FOR GEORGE MARTIN, it came in the form of a most unexpected telephone call. And from no less than Paul McCartney.
It was a late spring day in 1969, and England’s most esteemed record producer was sitting in his office on London’s Park Street, toiling away at AIR (Associated Independent Recording), the company he founded four years earlier after experiencing one rebuff too many at the hands of the vaunted EMI Group.
And what a rebuff it had been. After leading EMI’s Parlophone Records label with a steady hand for more than a decade, the normally staid George simply couldn’t take it anymore. Within the space of a scant eighteen months—from the autumn of 1962 through the spring of 1964—he had transformed Parlophone from a modest comedy imprint into EMI’s most valuable, blue-chip musical property. His production had earned EMI a king’s ransom many times over—tens of millions of pounds, quite literally—and what did he have to show for it? In 1963, his salary amounted to a paltry £3,000 during a year in which the records he produced held the number-one position on the British charts for a phenomenal thirty-seven weeks.1
But by the spring of 1969, the high tide of Beatlemania was just a memory. As the days and weeks passed since he had last seen the bandmates, the man whom the Beatles lovingly referred to as “Big George” had begun to assume that he would never work with the group again. Indeed, it was the longest he’d gone without seeing them since their February 1968 sojourn to Rishikesh in the company of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Only this time, it was different. This time it had seemed eminently more final.
On the one hand, George was relieved by the respite, having grown tired of the emotional roller coaster. The heartbreak had simply become too much to bear. Yet on the other hand, he was terribly sad to see them go out with a whimper after such masterworks as Rubber Soul, Revolver, and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Surely, their last gasp wouldn’t be in the form of the failed Get Back LP, with all of the attendant infighting and the would-be album’s crude and haphazard production efforts?
“What a shame to end like this,” George thought to himself at the time. But then, to his great surprise, Paul had phoned him out of the blue. So unexpected, yet at the same time, so very welcome to George’s ears. Paul wasted little time in getting down to business: “We’re going to make another record,” he announced. “Would you like to produce it?” For his part, George’s reply was immediate and firm. “Only if you let me produce it the way we used to,” he answered. “We do want to do that,” said Paul. “John included?” asked George, overbrimming with caution. “Yes,” Paul replied. And then, as an afterthought: “Honestly.”2
For all of his understandable hesitation in that call, George was undeniably intrigued. Only a short time later, he was back in the familiar environs of Studio 2, assisting Paul in nailing down a lead vocal in the service of a new and as of yet untitled Beatles album. But as Paul’s fellow band members assembled in the studio in the coming days for one more stab at greatness, George worried, justifiably, whether or not they could recapture the magic of days gone by.
Was it even possible, at this late date, to take the Beatles’ sad song and make it better?