Why Ringo Starr Said This Beatles Song Was “The Worst Track We Ever Had To Record”

Every artist has songs they can’t stand, and for The Beatles, that song was “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”. Recorded at a time when the band was already struggling, the song appears on The Beatles’ Abbey Road album. It was a bit of a pain to make, according to drummer Ringo Starr.

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Starr told Rolling Stone, “It was the worst track we ever had to record. It went on for f***ing weeks. I thought it was mad.”

The year was 1969, and Lennon had been in a car crash with his wife, Yoko Ono, weeks prior. She accompanied Lennon to the studio for some of the recording, which probably didn’t help matters. McCartney, who wrote the song, also kept having new ideas throughout recording, which annoyed Beatles like George Harrison.

Harrison even admitted, “After a while we did a good job on it, but when Paul got an idea or an arrangement in his head ….”

Other Beatles expressed a similar sentiment. Lennon said he “hated it,” and that the track was done “a hundred million times.”

It took The Beatles four lengthy sessions to complete “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”.

The Story Behind the Song

Even though the recording of “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” was incredibly difficult, it’s ironic once you learn the song’s meaning. When Paul McCartney set out to write “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”, he had become interested in the works of Alfred Jarry. After hearing his play “Ubu Cocu,” McCartney was inspired. He wanted to write a song about a character (Maxwell) who also lives in Jerry’s fictitious universe.

“I don’t know, to me, the silver hammer is like a medical thing, it’s a little bit ominous,” McCartney shares in his podcast A Life In Lyrics. Apparently, Maxwell was a medical student, and his silver hammer is kind of like a reflex hammer. You know, the kind the doctor uses to check your knees. However, this hammer works a little differently. Maxwell’s hammer comes up from behind and greets its victims (Joan, the teacher, and the judge) with an unhappy fate.

In Barry Miles’ biography Many Years From Now, McCartney explains that the song is “my analogy for when something goes wrong out of the blue, as it so often does, as I was beginning to find out at that time in my life.” He continued, “I wanted something symbolic of that, so to me it was some fictitious character called Maxwell with a silver hammer.”

Considering the song is supposed to be about things going wrong, it’s kind of fitting that Ringo found it the most difficult to record.

Photo by: Daily Herald Archive/National Science & Media Museum/SSPL via Getty Images