The latter years of The Beatles have become an arena for debate once more. Where fan lore previously held that 1969 to their dissolution was a fractured period, of endless in-group inter-fighting, Get Back has shown that actually, things weren’t so bad at times. Yet one song remains beyond the pale for Ringo Starr – ‘Abbey Road’ knockabout ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’.
A Paul McCartney endeavour that matches music hall aspects against then groundbreaking technology, it took a number of sessions before the songwriter was entirely happy with it. Sadly, the studio grind took its toll on the rest of the group.
Ringo Starr, for example, was left exhausted by his bandmate’s perfectionism. In a 2008 interview with Rolling Stone he said it was “the worst session ever” and “the worst track we ever had to record”, before adding: “it went on for fucking weeks”.
That’s perhaps a little strong. Kicked off in 1968, Paul McCartney initially wanted to include ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ on the White Album, before time constraints pushed it back. Rehearsed during the Get Back era, it was finally recorded six months later.
—
—
Sessions weren’t exactly smooth, though. John Lennon was recovering from a car accident in Scotland, a mishap that saw The Beatles icon and Yoko Ono recover in Golspie’s Lawson Memorial hospital, in the Highlands. “I hated it,” Lennon told David Sheff for Playboy in 1980. “All I remember is the track – he made us do it a hundred million times.”
He added: “He did everything to make it into a single, and it never was, and it never could’ve been. But [Paul] put guitar licks on it, and he had somebody hitting iron pieces, and we spent more money on that song than any of them in the whole album.”
George Harrison wasn’t a fan, either. Struggling to get his songs on to Beatles records, he was dismayed by the “fruity” nature of the song. Chatting to Crawdaddy magazine in 1977, he said: “Sometimes Paul would make us do these really fruity songs. I mean, my God, ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ was so fruity. After a while we did a good job on it, but when Paul got an idea or an arrangement in his head …”
For his part, Paul McCartney remains an unrepentant fan of the endeavour, and the song itself. Although – according to Setlist.com – he hasn’t played it live in over 20 years.
—
