It’s no secret that one of the most strained relationships within The Beatles was between Paul McCartney and George Harrison. Compared to the rest of the group, McCartney and Harrison were never particularly close. As McCartney’s creative control over the band increased, Harrison’s frustration with him reached a breaking point. Perhaps no song illustrates this tension more clearly than ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’, a track that Harrison famously disliked, viewing it as a symbol of McCartney’s dominance and creative direction in the later years of the band.
Featuring on the band’s Abbey Road album, the track came when the group struggled to continue in their current guise. Harrison had even previously left the band earlier in 1969 after suggesting that his songs (having recently found his zeal for songwriting) were not being given the same attention as the Lennon-McCartney partnership. He returned in the hope of turning the ship around.
Having recently experienced a creative false start earlier in the year, the band was keen to ensure things ran as smoothly as possible. The group had spent much of 1969 at creative odds and dabbling with the idea of disbandment as each band member suddenly saw solo stardom on the horizon. The notion of change for Abbey Road didn’t deter the inter-band dissent from running rife for a new Macca composition.
The song was ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’, and Paul McCartney felt strongly that it needed to be played a certain way. It took hours and hours of session time with the bassist even employing a studio engineer to go out and fetch a blacksmith’s anvil as part of the production process. Even after this, McCartney still wasn’t happy.
“The worst session ever was ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’,” the usually affable Ringo Starr told Rolling Stone. “It was the worst track we ever had to record. It went on for fucking weeks.”
For George Harrison, the track landed with even more weight. He had been fighting with McCartney’s creative vision for some time. Harrison was so unimpressed with the track and wasn’t afraid to share his damning thoughts. “Sometimes Paul would make us do these really fruity songs,” he told Crawdaddy in the 1970s. “I mean, my God, ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ was so fruity.”
It was a shared thought, too. McCartney’s songwriting partner, John Lennon, also claimed he “hated it,” confirming, “He did everything to make it into a single, and it never was, and it never could’ve been.”
Despite this, McCartney felt positive about the song, no matter the inter-band derision it suffered: “It was the best radio play I had ever heard in my life, and the best production, and Ubu was so brilliantly played,” he said in the Barry Miles book Many Years From Now. “It was just a sensation. That was one of the big things of the period for me,” proclaimed Sir Paul.
For Harrison, however, having attempted to record the song over countless different sessions to achieve McCartney’s perfect vision, the song represented a larger issue. By 1969, in Harrison’s eyes at least, McCartney had become the band’s leader. “At that point in time, Paul couldn’t see beyond himself,” Harrison told Guitar World in 2001. “He was on a roll, but … in his mind, everything that was going on around him was just there to accompany him. He wasn’t sensitive to stepping on other people’s egos or feelings.”
In the end, George Harrison’s dislike for ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ was rooted in the mire of both personal and artistic issues that were rumbling around the group during this time. He found the song frivolous, was frustrated by the exhausting recording process, and resented McCartney’s controlling approach when the band’s internal tensions were at their peak. The song, on reflection, became emblematic of the creative differences that were pulling The Beatles apart during the making of Abbey Road.
