Except that the last album they recorded was Abey Road which was hardly a stinker. Let it Be is a good example of what the Beatles could have been without some sort of creative discipline and, of course, George Martin.
Nitpick: It was Paul, not George, who had the idea for the Bach trumpet, after watching a Brandenburg Concerto on TV. (Martin says as much in The Compleat Beatles: “It didn’t occur to me, but it occurred to him.”) Paul then sang the melody he wanted and George wrote out the chart.
A very scathing but perceptive article on this topic appeared in Slate, and I recommend it to you all:
Dead Beatles for Christmas: Why Were Their Solo Albums So Awful?
Not a nitpick, so thanks for the correction (I’m like this alot when I’m away from my books, I would have looked it up in “Abbey Road Day by Day” to confirm it).
Let’s try another example that everyone can correct. John recorded “Strawberry Fields.” He liked the first half of one take, the second half of the second. He told GM to stick 'em together.
Can’t, George says, they’re in two different keys.
That’s your problem, John says.
George figured it out. IIRR, he slowed down the first song a tad, and speeded up the second song a tad, and it worked. Sounds obvious, but nobody had ever done that before on a record.
I found that Slate article less-than-profound, and in fact juvenile.
Chuck Berry is still out there playing night-after-night. He’s not 1/4th of anything. But he hasn’t had a hit since 1972 and that was essentially a novelty song. His last real rock’n’roll top 10 hit was in 1964*.
There was nothing special about the decline of The Beatles (as a group or solo). They all do it.
“It’s better to burn out than it is to rust.”
- Chuck had a little comeback then, guess why?
I thought that it was actually early versions of two separate songs, not different takes. But I’m sure other people will weigh in and straighten it out.
John tried to stop Paul from wandering off in cutsey whimsey. There is no way “Martha My Dear” should share the same wax as “Helter Skelter”.
If you’ve never noticed where the edit is, I’m going to spoil this song for you forever. It’s Take 7 with no orchestra for the first minute. Take 7 ends at “Let me take you”. There it edits to Take 26 on “down” and the orchestra comes in.
No one’s mentioned it, so it needs to be said.
Brian Epstien was the prime bullshit detector for the Beatles. Even they knew it.
Once he died, after Sgt. Pepper, there output while still together became very slipshod.
Magical Mystery Tour, while a pretty good album, was a horrible film.
The White Album, while featuring many flashes of true brilliance, could have easily been trimmed to one disc, so overloaded is it with junk.
Let It Be is particularly uninspired musically as an album.
Abbey Road was their last gasp, a brief return to form before total dissolution, which is exactly what they’ve called it all these years.
Why are the solo albums so mediocre? One could argue that they were better together than apart, but their later collective output suggests otherwise. I was particularly struck by this when the “new” Beatles singles from “Anthology” were released. Twenty-Five years of individual musical development, and, back together, they sound like an outtake from the Let It Be sessions? WTF? Perhaps the producers were going for exactly that, but it was an absolute artistic failure. I never hear those two songs on the radio.
I think the reason that their solo work isn’t up to standard is that they all shot their wad during the first two thirds of the Beatles’ existence, and were completely out of ideas after that.
Well, that’s a little harsh. All of them did some pretty good work after the Beatles broke up. Paul’s “Maybe I’m Amazed”, “Mull of Kintyre”, “Band on the Run”, and a handful of other songs were as good as most of the stuff he wrote with the Beatles. And Wings was the most successful act of the 1970’s, if I recall correctly. So it’s not as if he just started producing crap and nothing else.
George Harrison’s “Cloud Nine” was a really good album. His last one was pretty good, too.
And Lennon put out a few outstanding tracks during his solo career.
I think the best explanation is that when the Beatles were together, peer pressure coupled with high expectations, great production, and much better self-criticism caused them to go through a burst of creativity, creating a ton of music. THen they sifted through it and picked out the best stuff.
Also, even though Lennon and McCartney wrote most of their songs individually, the other one was always figuratively looking over their shoulder. McCartney knew that if he wrote something treacly he’d hear about it from Lennon, and if Lennon wrote some tuneless experimental thing, McCartney would make sure he knew about it. There was a pretty intense rivalry there which forced both of them to excel.
As for Harrison, he was being inspired by the both of them, and also forced to excel to even hope to get his tracks on the album.
When they split up, their determination to do it ‘their way’ led them both to some horrible excesses. And their massive popularity meant that producers and record people weren’t giving them the feedback they needed to filter out the chaff from the wheat. But the talent was still there - just a little older and a little less focused.
[hijack]Is this a shot a Steely Dan? If so, then same on you! Two Against Nature and Everything Must Go are both great records.[/hijack]
As for ths OP, I tend to agree with those who say ego is a big part of the problem with the uneven feel of the solo records as well.
“I was a Beatle…I can do anything and people will love it!”
That being said, I don’t count Two Virgins and the similar albums to be true John solo records. Starting with Plastic Ono Band until Somtime in NYC, the Lennon solo records are great IMHO.
I can’t listen to much Paul stuff except for McCartney and Band on the Run…but Wings Over America is a pretty good live record.
As for George, I like All Things Must Pass and Brainwashed…never really got into the rest of the stuff.
Ringo…blah.
And George Martin did a fine job, but a lot of the “5th Beatle” stuff confuses me. I mean John and Paul wrote and arranged most of the songs. Paul would score them by humming or whatnot. I mean GM helped them use the equipment to get their desired effect(s), but he was not a creative force. Right place at the right time if you ask me.
I mean all the boys had some big success since the Beatles broke up…what did GM do? (And that is a serious question. I really don’t know what he did.)
Not to mention the excesses of the period- we’re talking about the seventies here, for the most part.
I never knew this. Interesting.
I also agree that George Martin is vastly overrated as a producer. The Beatles blew by him in sophistication time and time again. He was just a standard studio producer of the era. What sticks out in my mind is a bit from a Beatles documentary that has him talking about trying to decide who was going to be the frontman/leader of the group. The Beatles already knew there wasn’t one but it took Martin a long time to even accept such a “radical” concept. A more creative producer would have had them doing a “Revolver” style album 1-2 years earlier.
Since he isn’t known for doing much else sans-Beatles, I say he was a very minor figure.
Yeah, I never understood why they called Martin the 5th Beatle either… he’d be more like the 7th.
I disagree. Martin was a pretty big influence on the Beatles, and he DID write music, sometimes without even the Beatles’ knowledge. For instance, listen to the Elizabethan piano solo at the end of “In My Life”. George Martin decided that the song needed something more, so while the Beatles were out of the studio he sat down, scored a piano piece, and played and recorded it himself. Then he added it to the song, and when the Beatles heard it, they loved it, so it stayed in. The Beatles had absolutely zero creative influence on that portion of the song.
That’s going a bit above and beyond the call for a producer.
Martin also suggested the use of strings in “Yesterday”, and wrote and scored the whole string part (Paul could not read music). He scored much of the Beatles’ music, and much of it was original to him. For an example of how the Beatles worked with Martin, John came up to him when he was writing “For the Benefit of Mr. Kite” and said, “I want some kind of circus music in this song.” That’s it. George Martin wrote it all.
Plus he had playing credits on a number of songs, and writing credits on at least one album.
The other reason Martin was a big influence is because the Beatles respected him highly, and listened to his judgement. When he offered an opinion, they always took it seriously. He acted as editor as well as producer.
Based on what I’ve read, George Martin should get HUGE credit for working with Beatles, mentoring them in the studio, channeling their creative forces and contributing some to their music.
If you haven’t read The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions you really should. All of the things Sam Stone cites are in there and many others, like the fact that Martin:
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Arranged Eleanor Rigby’s strings (and may have been a force behind recommending a string arrangement to begin with)
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Working with his engineers to introduce then-innovative, now-essential studio effects like looping, flanging and DI. Again, folks like Paul definitely wanted to do looping, but Martin made it work in the studio.
Hearing people say “Martin was right time/right place” or that “the Beatles should’ve gotten to Revolver two years earlier” sound uninformed and naive to me - look at the context:
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The Beatles knew nothing about how to work in a studio. The move from just learning to being equals to Martin, to using Martin and his team as an engineering team to do their bidding was a natural progression.
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The Beatles were HUGE by late '63 in the UK; if they wanted to push someone like Martin aside, they could have.
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The Beatles were uniquely positioned in time - not only were they growing as musicians, but music was changing around them. Folk rock/Dylan, Motown and R&B had stepped into the hole left by early rock/rockability, Spector and the Wall of Sound, Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys - all of this was happening. What was so amazing about the Beatles is that they could digest these influences and come out with something all their own. And they worked at such a pace - pushed on by Brian Epstein, Parlophone execs and George Martin - that they created new material based on their influences while their influences were still on the charts. Lennon wrote “Hide Your Love Away” to sound like Dylan while Dylan was still huge. The Beach Boys/Pet Sounds vs. Beatles and Revolver/Sgt. Pepper cycle is well-known.
The point is that expecting the Beatles to have come up with something like Revolver, with its sophisticated production - looping, flanging, multi-tracking etc. - makes no sense - much of the studio innovation had not been invented, the Beatles simply didn’t know their way around the studio, and the musical influences had not pushed the Beatles along. And Martin was instrumental in helping the progress.
Read the book - if you have and still feel that way about Martin, offer a few cites.
Not only that, Martin actually left EMI in the mid-60s to become an independent producer, hiring himself back out to EMI (for a lot more money than EMI paid him); he was only able to do that with the Beatles’ support, as they refused to work with anyone else.
Except, the Beatles weren’t really that old when they broke up. In no way can you compare the ex-Beatles of 1971 with the Rolling Stones of today, agewise. Incidentally, I saw the Stones’ concert on HBO a year or so ago and was impressed with the fact that they can still deliver the goods onstage. Though I agree that they haven’t given us much in the way of worthwhile, new music for more than 20 years.