Producer George Martin Was Shocked The Beatles Recorded Anything After the Misery of ‘Let It Be’: ‘I Really Believed That Was the End of The Beatles’
When The Beatles told producer George Martin that they wanted to get back into the studio to record an album after Let It Be, he could hardly believe his ears. He assumed the band would break up. Recording Let It Be had been a miserable experience for all involved and he didn’t see a future for The Beatles.
George Martin said making The Beatles’ ‘Let It Be’ was a terrible experience
In early 1969, The Beatles gathered to begin working on Let It Be. Tensions among the band members were at an all-time high. Their recording sessions for the White Album had also been challenging, and Let It Be was no different.
“This was a very difficult period,” Paul McCartney said in the book Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now by Barry Miles. “John was with Yoko full-time, and our relationship was beginning to crumble: John and I were going through a very tense period. The breakup of The Beatles was looming and I was very nervy.”
Still, the band decided to get in the studio again that same year to record Abbey Road. Martin found this astonishing.
“Let It Be was such an unhappy record (even though there are some great songs on it) that I really believed that was the end of The Beatles, and I assumed I would never work with them again,” Martin said in The Beatles Anthology. “I thought, ‘What a shame to end like this.’ So I was quite surprised when Paul rang me up and said, ‘We’re going to make another record — would you like to produce it?'”
George Martin was not happy with the end result of the Beatles’ album
The biggest frustration about Let It Be was that the difficult recording sessions did not create a product Martin liked. The band’s manager, Allen Klein, brought in Phil Spector to remix Let It Be. Neither Martin nor McCartney were happy with Spector’s version. They felt it undermined all their work.
“That made me very angry — and it made Paul even angrier because neither he nor I knew about it till it had been done,” Martin said. “It happened behind our backs because it was done when Allen Klein was running John.”
The band was not as unhappy while recording ‘Abbey Road’
Martin agreed to produce Abbey Road. He said was a much more pleasant recording experience than Let It Be had been. He wondered, though, if this was because The Beatles knew it would be their last record.
“It was a very happy record,” he said. “I guess it was happy because everybody thought it was going to be the last.”
Ringo Starr agreed. He was happy with both the recording experience and the finished product.
“After the Let It Be nightmare, Abbey Road turned out fine,” he said. “The second side is brilliant. Out of the ashes of all that madness, that last section is for me one of the finest pieces we put together.”
