The Beatles song George Martin didn’t think was good enough: “What the hell was that?”
There’s a good chance that The Beatles would still be playing the Liverpool bar circuit had it not been for George Martin. The producer might not have considered them the greatest musicians he had ever heard in his life, but beneath all the scrappy bar band energy, he knew there was potential for them to be the biggest act in the world with the right idea. That said, he did have the final say in the early days, and he didn’t think that ‘One After 909’ was nearly up to their usual standard.
Granted, it would take a while before Martin even considered them to be world-class songwriters. Their first version of ‘Please Please Me’ was less-than-stellar, and it’s not like the lyrics to ‘Love Me Do’ were going to win any Pulitzer Prizes or anything, so the goal was to just give them another song from the Mitch Murray watered-down take on rock and roll.
Although ‘How Do You Do It’ had what it took to be a hit, the idea of the Fab Four being given songs to sing like Elvis Presley didn’t sit well with them. They had been inspired to write their own stuff because of Buddy Holly, and come hell or high water, they were going to do what they had to make their little ditties hits.
Then again, ‘One After 909’ does seem like a clunker, even by their old standards. Regardless of the amount of overdubs that got thrown onto it on Let It Be, a bluesy tune about a guy who loses his girl because he goes to the wrong railway location reads less like romantic drama and more like some madcap comedy.
When looking back on those initial sessions, Martin thought that if ‘One After 909’ was their finest work, there was no way they would cut it as songwriters, saying, “When I first met them, their material was terrible. I mean, ‘One After 909’? What the hell was that? It was silly stuff, not very good, really. But they had this charisma.”
That charisma and naivete were probably what made them fearless when suggesting new ideas as well. Martin could have helped translate early tracks like ‘From Me To You’ into hits, but by the time they hit on records like Rubber Soul, they were more comfortable taking chances, whether it came to using a sitar on ‘Norwegian Wood’ or putting Paul McCartney’s bass through a fuzz pedal on ‘Think For Yourself’.
If anything, the fact that ‘One After 909’ ended up on Let It Be is more of a joke inclusion compared to ‘The Long and Winding Road’ and ‘Across the Universe’. This was just them attempting to refamiliarise themselves with what made them great in the first place, so going back to the early days and seeing if they could put some energy back into one of their duds is far more inspired than just jamming and seeing where everything goes.
The tune does offer a few ups and downs, but given what we know in Get Back, there’s probably a good reason why Martin was never the producer on these sessions. Had he known that they would go back to their sillier tracks, he would have probably whipped them into shape.
