Like the Beatles, Martin couldn’t help but be impressed by the maximum volume of the recordings produced in American studios. As Martin later observed, by early 1966 “I had been a record producer for so long that whenever I listened to anything new I was not listening only to the music; I was listening to the way the recording had been made, technically. What amazed me,” he added, “was the sheer technical ferocity of the stuff. The US studios managed to pack so much volume on to a disc, much more than we could over here in the UK. I could pick up the newly imported piece of 45 RPM vinyl, look at it, and actually see the ear-splitting loudness of the record before I had even put it on. It was, as they say, in the groove.” Although he may not have been fully a part of the ongoing conversation about where and under what conditions the bandmates would record their follow-up long-player to Rubber Soul, he certainly grasped the nature of their desire to make a sizzling, American-style record in places like Stax. “Why can’t we cut a record like that?” he would say to the Beatles. “If we had tried to cut a record as loud as that, the needle, probably the whole playing-arm of your Dansette record player would have jumped straight off the vinyl and fallen on the floor.” Such was the nature of the technology at EMI Studios at the time. But understandably, George’s mind was in a very different place in those early months of 1966. He had been busying himself with getting AIR off the ground, signing new acts, and scouting out future London recording studio spaces for himself and his partners.9
In the end, the Beatles’ American recording plans may have collapsed almost entirely for financial reasons. Almost. “They wanted a fantastic amount of money to use the facilities there,” Paul later recalled, strongly suspecting that it came down to capitalizing on the Beatles’ wealth and name. “They were obviously trying to take us for a ride,” he added. Years later, Martin would take this issue a step further, pointing out that recording in the United States simply wasn’t realistic in terms of the bottom line: “From EMI’s point of view,” he recalled, “it wouldn’t have made sense because every record would have had to bear the 1.5 percent AFM [American Federation of Musicians] levy. It wasn’t feasible. Anyway, I had to do what EMI told me.” This last fact was particularly relevant in terms of George’s ongoing work with the Beatles, which was strictly governed by the deal that he had struck back in 1965 when he parted ways with the record conglomerate. But perhaps even more interestingly, George attributed the Beatles’ change of heart to the simple fact that he “didn’t want to record in the States.” Was he still as integral as he believed himself to be in the Beatles’ artistic calculus? Or had he become expendable now that the Beatles, at least to John’s way of thinking, had finally taken over the studio? As historian Mark Lewisohn has observed, it is difficult to imagine a scenario in which George wouldn’t have ensured that he remained integral to the Beatles’ activities at this juncture. Martin underscored this point himself in his April 1966 remarks to Barrow, pointedly demonstrating his continuous central role in their creative brain trust. “If we ever do go out of London for sessions,” said George, “it would be experimental. It’s true that different local musical environments could have a strong effect on the Beatles. We wouldn’t know what to expect in the way of results but it would be a new experience for all of us.” According to Lewisohn, if Martin had felt threatened, it wasn’t from Cropper but Stewart, who was a bona fide producer with a longer and more distinguished record than the rhythm-and-blues guitarist. “George Martin wouldn’t have liked another producer in the mix,” said Lewisohn.10
As it happened, the Beatles had been experiencing another transformation during roughly the same period in which they had pondered their recording venture in Memphis. And it would have far-reaching implications for George’s working relationship with the band. For Paul, in particular, the post–Rubber Soul era was turning out to be “a very free, formless time for me,” he later recalled. When he was still living with Jane Asher’s family on Wimpole Street—the place where George Martin had taken oboe lessons during the late 1940s—Paul had made vital connections across literary London and the avant-garde art world. As he spent more and more time with the smart set, he began to realize his own intellectual deficits, recognizing that “people are saying things and painting things and writing things and composing things that are great. I must know what people are doing.” In addition to studying the work of experimental composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luciano Berio, Paul took to reading contemporary poetry and broadening his literary horizons. Robert Fraser, the London art dealer and gallery owner who went by the name of “Groovy Bob,” emerged as one of Paul’s mentors, introducing him to such purveyors of the canvas and screen as Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, and Michelangelo Antonioni. Paul was also the first Beatle to up his musical game. With George’s encouragement, Paul took piano lessons at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, the producer’s alma mater. McCartney wasn’t the only member of the Beatles’ inner circle who had considered spreading his wings. For a time, Martin had even considered learning how to play the guitar so he could better understand the Beatles’ composition and performance practices. But he gave up quickly, realizing that he would never have the necessary time to learn how to play, much less master the instrument.11
During this same period, Paul became friends with John Dunbar and his wife, Marianne Faithfull. With Dunbar and Peter Asher, McCartney would help found the Indica Bookshop and Gallery, which emerged as the unofficial headquarters for bohemian London. As Dunbar later recalled, “We talked a lot about the music, all of the time. We used to play stuff and record stuff. Old blues, Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters, all the old blues blokes.” And oh, how they recorded stuff. Paul had procured a couple of Brenell reel-to-reel tape recorders from Dick James’s son. “I used to experiment with them when I had an afternoon off, which was quite often,” Paul later recalled. “We’d be playing in the evening, we’d be doing a radio show or something, and there was often quite a bit of time when I was just in the house on my own so I had a lot of time for this. I wasn’t in a routine. . . . So I would sit around all day, creating little tapes.” Paul became entranced by the idea of running the tape backward, later graduating to creating imaginative tape loops by splicing bits of tape into pieces and randomly joining them together courtesy of a bottle of EMI glue that he had picked up at Abbey Road.
Paul was particularly influenced by Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge, a mid-1950s work by the renowned composer of electronic sound and one of the first great musique concrète classics. By disabling the Brenell’s erase heads and allowing a continuous loop of tape to course through the machine, Paul found that the machine would be constantly overdubbing itself and, in so doing, creating a saturation effect that he could slow down or speed up at his discretion. “I used to make loops mainly with guitar or voices, or bongos, and then I’d record them off on to this other Brenell so that I had a series of loops,” Paul recalled. “It would start with a thing that sounded like bees buzzing for a few seconds, then that would slow down and then an echo would kick in and then some high violins would come in, but they were speeded-up guitar playing a little thing, then behind them there would be a very slow ponderous drone. Quite a nice montage sound collage. The guitar would sound like seagulls. They were great little things and I had great plans for them, they were going to be little symphonies, all made with tape loops done by varispeeding the tape.”12
Paul was so enthralled with his Brenell experiments that he outfitted the other Beatles’ homes with machines of their own. Like Paul, John soon began making experimental recordings with his Brenell recorder. Lennon’s tape loops were often accented with sounds produced on a Mellotron, which Martin later described as Lennon’s “favorite toy of the moment. The Mellotron was a Heath Robinson contraption if ever there was one; you could virtually see the bits of string and rubber holding it together. It was as if a Neanderthal piano had impregnated a primitive electronic keyboard, and they’d named the deformed, dwarfish offspring �
��Mellotron.’” Lennon had purchased the Mellotron in 1965, possessing one of the rare versions with a polished mahogany cabinet and gold serigraphy. Pink Floyd, a new band out of London Polytechnic, also had their hands on one of the rare models, which they would shortly put to use on their debut album, with Norman Smith, Martin’s old protégé, sitting in as their producer. An electro-mechanical keyboard, the Mellotron created sound through a tape-replay system composed of eighteen prerecorded instruments. As Geoff Emerick later pointed out, the Mellotron was not without controversy: in Great Britain, “the Musicians’ Union tried to stop manufacture because of the way it reproduced the sounds of other instruments.” As for George Harrison, the quiet Beatle had recently purchased Kinfauns, a bungalow in Esher only a few miles away from Kenwood, Lennon’s place in Weybridge, where he planned to install a home recording studio.13
In the meantime, Harrison was experiencing a renaissance of his own. Like McCartney, he had begun to realize that the Beatles’ live shows were contributing to a deterioration of the bandmates’ musicianship. The throes and screams of Beatlemania, Harrison feared, had led to the erosion of their sound, not to mention a roadblock in the way of their further development as musicians. As Harrison remarked at the time, “We have different audiences all the time and we play the same numbers—so we don’t get much chance to develop. . . . I suppose I should have improved much more. If we pack it in one day I’ll probably learn to play the guitar properly. Or chop it up.” But as it turned out, there were still plenty of new vistas of musical discovery available to him. In early 1965, he had become enthralled by the sitar, the Hindustani fretted instrument, which he had discovered on the set of Help! For his part, Martin had accrued previous experience recording the instrument back in 1959 for Peter Sellers and the Goons when they lampooned My Fair Lady’s “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly” complete with sitar accompaniment, which Martin had arranged via London’s Asian Music Circle. More recently, Martin had gamely recorded Harrison playing the exotic instrument on Rubber Soul’s “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown),” but the quiet Beatle was only just getting started. At the time, Harrison admitted that he was so smitten with the instrument that “sometimes before I go to sleep, I think what it would be like to be inside Ravi’s sitar.”14
Harrison had found his own way into the vaunted Asian Music Circle after breaking a sitar string during one of the sessions for “Norwegian Wood.” He met Ravi Shankar, the Bengali-born musician and composer, by way of Ayana Angadi and his wife, Patricia. Together, the couple led the Asian Music Circle, which met in their home in Finchley. Founded in 1953, the circle had invited a number of eminent Indian musicians to London, including Vilayat Khan, Ali Akbar Khan, Alla Rakha, Chatur Lal, and Shankar, who was in his midforties by the time he met Harrison and had already emerged as the most prominent Indian musician of his day—and most especially as an accomplished practitioner of the sitar. After working with Shankar, Harrison devoted himself to mastering the difficult instrument in much the same way that he approached his craft as a guitarist. It was an effort that would alter the musical direction of the Beatles, with far-reaching and unforeseen implications.
On Wednesday, April 6, 1966, Martin and the Beatles reconvened at Abbey Road for the first time in more than four months. That evening, they settled down to work in Studio 3, smaller and in sharp contrast with Number 2, their regular EMI Studios recording venue. But the room change wasn’t the only shift in evidence that night. Changes were clearly afoot, as George and the Beatles’ long-standing engineer Norman “Normal” Smith had vacated his seat in the control room, having ascended to become the next Parlophone A&R head, George’s old job before he left the EMI Group to go into business for himself. But things had gotten off to a rocky start for Smith after having been chastised by EMI chairman Sir Joseph Lockwood for what Lockwood had seen as impolitic behavior when Smith sent a letter in which he attempted to lure away one of a rival record company’s artists. For his part, Smith realized how close he’d come to being fired. And while he may not have known it at the time, Sir Joseph didn’t forget so easily either. Throughout 1966 and into the early months of 1967, the EMI chairman had tried to entice independent producer Joe Meek to take over as Parlophone’s A&R head. For record-business folk like Martin and Smith, Meek was a household name. Martin had known the younger man since the mid-1950s, when Martin, then Parlophone A&R head, recorded Meek’s “Put a Ring on Her Finger” with singer Eddie Silver. The record failed to chart in the United Kingdom but managed a top-thirty showing stateside. Meek’s career began to take off after he produced Humphrey Lyttelton’s hit single “Bad Penny Blues” for Parlophone. As the 1950s wore on, Meek quickly became known as one of London’s quirkiest, albeit most gifted, producers.
Meek worked with Martin even more closely in 1958, when he produced pop duo Joy and David’s “Whoopee!,” with Martin sitting in on the Abbey Road session as supervisor. The two producers clashed almost immediately when it became clear to Meek that, at the time at least, the men had very different ideas about staging an artist’s career. During the session, Meek asked Martin about Joy and David’s chances at recording a hit track, to which Martin replied, “Yes, about their eighth record.” For the aggressive Meek, eager to grow his reputation in the marketplace after landing a hit with Lyttelton, Martin’s seeming conservatism was patently unacceptable. A few short years later, Meek became known far and wide as a technical wunderkind after landing an international hit with the Tornados’ “Telstar.” Penned by Meek and named in honor of the Telstar satellite that began orbiting the Earth in July 1962, “Telstar” featured a clavioline, an electronic, space-age-sounding keyboard. The instrumental topped the UK and US charts in 1962, earning a coveted Ivor Novello Award for Meek in the process. Earlier that same year, Meek had even had a shot at producing the Beatles before they came into Martin’s orbit. Epstein had pitched the band to Meek, who “was no more impressed with their audition tape than anyone else, seeing the Beatles as just another noisy group covering other people’s songs.” Epstein had pleaded with the young producer to take on the Beatles. In the end, Epstein went home to Liverpool empty-handed once again, and Meek would later claim that any potential deal had fallen apart because, improbably under the circumstances, Epstein had demanded too high a percentage.15
As George well knew from his long experience in the esteemed halls of EMI, the record conglomerate was rife with political intrigue and warring factions. In this light, it is easy to understand why Sir Joseph may have been determined to unseat Smith over what might have seemed like a fairly minor infraction in protocol. As 1966 progressed, the EMI chairman would make several overtures to Meek about assuming Martin’s former role with Parlophone. But by this time, Meek was a far cry from the eager young producer who had transformed “Telstar” into an international juggernaut. Fraught with paranoia and hooked on barbiturates, the skilled producer was hunkered down in his three-story home studio at 304 Holloway Road in Islington, not too far, as the crow flies, from George’s boyhood haunts. Nestled above a leather-goods shop, Meek’s studio had already seen a number of hits produced within its walls. In addition to “Telstar,” 304 Holloway Road had witnessed such Meek productions as John Leyton’s UK chart-topper “Johnny Remember Me” and the Honeycombs’ number-one hit “Have I the Right?,” which also managed to crack the top five in the American market. But during the intervening years, the once-promising producer had slipped further behind the competition. Back in the summer of 1965, he had listened to Martin’s exquisite work on “Yesterday” with some friends, and everything came brutally into focus, if only briefly. “That’s beautiful,” he said aloud. “I don’t need telling that.” And while it had been nearly two years since Meek had struck gold with the Honeycombs, Lockwood was betting that the wunderkind might yet right his ship before it was too late. And he was hoping that the addle-minded Meek would leave his home studio behind and stake his future with Parlophone at Abbey Road.16
However tenuous it may ha
ve been at the time, Smith’s promotion made way for young Geoff Emerick to serve as the Beatles’ balance engineer, with Phil McDonald acting as technical engineer. Emerick, who would turn twenty years old in 1966, had already been working at Abbey Road for nearly four years, having begun as a novice “button pusher” at the tender age of fifteen, fresh off of completing his studies at North London’s Crouch End Secondary Modern School. Emerick’s preternatural ability to hear minute particulars of sound had earned him the nickname “Golden Ears” around the studio corridors. In truth, there was no standing rule that would have prevented Smith from serving as a producer in his own right while staying on as the Beatles’ engineer. But Martin wasn’t having it. Years later, Emerick would speculate about his older colleague’s motives:
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