Sound Pictures

by Kenneth Womack

  When things finally got underway, Martin and his production team, which was composed of Emerick and Phil McDonald, busied themselves with the basic track. As had been their practice since the Help! album, the Beatles’ fifth long-player, the bandmates rehearsed each new song with George rolling the tape. This arrangement afforded them the creative space to perfect various aspects of the composition and to enjoy the occasional happy accidents that occur during the recording process that often take a routine track and transform it into something truly special. By this point, John’s new song went under the working title of “Mark I.” As they readied their first attempt at capturing the track, Phil prepared one of Paul’s simple tape loops composed of slowed-down, distorted acoustic guitar and percussion and cued it up. “Here it comes,” George announced through the playback, as Paul and Ringo began recording a steady rhythm track of bass and drums, respectively. And that’s when John unleashed his guide vocal to try the song out for size: “Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream,” he sang, occasionally flagging as he paused to take in the sound effects produced by the tape loops. A second take resulted in a breakdown, but by take three they had captured a strong recording of Paul and Ringo’s basic track—sans tape loops, this time. The stage was set for the tape loops and other assorted sound effects that bring the song home. Everyone seemed to be satisfied. Almost everyone, that is.3

  To his ears, John sounded nowhere close to the Dalai Lama on a mountaintop. Nor did he sound like his other variation on the theme, which he described as “a thousand chanting monks.” As Geoff later recalled, “George Martin looked over at me with a nod as he reassured John. ‘Got it. I’m sure Geoff and I will come up with something.’ Which meant, of course, that he was sure Geoff would come up with something.” For his part, Geoff was caught in a panic. It was his first session as George and the Beatles’ lead engineer, and he wanted to impress them. As he later recalled, “The whole time, I kept thinking about what the Dalai Lama might sound like if he were standing on Highgate Hill, a few miles away from the studio. I began doing a mental inventory of the equipment we had on hand. Clearly, none of the standard studio tricks available at the mixing console would do the job alone. We also had an echo chamber, and lots of amplifiers in the studio, but I couldn’t see how they could help, either. But perhaps there was one amplifier that might work, even though nobody had ever put a vocal through it.” That’s when he got it: Geoff knew that the studio’s Hammond organ was connected to a Leslie speaker system, which was composed of a large wooden box containing an amp and two sets of revolving speakers emitting bass and treble, respectively. Named after Donald J. Leslie, the innovator behind the Vibratone sound, the Leslie speaker had been designed in order to soften the church-like sound of the Hammond organ by adopting a system of rotating baffles that create a vibrato effect. To Geoff’s mind, it seemed just possible that John’s voice might be properly modulated to his specifications if the engineer were to project it using the Leslie speaker system.4

  With a solution suddenly in hand, Geoff was ready to take it to George for the producer’s approval. This was EMI Studios, after all—the austere place where white-coated studio personnel and strict rules and equipment policy ruled the day. Sometimes painfully shy, Geoff made his pitch:

  “I think I have an idea about what to do for John’s voice,” I announced to George in the control room as we finished editing the loop. Excitedly, I explained my concept to him. Though his brows furrowed for a moment, he nodded his assent. Then he went out into the studio and told the four Beatles . . . to take a tea break while “Geoff sorts out something for the vocal.”

  While the Beatles took their break, Ken Townsend, EMI Studios’ veteran maintenance engineer who had worked at Abbey Road since 1954, rewired the Leslie speaker system to accommodate Geoff’s plan. Together, Geoff and Phil tested the newfangled piece of equipment by placing two microphones adjacent to the Leslie speakers. To Geoff’s ears, “it certainly sounded different enough; I could only hope that it would satisfy Lennon.” As McCartney and Harrison joined Martin and the others in the control room, Lennon took his place in front of the mic. Using the empty track four to allow for John’s new vocal, George instructed Geoff to activate the Leslie effect for the second half of the song, which was recording alongside George Harrison’s droning tamboura. The result was plain to see through the glass window in the control room. A smiling Lennon gave a thumbs-up. As Emerick recalled, “Lennon’s voice sounded like it never had before, eerily disconnected, distant yet compelling. The effect seemed to perfectly complement the esoteric lyrics he was chanting.” Meanwhile, back in the control room, McCartney and Harrison good-naturedly slapped each other on the back. “It’s the Dalai Lennon!” McCartney exclaimed. Looking over at his mentor, Emerick watched as Martin gave him a wry grin. “Nice one, Geoff,” he said. For the new balance engineer on his first day on the job, it was a bravura moment. “For someone not prone to paying compliments,” Geoff later wrote, “that was high praise indeed. For the first time that day, the butterflies in my midsection stopped fluttering.”5

  But as it turned out, the best was yet to come. As John joined the others in the control room to listen to the playback, he could barely contain his exuberance. “That is bloody marvelous,” he remarked. “I say, dear boy,” John said to Geoff in a mock upper-class accent, “tell us all precisely how you accomplished that little miracle.” Geoff tried his best to explain how he had reimagined the Leslie speakers’ purpose in order to facilitate John’s request to alter his vocal, but the effort hardly mattered. When it came to technical considerations, Lennon was usually at sea. As Emerick observed, “In my experience, there are few musicians who are technically savvy—their focus is on the musical content and nothing else, which is as it should be—but Lennon was more technically challenged than most.” Already bursting with new ideas for creating unusual, avant-garde sounds, John pummeled Geoff with even greater sonic challenges. “Couldn’t we get the same effect by dangling me from a rope and swinging me around the microphone instead?” he asked, laughing uproariously at his own suggestion. “Yer daft, John, you are,” said Paul, teasing him over his outlandish suggestion. Meanwhile, back in the control room, Geoff could see George Martin cheerfully shaking his head in bemusement “like a schoolteacher enjoying the naïveté of one of his young charges.”6

  Amazingly, with Geoff occupying the second chair, George had overseen an incredible sonic discovery—and during their very first night back in the studio, no less. Perhaps the Beatles didn’t have to go to America after all in order to land the “specialist” recording engineer of Harrison’s dreams. Emerick had been right there all along—almost since the very day the bandmates first arrived at Abbey Road themselves. And as events would shortly prove, the Beatles and their new production team were only just getting started. By the time that they finished up work that evening, George and the Beatles had captured three takes of “Mark I.” If there had been a turning point for the creative artistry that they had been working toward for just four short years, this was it. Nearly thirty years later—while listening to the song with Martin sitting at the mixing desk—Harrison and McCartney couldn’t hold back their sense of reverence for what had occurred that night so long ago. “Ah, now we’re talking!” said Harrison, as the tamboura’s ominous drone materialized out of the ether. “We’re talking serious music now,” McCartney added. And it was the dawn of an incredibly serious and artful music indeed. “Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream.” George and the Beatles were preparing to float downstream on the shoulders of their own new musical direction. The same folks who had catalyzed the British Invasion sound were now on the verge of something new and different—and, for the most part, it certainly wasn’t rhythm and blues, which had been done before and widely by practitioners across the pop-music landscape.7

  But as it turned out, George and the bandmates weren’t the only people inspired by their recent musical and artistic leaps. In addition to Geof
f Emerick, who was determined to earn his place in the balance engineer’s chair in spite of his tender years, Ken Townsend had often heard Lennon complaining about the awkwardness and tedium of having to double-track his vocals by singing along with himself, as he had done most recently with “Mark I.” Martin would often ask the Beatles to double-track their vocals in order to imbue their performances with more warmth and power, as they did to great effect with such earlier songs as McCartney’s “All My Loving” and Lennon’s “This Boy.” As Townsend later recalled, “They would relate what sounds they wanted and we then had to go away and come back with a solution.” For the Beatles—Lennon especially—double-tracking was, according to Townsend, “quite a laborious process, and they soon got fed up with it. So after one particularly trying nighttime session doing just that, I was driving home and I suddenly had an idea.”8

  Once he had perfected it, Townsend’s innovation would have far-reaching implications—not just for Martin and the Beatles but for the whole of the recording industry. Townsend’s resulting process, which balance engineer Stuart Eltham would dub as artificial double-tracking or ADT for short, involved taking the recording signal from the tape machine’s playback head and recording it onto a second tape machine outfitted with a variable oscillator, a device that works by creating a rhythmic pulse. This pulsating sweep allows the recording speed to be altered before being fed back into the first tape machine, where it is merged with the original recording signal. Mark Lewisohn offers a useful metaphor for understanding the manner in which ADT operates: “In photography, the placement of a negative directly over another does not alter the image. The two become one. But move one slightly and the image widens. ADT does this with tape. One voice laid perfectly on top of another produces one image. But move the second voice by just a few milliseconds, and two separate images emerge.” Better still, the deployment of ADT meant that studio personnel like Martin could save a track for other purposes, which, in the four-track world of EMI Studios in 1966, was of considerable advantage. Townsend’s ingenious design meant that ADT’s users could control the level of oscillation, which afforded balance engineers like Emerick the ability to create different kinds of artificial sounds and phasing effects that were not previously in the realm of possibility.9

  Martin and the Beatles were ecstatic over Townsend’s invention. Even Harrison got into the act, proclaiming that Townsend should receive a medal for his invention. Years later, his words would ring true after the EMI engineer—and later studio head—earned an MBE, the same award that the queen had bestowed upon the Beatles back in 1965. As for Lennon, ADT proved to be a turning point for the singer. According to Phil McDonald, “After Ken invented ADT, John used to say, ‘Well, I’ve sung it once, lads, just track it for me.’” While Lennon pointedly eschewed learning about recording technology, he couldn’t resist asking Martin about the inner workings of Townsend’s innovation. As George later recalled, “I knew he’d never understand it, so I said ‘Now listen, it’s very simple. We take the original image and, we split it through a double vibrocated sploshing flange with double negative feedback.’” Picking up on the producer’s tongue-in-cheek explanation, John replied, “You’re pulling my leg, aren’t you?” Not missing a beat, George said, “Well, let’s flange it and see. From that moment on, whenever he wanted ADT, he would ask for his voice to be flanged, or call out for ‘Ken’s flanger.’” The name stuck, and even decades later, musicians and studio personnel often refer to ADT as flanging.10

  While ADT emerged slightly too late to register any effect on the production of “Mark I,” for which Lennon double-tracked his vocal the old-fashioned, onerous way, Townsend’s process would figure prominently in Martin and Emerick’s mixing activities associated with the album. During the afternoon session on April 7, George and the group continued working on “Mark I,” adding more intentional deployment of tape loops than the day before in order to imbue the song with a stronger sense of imagery. With Paul’s collection of tape loops at the ready, Geoff guided the bandmates through the maelstrom of Paul’s assorted sonic experiments with the intention of whittling them down to a handful of sounds. As Geoff later recalled, “We played them every conceivable way: proper speed, sped up, slowed down, backwards, forwards. Every now and then, one of the Beatles would shout, ‘That’s a good one,’ as we played through the lot.” Eventually, the Beatles and their production team had selected five tape loops for deployment in “Mark I.” Musicologist Ian MacDonald has helpfully identified the tape loops as follows:

  1. A recording of McCartney’s laughter, sped up to resemble the sound of a seagull (0:07)

  2. An orchestral chord of B flat major (0:19)

  3. A Mellotron on its flute setting (0:22)

  4. A Mellotron strings sound, alternating between B flat and C in 6/8 time (0:38)

  5. A sitar playing a rising scalar phrase, recorded with heavy saturation and sped up (0:56)

  With John’s original vision for “Mark I” finally beginning to take shape, George and the bandmates were faced with another dilemma. As Geoff remembered, “The problem was that we had only one extra tape machine. Fortunately, there were plenty of other machines in the Abbey Road complex, all interconnected via wiring in the walls, and all the other studios just happened to be empty that afternoon.” To George’s mind, the only solution was to conduct a “live mix,” which necessitated rounding up nearly all of the studio personnel to get the job done. As Geoff recalled, “What followed next was a scene that could have come out of a science fiction movie—or a Monty Python sketch. Every tape machine in every studio was commandeered and every available EMI employee was given the task of holding a pencil or drinking glass to give the loops the proper tensioning. In many instances, this meant they had to be standing out in the hallway, looking quite sheepish. Most of those people didn’t have a clue what we were doing; they probably thought we were daft. They certainly weren’t pop people, and they weren’t that young either. Add in the fact that all of the technical staff were required to wear white lab coats, and the whole thing became totally surreal.”11

  As EMI Studios personnel busied themselves with keeping the tape loops taut, George and Geoff worked in the control room, hunching over the recording console as the Beatles shouted out instructions over their shoulders—“Let’s have that seagull sound now!” George and Geoff hurriedly raised and lowered the faders on the desk as the sound of the Beatles’ directions filled up the control room. “With each fader carrying a different loop,” Geoff recalled, “the mixing desk acted like a synthesizer, and we played it like a musical instrument, too, carefully overdubbing textures to the prerecorded backing track.” With the track nearly complete, Harrison suggested the idea of beginning the song with the sound of his tamboura. As Geoff later wrote, “George Harrison had said that the tamboura drone would be the perfect complement to John’s song, and he was right. Having seen how well Paul’s loops had worked, George wanted to contribute one of his own, so I recorded him playing a single note on the huge instrument—again using a close-miking technique—and turned it into a loop. It ended up becoming the sound that opens the track.”12

  By this juncture, nearly all of the available tracks had been filled, with the tape loops being relegated to track two of “Mark I.” For the time being, track three would remain available for further adornment, and for just a little while longer, the song would be known among the Beatles’ brain trust by its working title. But for his part, Martin recognized that this unusual recording represented a clear departure for himself and the Beatles in more ways than one. Sure, it was innovative in terms of its experimental nature. But as Martin later observed, it “was a weird track, because once we’d made it we could never reproduce it.” Given the way in which the tape loops had been selected and assembled, with most of the personnel at Abbey Road in on the action, Martin had succeeded in creating a unique artifact. “The mix we did then was a random thing that could never be done again,” he remarked. “Nobody else was
doing records like that at that time—not as far as I knew.” Even better still, “Mark I” represented a pivotal moment in the musical evolution that George and the bandmates shared together—and the experience had left the producer reveling in a state of liberation unlike anything else he had known during his many years in the record business. “As the Beatles began kicking over the traces of popular musical conventions,” he later wrote, “it gave me the freedom to do more of what I enjoyed: experimenting, building sound pictures, creating a whole atmosphere for a song, all the things I’d always loved doing anyway. It was a very happy marriage. I didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission: that was the wonderful thing, that autonomy, that power. As long as the five of us agreed, everyone else could go hang!”13

  If the Beatles’ latest long-player had a Motown, rhythm-and-blues-tinged moment, it was clearly in evidence with “Got to Get You into My Life,” which George and the bandmates began recording that same evening. A brand-new McCartney composition ostensibly about the first flush of romantic love—but really concerning Paul’s incipient, unquenchable passion for marijuana—“Got to Get You into My Life” began as an acoustic number. And at first, the song had nothing in common with the rhythm-and-blues sound for which the Beatles had openly hungered only a few weeks earlier. Take one featured a one-note introductory piece played by Martin on the Hammond organ, with Starr providing a hi-hat accompaniment. By take five, McCartney had added lead vocals against his acoustic rhythm track, with Lennon and Harrison layering spirited backing vocals across the refrain. The next day, Friday, April 8, George and the Beatles resumed work on “Got to Get You into My Life”—only this time they were back in the familiar confines of Number 2, the Abbey Road studio from whence they had recorded the balance of their work since first meeting George back in June 1962. As they continued work on Paul’s song, George and the bandmates decided to remake “Got to Get You into My Life.” They recorded a basic rhythm track consisting of McCartney’s bass and Starr’s drums, along with two fuzz guitars, played by Harrison and Lennon, respectively, on track two. Track three included a second bass guitar, with track four featuring McCartney’s guide vocal. And with that, they would abandon work on “Got to Get You into My Life,” save for the addition of a slight bit of guitar ornamentation the following week, until May 18, when the song would be entirely remade yet again.