The artist George Martin was encouraged not to work with: “He’s a loser”
Any artist who’s been in the game long enough can normally develop a musical sixth sense of some kind. Even if they aren’t the most proficient musician in the world, they at least know how to extract talent from themselves or make the best of what they have to create something that is either pleasant in the moment or wildly ahead of its time. And while George Martin was more than happy to work with anyone he thought had the goods, he wasn’t safe from industry insiders steering him in the wrong direction.
Then again, anyone who was trying to give the producer of The Beatles advice was already fighting a losing game. This is the same man who helped create the massage textures behind ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, so it’s not like he was going to turn in anything subpar for the sake of making a quick buck.
That’s not to say he hasn’t made a few duds in his prime. He did manage to produce plenty of acts that worked magic, like Cheap Trick and America, but that also came at the expense of working on the Sgt Pepper movie, which may as well have been his equivalent of taking the musical companion to the Mona Lisa and then proceeding to colour on top of it with crayons and to say that he “fixed” it.
Before any of that sacrilege transpired, though, Martin already had his ear on the next phase of rock and roll when he heard Jeff Beck. While he had been used to having a hands-on approach with the Fab Four, Beck knew the kind of music he heard in his head and was willing to go anywhere he could to get it, even if it meant transforming the way that most of us saw guitar playing.
But looking at the way his career had transpired, many people were starting to look at him like damaged goods. He had left the great gig as The Yardbirds’ guitarist, and while working with Rod Stewart had given him a second wind, the thought of him doing a record made up of primarily instrumental work wasn’t going to set the world on fire as much as bands like Led Zeppelin were.
While Martin had been fascinated by the idea of working with Beck, he remembered being talked down by numerous people, saying, “[They said] ‘Don’t touch Jeff Beck, he’s a loser.’ [I said] ‘No, I think he’s a great guitar player.’ I’d always admired his playing enormously, and I knew his work well. He is a gut player. Sometimes, he would play badly. Nothing would come, and he would get very angry with himself. But other times, he [could] sit down with a battered guitar and make the most incredible sounds.”
That kind of emotion came out through every second of Blow By Blow. Even though Beck always had a strained relationship with the record during his lifetime, songs like ‘Freeway Jam’ are still some of his most revered tracks because of his collaboration with Martin, who let his jam sessions turn into fully fleshed-out songs over the course of those weeks of recording.
Even if Beck transformed ‘She’s A Woman’ to become virtually unrecognisable to anyone, it was never out of disrespect for what Martin had done. The Fab Four will forever be the producer’s main success story, but when he first heard Beck playing songs like ‘Cause We’ve Ended As Lovers’, it was clear that this was what the future of music was going to sound like.
