Customer Reviews

Summer of Love: The Making of Sgt. Pepper

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This fascinating, thorough, and accurate book about the making of the Sgt. Pepper album is the British edition of Martin's With A Little Help From My Friends. It's the same book: same text, same photos, different title. Martin did a tremendous job researching this book, combining his and others' enjoyable first-hand recollections about the making of the album with extensive research at the EMI studios, relistening to the session tapes (including the unreleased alternate takes), checking the detailed notes written on the original session sheets, and so on. (In contrast, for All You Need Is Ears all those years ago, he relied on his memory, and the results were much less complete.) Amazingly, this was the first Beatles book to reveal that Paul McCartney played lead guitar on the "Sgt. Pepper" title track (yes, he sure did), and also the first to thoroughly dispel the tired myth that "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" was "all John": it was a true cocomposition by John AND Paul (as John said himself in at least two interviews). It's refreshing to see a book like this that assumes the TRUTH will be "good enough" entertainment for any sensible reader. Martin, thankfully, simply ignores rock writers' relentless post-Lennon rewriting of Beatles history, which has magnified anything negative Lennon ever said about McCartney while ignoring anything positive (such as Lennon's praise of "When I'm Sixty-Four" to interviewer Anne Nightingale)... and has consistently seized on Lennon's MOST mistakenly exaggerated or misleading claims about his own role in the creation of songs, while "forgetting" about all the many times John happened to give Paul completely fair, due credit (such as his 1965 interview with Valerie Wilmer, in which he described "Ticket To Ride"'s melody as cowritten by McCartney). George Martin, who admired and liked both Lennon and McCartney, has no axe to grind about them, or the other two Beatles... and he finds the right balance of modesty and candor in describing his own important role in the creation of this album, too. The previously unseen session photos are a fine bonus. This book is a keeper.

While this book is ostensibly about the making of Sgt. Pepper, it's more revealing of George Martin and his view of The Beatles. The sections detailing album production (coupled with Martin's musical analyses) tend to be rather dry, and the divvying of songwriting credit provides little more than grist for the Lennon-McCartney argument mill. What turns out to be most interesting is Martin and Pearson's ability to communicate some of the feeling of the times, some of the extra-studio influences that brought the Beatles to the making of Sgt. Pepper, and subsequently led to the creation of the album.

With the huge number of books written about The Beatles, one could easily point to other volumes that cover some or all of this ground. But Martin had a unique position in the Beatles coterie, and though this volume is far from a tell-all, it does leverage his vantage point. It's not explosive in a way that radically redefines one's view of The Beatles or their times, but it does provide some first-hand perspective that adds shades to the ever aging picture. How much of this is accurate, and how much is shaded memory, is hard to say. Beatles fanatics may find the so-called McCartney-esque slant infuriating, but those who simply lived through times will find Martin's writing pleasantly evocative.

There is very little here that isn't also in George Martin's earlier and much superior (and ungrammatically entitled, alas) "All You Need is Ears". The stories retold are altered, seemingly to jibe with Paul McCartney's relentless post-Lennon rewriting of Beatle history. Veracity aside, this tends to make them banal and humorless.

Recommended: PENTATONIC SCALES FOR THE JAZZ-ROCK KEYBOARDIST by Jeff Burns.

It's amazing to think the author needed the services of a ghostwriter to write this badly. You'd think a reasonably intelligent twelve-year-old could have accomplished it by himself. Those who "[assume] the TRUTH [sic] will be 'good enough' [sic] entertainment for any sensible reader" may appreciate the Andy Warhol documentary in which the exterior of a building is filmed for twenty-four hours--the film itself lasts twenty-four hours. The art of the memoir is knowing what to leave out. McCartney's habitual trick is to damn John Lennon with faint praise. He loves to tell (and retell and retell again) how John Lennon contributed to his "It's Getting Better" the line "It can't get no worse", while completely ignoring the sophisticated and innovative harmony of "Julia" and "Because", etc. Rather a coincidence then that George Martin treats us to here to yet another rehearsal of this insipid story. (John Lennon was murdered December 1980. Interviews with John Lennon appeared in the December issues of "Playboy" and "Rolling Stone". In neither of these interviews does John Lennon attribute any bit of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" to Paul McCartney. In 1965, on the other hand, the Beatles were still pretending that the attribution "Lennon-McCartney" necessarily implied a collaboration.) I can't help suspecting that in this case "research"--in contradistinction to believing your own eyes and ears--meant letting your book be edited by Paul McCartney's propensity for dissimulation and enormous ego.