First Steps with the Beatles
Born in Edmonton, North London, on February 22, 1923, Norman Smith was a glider pilot in the Second World War, but saw no action. In 1959, after spending a few not particularly successful years as a drummer, percussionist, and trumpeter in a Dixieland band, the Bobby Arnold Quintet, Smith decided to reply to an advert placed by EMI in the Times (London). “The age cut-off was twenty-eight, and Norman was in his mid-thirties, so he pruned six years [actually eight!] off his age, and, to his surprise, was asked back for an interview, along with over a hundred other applicants. Asked by one of the interviewers what he thought of Cliff Richard, who was just emerging at the time, Norman was far from complimentary about Cliff. The interviewers, again to his surprise, tended to agree. And Norman was appointed as one of three new apprentices.”5
At EMI, Norman Smith climbed the ladder rung by rung. “I had to start right at the bottom as a gofer, but I kept my eyes and ears open, I learned very quickly, and it wasn’t long before I got onto the mixing desk.”13 And things got even better: on June 6, 1962, he was given the task of test-recording a group from Liverpool “with funny haircuts.”13 This was the beginning of an incredible adventure with the Beatles—one of the biggest groups in the history of rock and pop—which lasted from Please Please Me (1963) until Rubber Soul (1965).
A Creative Collaboration
In August 1969, when George Martin set up AIR studios, Smith succeeded him as head of the Parlophone label. A few months later, he took a little trip to the UFO Club to hear a young group by the name of Pink Floyd that Bryan Morrison had told him about. “‘Their music did absolutely nothing for me,’ he conceded. ‘I didn’t really understand psychedelia. But I could see that they did have one hell of a following even then. I figured I should put my business hat on, as it was obvious that we could sell some records.’”14 To Peter Martland he gave a slightly different account of this first encounter with the Floyd, confessing that he was literally overwhelmed: “What I saw absolutely amazed me, I was still into creating and developing new electronic sounds in the control room, and Pink Floyd, I could see, were exactly into the same thing; it was a perfect marriage.”15
From this day on, he was fixated upon signing the group to EMI. He achieved this aim in February 1967. Norman, whose point of reference remained the Beatles, had the intelligence not to curb the sonic experimentation of his young protégés, even if he did occasionally try to refocus their lengthy improvisations. According to Nick Mason, “He was […] very good-natured and a capable musician in his own right. Most important of all for us, he was happy to teach us rather than protect his position by investing the production process with any mystique.”5 Aided by the sound engineer Peter Bown, Norman Smith would produce The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967) and A Saucerful of Secrets (1968). After that, feeling he no longer understood the group’s artistic direction following Syd Barrett’s departure, he donned his producer’s hat no more than symbolically for the studio disc in the Ummagumma set (1969), the other disc being a live recording produced by Pink Floyd themselves, and for Atom Heart Mother (1970). “From our first day,” explains Nick Mason, “Norman encouraged us to get involved in the whole production process. He was aware of our interest in the science and technology of recording when, in his words, ‘most bands at the time were just trying to be part of the Mersey Sound bandwagon.’”5
Pink Floyd would take so well to production that they ended up being able to dispense with his services. The pupils eventually surpassed the master…
Stage Name: Hurricane
Norman Smith’s reputation therefore owes a great deal to the Beatles and Pink Floyd, just as the Beatles and Pink Floyd owe much to Norman Smith in terms of their creative process in the studio. But there was more to his career than simply working with these two groups. Although he played a key role in the aforementioned Mersey Sound, producing Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Swinging Blue Jeans, and Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, his name is also associated with the Pretty Things (notably the concept album S.F. Sorrow, 1968), Barclay James Harvest (eponymous album, 1970, and Once Again, 1971) and Kevin Ayers (The Kevin Ayers Collection, 1983).
He would also score some notable successes as a singer-songwriter under the pseudonym Hurricane Smith (a nickname taken from Jerry Hopper’s film of the same name released in 1952). “Don’t Let It Die” (a song originally written for John Lennon) would get to number 2 in the United Kingdom in 1971, while “Oh Babe, What Would You Say” climbed to number 1 in the United States (Cashbox) and number 4 in the United Kingdom.
Norman Smith published his memoirs in 2007 under the title John Lennon Called Me Normal (“Normal” being the nickname Lennon had given him at the beginning of the sixties). He died on March 3, 2008, at the age of eighty-five.
Some people claim that “Don’t Let It Die” is the song Norman offered the Beatles in 1965, in order to complete Help! The Fab Four initially agreed to record the song in question but ultimately declined the offer. Norman would never confirm the title of this mystery number. He had nevertheless begun his career as an author-composer even earlier, with the Shadows in 1964, penning “It’s a Man’s World” (the B-side of “The Rise and Fall of Flingel Bunt”) with his friend Malcolm Addey.
THE PIPER
AT THE
GATES
OF DAWN
ALBUM
THE PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN
RELEASE DATE
United Kingdom: August 5, 1967
Label: Columbia Records
RECORD NUMBER: SX 6157 (mono)—SCX 6157 (stereo)
Number 6
In the Top 20 for 11 weeks
Astronomy Dominé / Lucifer Sam / Matilda Mother / Flaming / Pow R. Toc H. / Take Up Thy Stethoscope And Walk / Interstellar Overdrive / The Gnome / Chapter 24 / Scarecrow / Bike OUTTAKE She Was A Millionaire
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and Syd Barrett’s Magic Powers
By the time they signed with EMI on February 28, 1967, Syd Barrett, Roger Waters, Rick Wright, and Nick Mason had already recorded several songs in the studio, including, at Sound Techniques, their first single, “Arnold Layne” and “Candy and a Currant Bun,” which would be released on March 11. They nevertheless remained a live band at heart whose performances in the clubs and other venues were based on lengthy psychedelic improvisations and elaborate lighting effects. Between January 5 and February 20, 1967, for example (the eve of the first Piper at the Gates of Dawn session), Pink Floyd played some twenty gigs, notably at the Marquee, the UFO Club, and the Commonwealth Institute. Gigs that, moreover, could be described as “multimedia” and that closely resembled the “acid tests” that were taking place at the same time in California under the aegis of the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. Furthermore, after the concert given on October 15, 1966, at the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm for the launch of the underground magazine International Times (it), Roger Waters revealed: “It’s definitely a complete realisation of the aims of psychedelia. But if you take LSD, what you experience depends entirely on who you are. Our music may give you the screaming horror or throw you into screaming ecstasy. Mostly it’s the latter. We find our audiences stop dancing now. We tend to get them standing there totally grooved with their mouths open.”11
The First Progressive Rock Album
Recording an album would therefore be a new milestone for Pink Floyd. It was February 1967. A few months earlier (August 1966), the Beatles had rolled back the frontiers of rock music in spectacular fashion with Revolver (in particular “Tomorrow Never Knows”), and all the indications were that the songs they had been working on in Studio Two at Abbey Road since November (the single “Strawberry Fields Forever”/“Penny Lane” and the album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band) would represent a new high point. The Rolling Stones had also been exploring new paths with Aftermath (April 1966) and Between the Buttons (January 1967), as had Bob Dylan with his double album Blonde on Blonde (May 1966), the Doors with their first, eponymous, album (Ja
nuary 1967), the Byrds with Younger Than Yesterday (February 1967), and Jefferson Airplane with Surrealistic Pillow (February 1967)—not to forget Jimi Hendrix, who was getting ready to transform rock guitar with Are You Experienced (May 1967). In a word, good old rock ’n’ roll had changed. The hour of psychedelia had come, a genre that is less a spaced-out reinterpretation of the blues than the soundtrack to acid trips—in a sense a rereading of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which had inspired Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert to write The Psychedelic Experience in 1964.
A Highly Select Trio
While the EMI management was not exactly hostile to the changes occurring in the music world (thanks partly to company chairman Sir Joseph Lockwood, one of the few in the British record industry who really believed in the future of rock music), it nevertheless wanted to surround Syd Barrett, Roger Waters, Rick Wright, and Nick Mason with a solid team. Three individuals in particular would play a key role in the artistic success of the first album.
First of all, Norman Smith, the architect of the Beatles’ sound up to and including Rubber Soul, acquired a wealth of experience working alongside George Martin. Smith was the producer Pink Floyd, and Barrett in particular, needed in order to realize their abundant ideas, structure their songs, and add this or that instrument so as to imbue their whole sound with more atmosphere. For them he represented a link with the Fab Four. Peter Jenner describes the effect this produced: “And then here were they, signed by EMI and being taken off to Abbey Road, which was where The Beatles recorded for God’s sake, you know, WOW!!!”10 It was not long, however, before the group started to question Norman’s role. Phil May, the Pretty Things singer, whom Smith would also produce at the end of 1967 (on their album S.F. Sorrow), testifies: “It was hard [working with Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd]. But with Roger [Waters], he was such an egoist. I mean, the minute he could get rid of anybody who was doing anything in the Floyd, he would. I mean, Roger wanted the Floyd for himself. […] And Norman wasn’t part of that scenario,” and: “If there wouldn’t have been Norman Smith, the [Pink] Floyd wouldn’t have existed… well, they wouldn’t have been able to sort of develop what they were trying to do. There was nobody with the ears Norman had.”16
The second member of the triumvirate was the sound engineer Peter Bown, whom Julian Palacios describes as “a florid gay man in his forties with a Beatle fringe and jovial disposition, coupled with an extraordinary ear,”17 and whom George Martin called an “electronics wizard.” Having moved across from classical music, he was at this time one of EMI’s crucial balance engineers. “Bown was one of Norman Smith’s mentors,” observes Kevin Ryan [co-author of Recording the Beatles]. “A senior engineer, Bown taught Smith the art of engineering when Smith was just starting out. […] More than any other engineer at EMI, he experimented endlessly. Bown was gear-obsessed. He was always trying out new equipment and looking for unconventional ways of combining pieces to make new sounds. Bown was the best engineer for Floyd.”17 It is the same story from Andrew King, who, quite apart from his qualities as a brilliant technician, saw him as someone who was eccentric to say the least, someone who painted his nails with a coat of plastic because “[…] the faders [on the console] were wearing his fingers out.”10 He was so conscientious that he would have no hesitation in positioning himself in front of the drummer for minutes on end in order to listen to the precise sound that was being emitted, before then trying to reproduce it in the control room. During the course of a long career, he would record many artists, including the Hollies. He had a hand in the mixing of the Beatles’ Let It Be and would take charge of aspects of Syd Barrett’s first two solo albums before focusing once more on classical music.
The third and final element in the trio was the tape operator Jeff Jarratt, whose job was to assist Bown (and, of course, make tea): “When I was asked to do the album, I went down to see them [play] at the Regent Polytechnic, to know what it was all about before we started working and their performance on stage was quite fantastic.”18 Jarratt would be promoted to sound engineer at the end of 1968. Among his achievements, he was able to pride himself on helping to record the Beatles’ “Something” and John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Wedding Album in 1969.
In addition to this crucial threesome, other sound engineers and assistants who worked on the album included Malcolm Addey, Geoff Emerick, Harry Moss, Jerry Boys, Graham Kirkby, Peter Mew, Michael Sheady, and Michael Stone.
The Wind in the Willows
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn is first and foremost Syd Barrett’s album. With the exception of “Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk” (credited to Roger Waters) and the instrumentals “Pow R. Toc H.” and “Interstellar Overdrive” (credited to all four members of the group), all the songs are the work of the guitarist-singer. Barrett was undergoing a period of intense creativity at this time: he was composing, painting, and reading without respite, as well as ingesting quantities of hallucinogenic substances that were gradually removing him further and further from day-to-day reality.
For all this, the songs by Barrett brought together on this debut Pink Floyd album are not escapist songs; they are an evocation (albeit idealized) of his childhood, of those carefree, tranquil years before his father’s death. They bring to mind Lewis Carroll, Tolkien and his Lord of the Rings, and nursery rhymes inhabited by elves and fairies—but reinterpreted, or rather transformed by means of an immoderate consumption of psychotropic drugs. Indeed the album is named after the seventh chapter of The Wind in the Willows, the masterpiece of children’s writing by Kenneth Grahame that was published in 1908. This novel tells of the adventures of Mole and Rat, who, during the course of their peregrinations on the River Thames, encounter the wealthy property owner Toad. Other characters include Rat’s friends the cheerful Otter and his son Portly. Then there is Pan, the god of Greek mythology, half-man, half-goat, who, in the seventh chapter, appears to Mole and Rat in the guise of a helper: “Then the two animals, crouching to the earth, bowed their heads and did worship. Sudden and magnificent, the sun’s broad golden disc showed itself over the horizon facing them; and the first rays, shooting across the level water-meadows, took the animals full in the eyes and dazzled them. When they were able to look once more, the Vision had vanished, and the air was full of the carol of birds that hailed the dawn.” Syd Barrett was evidently not unmoved by this experience, this vision, for it seems to have influenced him strongly in the writing of the album as a whole. Peter Bown recalls the moment when the Floyd guitarist suggested this particular title: “‘What about The Piper at the Gates of Dawn?’ and I said: ‘It’s nothing really to do with the LP, is it?’ and he said: ‘Well, that doesn’t matter! It’s something new!’”10
The Recording
The sessions for The Piper at the Gates of Dawn began on February 21, 1967, at the EMI studios located at 3 Abbey Road in Saint John’s Wood (North London). Because Studio One (the largest) was reserved primarily for the recording of orchestral works, and the Beatles were in the process of breathing life into Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in their customary Studio Two (made available to them twenty-four hours a day—unheard of in the recording industry!), Syd Barrett, Roger Waters, Rick Wright, and Nick Mason moved into Studio Three, a far more modestly proportioned room used for smaller bands, but ideal for rock. For Nick Mason, “[…] the recording for Piper went pretty smoothly […] there was general enthusiasm from everybody and […] Syd seemed to be more relaxed and the atmosphere more focused […].” This point of view was not shared by Norman Smith, however: “I always felt I was treading on this ice the whole time, and I had to watch exactly what I said to Syd. He was always terribly fragile.” Smith adds: “He would perhaps have laid down a vocal track and I would go up to him and say, ‘OK, Syd, that was basically good, but what about blah, blah, blah?’ I never got any response, just ‘Hum.’ We would run the tape again, and he would sing it exactly the same way.”5 On the other hand, Bown and Jarratt have expressed their amazement at Barrett’s
energy and sparkle: “He sometimes had to explain to me what it was about, or meant to be about,” explains Bown to David Parker in his book Random Precision. “Always the bright, creative chap who couldn’t sit still, always wanted to try something new, always had great ideas.”10 Looking back, Andrew King would have no hesitation in talking of his “magical powers.”10
There would be more than fifty sessions in total, taking into account the recording, the mixing, and the mastering. This is no small number—especially as the album has only eleven tracks and the group gave priority to live takes. It should be recognized, however, that the music is relatively complex, difficult to get together, and above all incorporates an extremely wide range of electronic sounds, requiring fastidious studio work. This helps us to gauge a little more accurately the achievement of Norman Smith in channeling the improvised nature of the tracks and adapting it to the professional criteria of the day. However, if we compare this debut album to the Beatles’, made in barely more than a dozen hours at the same place, and with more or less the same equipment, it becomes clear that the musical approach is radically different, not least because of the way rock music had changed between 1963 and 1967.
A Decisive Turning Point
The sessions for The Piper at the Gates of Dawn concluded on July 21, 1967, with the mixing of the stereo version. The album was released in the United Kingdom on August 5, during the Summer of Love. It would reach number 6 on the charts and remain in the British Top 20 for eleven weeks.
Pink Floyd All the Songs Page 5
