The Beatles aren’t known as the ‘Fab Four’ for nothing. Apart from the fabulous depth and breadth of their contribution to modern music, there were just four of them, no more or less. During their eight-year recording career as a band, they were incredibly tight-knit in the studio and it was very rare that another musician was allowed to muscle in on a song.
As Ringo Starr put it during a recent interview with AARP, for each of the band members, it was as though they’d “got three brothers”. The Beatles always “looked out for each other,” he added. No one was going to get in the way of their chemistry as a band.
After Starr replaced Pete Best as the group’s drummer and session drummer Andy White took his place during the album take of their debut single ‘Love Me Do’, Beatles recordings were supposed to be for band members only. That didn’t stop a few guest musicians from sneaking their way into the mix here and there (but certainly not everywhere).
There’s Eric Clapton’s iconic lead guitar part on the 1968 George Harrison composition ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’. The previous year, a whole host of stars sang guest vocals on the single ‘All You Need Is Love’. And, in one of the more astonishing pieces of Beatles trivia, Brian Jones would posthumously feature on the penultimate ever Beatles single release, with his alto sax part making it onto ‘Let It Be’ B-side ‘You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)’.
However, none of the above claim the prize of being the non-Beatle to have appeared on the most Beatles songs. Depending on your definition of “guest musician”, this prize could only go to one of two people.
Not just a producer
If you’re going to count anyone who played on an officially released Beatles song apart from the four band members themselves, there’s one undisputed champion.
The Beatles’ producer, George Martin, played on a whopping 37 songs recorded by the group. That’s around 15% of their total output of songs and excludes all of the additional songs for which he arranged and conducted orchestral parts while not playing any instrument himself.
Martin’s instrumental contributions began with the band’s first album, Please Please Me, on which he played piano for the track ‘Misery’ and celesta for ‘Baby It’s You’. At the time, none of the four Beatles felt confident enough about the keys to take on any piano or organ parts.
This situation soon changed as the band picked up new instruments incredibly quickly, with Martin sharing piano parts on 1964’s A Hard Day’s Night with Lennon and McCartney. Still, the producer would continue to contribute parts occasionally until The White Album in 1968, when his entire instrumental contribution to the 30-track double LP was limited to one small piano part on ‘Rocky Raccoon’…
Martin’s most celebrated and groundbreaking instrumental parts on Beatles songs include the glissando-embellished piano solo in ‘In My Life’. The producer sped up the solo himself to fit it into the song’s middle eight, an effect Lennon loved so much that he insisted it stay like that in the final version. Then there’s the break on ‘Good Day Sunshine’, which takes the piece in an unexpected direction by mixing blues and music hall influences.
Almost a “Fifth Beatle”?
Leaving mainstay Beatles producer George Martin aside, we could also confine the term “guest musician” to people who worked with The Beatles as musicians alone. In that case, the musician to have played on the most Beatles songs would be American musician and friend of the band Billy Preston.
Preston played electric piano and organ on a total of eight different songs for the group’s ‘Get Back’ project, which would later become the album ‘Let It Be’ and three accompanying singles. Most prominently, Preston performs piano solos on the songs ‘Get Back’ and ‘Don’t Let Me Down’ and can be seen playing with the band in the video of their famous rooftop concert in January 1969.
So significant were Preston’s contributions to recordings that there were discussions about letting him become a fifth member of the band, which McCartney allegedly disagreed with. He would play two small instrumental parts on the group’s subsequent album Abbey Road, taking his total of Beatles songs played on to ten.
After The Beatles broke up, he continued to play with Lennon, Harrison and Starr on their solo recordings, as well as the Rolling Stones. Between the 1960s and 1990s, Preston had his own prolific recording career, too, having released his first album at the age of just 16 in 1963. Who needs to be a Beatle, anyway?
