SONG BY SONG
TRACK FOUR
- WRITTEN BY: McCartney
- LEAD VOCAL: McCartney
Paul McCartney had an easy com-
mute to work every day. Abbey Road
Studios were just a few blocks from his
home in St. John’s Wood, making it a
breeze to pop into the studio before his
bandmates arrived. He did just that for
five days straight in order to practice
his vocal for this homage to Little Rich-
ard, Fats Domino and 1950s rhythm-
and-blues belters he and the other
Beatles worshipped in their shared
musical youth. To prepare, McCartney
practiced the vocals over and over.
“I wanted it to sound as though I’d
been performing it onstage all week,”
he said in 1995’s documentary The
Beatles Anthology. He got the desired
wrung-out effect. His “hoarse fulsome
shout,” wrote Jonathan Gould in his
2007 book Can’t Buy Me Love, “simul-
taneously summons and sends up the
melodramatic emotionality of 1950s
doo-wop and R&B.”
TRACK THREE
- WRITTEN BY: McCartney
- LEAD VOCAL: McCartney
A peppy and darkly humorous tune like
those that might have been heard in the
Liverpool music halls of his parents’ day,
McCartney’s giddy ditty tells a grisly
tale with a grin. The title’s (fictitious)
homicidal med student Maxwell Edison
clobbers first his girlfriend, then his
teacher and finally the judge who finds
him guilty. And in the chorus —“Bang!
Bang! Maxwell’s silver hammer came
down upon his head” —Ringo Starr duti-
fully clobbers a blacksmith’s anvil with
a hammer. (In the Let It Be film, Beatles
roadie Mal Evans is seen doing the anvil
hammering in an earlier take of the
song.) If the repeated banging would
annoy some listeners, it was nothing
compared to Paul’s bandmates, who
termed the song “for grannies” (Len-
non, who did not appear on the track ),
“fruity” (Harrison) and “the worst
track we ever had to record” (Starr).
Not even Steve Martin, who gamely
played Maxwell in the 1978 film musical
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
(above), won the song much respect.
But there may have been metaphor in
McCartney’s madcap tune. The song,
he told biographer Barry Miles in 1997,
“was my analogy for when something
goes wrong out of the blue.” The of-
fenses of this clunker, however, appear
to have been premeditated.
‘BANG! BANG!’
Steve Martin’s turn
as Dr. Maxwell
Edison was
a high point in the
1978 Bee Gees
film vehicle Sgt.
Pepper’s Lonely
Hearts Club Band.
‘I’LL NEVER MAKE IT ALONE’
With a thrashing vocal, “Oh! Darling”
is a song that the still-touring
McCartney keeps off set lists.
