Was Paul McCartney’s ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ a sore spot for ‘Abbey Road’?
It’s not exactly a secret that The Beatles had their fair share of run-ins regarding their music, and the Abbey Road album was no exception. Like a bull in a China shop, ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ comes in right after ‘Something’, a choice that has been misconstrued by some as a bit of a joke. Dubbed as one of Paul McCartney’s “silly little songs”, it begs the question, was the track a deliberate whimsical detour in a cluster of well-uniformed fables, or simply a misguided weak spot on one of the Fab Four’s finest albums?
In the latest episode of the McCartney: A Life in Lyrics podcast, Irish poet Paul Muldoon picks apart McCartney’s comically macabre song. It tells the story of a maddened medical student, Maxwell Edison, who carries out a murder spree with a hammer: “Bang! Bang! Maxwell’s silver hammer / Came down upon her head / Clang! Clang! Maxwell’s silver hammer / Made sure that she was dead”.
While its sing-songy tone and gallows humour were polarising, the song also explored a duality that fit surprisingly well within Abbey Road. Alongside tracks like ‘Mean Mr Mustard’ and ‘Polythene Pam’, ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ adds to this mosaic of character sketches and theatricality that no other musicians were really attempting at the time. McCartney was meticulous in his production, which involved new instrumentation, including the use of a Moog synthesiser, marking a novel sound experiment for The Beatles.
Throughout the course of the episode, Muldoon points out that the other members weren’t fond of the tune and that Ringo Starr had claimed it was the worst song they had ever recorded. “The worst session ever was ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’,” Ringo Starr told Rolling Stone. “It was the worst track we ever had to record. It went on for fucking weeks.”
George Harrison wasn’t exactly a fan, either. He had been wrestling with McCartney’s creative vision and controlling demeanour throughout the entirety of the Abbey Road recording and was deeply unimpressed: “Sometimes Paul would make us do these really fruity songs,” he told Crawdaddy in the 1970s. “I mean, my God, ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ was so fruity.”
John Lennon had also expressed his frustration. He viewed the recordings as wasteful and unnecessary, admitting: “I hated it… He did everything to make it into a single, and it never was, and it never could’ve been.” McCartney, however, stood by his decision: “I was very keen on it. It took a little bit long to record,” he shared. “I remember the guys getting p**ed with me. Occasionally, I, in particular, would take too long ’cause I was trying to get what was in my head.”
McCartney explained that regardless of their disagreements, he felt that he and his bandmates generally enjoyed and thrived on working together in the studio – that their disagreement was more of a one-time thing. Despite the pushback, going off on a tangent wasn’t exactly a new tactic for the group. The Beatles had experimented with abstract themes, unconventional language and random, off-the-cuff monologues for a while, continuing to do so in a more extreme way in their final two albums.
‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ may be Monty Python meets music hall, but it is, if anything, a stark reminder of the tensions and creative differences that had been bubbling to the surface for quite some time, a knot among the threads that began to slowly pull the band further apart.
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