I quite like "The long and winding road". My little brother used to call it "The long and" when he was 7. He thought 'what a silly name for a song, "The long and" '. I never did tell him what it was called.
Truth be told, all four Beatles could rock hard and did. But they were also very versatile and alone amongst just about every band that came out of the British isles in the 60s, weren't blues based or particularly influenced by it. That set them apart. The three main writing Beatles wrote very tender songs at times. While Lennon was caustically berating McCartney for his "granny" music, he was writing lovely tender songs like "Dear Prudence", "Julia" and "Goodnight". The latter is thought of as being so unLennonlike, that in one book on the band's music the writer speaks of it as a McCartney ballad !
Yeah, Macca could rock, man. "I saw her standing there", "I'm down", "Sergeant Pepper's lonely hearts club band", "Helter skelter", "Why don't we do it in the road ?", "Back in the USSR", "The end"........it's quite a list, if one could be bothered to go looking.
The moral here is: producers are not always the big bad wolf out to "change" the band or their sound......
I don't believe this of producers in general though some like this have obviously existed. I think producers do a good job by and large otherwise they wouldn't be in such demand from established acts.
But that doesn't mean a producer is
de rigeur or a must have item. I don't agree for a moment that just because an act doesn't want a producer, that's some kind of hard fried evidence that they're insecure and need one. In any endeavour, there are going to be those that benefit from outside help and those that simply don't need it. Or don't require it.
Acts didn't take to producing themselves for nothing.
