George Martin Said The Beatles’ Creative Freedom Went Too Far on 1 Album
Beatles producer George Martin worked with the band extensively on each of their albums. He got to know the band and their working style well as they grew as artists. While he was typically happy to see their growth, he said they began taking too many creative liberties beginning with one album. He shared why this became a problem for the group.
George Martin said The Beatles lost focus on one album
In 1967, The Beatles pushed the limits of what was possible with an album when they released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. They continued to push boundaries with their later albums, which Martin viewed as a problem.
“During Magical Mystery Tour I became conscious that the freedom that we’d achieved in Pepper was getting a little bit over the top, and they weren’t really exerting enough mental discipline in a lot of the recordings,” Martin said in The Beatles Anthology. “They would have a basic idea and then they would have a jam session to end it, which sometimes didn’t sound too good.”
Martin believed this problem bled over into the making of The White Album. He thought the band had too many ideas and was unwilling to try to make the album more cohesive.
“I complained a little about their writing during the later ‘White’ album, but it was fairly small criticism,” he said. “I thought we should probably have made a very, very good single album rather than a double. But they insisted. I think it could have been made fantastically good if it had been compressed a bit and condensed.”
John Lennon said he felt resentful of the same Beatles album
Martin wasn’t the only one to have a problem with Magical Mystery Tour. John Lennon saw Paul McCartney as the driving force behind the album. When he listened back to it, he grew to resent it. His resentment had more to do with the differences in his and McCartney’s lifestyle than the content of the album, though.
“Yeah … and there was a problem with that period, which is why I got a little resentful later on about the album,” he said, per the book All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview With John Lennon and Yoko Ono by David Sheff. “I was living a more suburban life at the time, with a wife and a kid, while he was still tripping around town, hanging out and being a bachelor.”
They took ‘The White Album’ in many different directions
A problem with The White Album that they didn’t have to deal with as much during Magical Mystery Tour was that the band was constantly fighting each other. They each had different visions for the album, which is why they ultimately released a double album.
“That [the ‘White’ album] was just saying: This is my song, we’ll do it this way,” Lennon said. “That’s your song, you do it that way.’ It’s pretty hard trying to fit three guys’ music onto one album — that’s why we did a double.”
Ringo Starr believed the conflicting visions were ultimately to the detriment of the album.
“There was a lot of information on the double album,” he said, “but I agree that we should have put it out as two separate albums: the ‘White and the ‘Whiter’ albums.”
