Have the Beatles ever made a bad song?
Some songs were mediocre at worst, then there were the good ones and great ones.
John Lennon had always been highly critical of micromanaging producers, and many "bare" tracks of Beatles songs which were what the four guys from Liverpool did before the big production team came into to clean things up were better, imho.
Of course, the heavy production did work very well on Sgt. Peppers, but less so on later albums. What Martin and Spector didn't realize at times was that the Beatles were also a rock band, too.
If you can, find a "bootleg" of
Yesterday without the orchestration, or
While my guitar gently weeps without the overproduction. I also like the very bare, McCartney and keyboard only
Long and winding road, a true masterpiece which would later be used as a format for many an Elton John, Carole King, and Billy Joel song when such great artists wanted to get that haunting minimalistic approach.
When I was first introduced to Beatles "bootlegs", which John Lennon personally collected, I realized that the band that came out on vinyl was half the band and half the record producer. I think the music industry had become so used to the successful model of having a Phil Spector type of guy run the whole show, that it had forgot that perhaps the artists themselves had something to add.
The early Beatles recordings have some astounding energy with some of rock and roll's best drumming behind Pete Best (who was in a lot of ways a precursor to Keith Moon and later John Bonham),but it didn't fit nicely into George Martin's idea of a band that was made to pay attention to the singers, and not the musicianship of the band as a whole.
And Lennon was not always happy that, while he could play a mean lead guitar, Martin pushed for Lennon to be more backup on guitar and up front on vocals. And pushing Harrison to lead guitar duties more often lessened his voice, which we all found out later to be genius in its own right.
The lessons learned from bands being creative to being controlled later led to many artists, once they had the pull, to self-produce and co-produce an album. The producer would later be a player in the band, not its dictator.
.....
Of course, sometimes a member of the band thinks they are the producer, financier, and promoter and their egos annoy everybody in a 500 mile vicinity, and the ones I can think of are Stanley-Simmons of Kiss, and Lars Ulrich of Metallica.
