Timekeepers

by Simon Garfield

  Mark Katz, a leading historian of recorded sound, has noted that listening to music at home before the LP was a distinct nuisance.16 He quotes the blues singer Son House from the 1920s, who bemoaned ‘gettin’ up, settin’ it back, turnin’ it around, crankin’ the crank, primin’ it up and lettin’ the horn down’. Bad enough for blues and jazz, fairly catastrophic for classical, for which a recording of a symphony was split into 20 sides on 10 discs (which is how the ‘album’ got its name – a collection of 78s in a folder).

  One got used to it, of course, and in the early days recorded sound must have seemed like a miracle. But creatively it was more than a nuisance; it was a hindrance. An opera or a concerto was no longer split up into the acts or movements intended by the composer, but into false movements created by the limitations of a four-minute wax cylinder or disc. Music would suddenly stop, and the only way it would continue was when someone got up from the armchair. What was the effect of this? Shorter recordings, or more recordings of shorter pieces. Mark Katz has noted that while concerts in the early half of the twentieth century contained the usual array of symphonies and operas, ‘any survey of record catalogues . . . will reveal the dominance of character pieces, arias, marches and brief popular song and dance numbers . . . It was not long before the time limitation affected not only what musicians recorded but also what they performed in public.’ Audiences increasingly wanted the short pieces they knew from their records.17 The length of the three-minute pop song was cemented, if not created, by the ability to record little more, but it is more surprising that this practice existed both before and beyond pop.

  When Igor Stravinsky composed his Serenade for Piano in 1925, there was a specific reason why the piece only lasted 12 minutes and appeared in four almost equal segments. ‘In America I had arranged with a gramophone firm [Brunswick] to make records of some of my music,’ Stravinsky explained. ‘This suggested the idea that I should compose something whose length should be determined by the capacity of the record.’ Hence four movements of under three minutes, each of which fit snugly on one side of a 10-inch, 78 rpm disc.18 Composers were also willing to cut their own work to fit the limitations of a record. In 1916, Edward Elgar reduced the score of his Violin Concerto to fit four 78s; an uncut performance would easily last more than twice that length.

  The performance offered by musicians may also change from a concert recital to a recorded version. The visual texture of a live performance may have to be somehow recreated in the listener’s mind by the introduction of vibrato and other resonances. The conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt believes that ‘if you don’t see the musicians . . . you have to add something which makes the process of music making somehow visible in the imagination of the listener.’ The timing may also change, not least the gaps between movements or other dramatic pauses. A silent musician in a concert hall may provide drama to proceedings by wiping a bow or brow, or damping percussion; on CD this would be dead air. In becoming tighter, a performance may become less broad, and the rhetorical effect reduced.

  When the Beatles returned to Studio 2 after lunch they recorded ‘A Taste of Honey’, ‘Do You Want to Know a Secret’ and ‘Misery’. Then there was another break for supper, and in a marathon evening session between 6.30 and 10.45 p.m., for which they would have been paid overtime, they recorded ‘Hold Me Tight’, ‘Anna (Go To Him)’, ‘Boys’, ‘Chains’, ‘Baby It’s You’ and ‘Twist and Shout’, most of them in one or two takes.

  ‘It’s amazing really how creative we could be in those circumstances,’ George Martin said in 2011, reminiscing with Paul McCartney about their time in the studio. McCartney replied, ‘I say to people now, “10.30 a.m. to 1.30 p.m., two songs”. And you would just remind us about halfway through the three-hour period, “Well, it’s just about enough on that one, chaps, let’s wrap it up.” And so you learnt to be brilliant, he said modestly, in one-and-a-half hours.’

  ‘But I was under pressure because I got so little time with you,’ Martin remembered. ‘You were running all over the world, and I would say to Brian [Epstein], “I need more time in the studio.” And he said, “Well, I can give you Friday afternoon, or Saturday evening,” and he would dole out time to me like giving scraps to a mouse.’19

  Nothing was wasted. Every song recorded on 11 February 1963 was used on the album, which was called Please Please Me. To the 10 new tracks were added 4 songs already recorded as A- and B-sides for two singles (‘Love Me Do’/‘P.S. I Love You’ and ‘Please Please Me’/‘Ask Me Why’).20

  And then Monday, 11 February 1963 was over. The first LP from what would become the biggest and greatest and most influential band in the world was ready for remixing and then a release 39 days later. In a few years, the recording of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ would require more than two dozen takes over five weeks. But the entire first album, excluding the singles, had taken just one day.

  Mark Lewisohn, on the other hand, is taking rather longer to tell the story of that album and all the others in the Beatles’ phenomenal seven-year recording history (only seven years – one has to pinch oneself every time one thinks of that). Lewisohn is the author of All These Years, a forensic and compelling account of the Beatles and their world. It may turn out to be a 30-year project. It was planned as a three-volume endeavour ending in 1970, but the author is now considering a fourth to accommodate solo projects and the aftermath.

  ‘It was a stab in the dark,’ he says. ‘When I began in 2004 it was originally going to be a 12-year project, but . . . insanely bad judgement on that score.’ The publication dates of the three volumes were once planned as 2008, 2012 and 2016. ‘So this year ought to be seeing the conclusion of the series.’ The revised timeline now suggests volume two in 2020 and volume three in 2028. ‘And if I do a fourth one it will be into 2030-something.’ When we met in 2016, Lewisohn was 57; a fourth title will take him well into his 70s. ‘The usual parallel that Americans make is the series of books by Robert Caro on Lyndon B. Johnson,’ he says. ‘He still has one to do and he’s 80-something, so he has a battle against time.’21

  Lewisohn works from home in Berkhamsted, an ancient market town in Hertfordshire. When he sits at his desk he almost disappears among the books, music papers, tapes, boxes, filing cabinets and the rest of the gear, by far the greatest amassment of Beatles documents in private hands, so that a visitor has only one spot of four square inches to rest a cup of tea. Lewisohn’s laptop is perched on a stand so as to free more space beneath it. And then there is the noise in his mind. ‘It’s like plate-spinning at the circus,’ he says of the parallel timelines. In Volume One, ‘there are simultaneous events happening in London, Liverpool and Hamburg, but in Volumes Two and Three the number of plates will multiply. While I’m off telling the Beatles’ impact in Indonesia or New Zealand or Argentina, I could lose the readers with what’s going on in London or Liverpool or anywhere else. I know that I’m stacking problems for myself all down the line in terms of weight of material and how to assimilate it all.’

  I had come to talk to Lewisohn about Ringo’s drumming, and how, over the years, he has been so maligned (to the point where Morecambe and Wise referred to him as Bongo). Lewisohn was a great supporter. ‘He gave the Beatles what they always lacked,’ he told me. ‘There’s no bad or even adequate drumming on any Beatles record. His fills were constantly imaginative and original. In terms of timekeeping he was a human metronome.’

  But then I became more interested in Lewisohn’s own rhythms. A 30-year project is a daunting thing for a fellow writer to contemplate; how does he arrange his days to handle the task? ‘There’s not enough time in the day to cover it,’ he said. ‘I try to do a double day every day – getting up really early and finishing as late as possible. I have lunch at the desk, and I have very few distractions.’

  Of course, such considerations are apt. So much of the project is concerned with timing, and with the characters in the story aligning just so. So many events, Lewisohn writes in the first volume, ‘have
slotted perfectly into the puzzle’ or are ‘nothing less than a miracle of timing’. The occasion the Beatles met Little Richard was imbued with ‘God-given timing’. When Brian Epstein sees the Beatles for the first time at the Cavern Club on Thursday, 9 November 1961 ‘right on cue . . . the tracks that had been running in parallel for so long finally converged’. Perhaps all histories find synchronicity and temporal coincidence in things that weren’t that exceptional, or in things that would have happened anyway, sooner or later. But as Lewisohn attests in his introduction, ‘throughout this history, the timing of everything is always perfect’.

  _______________

  1 The principal source seems to have been Joseph Böhm again. ‘Beethoven was so excited that he saw nothing that was going on about him, he paid no heed whatever to the bursts of applause, which his deafness prevented him from hearing in any case. He had always to be told when it was time to acknowledge the applause, which he did in the most ungracious manner imaginable.’ Translated in H.C. Robbins Landon, Beethoven: A Documentary Study (London, 1970). See also: R.H. Schauffler, Beethoven: The Man Who Freed Music (New York, 1929); George R. Marek, Beethoven: Biography of a Genius (London, 1970); Barry Cooper, Beethoven (Oxford, 2000); Thomas Forrest Kelly, First Nights (Yale, 2000).

  2 Schindler wrote this in one of Beethoven’s 400 Conversation Books, the verbal scrapbooks used by his visitors to communicate with the composer once his deafness took hold.

  3 There are echoes. From the beginning of the twentieth century, music has splintered into so many genres that often it is only attitude and tempo that defines them. Jazz found myriad ways of defining the undefinable: bebop always meant fast; cool jazz was predominantly airier. From ballad to speed metal, the definitions extend to pop and dance music too. The modern club dance scene may be entirely delineated by its bpm, with house set somewhere between 120–130 and trance at 130–150. You’ll find breakbeat somewhere between them. And speedcore only gets serious at 180.

  4 There is some suggestion in his correspondence that he still regarded the use of allegro, andante and the rest as a useful indicator of character, if not of tempo.

  5 Another note from Beethoven, however, suggests that the composer was well aware of the old-style metronome a few years before the Winkel/Mälzel improvements. He was certainly aware of the obvious connection between the old pendulum metronome and the clock, and may have acknowledged the link in his Eighth Symphony. Although listeners argue about his intentions, the brief second movement has the staccato tick-tock rhythms of a clock, and is believed by some to be the composer’s tribute to the metronome. It is also possible that this passage was inspired by the second movement of Haydn’s Symphony No. 101 (‘The Clock’).

  6 The word metronome (metronom in German) derived from the Greek metron and Latin metrum, ‘to measure’. Metre (length) and metre (poetic) ditto.

  7 A century later, and a century apart in musical composition, Arnold Schoenberg would agree with Beethoven’s creative wish for control over timing. Writing in 1926, he asked, ‘Doesn’t the author have at least the right to indicate, in the copies of the work he himself publishes, how he imagines his ideas should be realized?’

  8 Musical Quarterly, Spring 1993.

  9 The app, published by Touchpress and Deutsche Grammophon in 2013, is a rather magnificent thing, enabling the listener to follow and contrast each performance either from the 1824 score or any of the orchestras’ instruments. The accompanying notes and interviews are also fascinating.

  10 The concert hall has been demolished, and in its place stands the Hotel Sacher, home of the famous torte.

  11 The cassette had been launched by Philips in 1962, and had been a huge hit for a new generation of pop fans and car drivers, but was let down by its poor fidelity and its overwhelming desire to unspool; the record industry loved the cassette for a while (until it was used to record music from the radio, when it started to love it less). The video disc, also known as the laserdisc, had also been partially developed by Philips, but had proved popular only with the Bang & Olufsen crowd and boffin cineastes – early adopters without any later adopters.

  12 Much of the video format war focused on a videocassette’s duration. If Sony’s Betamax lasted an hour, but JVC’s VHS lasted two or four, then anyone interested in sport or movies had an easy decision. There was another incompatible competitor in the shape of Video 2000 (Philips and Grundig both lost their shirt on that one), and, for a short while at least, a system from Panasonic called VX. This offered an early and primitive programmable timing device: the box itself was called the Great Time Machine.

  13 Between August 1982 (when the first CDs and players reached the market) and the beginning of 2008, global CD sales were estimated at 200 billion. The product spawned the CD-Rom and became a key method of computer storage. The recordable CD followed, and then the DVD and Blu-ray on the same platform.

  14 As with the rest of the tracks on the album, the song was originally credited to ‘McCartney–Lennon’.

  15 If you’re Ray Charles with ‘What’d I Say’ (1959, 6 minutes 30 seconds) or Bob Dylan with ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ (1965, 6:13) or Don McLean with ‘American Pie’ (1971, 8:42) you just carry on over and put part two on the B-side. The most notable exception to the trend was the Beatles’ ‘Hey Jude’, remarkable because in 1968 the sophistication of mastering techniques and pressing plants enabled a song lasting 7:11 to appear on one side. The B-side, neatly, was ‘Revolution’.

  16 Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (University of California Press, 2004)

  17 The relationship between familiarity and popularity is captured nowhere better than at the live pop concert. Whereas once a debut performance of a new piece was judged an occasion for excitement and privilege – the first performance of Beethoven’s Ninth, say – it is now judged an occasion to go to the bar. The story is told of how Neil Young, during one of his more recalcitrant phases (i.e. anytime in the last four decades), announced to an audience that the first half of his concert would be new material, and the second half would be songs they already knew. He played the new material, and then in the second half, with the new material no longer new, he played it again.

  18 Many composers and musicians distrusted the LP for this and other reasons. They log mistakes for posterity; they remove surprise excitement. Béla Bartók noted how even a composer’s own recordings immediately restrict the ‘perpetual variability’ of their music, while Aaron Copland wrote that ‘the unpredictable element, so essential in keeping music truly alive . . . dies with the second playing of a record’.

  Most famously, John Cage loathed the LP beyond compare. It was a dead thing, he believed, and once told an interviewer that they could ‘destroy one’s need for real music . . . [Records] make people think that they’re engaging in a musical activity when they’re actually not.’ In 1950, just two years after the LP was launched, Cage wrote to Pierre Boulez (himself no slouch in his promotion of the unorthodox) only half-joking that he was about to establish ‘a society called Capitalists Inc (so that we will not be accused of being Communists); everyone who wants to join has to show he has destroyed not less than 100 discs of music or one sound recording device; also everyone who joins automatically becomes President.’ (For more on Cage and his relationship with sound recording see Records Ruin the Landscape by David Grubbs, Duke University Press, 2014).

  19 From ‘Produced by George Martin’, BBC Arena, 2011.

  20 They also recorded ‘Hold Me Tight’, which was left off the album. When George Martin first heard the band play the song ‘Please Please Me’ at Abbey Road he judged it far too slow, more like a plaintive Roy Orbison song than an exciting Merseybeat racket. The tempo was wrong. He asked them to rethink it: ‘It badly needed pepping up,’ Martin said later. ‘Actually, we were a bit embarrassed that he had found a better tempo than we had,’ McCartney conceded. The pepping seemed to work: it became their first number one.

  21 The Years of Lyndon
Johnson will encompass five volumes; by 2015 Caro had published four of them, the first one appearing in 1982. We will meet LBJ again in the following chapter.

  Silent at last: Jean Thurmond greets her husband after he finally stops talking.

  Chapter Five

  How Much Talking Is Too Much Talking?

  i) In the Time of Moses

  Last year, on my fifty-fifth birthday, I received an email from a woman called Connie Diletti with an enticing offer. Diletti was the producer of an annual conference in Toronto called IdeaCity, a gathering of 50 speakers talking about big issues such as climate change, food science, and the possibility of Canada merging with the United States, and she wanted me to be a part of it. This year there was going to be a section about love and sex, and she asked whether I would talk about love letters (I had written a book about letter-writing, and my best examples were all about love in one way or another). I had never been to IdeaCity or Toronto before, and I had always wanted to see Niagara Falls nearby, and so I expressed genuine interest in attending. I emailed back, asking what the deal was: how many hotel nights would IdeaCity pay for? What was the story with the flights?

  Connie Diletti’s reply had all the sweeteners. In exchange for a 17-minute talk I was offered airfare, a five-star hotel, an HD video of my talk hosted on the IdeaCity site for ever, organised parties every night, and ‘a special speakers’ brunch on Saturday at Moses’s home’.

  There was more, but these were the salient points. The most salient of all was the fact that I was only required to speak for 17 minutes. Not my usual 45 with questions, and not the more rounded 15 minutes or even 20 minutes. Why 17, I wondered. Was this magical number arrived at after years of careful analysis? (IdeaCity was in its 16th year, a mere upstart compared to the 25 years of TED conferences, with which it bears comparison, but certainly old enough to have garnered a clear idea of when the audience tended to fall asleep.) Or was the 17-minute slot mine alone, with other speakers given what may simply have been equally random durations? Would Lord Lawson, another participant, be given only 12 minutes with which to deny global warming, his current specialty? Would Dr Amy Lehman be granted 28 minutes to talk about the abuse of malaria nets by the banks of Lake Tanganyika? Would the best speakers with the sharpest patter and the funniest slides – there was a university man due to talk about the science of icebergs – make their sessions just fly by, while others, speaking for the same time on ‘the myths of garlic’ or the ‘rap guide to religion’ seem interminable? And who was Moses?