There is no ‘best’ member of The Beatles. The band’s magic was in its constitution. The fact that the Beatles had been buddies since their budding high school days gave them license to bicker the way only old friends can. Their wildly varying individual personalities meant they often bickered away like brothers, ultimately aiming to capture the perfect mix of the artistic milieu that made up the generational band.
This spirit had been imperative when it was the four of them against the world as they cut their teeth in the rough and tumble realm of gangsters, dodgy club owners, and even dodgier clubs miles away from home in Hamburg at tender ages. Their compact cohesion made them a band in the traditional sense, a true group, and this ensured that any little spats were easily eschewed with the very next joke.
However, when the laughter stopped, the band seemed less like a gang, the aim drifted from the perfect mix, and the bickering boiled towards full-blown arguments; the whole constitution that made them so great suddenly became under threat. They were no longer high school buddies making magic but rather individual musicians with growing grudges. Nowhere was this more apparent than with the “worst” session that the Fab Four ever endured—a session that rendered them closer to The Disgruntled Three with an axe to grind with The Selfish One. Enter the pivotal moment of ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer‘.
“The worst session ever was ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’. It was the worst track we ever had to record. It went on for fucking weeks. I thought it was mad,” Ringo Starr quipped. Nobody seemed to want the track except an increasingly insistent Paul McCartney, who proudly brought it to the studio at a time when tempers were already frayed. The image of a hammer striking against an unyielding anvil that can actually be heard in the recorded mix is an apt one for how things felt in the studio.
“I hated it,“ John Lennon reflected. “All I remember is the track – he made us do it a hundred million times“. That wouldn’t have been so bad if spirits were high and another masterpiece was neigh, but there was an undercurrent that the true sentiment was a vanity project designed to break up the band. “[McCartney] did everything to make it into a single and it never was and it never could’ve been. But [McCartney] 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,“ Lennon added to David Sheff.
The track has 21 registered takes in their annals – a drop in the ocean compared to modern recording sessions – but for a band borne from the frenzy of Hamburg, such practices seemed like a far cry from what they were all about. This was the fatal blow that ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ dealt, it made it clear that something had gone awry artistically—a facet that had never previously reared its head amid all the horrors that the band had faced together, ‘together’ being an operative word.
Spiritually, the song itself even reflected this. As McCartney explained, “[It] was my analogy for when something goes wrong out of the blue.“ Something had gone wrong—a million things, in fact, from the overbearing presence of Yoko Ono to the even more damning presence of heroin, Allen Klein or even the absence of the late Brian Epstein. But above all, they weren’t young brethren against the world any more. That is what they had always been. ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ stuck a nail into that old coffin. And if The Beatles weren’t the good old Beatles anymore, then they simply weren’t a band at all.
The spirit of the song was decreed by George Harrison, too. “It was silly,“ he said. “It was very selfish, actually.“
The end had arrived. As George Martin reflected, ”I’m very fond of Abbey Road. Probably because it’s the last album we made, and we kind of knew that.” The irony is that the fact that the song is an instant classic serves as perfect evidence of the greatness of the band that came before—it wasn’t a dying ember, it was a blaze of mad glory.
