The album George Martin called a “pain in the ass”
George Martin seemed to have some musical sixth sense every time he walked into one of The Beatles’ recordings.
As much as he liked to guide them in the right direction whenever they wrote their songs, there are countless tunes in the Fab catalogue that could have been considered co-writes with the producer if they were making them today. But while Martin did have a few low points in his career with the band, rarely did have a project where it felt like he didn’t want to be there half the time.
But it’s not like every trip to Abbey Road Studios was meant to be a walk in the park, either. The entire road to the band getting a deal already came about after they were rejected by everyone else, and while Martin did his best to make sure that they sounded great on vinyl, he wasn’t going to sit there and watch them play their songs while Pete Best wasn’t pulling as much weight as the others.
Then again, there was always room for them to grow. They had already made some of the greatest pop music of the time before the 1960s were even halfway finished, but when they started working on more adventurous material, that’s when Martin’s ears perked up. There was no reason for them to rely on making a catchy single every time they made a record, and they were more than willing to throw anything they could at the wall and put it out to see what their fans thought of it.
That’s the kind of freedom that most people wish they could have, but it’s not like Martin didn’t have a few artistic reservations as well. The White Album lasted long enough for him to leave the sessions halfway through, and while he oversaw a lot of what was going on during the making of Let It Be, the fact that Phil Spector added his orchestrations on top of everything seemed like a massive insult to what they were working on.
Still, no other album was more of a chore for him to sit through than working on the Yellow Submarine soundtrack, recalling when discussing the track ‘Hey Bulldog’, “The boys didn’t dig the film at all because they weren’t involved with it to begin with. It was a pain in the ass. They said, ‘We really don’t need this in the album, let’s just give them that one.’”
But Martin shouldn’t have been too deterred from working on the record. For one thing, he actually got to flex his muscles as a composer. The band weren’t going to sit around and make some wacky concept album of songs, so hearing his orchestrations on the back half of the record is actually fairly compelling, like listening to ‘Pepperland’ or creating the kind of whimsical feeling that’s halfway to being a Beatles song if they only added their harmonies on top of it all.
If there is a silver lining to the album, though, it’s got to be ‘Hey Bulldog’. The rest of the songs are all filler in their own way, but whereas ‘It’s All Too Much’ did have a lot of feeling behind it this is the kind of off-the-wall tune that Lennon was always so good at whipping out, taking the basis of a piano lick and turning it into a bluesy hard rocker with McCartney playing some brilliant bass runs throughout the tune.
So while it’s easy to understand why the whole thing was a pain in the ass, that doesn’t mean that the final result isn’t without merit. The Beatles are far from as perfect as most people would lead you to believe, but it’s saying something when the band’s vote for their “worst” album is still pretty great.
