“The worst”: The 1969 song that practically proved to be The Beatles’ last
There is no ‘best’ member of The Beatles. The band’s magic was in its constitution.
The fact that the Beatles had been buddies since their budding high school days gave them license to bicker and badger the way only old friends can. Their wildly varying individual personalities meant they often bitched like feuding brothers, ultimately aiming to capture the perfect mix of the artistic milieu that made up the generational band.
This spirit had been imperative when it was the four of them against the world as they cut their teeth in the rough and tumble realm of gangsters, dodgy club owners, and even dodgier clubs miles away from home in Hamburg at tender ages. Their compact cohesion made them a band in the traditional sense, a true group, and this ensured that any little spats were easily eschewed with the very next joke.
However, when the laughter stopped, the Fab Four seemed less like a gang. Their aim drifted from mastering the perfect mix, and the bickering boiled towards full-blown arguments. The whole constitution that made them so great suddenly became under threat. They were no longer high school buddies making magic but rather individual musicians with growing grudges.
Nowhere was this more apparent than with the “worst” session that the Fab Four ever endured. It was a session that rendered them closer to The Disgruntled Three with an axe to grind with The Selfish One than the once-thick-as-thieves Fab Four. Enter the pivotal moment of ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer‘.
The nail in the coffin
“The worst session ever was ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’. It was the worst track we ever had to record. It went on for fucking weeks. I thought it was mad,” Ringo Starr quipped. Nobody seemed to want the track except an increasingly insistent Paul McCartney, who proudly brought it to the studio at a time when tempers were already frayed.
The image of a hammer striking against an unyielding anvil that can actually be heard in the recorded mix is an apt one for how things felt in the studio. Belligerence ran high, and the unity of the band was finally shattered beyond repair.
“I hated it,“ John Lennon reflected. “All I remember is the track – he made us do it a hundred million times“. That wouldn’t have been so bad if spirits were high and another masterpiece was nigh, but there was an undercurrent that the true sentiment was a vanity project designed to intentionally break up the band.
“[McCartney] did everything to make it into a single, and it never was, and it never could’ve been. But [McCartney] put guitar licks on it and he had somebody hitting iron pieces, and we spent more money on that song than any of them in the whole album,“ Lennon added in discussion with David Sheff, still angered by it years later.
The track has 21 registered takes in their annals – a drop in the ocean compared to modern recording sessions – but for a band that boomed amid the frenzy of Hamburg, such practices seemed like a far cry from what they were all about. They might have spent months making Sgt Pepper, but that seemed like a direct response to giving up life on the road. Now, with families and disparate ambitions, this arduous approach didn’t seem to fit.
Endless takes of a track only one of them liked dangerously illuminated the fact that they were now pulling in different directions, for the first time, in a creative sense, too. This was the fatal blow that ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ dealt: it made it clear that something had gone awry artistically. They had survived Hamburg, Beatlemania, relentless touring and unimaginable fame because they still believed in the same band. ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ exposed the moment they no longer did.
Spiritually, the song itself even reflected this. As McCartney explained, “[It] was my analogy for when something goes wrong out of the blue.“ Something had gone wrong. A million things, in fact, from the overbearing presence of Yoko Ono to the even more damning presence of heroin, Allen Klein or even the absence of the late Brian Epstein.
But above all, they weren’t young brethren against the world any more. That is what they had always been. ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ stuck a nail into that old coffin. And if The Beatles weren’t the good old Beatles anymore, then they simply weren’t a band at all.
The spirit of the song was decreed by George Harrison, too. “It was silly,“ he said. “It was very selfish, actually.“
The end had arrived. As George Martin reflected, ”I’m very fond of Abbey Road. Probably because it’s the last album we made, and we kind of knew that.” The irony is that the fact that the song is an instant classic serves as perfect evidence of the greatness of the band that came before. It wasn’t a dying ember, it was a blaze of mad glory, it was a total ballache.
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