The rest of the April 20 session was devoted to a standout composition from Harrison titled “Taxman.” Even still, the derivative nature of the Beatles’ work on this particular Wednesday was continued with “Taxman,” which sported a basic rhythm that had been inspired by the “Batman Theme,” a surf music ditty that had been popularized by the American television show starring Adam West and Burt Ward and had ascended the UK charts that same spring. “Batman Theme” had proven to be remarkably influential among British music circles—the Who would release a cover version on their Ready Steady Who EP later that year. Fortunately, the interconnections between “Taxman” and the “Batman Theme” would end with the songs’ rhythm tracks. As it happened, “Taxman” had been inspired by Harrison’s disgust over the exorbitant British tax code—especially the “supertax” to which high earners such as the Beatles were subjected. During a February 1966 interview with Maureen Cleave, Harrison likened Prime Minister Harold Wilson to the Sheriff of Nottingham, who became infamous in the legend of Robin Hood for his insatiable appetite for taxing England’s citizenry into oblivion. “There he goes,” Harrison remarked to Cleave, “Taking all the money and then moaning about deficits here, deficits there—always moaning about deficits.” As the song evolved, Lennon had thrown in a lyric or two to heighten the song’s acerbic wit. Martin supervised four takes of “Taxman” as the Beatles attempted to capture the basic rhythm track, which consisted of Harrison and Lennon’s guitars, McCartney’s bass, and Starr’s drums. After the fourth take had been concluded, Martin and the group devolved into a lengthy discussion about the song’s structure.16
The next session began on Thursday afternoon, when George and the Beatles continued working on “Taxman,” which they remade across eleven takes in a session that sprawled into the wee hours of the next morning. The first ten takes were devoted solely to perfecting the song’s intricate rhythm track, which reprised the instrumentation from the previous session. Martin supervised several overdubs, including Harrison’s two lead vocal tracks, with harmonies from Lennon and McCartney, as well as Starr’s tambourine part. At this point, the song included two vocal features that would later be excised, including Lennon and McCartney’s “anybody got a bit of money” falsetto harmony, as well as a coda in which the bandmates sang “Taxman!” by parroting the conclusion of the “Batman Theme.” In one of the session’s highlights, McCartney performed a spectacular lead guitar solo, complete with a raga-like cadence. As Harrison remarked, “I was pleased to have him play that bit on ‘Taxman.’ If you notice, he did a little Indian bit on it for me.” Martin would later reprise McCartney’s blistering guitar part by flying the tape into the fade-out. This session also witnessed McCartney lazily counting off the song, an element that Martin would later deploy as an ironic introduction to the still-untitled long-player.17
On Friday, April 22, Martin and the Beatles brought two key tracks to fruition, including “Taxman,” for which Lennon and McCartney fashioned a new harmony referring to the politicians of the day—“Ha, ha, Mister Wilson, ha, ha, Mister Heath”—in keeping with Harrison’s original vision for the composition. Starr also superimposed a cowbell part onto the song. Up next was Lennon’s “Mark I,” which was finally completed after a number of adornments, including organ, tambourine, and piano overdubs on track three. Although ADT was available at this point, Lennon opted to manually double-track his voice in order to improve his lead vocal during the song’s early verses, which he found to be too “thin sounding.” At one juncture, McCartney added a backward guitar solo, which Martin and Emerick appended to the track by turning the tape around during the recording. At some point over the next few weeks, John would finally drop “Mark I” as the song’s title, adopting a non sequitur from Ringo instead. The new title found its origins in a February 1964 BBC interview at London Airport in which Ringo had been asked about the notorious incident at the British embassy in Washington, DC, in which a lock of hair had been snipped from his scalp. “What happened, exactly?” David Coleman, the interviewer, asked. “I don’t know,” Ringo replied. “I was just doing an interview. Like I am now! I was talking away and—there it goes! I looked round and there were about 400 people, smiling. You can’t blame anyone. I mean—what can you say?” At that point, John asked, “Well, what can you say?” to which Ringo answered, “Tomorrow never knows.” Although he laughed uproariously at the time, Lennon must have stowed the line away in his memory banks for safekeeping, only to resurrect it as the title of what would become—for a time, at least—Martin and the Beatles’ most outlandish and groundbreaking recording.18
On Tuesday, April 26, the Beatles’ impressive fervor to complete their new album continued unabated, as they returned from the long weekend to remake “And Your Bird Can Sing.” For George, the week would begin with a pair of sessions in which they tidied up a pair of tracks they had begun earlier in the month, only to end with a moment of pure artistry for the Beatles’ producer akin to creating the orchestration for “Yesterday” or the windup piano solo for “In My Life.” But first, George and the bandmates had their sights set on completing “And Your Bird Can Sing.” As the lengthy session began that afternoon, it was clear from the start that the Byrds-influenced composition from the week before had been scuttled in favor of a guitar-laden rock fusion. Lennon was no less playful—“Okay, boys, quite brisk, moderato, foxtrot!” he announced as the session commenced—but he was clearly ready to get down to business. As “And Your Bird Can Sing” progressed over the next eleven takes, the composition was elevated to the key of E and transformed into a banquet of electric guitars, highlighted by a dual guitar solo from McCartney and Harrison on their Epiphone Casinos. As McCartney later recalled, “We wrote [the duet] at the session and learned it on the spot—but it was thought out. George [Harrison] learned it, then I learned the harmony to it, then we sat and played it.” After take ten had been selected as the best, Lennon overdubbed his lead vocal, with McCartney and Harrison providing harmonies. The voices were later treated with ADT during the remixing phase. While take ten captured their fancy, they also liked the coda for take six, which featured a splendid bass run from McCartney. Emerick dutifully edited the bass flutter onto take ten in postproduction.19
The next evening, April 27, Martin and his production team carried out a mono mixing session for “Taxman,” “And Your Bird Can Sing,” and the track that would come to be known as “Tomorrow Never Knows.” Only this time, they were joined by the bandmates themselves, who were beginning to take a greater interest in the presentation of their work. As Phil McDonald later recalled, “They found that they could get more control of the sound that they wanted by actually being there for a mix.” While eleven mixes were completed that evening, none would make it onto the new long-player—underscoring the increasing oversight and general artistic concern that the bandmates dedicated to their art. As it happened, the Beatles wouldn’t begin recording that day until 11:30 PM, when they began working on a new Lennon composition in Studio 3—a song devoted to the act of sleeping, one of John’s favorite pastimes. Maureen Cleave, the journalist from the London Evening Standard who had recently conducted an exposé devoted to all four Beatles, called him “possibly the laziest man in Britain.” The songwriter echoed these words in “I’m Only Sleeping,” singing “Everybody seems to think I’m lazy / I don’t mind; I think they’re crazy.” As was their practice, Martin and the bandmates spent the lion’s share of the session, which ran until three in the morning, refining the basic rhythm track, which featured Lennon and Harrison strumming their acoustic guitars, McCartney on bass, and Starr on drums. With the tape running fast in the spirit of “Rain,” the Beatles recorded eleven takes, the last of which was noted as being the best. The manipulation of tape speed afforded “I’m Only Sleeping” with a lethargic, dreamlike quality upon playback, an effect that paralleled the mood of the song to a tee.20
For the time being, George and the Beatles would put “I’m Only Sleeping” aside to concen
trate on “Eleanor Rigby,” the composition that had emerged after Paul’s visit to Bristol earlier in the year. On Thursday, April 28, George would supervise a session that saw the bandmates—in this instance, John and Paul—in the Studio 2 control room, while he toiled down below conducting a double string quartet. For George, “Eleanor Rigby” represented an opportunity to display the skills that he had learned back at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama back in the late 1940s, as well as during more than a decade as a professional A&R man. In moments such as these, the Beatles afforded him with a wide berth to show off his expertise. In this case, George pulled off one of the finest moments across his incredible career as he executed his superb score for “Eleanor Rigby” that evening at EMI Studios. Years later, he would recall that
my score for “Eleanor Rigby” was influenced by Bernard Hermann’s for the film Fahrenheit 451. Bernard Hermann was the favored composer for Alfred Hitchcock. He’s since been revered for his work. His scoring on Fahrenheit 451 used strings a great deal and also electronics, and I did notice in particular that the strings that he wrote were the very opposite of syrupy. They were jagged, spiky, very menacing. Psycho was similar. That kind of short attack that you get on his strings was very useful on “Eleanor Rigby.” It had to be very marcato; it had to be an absolutely tight rhythm, which strings aren’t noted for.
The score that George composed for “Eleanor Rigby” proved to be the epitome of marcato, which denotes music being played with great emphasis. And his orchestration for McCartney’s tale about a lonely, dejected spinster was menacing and emphatic indeed. But Martin would later admit that he had been mistaken about Fahrenheit 451’s influence. François Truffaut’s brilliant adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel wouldn’t premiere until the fall of 1966. Hermann’s score for Hitchcock’s Psycho was the more likely influence, having been in the cultural main since 1960. Its penetrating, staccato movements bear more than a passing resemblance to Martin’s vision for “Eleanor Rigby,” a composition that, as with Hermann’s finest work, was truly the “opposite of syrupy.”21
Recorded in its entirety with an octet of studio musicians during the April 28 session, Martin’s magnificent arrangement for “Eleanor Rigby” had been brewing over the past several weeks along with the song’s memorable lyrics about the corrosive power of loneliness. McCartney and Lennon had refined the lyrics at a recent writing session, also attended by Lennon’s boyhood friend Pete Shotton, at the Beatle’s Weybridge estate. And there would be more refinements yet to come in that regard. When it came to scoring “Eleanor Rigby,” Martin not only drew upon Hermann’s musical influence but upon McCartney’s own vision for the song, which had been inspired by Antonio Vivaldi. Jane Asher had recently introduced McCartney to the work of the Venetian composer by way of The Four Seasons, Vivaldi’s famous series of violin concertos. McCartney had begun the composition while vamping on an E minor chord in the basement music room at the Asher residence, later recording a demo version of the song at a Montagu Square studio. In this fashion, Paul captured his vision for the song’s musical direction. When it came time for Martin to translate McCartney’s vision onto the page, the songwriter only offered a single request: “I want the strings to sound really biting.” As McCartney later recalled, “I thought of the backing, but it was George Martin who finished it off. I just go bash, bash on the piano. He knows what I mean.” Did he ever.22
George later recalled that the composition process for his score for “Eleanor Rigby” ensued after “Paul came round to my flat one day, and he played the piano and I played the piano.” Deftly scored around a series of E minor and C chords, Martin’s arrangement not only wore its Hermann antecedents on its sleeve but also worked in unison with McCartney’s lyrics to establish one of the most vivid musical tapestries in the Beatles’ canon. Working through Laurie Gold, EMI’s session organizer, Martin arranged for several of London’s top chamber musicians to join him at Abbey Road. The octet included violists John Underwood and Steve Shingles; cellists Derek Simpson and Norman Jones; and violinists Jürgen Hess, Tony Gilbert, John Sharpe, and Sid Sax. For their part, Gilbert and Sax were veteran Beatles studio musicians, having performed on Martin’s groundbreaking score for “Yesterday.” As classical players at the top of their profession, the studio musicians were only vaguely familiar with the Beatles. But they were well acquainted with Martin—if only by reputation. London’s premier session men had the greatest respect for George. They knew that sessions would start on time, be professional, and be well organized. With Lennon and McCartney up in the Studio 2 control room, the April 28 session was no different. In historian Steve Turner’s account of the octet’s performance, which typified the manner in which professional studio musicians approached such sessions during that era, “the musicians sat near each other, as they would have done for a concert, read the music that was on their music stands (and which didn’t seem exceptional to them), and played when asked to. They weren’t prepared by listening to a demo tape beforehand, and although they were always welcome to go to the control room, none of them were sufficiently interested to stay on to hear a playback.” Over the next three hours, the octet performed fourteen takes of the score under Martin’s direction.23
For the most part, the session was routine for Martin and the studio musicians alike. The key issue of the afternoon, which emerged between the first and second takes of the musicians’ performance, was whether or not they should play the musical accompaniment to “Eleanor Rigby” with vibrato. This was no minor consideration. The use of vibrato would call to mind the sound of Annunzio Mantovani, the Anglo-Italian purveyor of light orchestral entertainment and a forerunner of Muzak (or elevator music). Known for his overdone cascading strings, Mantovani’s compositions sold handsomely throughout the 1950s, but by the following decade, his music had become increasingly associated with an ersatz, easy-listening sound. For the likes of Lennon and McCartney, who had been feted in Western media of all stripes, sounding even remotely like Mantovani would have been strictly verboten.
For his part, Martin had a soft spot for the Mantovanis and Percy Faiths of his day. As Geoff later recalled, Paul in particular was fearful that the score would be “too cloying, too ‘Mancini,’” in reference to the popular American composer of that era. So when it came to the score for “Eleanor Rigby,” John and Paul and the members of the octet were squarely on the same page, as the studio musicians opted to dispense with vibrato in favor of a more classically oriented sound. Their impulse made all of the difference, bringing Martin’s arrangement into stark relief, imbuing his score with darkening shades of fear and uncertainty—the perfect palette for McCartney’s tale about a reclusive spinster and the doom that awaits her at the song’s despairing conclusion, the dispiriting place where “no one was saved.” But in the end, it was Martin who had the last laugh. While McCartney held deep suspicions about vibrato as being emblematic of the BBC’s light program, Martin decided to test the younger man’s resolve, instructing the musicians at one point to play two quick versions of the score—one with vibrato and the other without. “Can you hear the difference?” George called up to Paul in the control room. “Er, not much,” the Beatle sheepishly admitted.24
While the musicians clearly held great respect for Martin, Emerick had a very different experience altogether in his dealings with London’s finest string players. As the balance engineer, Emerick was responsible for miking the instruments. He was particularly concerned with capturing the “biting” sound that McCartney envisioned for “Eleanor Rigby.” As Geoff later recalled, “String quartets were traditionally recorded with just one or two microphones, placed high, several feet up in the air so that the sound of the bows scraping couldn’t be heard. But with Paul’s directive in mind, I decided to close-mic the instruments, which was a new concept. The musicians were horrified! One of them gave me a look of disdain, rolled his eyes to the ceiling, and said under his breath, ‘You can’t do that, you know.’” With his confiden
ce shaken and beginning to second-guess himself, Geoff pushed forward, placing the mics only an inch or so away from each instrument in order to record the sound that Paul desired. “It was a fine line,” Geoff reasoned. “I didn’t want to make the musicians so uncomfortable that they couldn’t give their best performance, but my job was to achieve what Paul wanted. That was the sound he liked, and so that was the miking we used, despite the string players’ unhappiness. To some degree, I could understand why they were so upset: they were scared of playing a bum note, and being under a microscope like that meant that any discrepancy in their playing was going to be magnified.”25
But things didn’t end there. As the musicians worked through successive takes of Martin’s score, Emerick had to contend with the players continually shifting their chairs backward in order to ease away from the microphones. He could literally hear their chairs scraping from his place up in the booth above Studio 2. Between each take, Geoff was forced to leave the control room in order to move the mics closer to the instruments. “It was comic, really,” Geoff later recalled. George finally decided to end the charade, instructing the musicians over the talkback to stop moving their chairs. As it was, the players couldn’t wait to leave the studio, not even bothering to stick around to listen to the playback. But it hardly mattered. Martin and Emerick—not to mention Lennon and McCartney—were thrilled by the result. As with so many instances across the sessions devoted to the Beatles’ latest long-player, recording Martin’s score for “Eleanor Rigby” had found the band’s production team working together to create new, uncharted vistas of sound in popular music.26
Sound Pictures Page 9
