They call me MISTER Epstein!

Glyn Johns is hanging around, angling to squeeze out George Martin, who’s still around, futilely trying to fill the “daddy” role they lost when Mr. Epstein died.

You need the George Martins and Mr. Epsteins and “daddy figures” to make the trains run on time.

After Mr. Epstein, George Martin was the closest thing to a daddy figure whom they all still respected. And his patience dealing with his impulsive charges is pretty amazing.

Whether it was Paul, Allen Klein, the ghost of Mr. Epstein, or someone, there needed to be someone to realize their plans (“let’s film a concert for a TV special”) with more thought and care than the totally ad hoc joke of a situation we see here, where they show up at an empty Twickenham film studio with two amps and a shipping pallet for the drum kit to stand on and are expected to make an album and get ready for their concert with no firm venue to play it in.

You could make the same argument about Help!, made while Mr. Epstein was still forcing them to do things John probably didn’t want to do. Wretched movie, but glad we got the soundtrack album.

Again, when people talk about their insane productivity from 1963-69, it simply doesn’t happen without Paul there to crack the whip from 1967 onwards after Mr. Epstein passed away.

What they needed to do, in my opinion, was sit down and have a serious band meeting and decide what they wanted to do once and for all. Or to appoint an outside party besides Paul to assume the role of Mr. Epstein and break the ties and say “OK, this is what we’re going to do in 1969.”

But, yeah, they never found a replacement for Mr. Epstein to help them sort out their problems.

Kind of amazing that they hadn’t bought or built an office building/studio/rehearsal space in London earlier than they did, say by 1966/67 at the latest, but that’s yet another idea that a competent manager should have had for them, and Mr. Epstein was already in his own self-destructive spiral by then.