wrote. “I was getting fed up.”16
As for the Beatles themselves, as January rolled along, they seemed increasingly unable to concentrate on the project at hand, with John and Paul reeling off occasional guitar riffs or mindlessly playing fragments of songs, mostly oldies from their days in Hamburg. Johns may have felt elated to be producing the biggest band in the world, but Martin recognized the bandmates’ current state for what it was, a growing interpersonal and chemically induced nightmare. At this point, they were even having trouble coming up with new material—the Beatles’ superpower if ever there were one. Fed up with being the band’s solitary cheerleader, the normally well-mannered Paul became unhinged during the January 7 session: “We’ve been very negative since Mr. Epstein passed away,” he remarked. “I don’t see why any of you, if you’re not interested, get yourselves into this. What’s it for? It can’t be for the money. Why are you here?” Worse yet, he attributed the band’s inability to move forward creatively as the ruinous work of their own suffocating nostalgia: “When we do get together, we just talk about the fucking past. We’re like OAPs [old-age pensioners], saying, ‘Do you remember the days when we used to rock?’ Well, we’re here now, we can still do it.” If nothing else, Paul’s angry words of wisdom served to revive his flagging songwriting partner, who seemed to be unable to rouse the necessary creative energy to generate new material. When Paul finally confronted him about his inability to produce new compositions beyond “Don’t Let Me Down,” John responded with his classic defensive posture, a combination of sarcasm and petulance:
Paul: Haven’t you written anything?
John: No.
Paul: We’re going to be facing a crisis.
John: When I’m up against the wall, Paul, you’ll find that I’m at my best.
Paul: I wish you’d come up with the goods.
John: I think I’ve got Sunday off.
Paul: I hope you can deliver.
John: I’m hoping for a little rock-and-roller.
Lennon’s lethargy was understandable given the band’s considerable output and activity during the previous year, not to mention his escapades with Ono and the personal tragedy of her October 1968 miscarriage. As George had surmised at the onset of the project, John and Yoko’s protracted heroin abuse, which dated back to the previous summer, may have been taking its toll—at one juncture during the Twickenham sessions, Yoko joked about shooting heroin as the couple’s form of exercise.17
Whatever the cause for his malaise, for his lack of productivity, Lennon began increasingly to focus his wrath upon Harrison. Indeed, the two Beatles’ disintegrating relationship was beginning to exert a troubling effect on the bandmates’ efforts at Twickenham. The annals of Beatles history tend to blame McCartney’s controlling behavior for the group’s interpersonal dilemmas during the Get Back sessions, a conclusion that seems to be buttressed by a January 6 quarrel in which McCartney and Harrison resumed their rancor from the previous summer involving “Hey Jude.” Apparently still smarting over McCartney’s rebuke of his creative suggestion, Harrison reacted to McCartney’s patronizing attitude about his guitar arrangement for “Two of Us”: “I’ll play whatever you want me to play or I won’t play at all if you don’t want me to play,” he told Paul. “Whatever it is that will please you, I’ll do it.” There is no denying McCartney’s increasingly proscriptive songwriterly behavior, and if nothing else the Get Back project demonstrated Harrison’s—not to mention Starr’s—second-class citizenship in the band, an aspect of their communal makeup that had been growing in intensity in recent years as the guitarist’s songwriting abilities began to improve radically. “The problem for me was that John and Paul had been writing the songs for so long,” Harrison pointed out. “It was difficult. They had such a lot of tunes, and they automatically thought that theirs should be the priority, so I’d always have to wait through 10 of their songs before they’d even listen to one of mine. It was silly. It was very selfish, actually.” As a means of blowing off steam, Harrison took to singing impromptu Bob Dylan tunes during the rehearsals, including the symbolic “I Shall Be Released” and “All Along the Watchtower,” with its prophetic opening lyric, “There must be some way out of here.” Martin, for one, was sympathetic to Harrison’s plight, although he ascribed the guitarist’s lower artistic stratum in the Beatles to a kind of natural creative order: “He’d been awfully poor up to then. Some of the stuff he’d written was very boring. The impression is sometimes given that we put him down,” Martin recalled. “I don’t think we ever did that, but possibly we didn’t encourage him enough. He’d write, but we wouldn’t say, ‘What’ve you got then, George?’ We’d say, ‘Oh, you’ve got some more, have you?’ I must say that looking back, it was a bit hard on him. It was always slightly condescending. But it was natural, because the others were so talented.”18
Unfortunately, as the sessions trudged onward, Lennon even seemed to be baiting Harrison. During a rehearsal of Harrison’s new composition “I Me Mine,” Lennon “jokes that a collection of freaks can dance along with George’s waltz,” before telling the guitarist “to get lost—that the Beatles only play rock and roll and there’s no place in the group’s playlist for a Spanish waltz.” As if on cue, Paul later took to singing “I Me Mine” while feigning a Spanish accent. The trio’s behavior tellingly reminds us that the stakes of authorship—and the divisions that it creates—had never really ebbed. They had merely been redistributed among three Beatles instead of two. Although Lennon may have been equally annoyed by Harrison’s obvious surfeit of new material, there is little question that their growing feud involved Harrison’s exasperation with Ono’s constant presence in the studio, particularly when she spoke up for Lennon while her silent boyfriend nervously plucked at his guitar. On Friday, January 10, Harrison had reached a breaking point, no longer able to hide his vexation with Ono’s unremitting presence. After enduring a morning session in which Paul goaded him about how to perform his guitar part and a heated argument with John during lunch, the quiet Beatle abruptly quit the group, making a hasty exit and uttering, “See you ’round the clubs,” as he left the soundstage. Either out of spite or ennui—or both—Lennon began improvising the Who’s “A Quick One While He’s Away” within minutes of Harrison’s departure. At one point, he sarcastically called for an absent Harrison to play the guitar solo.19
At it happened, Martin hadn’t yet arrived at Twickenham that day. Walking into the studio, Martin was beside himself, frantically looking for Harrison as he made his way inside. And that’s when he ran headlong into Harrison, who was walking brusquely towards the exit. As it turned out, Martin had every reason to be frazzled. “I remember that George Martin had just backed across the car park in his Triumph Herald and knocked a dent in the door of George Harrison’s Mercedes,” Dave Harries later recalled, “and he didn’t have time to tell him he’d dented his car before George walked out in a huff and drove off.” For his part, Martin was hardly surprised by the turn of events. He had long recognized Harrison’s subordinate place in the pecking order—a hierarchy that he himself had helped to maintain at times—and the latest episode was symptomatic of the larger malaise. “For one thing,” Martin reasoned, “there was no manager, and it was very difficult to get anybody to give a decision. They were just floundering, and I had to deal with this.” But moreover, “John would often be very late for sessions or not turn up at all,” George later wrote. “It was a very unhappy time.” While the bandmates would later claim that Lennon and Harrison had fought a war of words rather than engaging in fisticuffs that day, Martin knew otherwise, maintaining that “there was actually a punch-up.”20
When he joined the bandmates in the studio that afternoon, Martin discovered how quickly things had deteriorated since Harrison’s departure. Lennon had already begun calling for the group to replace the quiet Beatle with Eric Clapton, a caustic suggestion given Harrison’s close friendship with the renowned guitarist, whom Lennon described as “just as good and not such a headache.” As Martin looked on, the songwriter advanced his impromptu plan even further. “The point is: if George leaves, do we want to carry on the Beatles? I do,” John told Paul and Ringo. “We should just get other members and carry on.” The day’s session ended with a spate of improvised jamming, including a rendition of “Martha My Dear” in which Yoko provided a screeching solo, screaming John’s name over and over. Meanwhile, Paul played on, seemingly unfazed by the chaos around him.21
For Martin, who had already been exasperated by the Beatles’ behavior and inability to produce new material at Twickenham—not to mention his own diminished status with the group—things appeared to look up, if only briefly, when the bandmates succeeded in calling a truce with Harrison. A weekend meeting on Sunday, January 12, with Harrison and the others at Starr’s estate had collapsed after the guitarist pointedly refused to return to Twickenham. Realizing that Harrison meant business, on Wednesday, January 15, they held an afternoon meeting in which the quiet Beatle laid out his terms for restoring peace to the group. The truce involved at least two considerations: first, they would abandon Twickenham’s dour atmosphere immediately in favor of Apple’s newfangled basement studio; and second, they would dispense with the concept of a live performance, instead staging a concert for Lindsay-Hogg’s cameras without benefit of an audience. The shift from Twickenham to Apple effectively spelled the end for the television production, with the Beatles now supposedly setting their sights on recording a new album and a concomitant documentary. Although their fantasy of making a spectacular return to the stage had perished, the idea for a new studio album had been born—and if Martin and the Beatles knew nothing else, they understood implicitly how to make an LP. What the bandmates were clearly beginning to understand at this juncture was the extent to which their misspent dream of Apple Corps was transforming into a financial nightmare, just as Martin had feared it would. In an interview published in the January 17 edition of Disc and Music Echo, Lennon admitted that “Apple is losing money. If it carries on like this, we’ll be broke in six months.”22
The Get Back sessions would have resumed on the following Monday had it not been for Magic Alex, who had promised back in July to build a seventy-two-track recording studio for the group in the basement of the Apple building at 3 Savile Row in Soho. When George arrived at the studio, he was shocked to discover sixteen speakers arrayed along the basement walls, with Magic Alex’s multitrack system nowhere in evidence. The facilities, from Martin’s perspective, “were hopeless.” As Harrison later recalled, “Alex’s recording studio was the biggest disaster of all time. He was walking around with a white coat on like some sort of chemist, but he didn’t have a clue what he was doing. It was a 16-track system, and he had 16 tiny little speakers all around the walls. You only need two speakers for stereo sound. It was awful. The whole thing was a disaster, and it had to be ripped out.” It was at this point, Johns later recalled, that “George Martin came to the rescue.” Realizing that Magic Alex’s handiwork couldn’t be easily remedied with a soldering iron and a few stray cables, George called Abbey Road in desperation. “For God’s sake,” he implored EMI’s studio techs, “get some decent equipment down here!” In short order, EMI engineers Dave Harries and Keith Slaughter were hurriedly dispatched to Apple with the requisite equipment. They were joined by a twenty-year-old tape operator named Alan Parsons. “I couldn’t believe it,” Parsons later remarked. “There I was. One day I was making tea at Abbey Road, and the next day I was working with the Beatles at their studio.”23
The first thing Alan noticed was Magic Alex’s ostensibly state-of-the-art mixing desk, which “looked like it had been built with a hammer and chisel. None of the switches fitted properly, and you could almost see the metal filings. It was rough, all right, and it was all very embarrassing, because it just didn’t do anything.” Consequently, Martin and Glyn Johns spent the next two days turning Apple’s basement into a respectable recording studio by bringing in two mobile four-track mixing consoles from EMI, as well as overhauling the basement’s amateurish soundproofing. And then there was the troubling matter of the building’s noisy heating system. “The heating plant for the entire building was situated in a little room just off the studio,” Martin later wrote. “And since the sound insulation was not exactly magical,” he quipped, in sly reference to the Beatles’ would-be inventor, “every now and then in the middle of recording there came a sound like a diesel engine starting up.”24
For his part, Johns was impressed with Martin’s easygoing demeanor and willingness to help out after being shunted aside by the band that he had driven to the top of the hit parade. As Glyn later wrote, “By the time we moved to Savile Row, George, realizing I was in an awkward position, was kind enough to take me to lunch in order to put my mind at rest, saying I was doing a great job, everything was fine, and I was not stepping on his toes in any way. What a gentleman he is.” By Wednesday, January 22, when Martin and Johns had finally managed to knock Apple Studios into semi-acceptable shape, production-wise, Harrison officially returned to the fold, performing a duet of “You Are My Sunshine” with Lennon in order to signify their renewed camaraderie. Later that day, Harrison decided to alter the band’s chemistry, as he had done so successfully with Clapton back in September 1968, by inviting ace keyboard player Billy Preston to lend his talents to the Beatles. As luck would have it, Harrison and Clapton had seen Preston performing in Ray Charles’s band on January 19. The Beatles had first met Preston back in Hamburg in 1962 when he was a member of Little Richard’s backup band. “I pulled in Billy Preston” for the Get Back sessions, Harrison later recalled. “It helped because the others would have to control themselves a bit more. John and Paul mainly, because they had to, you know, act more handsomely,” he continued. “It’s interesting to see how people behave nicely when you bring a guest in because they don’t want everyone to know that they’re so bitchy.” When Preston began playing the Fender Rhodes electric piano, “straightaway there was 100% improvement in the vibe in the room.” Harrison’s gambit had clearly worked its magic. Martin later described Preston’s appearance at Apple Studios as a much-needed “emollient” that altered the band’s calculus in just the nick of time. Even Lennon was impressed, lobbying hard almost immediately for Preston to become a permanent member of the group, although McCartney demurred at the thought of five Beatles: “It’s bad enough with four!” he exclaimed.25
For the next several days, Martin, Johns, and the five musicians rehearsed with a vengeance. Time was clearly of the essence, as Ringo was due to star in The Magic Christian with Peter Sellers in early February. Meanwhile, Johns was scheduled to record an album with the Steve Miller Band in the United States, and Preston was about to embark upon a concert tour back in his native Texas. If the Beatles were going to salvage the Get Back project, something had to happen—and soon. With George having managed to regain a toehold in the studio, the group began to rally perceptibly. From January 23 through the end of the month, Martin and Johns would supervise the production of no fewer than seven outstanding Beatles songs. With Preston working alongside the Beatles on their first full day of recording sessions at Apple Studios, they continued working on “Get Back,” which had evolved over a series of false starts and improvisations back at Twickenham. In one instance, Martin spoke to McCartney over the talkback, inquiring about the song’s title. “What are you calling this, Paul?” he asked. “Shit,” McCartney replied. Without missing a beat, George deadpanned, “Shit, take one.”26
At another point, Johns offhandedly interrupted one of the “Get Back” takes to converse with Parsons, for which the engineer was rewarded with a curt “fuckface!” from Lennon and McCartney. With “Get Back” beginning to coalesce with the affable Preston working his Fender Rhodes, Martin, Johns, and the quintet turned to McCartney’s “Two of Us,” which had been refashioned by this point into a nostalgic, acoustic guitar oriented tune. In a moment of unscripted gusto, the band took a stab at “Maggie Mae,” the traditional Liverpool ditty about a cheeky prostitute that George had recorded with the Vipers back in the late 1950s. That same day, they also took a stab at John’s “Dig It,” a lengthy, free-form, improvisational rant in which Lennon name-checked the FBI, CIA, BBC, singer B. B. King, actress Doris Day, and Manchester football coach Matt Busby. The day concluded with the quintet recording basic rhythm tracks for “I’ve Got a Feeling” and an evolving Lennon number, “Dig a Pony,” which went under the working title of “All I Want Is You.”
Working a rare weekend, Martin, Johns, and the Beatles convened at Apple Studios on Saturday, January 25, for work on a pair of new compositions, including Harrison’s “For You Blue,” which went under the working title of “George’s Blues,” and McCartney’s “Let It Be,” a piano ballad that the songwriter had been rehearsing in the morning hours at Twickenham before the others, Martin included, arrived. Before making his way to Savile Row, George and Judy drove to the Marylebone Registry Office, where Cilla Black married her manager, Bobby Willis, with the Martins as their witnesses. Afterward, they joined the happy couple and their guests for a wedding luncheon at the Ritz. That afternoon, Martin made his way to Apple Studios, where Johns and the quintet were already in full swing. While the group was finally getting down to business by this point, they were unable to resist their penchant, which was rapidly becoming commonplace during this period, for unfocused jamming. As the distractions continued, they even recorded an impromptu cover of the Everly Brothers’ “Bye Bye Love,” for which Lennon and McCartney shared lead vocals. While “Let It Be” would continue to evolve over the next few days, “For You Blue” was completed by the end of the session. With McCartney playing a note-perfect honky-tonk piano, Harrison’s twelve-bar blues effusion featured Lennon’s nifty slide guitar solo—played with a Höfner 5140 Hawaiian Standard lap steel guitar resting on his knees. Buoyed by a spirited ad-lib from Harrison—“Go, Johnny, go!”—Lennon seemed to lose himself in the pure joy of his solo.
The weekend concluded with a Sunday session in which work continued on “Let It Be” and “Dig It,” which at one point featured John in an unlikely duet with six-year-old Heather, the daughter of Paul’s new fiancée Linda Eastman. Martin good-naturedly played a shaker part on the tune. Another seemingly inevitable bout of jamming ensued, with the Beatles quintet working through a medley of such chestnuts as “Shake, Rattle, and Roll,” “Kansas City,” “Miss Ann,” “Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” “Blue Suede Shoes,” and “You Really Got a Hold on Me,” followed by Harrison’s delivery of Smokey Robinson and the Miracles’ “Tracks of My Tears.” When the bandmates finally regained their focus, they tried their hand at a new McCartney ballad, “The Long and Winding Road,” which he had debuted back at Twickenham during his solo morning rehearsals, and Harrison’s evocative “Isn’t It a Pity?”
During the Sunday session, Martin, Johns, and the bandmates—spurred on, no doubt, by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who was searching in vain for an ending to his planned documentary—hit upon the idea of performing a concert on the rooftop of the Apple building. “At the moment, this documentary’s like No Exit,” Lindsay-Hogg complained. “There’s a lot of good footage, but no pay-off.” Like the characters in Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1944 existentialist drama, a play in which the characters torture each other endlessly, residing in a kind of living hell from which they are free to leave yet unable to escape, the Beatles’ latest filmic adventure seemed interminable. But on Saturday afternoon, the “payoff” appeared to have presented itself when Lindsay-Hogg, with McCartney and Mal Evans in tow, stepped out onto the rooftop above Savile Row. While Harrison would later cringe at the notion of performing about the “chimneys,” the rooftop’s enviable place atop the cityscape, with the whole of the Mayfair district revealing itself before them, seemed like as good a spot as any to bring the Beatles’ Get Back chapter, and Lindsay-Hogg’s film, to a close.27
Arguably the most triumphant week of their recording career—as the improbable moment when they wrenched victory from the jaws of defeat—George and the Beatles’ week began somewhat dismally with yet more unfocused studio jamming, as well as a loose progress through a working repertoire that now included “Get Back” and “I’ve Got a Feeling.” They also attempted a new McCartney tune titled “Oh! Darling.” With Johns and Parsons working alongside Martin in the booth, “Get Back” began to shape up considerably across eighteen takes. At one point, Lennon parodied the song with a lighthearted bit of studio chatter, singing “Sweet Loretta Fart she thought she was a cleaner, / But she was a frying pan.” At the conclusion of “Oh! Darling,” John enjoyed a moment of unrestrained delight, announcing, “I’ve just heard that Yoko’s divorce has just gone through. Free at last!” On Tuesday, the Beatles finally seemed to rediscover their mettle, recording serviceable versions of “Get Back” and “Don’t Let Me Down.” Still caught up in the notion of getting back to their roots, the bandmates performed a ragged version of their first single, “Love Me Do,” the song that had started it all with Martin back in June 1962. They also tried their hand at their old Skiffle number, “The One After 909,” which they had last attempted in George’s company back on March 5, 1963. In addition to working on two demos featuring Preston, they rehearsed McCartney’s “Teddy Boy,” a midtempo composition that the songwriter had begun back in India. As George looked on, the Beatles engaged in studio chatter about the direction of their project, which still seemed to be uncertain. Was it, in fact, a documentary in advance of a concert or a new long-player, which raised the obvious question, should they be rehearsing or recording? All the while, Lindsay-Hogg’s crew kept filming away, strolling among the bandmates with their handheld cameras running. “We got used to it after a time,” George later wrote, “but all the rows that went on were filmed as well.”28
The next day, Martin, Johns, and the bandmates continued their unlikely progress toward unexpected greatness, with Lennon trying out a new composition titled “I Want You,” which would later sport the subtitle “She’s So Heavy.” But as was their wont during this period, the recording devolved into yet another oldies jam, with the quintet lumbering their way through Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away” and “Mailman, Bring Me No More Blues,” as well as “Bésame Mucho,” another throwback to their first session with Martin back in 1962. Things took a decidedly different turn on Thursday, January 30, when the quintet made good on Lindsay-Hogg’s concept of a rooftop finale, with Martin and the group making their way upstairs on a wintry, windy day to deliver the live performance that they had been pondering, in several different forms, since taping “Hey Jude” for Frost on Sunday back in September 1968. Even at that late moment, with Mal Evans and Neil Aspinall already having set up their gear up on the roof, the bandmates considered scuttling their director’s plans at the last minute. As Lindsay-Hogg later recalled, “We planned to do it about 12:30 to get the lunchtime crowds. They didn’t agree to do it as a group until about twenty to one. Paul wanted to do it and George [Harrison] didn’t. Ringo would go either way. Then John said, ‘Oh fuck, let’s do it,’ and they went up and did it.”29
As Martin later recalled, “At the end of the day, they said, ‘Let’s go and give a performance after all. Let’s go do one on the roof.’ So they set up the equipment one very cold winter’s day, and at lunchtime started this tremendous noise from the roof in Savile Row. All the neighbors and passersby were asking what the hell was going on, and it was the Beatles broadcasting to London.” With nearly a dozen cameramen working on the roof, Johns observed the proceedings on the roof, leaving Martin six floors below in the basement studio, where he manned the converted eight-track equipment courtesy of Abbey Road. The Beatles themselves were quite a sight. With Preston working his Fender Rhodes electric piano, a bearded McCartney strapped on his Höfner violin bass for the occasion, while Lennon, having donned Ono’s fur coat to fight off the wind, played his Casino. While Harrison worked his Rosewood Telecaster, an orange rain-coated Ringo played his new drum kit, a set of Ludwig Hollywoods with a maple finish. While the rooftop concert was by no means perfect—it suffered from the same stops and starts that had plagued the band throughout the month—they managed to storm their way through five splendid numbers that day, including “Get Back,” “Don’t Let Me Down,” “I’ve Got a Feeling,” “One After 909,” and “Dig a Pony.” Finally, after some forty-two minutes above the streetscape, they concluded the show with a spirited reprise of “Get Back,” followed by John’s parting words to the assembled crowd below: “I’d like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves,” he remarked. “I hope we passed the audition.”30
While the Beatles’ performance proved to be a triumph given its seeming unlikeliness and the band’s January malaise, the rooftop concert hadn’t passed without any hiccups. For George, the most pressing dilemma had been the ominous arrival of a squad of London bobbies, who rode down Savile Row in one of Scotland Yard’s conspicuous Black Maria vans. When the police had been called to quell the noise, George was convinced “we’d all end up in jail, myself included.” Dave Harries remembered the moment when the Beatles’ producer learned about the arrival of the Black Maria van. “George Martin went as white as a sheet,” he recalled, “which I thought was hilarious.” From Lindsay-Hogg’s perspective, the bobbies’ appearance was no laughing matter. “We all thought we would probably be arrested up on the roof,” Lindsay-Hogg recalled. “I was more nervous than the Beatles were because I was an American and I thought I’d be deported or something.” For his part, Ringo was elated, later remarking, “I always felt let down about the police. I was playing away and I thought, ‘Oh, great! I hope they drag me off!’ I wanted the cops to drag me off—‘Get off those drums!’—because we were being filmed and it would have looked really great, kicking the cymbals and everything.” But it was not to be. Although Beatles lore and Lindsay-Hogg’s eventual documentary depicted the police officers as being determined to end the concert prematurely, the truth was far less dramatic and eminently predictable. As Harries recalled, one of the bobbies agreed to allow the concert to continue as long as they could watch: “When they found out who it was,” said Harries, “they didn’t want to stop it.”31
After the concert, George and the bandmates were ecstatic, feeling the adrenaline rush of the moment. “They played wonderfully,” George later wrote, clearly relieved by the Beatles’ high-energy performance and most especially by their ability to rebound from their unsettling month at Twickenham and Apple Studios only to produce a concert for the ages. “That was one of the greatest and most exciting days of my life,” recalled Alan Parsons. “It was just unbelievable.” As they rejoined Martin in the basement down below, the bandmates and their producer can be heard reveling in the excitement of the moment, with Martin imagining a “whole squadron” of speaker-laden helicopters broadcasting their output to the city and Harrison fantasizing about the Beatles uniting London’s rock bands in the spirit of a singular, communal purpose:
Martin: It’s come off actually much better than I thought it would.
Lennon: Yes, just the whole scene is fantastic!
Martin: As Michael was saying, this is a very good dry run for something else too, apart from the value of its own as it stands.
Harrison: Yeah, I think for taking over London.
Lennon: Try the Hilton tomorrow.
Martin: The idea is, we’ll have a whole squadron of helicopters flying over London with loud, mounted speakers underneath them, you see.
Lennon: That’s fantastic, yeah.
Harrison: And every rock group in the world, in London, all on top of the buildings playing the same tunes.
In many ways, the rooftop concert performed a similar function for George and the Beatles. As they made their way downstairs, with January 1969 rapidly fading into their rearview mirror, they felt, if only for the moment, as if they could do anything.32