Silver Hammer Man

No song on the Beatles' Abbey Road LP has sparked more controversy and debate than "Maxwell's Silver Hammer."  And few Beatles songs have aroused so much partisan feeling - as Mark Lewisohn wrote, you either love it or you hate it. It was a McCartney song his bandmates grew to hate, mainly because Paul treated "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" like a grand statement, even though the others saw it as just an absurd song.

Paul in fact was inspired to write the song by absurdist literature, specifically French playwright Alfred Jarry, whose avant-garde work introduced the concept of what Jarry called "pataphysics," which Wikipedia defines as "a branch of philosophy or science that examines imaginary phenomena that exist in a world beyond metaphysics; it is the science of imaginary solutions."

In that spirit, Paul conceived the idea of a homicidal medical student who represents a phenomenon that comes out of nowhere, wrecking havoc on an ordered world.  Maxwell Edison disrupts everything by murdering his girlfriend (who studies pataphysics), his teacher, and a judge planning to send him to jail.  As Paul explains, the song was "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. I wanted something symbolic of that, so to me it was some fictitious character called Maxwell with a silver hammer. I don't know why it was silver, it just sounded better than Maxwell's hammer."

The music of "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" is a romp of sprightly piano and guitar accompanied by Paul's droll vocals delivering verses that set up life as we prefer it to be, where everything goes smoothly, but the refrains are heavier with the sound of Maxwell's silver hammer coming down and coming down hard and upsetting everything, with the occasional sound of a new instrument - the Moog synthesizer, underscoring the music throughout, providing a sense of dread, with one over-the-top Moog riff at the end of the first chorus that lets the listener know that nothing is right at all.  It's among the most English of Beatles songs, with its catchy music-hall trappings and its inherent irony.   It's also funny as hell, with the refrain the musical equivalent of the sixteen-ton weight that would interrupt many a sketch from the British comedy troupe that would make their debut soon after Abbey Road's release - Monty Python's Flying Circus.

In a perverse way, "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" was rather cute - too cute for John Lennon, who didn't play on the song and called it a tune "for the grannies to dig."  George Harrison concurred.  "Sometimes Paul would make us do these really fruity songs," he said in a 1977 interview.  "I mean, my God, 'Maxwell's Silver Hammer' was so fruity."  And Ringo Starr?  "The worst session ever was 'Maxwell's Silver Hammer,'" Ringo, who clanged the hammer on the record, recalled years later. "It was the worst track we ever had to record . . .. I thought it was mad."

Paul's perfection, indeed, may have been what drove the other Beatles to madness, as he led George and Ringo through sixteen takes of the rhythm track, followed by numerous overdubs.  It took three days to record, as Paul kept hearing refinements in his head that George and Ringo couldn't.

Ironically, time constraints had prevented the song from being included on the White Album.  It was later rehearsed during the Twickenham sessions (as seen in the Let It Be film), where Paul admitted to its cuteness, calling it "the corny one," before it was finally recorded properly.

"They got annoyed because 'Maxwell's Silver Hammer' took three days to record," Paul later said.  "Big deal."

Paul seemed to make it a big deal, specifically with those trisyllabic rhymes.  And he did have big plans for "Maxwell's Silver Hammer." As John later said, "He did everything to make it into a single, and it never was and it never could have been."

"Maxwell's Silver Hammer," though, is still a masterful depiction of the absurd, a point brought to the fore on the occasion of the three papal deaths that have occurred in the past fifty years.  When the pope dies, attendants perform a bizarre ritual in which they strike the deceased pope on the head thrice with a hammer, calling out his birth name with each strike.

And just as a hammer certifies the pope's death, a hammer - present throughout the song - comes down loud and clear to give "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" a definitive ending.