Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music - the Definitive Life
Page 36
To Lennon, the book cried out for a soundtrack. He set this road map to the mind with the ultimate garage-rock conceit: a single chord driven furiously from beneath by bass and drums, with only two shifting modal harmonies up top (the I chord alternating with b-VIII). Guitars entered only as backward solo. While McCartney branched out further and further into his harmonic progressions (“Here, There and Everywhere” sports a cunning double-key narrative, the template for “Penny Lane”), Lennon distilled his new song down to a single chord, which flickered against its minor dominant (or Mixolydian V), wavering between this reality and the next. As rhythm subsumed harmony, random noise emerged triumphant. It was as if garage rock had been pointing toward something all along, and “Tomorrow Never Knows” became its ultimate vector and leaping-off point.
On the first day, April 6, they put down the drum and bass in three takes and labeled the tape “Mark I.” The next morning, McCartney, enamored of Stockhausen and Varèse compositions he’d heard through Dunbar and Miles, came in with tape loops he’d made on his living room reel-to-reel, which gave the track’s opening moments an unearthly sweep. To get these effects, Martin had several Beatles and friends stand holding fingers, pencils, empty reels, and other objects to string through the long, quarter-inch tape loops so they cycled on top of one another simultaneously. “I held up my jam jar for a huge loop to run through, and I felt I was helping create the latest in cutting edge artistic fusion,” Barry Miles remembers.4 Like the defining Mellotron introduction to “Strawberry Fields Forever,” or the finely shaded vocal harmonies on “Don’t Let Me Down,” McCartney’s role on this Lennon track tends to go undernoticed.
Later that day they did five early takes of McCartney’s soul workout “Got to Get You into My Life.” The next day they perfected “Life” with three more takes and began to think about adding horns. The following week brought “Love You To” on Monday, April 11, and their next single popped out over three intense days: “Paperback Writer” and “Rain,” songwriting leaps that brought new technical verve to their studio technique. For months, McCartney and the other Beatles had been pestering Martin to deliver sturdier, more punchy bass sounds, the kind they were hearing on labels like Motown (with the indefatigable James Jamerson) and Stax (whose house band, Booker T. and the M.G.s, featured white-knuckler Donald “Duck” Dunn). These complaints arose again during rhythm tracks for “Paperback Writer” and led to an ingenious solution from engineer Ken Townsend.
Before graduating to headphones (or “cans”), the Beatles used unidirectional microphones and sang directly in front of a huge white playback speaker dubbed “the White Elephant.” This enormous, oversize wooden box pumped out lively sounds they reacted to while singing, the next best thing to fronting live instruments without having to play as they sang. The microphone placement prevented the instrumental playback from leaking into their vocal tracks; by pointing them directly at the singers, these particular microphones never picked up the “leak.” This setup gave much of the early Beatles singing animation and punch. The switch to “cans” can be heard on a lot of the more intimate singing and harmonizing that begins with Sgt. Pepper.
The White Elephant had personality. “It’s a big playback speaker,” Ken Townsend remembered, “and for playback in the studios it had incredible bass.” At this “Paperback Writer” session in April, Townsend struck on a weird notion. “You sat in the control room and you heard all the comments from George Martin and the Beatles, and you sort of put two-and-two together. . . . It wasn’t because I felt we needed more bass, it was because the artist thought we needed more bass,” he went on. Townsend wondered if that White Elephant might absorb as well as it projected.
Simply by plugging the speaker into a different jack (to send rather than receive an electronic signal), Townsend reversed the White Elephant’s capacity—the speaker became a microphone. Instead of using it to sing along to, McCartney performed his bass line as usual through his regular amp, placed in front of the White Elephant, which picked up his sound and fed it into the control board. (In place of a microphone picking up the vibrations from his bass amp, a speaker picked up vibrations from another speaker cabinet.) The results were magnificent. On the playback, everybody marveled at the newly rich and booming McCartney bass sound.
But Townsend, a modest gentleman, describes some of the other factors that played tricks on their ears while they were mixing Beatle records. Townsend had been assisting George Martin on Beatle sessions since the early days in 1962; he joined EMI in 1950, and ultimately rose through its ranks to become director: “The Altec loudspeakers that we used in the control room, later on [it was] discovered that these were bass light. So in actual fact . . . the bass response was actually there sometimes, but we couldn’t hear it! When we put better speakers in the control room with more bass, we no longer had to fight for bass and the records got better.”5 The settings on Capitol’s American equipment, which didn’t always correspond to the settings the EMI engineers had mastered Beatle recordings to, complicated this playback situation. For a long time, Capitol engineers thought Beatle recordings sounded terrible, and they added reverb to everything they pressed to help wash over what they perceived as imperfections from EMI’s shop. This added still another layer to the tensions between UK and U.S. perceptions of the Beatles’ sound.
Over the next two sessions the band laid down the five complete rhythm tracks and overdubs for “Rain,” widely regarded as McCartney’s bass breakthrough, not just his solo breaks but the soaring melodic lines he traced surfing Ringo’s terse, involuted drumming. As part of the Beatles’ ethic never to repeat themselves, even when they’d stumbled on an ingenious solution, the White Elephant speaker bass feed did not appear after the B side, “Rain”; each new track demanded its own unique solutions.
Shortly after Maureen Cleave’s Lennon profile appeared in Britain, Capitol contacted Brian Epstein about supplying another album cover, this time for the Yesterday and Today compilation, set for June. To maintain its annual three-album schedule, Capitol culled tracks from the British editions of Help! and Rubber Soul and snagged three numbers from their current sessions (“Dr. Robert,” “I’m Only Sleeping,” and “And Your Bird Can Sing”). Epstein called Robert Whitaker, the Melbourne photographer he’d retained on staff for just such quick-and-dirty assignments. Whitaker made a habit of posing subjects with props to prompt whimsy: during a previous Beatle photo shoot, they had pointed brooms at one another, a session best known as the series Capitol slapped on Beatles ’65. This time, Whitaker took things a step further.
Whitaker suggested a pose to explode the tired cliché of the “cuddly moptops,” and the Beatles dove in. They grabbed Whitaker’s props and sat in white jackets, cackling and jostling, their bodies draped with raw animal flesh and dismembered baby dolls. Those white jackets atop turtlenecks were a nice touch—butchers, doctors, or mental patient stewards? The sick humor of Lennon’s cripple jokes and mental spastics suddenly sprang to life, and he pushed hard to make it the official American album shot.6 Curiously, there are no quotes about Epstein’s opinion on this photo, but the gesture reeks of the Beatles’ contempt for Capitol’s artificially sequenced albums. Implicit in this deal, which stripped Revolver’s American edition of three key Lennon tracks, was the controversy-baiting cover photo they forced Capitol to publish. One hundred thousand copies were printed before Capitol panicked and recalled them, leading to a notorious collectible item—for roughly thirty thousand of these, Capitol hastily pasted over the originals with new art, and “steaming off” the outer layer took on overtones of the occult: unveiling the smiling madmen underneath the corporate pose.
The replacement photograph showed the Beatles seated around a giant trunk in casual garb: John, arms folded and sneering in a mod-striped blue jacket with dark slacks and white socks; Paul sitting beneath him, inside the trunk; Ringo in a collarless Nehru shirt and jacket; George standing behind them in an off-tan shirt and billowing white tie. Compared to t
he body parts it replaced, this looked tame. But their mod clothes and patronizing expressions gave off an unfazed confidence, as if they were still toying with those body parts in their heads. The new cover mocked the very idea of a more “acceptable” pose.
But both the “Butcher cover” and the “more popular than Jesus” quote lay dormant while the band returned to the studio for many late-night sessions from April through June. As they recorded, the Rolling Stones’ Aftermath quickly ascended the charts, and the group’s singles, “19th Nervous Breakdown” and “Paint It Black,” saturated the airwaves, alongside Otis Redding’s cover of “Satisfaction,” the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High,” the Troggs’ “Wild Thing,” the Silkie’s “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” and the Kinks’ “Sunny Afternoon.”
Studio ingenuity and upside-down engineering tricks became hallmarks of most Beatles recordings from here on in, and the band loved raiding the instrument closet underneath the control room stairs in Studio 2 for weird sound effects (as on “Yellow Submarine”). But they also tweaked their guitar sounds through their writing: for “And Your Bird Can Sing,” McCartney and Harrison coiled around each other on their Epiphone Casinos for a winding duet, a dual lead that made Lennon’s bitterness shimmer; “Dr. Robert” had sunbursts of resentment. No sooner had they finished “Bird” than Harrison’s “Taxman” went from basic tracks to final arrangement in two days.
For all his wild-man, wire-the-limousine eccentricities, in practice Lennon resembled a technophobe; threading tape into a reel deck often gave him fits. This lack of skill turned him on one night when he accidentally threaded a reel to play backward: he had brought home a rough mix of “Rain” and in a stupor began running it the wrong way across the magnetic heads. He loved the result. Martin spliced out his opening vocal passage on “Rain” and ran it backward for the fade-outs of that same number, and “I’m Only Sleeping” used backward guitar doodles to convey the invading dreamscape of his afternoon naps. By the end of April, passing the halfway mark, Lennon had brought in “I’m Only Sleeping” (April 27), which included a cheeky yawn over McCartney’s bass break (at 2:00). Martin scored and conducted the string parts for “Eleanor Rigby” (April 28). Working side-by-side on separate songs on the 29th, Lennon laid down his vocals for his track and McCartney tracked “Rigby.”
Epstein intruded on Revolver sessions for a couple of promotional events: at the May appearance at the New Musical Express Poll Winners’ Concert at Wembley, they reached back to five songs from 1964–65 for what would be their last UK live appearance until 1969: “I Feel Fine,” “Nowhere Man,” “Day Tripper,” “If I Needed Someone,” and “I’m Down”; they tracked BBC interviews on May 2 and lip-synced promotional films for “Paperback Writer” and “Rain” on location in Chiswick Gardens on May 20. Back in the studio, the band regained its momentum quickly with “Yellow Submarine,” cut in five delirious takes on the evening of May 26.
The next night, all four Beatles attended the Bob Dylan show at the Royal Albert Hall, just as they had the previous spring. This year, however, Dylan had morphed from adored folkie bard into rock sage. For his first electric tour, he brought along Johnny Rivers’s drummer, Mickey Jones, to play with a Canadian crew, the Hawks (later known as The Band). Several nights earlier, in Manchester, someone in the crowd had yelled “Judas!” as Dylan lit into “Like a Rolling Stone,” rock mythology steamrolling over folkie holdouts.
By this point, Lennon and Dylan were circling each other warily, as much friends as friendly competitors in rock’s great superstar sweepstakes. Lennon gobbled up everything Dylan put out just as surely as Dylan listened carefully to Beatle albums. Blonde on Blonde, Dylan’s double-disc masterstroke (with “Just Like a Woman,” “I Want You,” and “Visions of Johanna”), came out shortly after this, and Lennon had likely heard advance acetates, enough to be intimidated, not least because Dylan had turned the druggy waltz of “Norwegian Wood” into fodder for his own daunting one-night stand, “4th Time Around.” In this transatlantic duel between narrative wizards, Lennon felt insecurities he couldn’t articulate. Dylan, on the other hand, had way too cool a façade to let on about feeling intimidated, even though the dramatic threat of his rock move had far more Lennon to it than Lennon numbers had Dylan fingerprints (“You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away”).
They partied on Beatle turf in the clubs after the gig. D. A. Pennebaker caught their car ride to the Mayfair Hotel on Stratton Street for part of his unreleased documentary on Dylan, Eat the Document (much of which appeared in Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home, in 2006, and was cited in Keys to the Rain: The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, by Oliver Trager, in 2004). This heavily bootlegged car scene captured the two pop stars jabbing each other verbally about pop’s lesser royalty, the only footage of the two songwriters conversing. Conducting a mock interview, Lennon accused Dylan of backing the Mamas and the Papas “big-ly.” “I knew it would get to that,” Dylan shoots back with mock condescension. “You’re just interested in the big chick [Mama Cass Elliot], right? She’s got hold of you, too. She’s got ahold of everybody I know. Everybody asks me the same thing. You’re terrible, man.” Dylan pushes back by asking Lennon about the band Silkie, the UK group that charted with “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” (on a session co-produced by Lennon and McCartney).
There’s an affection between these two as they fiddle with their superstar masks, but Dylan slurs his words and has to work hard to hold up his head, as though the chemicals compete for control of his body. None of the shtick seems to float, or to amuse them as much as they hope it might. Soon after this, Dylan begs his driver to pull over so he can be sick. Even Lennon, no stranger to hangovers, looks embarrassed to be riffing with Dylan in this condition. On the verge of a huge creative breakthrough, Dylan seemed gutted by drugs, living for his shows but absent for the rest. It’s hard to tell how much Lennon identified with him on this level, but he must have taken small comfort to see a fellow rock star so worn down by touring.
The Beatles scurried to finish Revolver as the summer’s touring season approached, adding elaborate sound effects to “Yellow Submarine” (in a daffy session with Brian Jones, Marianne Faithfull, George and Pattie Harrison, Neil Aspinall, Mal Evans, and Abbey Road staffers John Skinner and Terry Condon). The next day, Harrison led them through his third track, marked “Laxton’s Superb” (which became “I Want to Tell You”).
With vocal overdubs remaining for “Eleanor Rigby,” “Good Day Sunshine” ( just three takes on June 8), and “Here There and Everywhere” the following week, they mimed both “Paperback Writer” and “Rain” for the BBC’s Top of the Pops and then stopped off at the Waldorf Hotel on the Strand for a Pet Sounds listening party. To avoid the anticlimactic response that America had given Brian Wilson’s latest album, Bruce Johnston, the Beach Boys’ newest member, brought over a tape with Epstein’s former assistant, Derek Taylor (now promoting the Byrds in Los Angeles). An avowed Beach Boys fanatic, Taylor knew Lennon and McCartney would want to be among the first to have a listen. Kim Fowley, an L.A. scenester, remembered the two Beatles arriving in their collarless jackets, hanging on every note:
Everybody sat listening intently as the music played. When it ended, Lennon and McCartney went over to the piano together, noodled about with some chords, and had a private conversation about something, right in front of the rest of us. Then they came up and shook our hands, told Johnston how much they admired it, and just as quickly they were gone.7
McCartney let it leak that he prized “God Only Knows” as the “greatest song ever written.” Andrew Loog Oldham, now the Rolling Stones’ manager, took out a full-page ad in Melody Maker to proclaim Pet Sounds the “greatest album ever made.” In the ongoing debate between the primal and elaborate, and the American vs. British inclinations in rock style, the UK’s response to Pet Sounds proved clairvoyant. The very idea of Wilson seeking out Lennon and McCartney’s blessing would have been unthinkable even three years before, when the favor would m
ost likely have been sought from the other direction. In this way, Wilson’s fate linked up to Spector’s: cherished abroad, Pet Sounds, like “River Deep—Mountain High,” didn’t get the Capitol marketing support it deserved and peaked at number ten before a rapid falling off at home.
From there, Lennon and McCartney went straight back to EMI for nine more takes of “Here, There and Everywhere.” The “She Said She Said” session came on the last day (June 21), after an afternoon of mixing the rest of the tracks into an album sequence. The band recorded four complete takes of Lennon’s song between 7 P.M. and 3:45 A.M., while batting around album titles—Abracadabra, Magic Circles, and The Beatles on Safari—until Revolver got the nod. Racing to hit the stages Epstein had booked them the world over, a new commotion devoured the band, leaving scant time for reflection on how the rock star with the sharpest fangs, elsewhere so preening, ambitious, and arrogant, openly envied the state of childhood (“When I was a boy everything was right”), as his partner scored nursery-school sing-alongs (“Yellow Submarine”). Fewer still suspected this tour would be their last.
Aggravating many of the same frustrations Lennon and the Beatles felt during the previous summer’s performances, Revolver barely changed the rigors of the live game. The sounds they chased in the studio led to all kinds of tricks, edits, tape treatments, and sleight of hand, and along the way, they lost track of how any of it might be reproduced live. The sound checks that have become routine for touring bands ever since were unheard of at this point, and 1966 concert-amplification technology lagged even further behind their material than EMI’s equipment. They could barely hear themselves play or sing, and the crowds seemed to scream that much louder. Yet ambition compelled them to attempt the fragile vocal harmonies of “Nowhere Man” despite these enormous handicaps. One night, in exasperation, Lennon vented his frustration with how the Beatles struggled to hear themselves straight to the audience: “Don’t listen to our music. We’re terrible these days.”8