Sound Pictures

by Kenneth Womack

  Years later, Shingles would remember things differently about his session work that day. Perhaps revealing a considerable degree of sour grapes, the viola player would later recall that “I got about £5” for a one-time session fee when “Eleanor Rigby” went on to earn “billions of pounds. And like idiots we gave them all our ideas for free.” Shingles’s remarks are problematic for a number of reasons. First, the going rate for the standard Musicians’ Union session fee during that era was nine pounds, suggesting that Shingles was clearly underpaid by EMI. Second, the idea that the musicians’ ideation was behind Martin’s innovative score is difficult to believe, given the level of care and control that Martin exerted over his Beatles productions. As Julian Lloyd Webber later remarked, “People like Bobby Vee used cellos and Adam Faith had those plucked strings but cellos hadn’t been used really effectively on rock ’n’ roll records until the Beatles. George Martin was a very good arranger who knew what he was doing and he loved the sound of the cello. They are used beautifully on ‘Yesterday’ and especially ‘Eleanor Rigby.’”27

  After the players took their leave, Martin and Emerick had some tidying up to carry out before the next session. The octet had been recorded across all four tracks, with two instruments relegated to each track. Having chosen take fourteen as the best of the lot, they mixed down the recording, with the reduction being duly numbered as take fifteen. In so doing, they left space for overdubbing the vocals onto “Eleanor Rigby.” On Friday, April 29, Martin and the Beatles reconvened in Studio 3 to continue working on McCartney’s composition. During yet another session that began in the late afternoon and ranged into the wee hours of the next morning, the Beatles made great strides in bringing “Eleanor Rigby” and “I’m Only Sleeping” to fruition. Up first was McCartney’s vocal, which was overdubbed onto Martin’s string arrangement, with Harrison and Lennon providing the song’s memorable refrain, “Ah, look at all the lonely people.” At this point, McCartney’s lead vocal was treated with ADT, three mono remixes were carried out (with the third being selected as the best), and the recording for “Eleanor Rigby” seemed to be complete—if only for the time being.

  At this juncture, the Beatles turned back to Lennon’s “I’m Only Sleeping,” which they remade entirely. With the tape running, they rehearsed a new version of the song with a basic track featuring drums, vibraphone, and acoustic guitar. Only one take was seen through to completion that evening. Composed of acoustic guitars and percussion, this version of “I’m Only Sleeping” featured a vocal duet from Lennon and McCartney. As with the session associated with the song two days earlier, the vocals were recorded with the tape machine running fast and played back a half step lower in terms of pitch. The remake featured a strong resemblance to “Daydream,” a recent hit by the Lovin’ Spoonful, a band that Lennon and Harrison had seen in concert in mid-April. After comparing their efforts this evening with the version of “I’m Only Sleeping” that they recorded on April 27, George and the Beatles clearly preferred the earlier version, and the remake was subsequently abandoned.

  And with that, George and the Beatles took a much-needed, nearly weeklong break from working on Rubber Soul’s follow-up, the still-unnamed long-player that had already witnessed the bandmates, with vital technical assistance from Geoff, exploring more sonic frontiers than all of their previous work combined. Their new single, “Paperback Writer” backed with “Rain,” was mixed and ready for release, promising to pick up where “Day Tripper” backed with “We Can Work It Out” had left off the previous December. Even the most casual of listeners would be able to glean the artistic trajectory that the Beatles were now daring to travel. In a hair over three weeks, they had managed to eclipse their own expectations, which had already proven to be mighty ambitious indeed. For his part, McCartney wore his determination on his sleeve, remarking that this new batch of recordings had been “purposely composed to sound unusual. They are sounds that nobody else has done yet. I mean, nobody ever.” Leave it to Harrison to strike more measured tones about their accomplishments at roughly the midpoint of their latest project. “Musically we’re only just starting,” he remarked. “We’ve realized for ourselves that as far as recording is concerned most of the things that recording men have said were impossible for 39 years are in fact very possible. In the past, we’ve thought that the recording people knew what they were talking about. We believed them when they said we couldn’t do this, or we couldn’t do that. Now we know we can, and it’s opening up a wide new field for us.” As with McCartney, Harrison was sanguine enough to realize that it was their music that was blowing open the doors of artistic change, but at the same time the bandmates understood intuitively that it was Martin and Emerick who were the ones who were prying open the locks and recasting them for a new musical age.28

  With their work in the studio having been completed for the month of April, a period in which they had committed to tape a spate of groundbreaking recordings, there was still plenty of mystery in the air. How would they go about arranging such a motley assortment of recordings into a cohesive whole? Where Rubber Soul had a folk-rock flavor that dominated the fall 1965 sessions, this new LP had been all over the place as the Beatles tried on a wide range of musical styles and genres—from brash psychedelia and a string octet to Indian music and bass-heavy rock confections. All of which raised the question: What would they call this revolutionary long-player anyway? How do you begin to name something that intentionally broaches the unnamable?

  And to think that it had all started with the idea of making an honest-to-goodness American rhythm-and-blues album in Memphis.

  5

  Collective Madness

  * * *

  FOR THE BEATLES, May 1966 began with a milestone—although nobody could have possibly known it at the time. For the fourth year in a row, they appeared at the annual New Musical Express Poll Winners’ Concert. When they took the stage on May 1, the Beatles topped a roster of all-stars that included the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Yardbirds, the Spencer Davis Group (featuring Stevie Winwood), the Small Faces, Roy Orbison, and Cliff Richard and the Shadows, the act that the Fab Four had supplanted as England’s greatest hitmakers only a few years earlier. Cliff Richard was also the mainstay of producer Norrie Paramor, Martin’s one-time rival at EMI, as well as one of the driving forces behind his interest in landing a beat group of his own.

  But on May 1, the Beatles—especially Lennon—were beside themselves. Already prisoners of their fame, they were forced to arrive at the venue, Wembley’s Empire Pool, by entering the premises via the service entrance. Wearing white aprons and chefs’ toques, they made their way into the venue disguised as culinary staff. But the real trouble was brewing backstage. With the Stones knocking out numbers like “The Last Time,” “Play with Fire,” and “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” the bandmates gathered up their instruments and prepared to go onstage. And that’s when NME’s publisher Maurice Kinn informed Lennon that the Beatles wouldn’t be going on until after the awards ceremony. For John, these were fighting words. He expected his band to take the stage immediately after the Rolling Stones. The Beatles were England’s reigning superstars—the world’s, really—and there was no way they would be playing second fiddle to the Stones. “We’re not waiting,” Lennon barked. “We’re going on now.” Kinn told Lennon that he was powerless to accede to the Beatle’s wishes, having made a prior agreement with Andrew Loog Oldham, the Stones’ manager. For a moment, Lennon threatened that the Beatles wouldn’t play at all, but Kinn called his bluff, warning him that he would be forced to announce that the band had cancelled their appearance in front of ten thousand rowdy fans. Brian Epstein would be responsible for any ensuing damages to the Empire Pool, while also being vulnerable to NME for breach of contract. Fine, Brian countered, but ABC-TV would not be allowed to film the Beatles’ set following the awards ceremony. Watching the scene unfold before him, Loog Oldham, who had once worked at NEMS, was surprised to observe Epstein giving in so easily to
Kinn. Worse yet, he seemed to have lost his grip on the bandmates, who had formerly accepted their manager’s professional judgment without fail.1

  For his part, Lennon wasn’t even remotely pacified by Epstein’s attempt at détente. “You can’t do this to us,” Lennon roared at Kinn. “We will never appear on one of your shows ever again.” His words would prove to be very prophetic indeed. After the Stones finished their set, the Beatles, clad in dark suits and black turtlenecks, clambered onstage to accept their awards from American television star Clint Walker. Wearing dark sunglasses, Lennon took home the trophy for Great Britain’s top vocal personality. Meanwhile, the band was honored as the world’s top vocal group. When the awards ceremony concluded, the Beatles turned in a blistering set, clearly having left the backstage acrimony behind them. The oldest number in the set was 1964’s “I Feel Fine,” which they followed with “Nowhere Man,” “Day Tripper,” “If I Needed Someone,” and “I’m Down”—powerful evidence of how far they’d come since the days of “Please Please Me” and “She Loves You.” But it was hardly lost on the Beatles that, their latest strides in the studio notwithstanding, the lion’s share of their recent work could not be reproduced on the stage given its complexity, as well as contemporary limitations related to the equipment and technology of the day. After they completed their fifteen-minute set, the bandmates loped off of the stage, leaving ten thousand screaming fans in their wake, as well as their life as a working rock ’n’ roll band in their home country. Not only would the Beatles never play another show for Kinn, but they would never perform again before a paying audience in the United Kingdom.2

  Martin took advantage of the break in the Beatles’ recording schedule to attend to neglected AIR business that had been stacking up while he attended to the most valuable act in his stable—in truth, the most valuable act in anyone’s stable. In early 1966, Martin had been grooming a new act, Liverpool’s the Scaffold, for their recording debut. The group, which was primarily pop musical in style, also dabbled in comedy and poetry—a bizarre admixture of genre bending that was well ahead of its time. The Scaffold, who drew their name from the UK title of the Louis Malle film Lift to the Scaffold, was led by Mike McGear—the stage name for one Peter Michael McCartney, the younger brother of one of the principal songwriters in one of Martin’s other bands. “We were satirists,” McGear later remarked. “Our main thing was to comment on life. A ladies’ barber, a Post Office engineer, and an English teacher, jobs for life.” But they were also satirists in need of spectators with whom they could share their peculiar brand of humor. “We realized that when comedy got to a wider audience, it would be good to include music,” said McGear. “We couldn’t do rock ’n’ roll because we couldn’t sing or play instruments.” But in contrast with his deal with the Beatles, Martin enjoyed a larger percentage of any potential success that the Scaffold would accrue, given his existing agreement with the EMI Group, which dictated that EMI had the right of first refusal on any of AIR’s productions. If EMI opted to release the recordings, AIR would receive a royalty of 7 percent of the product’s retail price. When it came to AIR’s production of existing EMI artists, George and his partners, including former Decca A&R man Peter Sullivan and fellow EMI refugee John Burgess, would receive a producer’s royalty amounting to 2 percent of the retail price. When it came to the Beatles, EMI was even less generous, reasoning that the band had been discovered and established via the parent company’s investment. By way of his exit agreement with EMI, Martin’s AIR productions of Beatles records entitled him to just 1 percent of the wholesale price, which amounted to 0.5 percent retail in the UK marketplace.3

  With the Scaffold, McGear was joined by Roger McGough, who had previously studied French and geography at the University of Hull, where he began to pursue a life in poetry. McGough settled in Merseyside in the early 1960s, where he found work as a French teacher. At that juncture, he began working with John Gorman, a local telecommunications engineer, to organize regional arts events—namely, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. It was at Gorman’s instigation that the Scaffold was founded. At the time, McGear had been working as an apprentice hairdresser. He had originally considered “Mike Blank” as his nom de plume in order to avoid any suggestion that he was trading on his famous brother’s surname, but he adopted the root word gear instead so as to draw upon its Scouser connotations of being “fab” or “cool.” At Martin’s encouragement, they had signed with Parlophone, the producer’s old label. As McGear—who would return to using his original surname in the 1970s—later remarked, “George Martin was the Scaffold’s producer, not because of my brother and his chums, but because of his work with Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan. George had recorded Songs for Swingin’ Sellers, and Paul and I had fallen about laughing to those nice little sketches.” With Martin on their team, the Scaffold naturally gravitated toward lobbying for Epstein to be their manager, given the long string of successes that the two men had enjoyed together. “Now that we were involved with George Martin and EMI,” McGear later recalled, “we went to Brian Epstein and said, ‘You’ve got all the pop groups, but can you do a theatre comedy group?’ He goes, ‘My dear boy!’—cause he was a failed actor—‘Of course. We’d love to have you aboard.’ So we thought, with his enormous NEMS agency, we had nothing to lose.”4

  By the time that they had started working in the studio with Martin, the Scaffold had a number of “nice little sketches” ready for their new producer’s consideration. Chief among them were “2 Days Monday,” for which Martin was quite partial, and “3 Blind Jellyfish.” As McGear had observed, the producer had a penchant for comedy recordings that dated well back to the 1950s, and they were eager to try their hands at going national. Martin’s score for “2 Days Monday,” which he had selected as the A-side of the band’s first single, began with the Scaffold’s singers rotating their vocal parts against a solo tuba. As the song proceeded, Martin’s score augmented its orchestration with violin and flute arrangements. A novelty song about the mundane and arbitrary nature of human existence, “2 Days Monday” was similar in structure to the well-known Christmas carol “A Partridge in a Pear Tree” given the Scaffold’s repeating refrains and the manner in which they double-back on themselves as the song progresses. As with its holiday antecedent, “2 Days Monday” associated different themes with each day of the week, with Monday, for instance, finding the singer glum and dejected after a carefree weekend. Each verse ends with the ironic pronouncement, “Is everybody happy? You bet your life we are!” Released in May 1966 to Martin and the band’s great excitement, “2 Days Monday” backed with “3 Blind Jellyfish” failed to make a dent in the UK charts. But in contrast with his early days with the Beatles, Martin was hardly content to record the requisite sides and exhaust the Scaffold’s contract. Believing that the Scaffold had the makings of a 1960s-era Goons, he was more than prepared to invest more time and energy into their cause. And now that he was his own boss, and not under EMI’s ever-watchful eye, he was free to pursue any act that struck his fancy.

  Meanwhile, the Beatles devoted a good portion of their break to a series of in-depth interviews with Brian Matthew, the voice of BBC Radio Two’s Saturday Club program. Knowing the bandmates’ penchant for cutting up in front of each other and landing the most sardonic punch lines possible, Matthew opted to meet with them individually in order to create an environment that would be conducive for more candid, unguarded responses. Matthew’s concept was in a similar vein to Maureen Cleave’s revealing series of interviews with the bandmates that had been published back in March in the London Evening Standard. Recorded to celebrate Saturday Club’s four hundredth episode and scheduled for a June 4 broadcast, Matthew’s interviews addressed the bandmates’ new long-player and their recent low profile after so many months and years of being front and center in terms of media saturation. Proffering questions about whether or not the Beatles intended to retire and why they were spending so much time on their new album, Matthew seemed eager to get to t
he heart of the group’s apparently shifting concerns. For his part, Harrison got right to the point, telling Matthew, “We spend more time on recording now, because we prefer recording.” Lennon echoed the quiet Beatle’s perspective, reporting, “We’ve done half an LP in the time we’d take to do a whole LP and a couple of singles. We can’t do it all y’know. But we like recording.” John made a special point of noting that the band members were showing a greater interest in the mixing process, which had previously been the exclusive purview of producers and engineers.5

  During his own sit-down with Matthew, Ringo lauded the carefree existence that he now enjoyed—a life in which he was no longer overwhelmed by nonstop touring, photo sessions, and other sundry promotional efforts. “We used to work every night, practically. We were always tired—and hungry. Now we have plenty of time off.” Matthew concluded his interviews with McCartney, who spoke at great length about his personal cultural renaissance, as well as the ways in which he was challenging himself to be less narrow-minded: “When I was in Liverpool I went once or twice to the Liverpool Playhouse, a repertory theatre there, and I wasn’t very keen on it. I used to go to see if I liked going to these plays, you know? I just never went back again. But I went when I came down to London. I went to something that wasn’t like the plays they did in repertory. So, you see some great actors acting in a great play and you think, ‘Wow! That is good.’ I was wrong to say that theatre is just rubbish.”6