#17 Stories from the Edge of Music: George Martin
The Beatle builder, Robert Nighthawk & more
Well, hello 2024! What’s it going to be like this year — hard and cruel and full of death and bigotry? Or will sanity, kindness and love prevail? We’ll see; keep your fingers crossed. Meanwhile, we all need music, and you’re in the right place here.
“Here” is the (usually) weekly Substack, and is the work of Richard Flohil, a 60-year music business veteran who can’t sing, play an instrument, or even dance. But he can tell stories.
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MEET GEORGE MARTIN, THE MAN WHO HELPED BUILD THE BEATLES
George Martin, of course, is famous as the man who produced the Beatles and changed the world of popular music forever.
I first came across him in 1954 when he was recording a live concert by British jazz trumpet player Humphrey Lyttelton. The resulting record, Humph at the Conway Hall, is still in my record collection, battered and scratched after almost 70 years off and on my turntable.
At the concert, Martin stood next to me (I had an aisle seat) holding a microphone high above his head, to get the crowd noise as we lustily sang the hook phrase of a tune called “The Onions.”
In Toronto, more than 40 years later, he still remembered that night.
Now, of course, he was Sir George Martin, although the moment we met he insisted I call him by his first name; as we went through the rounds of interviews, I realized that he was a terrific storyteller. His illustrious career, of course, includes many, many more artists than the Beatles.
Martin made his first impact producing comedy albums by Peter Sellers, Flanders and Swann, Peter Ustinov, and Dudley Moore, among others. He went on to produce solo records for ex-Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, as well as a catalogue’s worth of stars from Jeff Beck to Celine Dion and from Kenny Rogers to Stan Getz.
His stories —usually involving aspects of his work with the Beatles — had been told many, many times, but he made them sound fresh, and every single interviewer felt that they had met a memorable character, a truly humble and self-effacing celebrity.
As the publicist who arranged more than half a dozen media appearances for him on behalf of Canadian Music Week, for which he was the keynote speaker, I have to add that at least half of the interviewers got back to me afterwards to thank me for including them on the media schedule.
He also demonstrated a lesson that every celebrity instinctively learns. As we swiftly crossed the lobby of the luxurious hotel at which the Canadian Music Week convention was being held, a young fan came dashing over, asking for an autograph.
Martin did not look up or slacken his pace, “Keep walking,” he said, “follow me…” As we turned a corner to the elevators, he paused, signed an autograph for the fan, and then said: “Sorry, but if I’d stopped back there, we would have been surrounded by 50 people in seconds.
“The knack, for anybody who’s well-known, is to keep walking, don’t stop, and never, ever, make eye contact…”
In the elevator, he was convulsing him with laughter when I repeated a line the Scottish comedian Billy Connolly had told me: “I hate fuckin’ signin’ autographs, but it’s easier to sign ’em than explain why you won’t.”
George Martin: A few postscripts:
For those who want to know more about Sir George, who died at 90 in 2016, may I recommend the exhaustive profile on Wikipedia.
Meanwhile, a couple of Peter Sellers videos of Beatles’ material originally produced by Martin. I bet John Lennon laughed his ass off…
And all you can say about this one is HELP!
REALLY THE BLUES: THE STORY BEHIND A BLUES LEGEND’S LAST RECORDINGS
Robert Nighthawk was another country blues artist with a memorable name who came out of Mississippi and wound up in Chicago — and, eventually, in Toronto.
I had originally heard him on Chicago’s Maxwell Street, a rough and tumble part of the South Side ghetto that featured an ad hoc open air market, some obvious brothels, and crowds buying everything from old records to cooking utensils.
Busking bluesmen, plugged into outlets in nearby houses, provided the musical background. When my friend Beverley Harris suggested we bring Nighthawk to Toronto, I agreed. He was, after all, the real thing; he’d played with the Memphis Jug Band, calling himself Robert Lee McCoy, although his real name was Robert Lee McCollum.
He’d moved north, recorded for the Bluebird label, and in 1965 was trying to revive his career in Chicago, without much success. He arrived in Toronto in a battered car with his band, drummer Jimmy Collins and rhythm guitarist Bob Woodfork.
After the show in a now-vanished venue, the First Floor Club, Beverley booked a small studio and the trio recorded for a couple of hours. Nighthawk played classic songs from his repertoire, but they sounded true and fresh.
Beverley paid the studio and kept the reel-to-reel tapes in their cardboard boxes for 30 years — and presented them to me, in a plastic shopping bag, at a party to mark my 75th birthday. In turn, I passed them on to my friend Holger Petersen at Stony Plain Records.
After audio expert Peter Moore (who won a Grammy for restoring the famous Bob Dylan/The Band “basement sessions”) had untangled, baked and restored the two-track tapes, there were five useable songs. Alas, all of them were tunes that Nighthawk had recorded more than once in the past.
They were Nighthawk’s final recordings, but there were not enough tracks for a full album, and the music — made late at night in a tiny studio in 1965 — remained unissued. Finally, Holger included them on the 30th and 35 th Stony Plain collections in 2008 and 2011. Both those collections are hard to find today, so Nighthawk’s music remains as elusive as ever.
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QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“We are lonesome animals. We spend our lives trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell stories.” — John Steinbeck (via songwriter Mary Gauthier).
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NEXT WEEK: LEON REDBONE, MUSIC’S MYSTERY MAN
There’s never been an artist quite like Leon Redbone. The New York Times called him a “throwback singer,” a too-slick description of one of the very few artists who made old music new again. Can’t wait to tell you his story…
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THAT’S IT, UNLESS YOU’RE A PAID SUBSCRIBER…
That’s a wrap, unless you count the stuff reserved for the PAID subscribers to Stories from the Edge of Music. More stories there, but not necessarily relating to music. Hopefully, you’ll be entertained if you‘re a paid subscriber, but if you‘re not you can upgrade to paid and help top up this writer’s old age pension/social security!
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