by Glyn Johns
The stereo mix of this record is certainly one of the best sounding that I ever made, but the credit has to go to the band, as all I did was try to faithfully put down on tape what they were giving me, adding a little echo here and there to enhance the mood.
We were putting together The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus just as the album was finished. So I took my acetate to a production meeting and played it to Mick, suggesting that I felt that the band was going to be huge and therefore we should have them on the show as it would be an enormous coup. My suggestion fell on deaf ears, as Mick did not get it at all. A couple of months later I dragged George Harrison to Olympic on the way home from a Beatles session and played him the master tape with the same result, he didn’t get it either. I found this slightly disconcerting as I could not understand why they did not get what was so exciting to me. Prior to this I had always felt that we all shared pretty much the same taste in music. Jimmy and John Paul Jones were from the same era with the same influences and yet Mick and George openly disliked what they had done, seeing no value in it at all. In any event, they were perfectly entitled to their opinion, and fortunately a large portion of the record-buying population disagreed with them.
• • •
It was on these sessions that I stumbled across my technique for recording stereo drums. It was a complete accident. I usually use three or four mics on drums. One over the top, one on the floor tom-tom, one on the bass drum, and one on the snare, which I very rarely use. Because we were always limited to the number of tracks available back in those days, drums would always be recorded on one track, and depending on the session, sometimes with the bass mixed with them.
We had finished a basic track and had decided to overdub an acoustic guitar on it. I took one of the Neumann U67s that I had been using on the drums to use on the guitar, and having finished the overdub, I put it back on the drums in order to start the next basic track. When I lifted the faders to listen to the drums, I found that I had inadvertently left the mic assigned to the track I had been using for the overdub, which I had placed to the far left of the stereo. As the other drum mic was in the middle, it spread the sound to the left. So I wondered what would happen if I put them left and right, and made the small adjustment of pointing the floor tom-tom mic at the snare, making the two mics equidistant from it. The result sounded enormous, with the completely different perspective that stereo brings. It is completely unnatural to have the drums spread across the entire stereo picture, so I panned each track to half left and half right, ending up with the technique I have used ever since. There is no question that if I had not been working with John Bonham and the extraordinary sound he was giving me, I would not have spotted it. A prerequisite to this working is that you must have a drummer who gives you a good sound in the first place, as well as a pair of Neuman U67s or 47s, or Telefunken 251s.
There are all kinds of representations of this method on YouTube, claiming to be my version. None of these are really accurate. Contrary to popular belief, I have never used a tape measure. It is not that precise, it is just a matter of using common sense and believing it will work, making small adjustments depending on the kit, the balance the drummer is giving you, and what he is playing.
MY DRUM MIKE TECHNIQUE, AS USED WITH JEREMY STACEY ON THE BENMONT TENCH ALBUM YOU SHOULD BE SO LUCKY AT SUNSET SOUND STUDIOS IN LOS ANGELES.
The Beatles, 1969
In December of 1968, while sitting at home on a night off, I answered the telephone to a man with a Liverpudlian accent claiming to be Paul McCartney. I thought it was Mick Jagger trying to be amusing, so I told him to stop messing about and asked him what he wanted. The man persisted, and much to my shock and embarrassment, it really was Paul McCartney.
He told me that he had an idea for the band to write all new material and then record it live in front of an audience for a TV show and for release as an album. The venue was to be discussed, but it would be somewhere exotic. He then asked if I would be interested in making the record with them. I felt like I’d won the lottery. He told me that they were all to meet at a soundstage at Twickenham Film Studios on January 2nd, 1969, when they were to start rehearsals, and asked if I could be there.
BEATLES SETUP AT TWICKENHAM FILM STUDIOS. PAUL, GEORGE, RINGO, MAL EVANS, YOKO, JOHN, AND ME.
I turned up on the appointed day with enormous anticipation. After all, they were the biggest band in the world and were at the height of their career. I had worked with many successful artists but I have to say, this was quite different. I have always loved vocal harmony and had constantly been blown away by the extraordinary sound that the blend of John, Paul, and George achieved. Add to that their songwriting and their reinvention of recorded sound, and you can imagine how I felt as I walked through the enormous doors of the soundstage at Twickenham that morning.
Mal Evans, the band’s trusty road manager, was there to greet me with a huge smile as I arrived. He and his young assistant, Kevin, made me feel most welcome. The soundstage was huge, far bigger than was necessary for what we had to do. We set the band up with Ringo on a rostrum at one end facing down the room, with the other three sitting facing him. A small PA with three vocal mics was added, and we were ready to go.
They had enlisted the services of Michael Lindsay-Hogg, a charming and brilliant director, to shoot a documentary of the making of the TV show and album. He and I had just finished working together on The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus so we knew each other well and got on just great. Each of us taking comfort in the presence of the other, being the new boys on the block. There was a small film crew with two or three cameras and a sound guy with a couple of mics on booms to record the sound for the film.
The band showed up in dribs and drabs—Paul first, Ringo second, followed by George and then John and Yoko. They were reconvening, having not seen one another for a while, so the usual social repartee took place as we all slowly acclimatized and eventually got round to discussing in more detail what we were about to embark on. The only slightly strange thing to me was that instead of politely melting into the background as they started to work, Yoko remained sitting on the same chair as John, sometimes answering for him when he was addressed by one of the others. He seemed quite happy with this, so everyone realizing that this was to be the way of things, proceeded as best they could. I had never witnessed anything quite like it and felt very uncomfortable, so heaven knows how the others felt. It was almost like having a fifth member in the band all of a sudden.
After they had finally run through the first song a couple of times, Paul turned to me and asked what I thought they should do for an intro. I nearly fell over in shock. I thought I had been employed to just engineer and here I am in the first hour of rehearsals being asked for my input into the arrangement. I responded as quickly and confidently as I could and suggested a way of playing the intro, which they liked, and we were off. I was amazed at how quickly and easily I was accepted, each guy individually making an attempt to put me at ease and make me feel part of the team. It was only then that I realized that George Martin was not to be involved. I assumed that was because it was a live recording and did not require the normal studio production associated with their records. In the book Recording The Beatles, it is suggested that the reason I got the job was that I had a union card to enable me to work on a movie. Like so much of the info in that book regarding my involvement with the band, this is complete nonsense, as I have never belonged to any union other than the musicians’ and as I had nothing to do with the film sound it would not have been necessary anyway.
Whenever we took a break we would continue to discuss the how, where, and why of the show. Paul had the idea to take a cruise ship full of Beatles fans to an ancient open-air amphitheater somewhere in Tunisia and put the show on there. This did not go down terribly well with the others, particularly Ringo, whose main concern seemed to be what the food would be like.
On the second day,
things came to a head among the band. The entire crew left the room in great haste to allow them some privacy to sort out their differences.
I have often thought that being in a band can be likened to being in a marriage. Members spend their lives cooped up with one another for weeks on end, sharing some very strange and sometimes extremely boring times together, magnifying the differences between the personalities that are bound to exist between any group of humans, that have nothing to do with the creative mix that they share as a unit.
Equally, there invariably comes a time when one or another in a band becomes frustrated with the status quo and wants to take a different musical path and set sail on his own.
I have a very clear memory of sitting outside in the bleak surroundings of the soundstage at Twickenham on that cold gray afternoon with Denis, the line producer for the film, both of us praying that the elation of being employed for a project with the most successful artist in the world was not about to come to a grinding halt after only two days.
It is not my place to discuss any detail of what happened, but it is common knowledge that George left the band and was persuaded to return a couple of days later.
Once that was over and done with we carried on and it seemed that all was quickly forgotten. The only visible change was that although Yoko still came to the studio most days she no longer occupied John’s chair with him. This could well have been a coincidence as she did occupy herself in other ways. She would have a driver come to the studio every day with a folder containing any press clipping that mentioned her or the band, taken from publications all over the world. One such day a guy turned up with an envelope containing the photographs that Ethan Russell had taken at the Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus TV show. John brought them over to show me and Michael Lindsay-Hogg, as we had both worked on it, and suggested that Ethan be asked to join us as the stills photographer for the duration of the project. This was great news for me as this meant that I would have another pal on the team.
John had recently appeared in the Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus in a supergroup that was an unlikely combination of him, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, and Mitch Mitchell. It was unrehearsed, and the performance was just a bit of fun really.
I was in my booth, way up in the gods, recording the sound for the show, and the area on the set where they were playing was obscured from my view. All was going well until I heard this extraordinary noise that sounded like someone stepping on the cat. I panicked, thinking that a piece of equipment might be malfunctioning, while peering at the screen trying to see if it was adversely affecting the guys onstage. All of a sudden a picture appeared of a small figure with a black bag over its head with a mic cable disappearing into it. It turned out to be Yoko, who had decided to contribute to the proceedings. How anyone could have considered her intrusion to be in any way musical is a complete mystery to me.
After a few days, the dust having settled, The Beatles got back into a normal routine of rehearsing the songs they intended to use, but it became increasingly obvious that the question of a venue for the show was not going to be resolved easily. The enthusiasm for the whole idea of going abroad began to wane when Ringo announced that he was not at all happy with the idea. So when there was no argument from John and George, it was dropped.
This created something of a problem, as Paul’s original idea of a TV show had been discarded. At least there was still enthusiasm for the songs that were being rehearsed and for playing them live, but we had a half-made documentary with no end. So it was decided that we would move to Savile Row and film the band completing the process of rehearsing the songs and then get Michael to light the studio properly in order to shoot and record the band playing the songs in a live performance as if in a show.
The Beatles had commissioned a studio to be built in the basement of their office building in Savile Row and we were informed that it was ready for use. So one evening, after we had finished at Twickenham, I was taken by George Harrison to check it out.
The band had formed Apple Electronics in 1967, for the purpose of designing and building innovative consumer electronics. It was headed up by Yanni Alexis Mardas, whom Lennon had nicknamed Magic Alex and I knew as Alex the Greek. I had come across this guy before with the Stones on their 1967 tour of Europe. He turned up at a gig and sold Mick on the idea of building a light show for use on the tour, the likes of which had never been seen. Having been paid for the components, he reappeared a couple of weeks later with what could only be described as very basic disco lighting. Each guitar amp onstage had small lamps attached to it that would change color and intensity with the level and frequency of the sound it emitted. I came to the conclusion that at best he suffered from delusions and at worst he was a complete fraud. He sure could talk the talk, and a couple of years earlier had convinced The Beatles that he was an electronics genius. In fact, according to his ex-flatmate, Marianne Faithfull’s first husband and art gallery owner John Dunbar, he was nothing more than a TV repairman.
Brian Jones had met Alex shortly after he arrived in England from Greece in 1965 and introduced him to John Lennon who had been impressed with his “Nothing Box,” on display in Dunbar’s gallery, which turned out to be exactly that, a small box with random blinking lights that John would supposedly sit and stare at while under the influence of LSD. It was at John Dunbar’s gallery that he met Yoko, as she was also an exhibitor there.
Alex took me out to dinner in London a few weeks after the Stones tour had finished, to pitch me his ideas. Among many claims that he made to me that evening was that he reckoned he could build a domestic robot that would clean the house and answer the door, knowing who was friend or foe. He had convinced George that he could build the most innovative studio yet, claiming he could design and build a 72-track tape machine. At this point in time we were only up to eight tracks. The only product that I can recall to surface from Apple Electronics was a transistor radio that looked like an apple.
I turned up at Savile Row dreading what I was going to find there. Particularly as it was going to be down to me to make it work. My fears were not unfounded. It was apparent that Alex knew little or nothing about the recording process. The console looked like something out of a 1930s Buck Rogers science fiction movie. Above it on the wall were eight loudspeakers that were about the size and thickness of a large ham and cheese sandwich. I had previously hinted to George that I had little or no faith in Alex and was put very sharply in my place. So when I all but burst into laughter at what I was confronted with as I walked into the control room, he accused me of being biased, having made up my mind before even trying it out. In any event, it soon became obvious to all concerned, and much to George’s chagrin, that they had been ripped off and that the whole setup was as much of a joke as I had originally assumed it would be.
George Martin came to the rescue and arranged for us to borrow equipment from Abbey Road, which was delivered and installed by the wonderful Dave Harries, who among his many accomplishments went on in later years to manage Air Studios for George Martin and build British Grove Studios for Mark Knopfler, in my opinion currently the best studio in England.
We carried on in much the same manner as we had started. I set the band up in the round with a small PA and they continued to rehearse the songs, playing and singing live. The major difference being that we were in a much cozier atmosphere than the cavernous soundstage at Twickenham and I had a proper control room with really good equipment to record what they were doing. After a couple of days, Billy Preston swung by to say hi and was immediately told to sit down at the electric piano and join in. What a bonus that turned out to be. He was an old pal of the band from their days at the Star-Club in Hamburg and they were all really pleased to see him. Apart from his genius as a musician he was great to have around and definitely contributed to the ever-improving mood of the sessions.
During those days at Savile Row, I felt increasingly privileged to witness the f
our most famous musicians in the world hone the songs they had written into acceptable arrangements in their simplest form, without relying on the incredibly complex and innovative production process that they had become famous for with the making of Sgt. Pepper. Having proved that they were the masters of the “produced” record, they had reverted right back to the beginning and were performing live with no overdubbing or sonic effects to distract the listener or enhance the music. There was nothing to hide behind. So it crossed my mind that possibly it would be of interest to their fans to have the same insight I was experiencing. Having no real end in sight for the album, one evening after our session at Savile Row, I took it upon myself to take the multitrack recordings I had made during rehearsals to Olympic Studios to mix and edit what I thought could be an idea for the album. This was to show in an audio documentary what I had witnessed in the previous days, as a “fly on the wall” insight to the four of them interacting, having fun, jamming, taking the mickey, stopping and starting and creating some wonderful music, warts and all. I had five acetates cut the following morning and gave one each to the band, keeping one for myself, saying it was just an idea and asking them to take a listen. The next day I got a resounding NO from each of them, which I completely understood and had fully expected.
A couple of days later we were all having lunch on the third floor. Ringo and I were in conversation about the building and its attributes and he asked me if I had ever been up on the roof, saying it had a wonderful view of the West End of London. So he took me and Michael Lindsay-Hogg up there, showing us a large area of flat roof with wonderful views of the city stretching away to the southwest. I suggested that if they wanted to play to a large crowd, why not play on the roof to the whole of the West End. We went back downstairs and put it to the others, and after some discussion it was agreed. As the Savile Row police station was only a couple of hundred yards away we knew the concert would probably not last long, but the police stopping it would all be part of the fun.
