Sound Pictures

by Kenneth Womack

  Not surprisingly, George and the Beatles were positively knackered the next day—so much so that the next session, on Thursday, June 2, wouldn’t begin until seven o’clock that evening. But in true Beatles style at this point, it ranged until 3:30 AM. With the month now in full swing, Martin had a looming, late-June deadline for completing the album, and the Beatles had a lengthy tour for which to prepare. It was a banner day for Harrison, who presented a third composition for inclusion on the album. For a time, the song went under the decidedly honest working title of “I Don’t Know.” But whatever it was called, the song would give the Beatles’ lead guitarist an unprecedented three new tunes on the record, demonstrating the many ways in which he had recently elevated his prowess as a working songwriter in a band that included the likes of Lennon and McCartney. Harrison understandably took heat from his friends for his lack of imagination in assigning titles to his composition. In addition to the well-named “Taxman,” his other composition on the album went under “Granny Smith.” In a moment of levity, Lennon suggested that he call the new one “Granny Smith Part Friggin’ Two!” In an instant of well-timed deadpan, Emerick suggested calling it “Laxton’s Superb,” in reference to another variety of British apple. The session commenced with five takes of the song’s basic rhythm track, which included Harrison’s lead guitar, McCartney’s piano, and Starr’s drums on a single track. Take three was selected as the best, and Harrison subsequently performed his lead vocal on the second track, with Lennon and McCartney providing harmonies on the third. The remaining track was devoted to another piano overdub from McCartney, along with Lennon on tambourine and maracas. After a tape reduction, the Beatles added handclaps to accentuate the final verse. At this juncture, Emerick observed that a very particular practice was developing with Martin in terms of recording Harrison’s songs. For Geoff, it seemed rather ironic that “George [Harrison] was being given a certain amount of time to do his tracks, whereas the others [i.e., John and Paul] could spend as long as they wanted.” Yet at the same time, “one felt under pressure when doing one of George’s songs.” It was as if Martin were unduly concerned about giving his principal and most accomplished songwriters as much space as they required to develop their ideas, yet he also recognized that Harrison was all too cognizant of his place in the pecking order. Like all great coaches, Martin didn’t want his third-string player to feel slighted at not playing at the top of his game, which was clearly on the upswing in early 1966.13

  During the Friday, June 3, session, Martin and the Beatles cleared up a number of odds and ends as the long-player began to take its final shape. First up was Harrison’s latest composition, which was still variously called both “I Don’t Know” and “Laxton’s Superb” at this point. McCartney overdubbed a bass guitar part, and then Martin and his production team carried out four remixes, choosing take one as the best of the lot. With Harrison’s song complete, they turned to “Yellow Submarine,” for which a mono mix was prepared. At this juncture, they discarded Ringo’s “Land O’Groats” monologue for good.

  While Martin and the band took a much-deserved weekend break, their work was very much in the news. On June 3, the first advertisement for the upcoming single, “Paperback Writer” backed with “Rain,” appeared in NME. Of particular note was the ad’s illustration, a photograph of the bandmates donning white lab coats and surrounded by dismembered doll parts and slabs of raw meat. The Beatles had posed for the photo back on March 25 at Robert Whitaker’s Chelsea studio. Titled by the photographer A Somnambulant Adventure, Whitaker’s vision was to create a work of surreal pop art, as well as a satirical, pictorial critique of the group’s overwhelming international fame. The next day, Saturday, June 4, saw the broadcast of the bandmates’ BBC interviews with Brian Matthew, as well as the opening of the Indica Gallery’s first official art exhibition. The gallery, like Whitaker’s photograph, would figure prominently in Martin and the group’s future. The weekend concluded with the premiere of Lindsay-Hogg’s “Paperback Writer” promotional video on none other than CBS television’s The Ed Sullivan Show.

  By Monday, June 6, the realities of their predicament must have settled in, as George and the Beatles felt the pressure of their upcoming LP and tour deadlines. Simply put, they had two weeks to finish the album. By that point, the Beatles themselves would be on a plane and jetting toward the first gig of their world tour, and Martin had plans of his own. But first, there was plenty of housekeeping to do. In a session in the Studio 3 control room, Martin supervised tape copying and remixes with Emerick and the bandmates in tow for an assortment of songs, including “Laxton’s Superb,” which had been aptly renamed “I Want to Tell You,” as well as “And Your Bird Can Sing,” “For No One,” “I’m Only Sleeping,” and “Tomorrow Never Knows,” which formally supplanted “Mark I” as the song’s title during the session. Remix eleven was selected as the best, which would have brought “Tomorrow Never Knows” to fruition were it not for Martin, who had second thoughts, telephoning Emerick on July 14—as the album went into the cutting room—and opting for remix eight instead. Around midnight, as June 6 transitioned into June 7, McCartney—like Martin, ever the perfectionist—descended into the studio to overdub his lead vocal for “Eleanor Rigby” with a well-timed counterpoint to Lennon and Harrison’s existing refrain, “Ah, look at all the lonely people.” Understandably lost in the shuffle that day was the significance of June 6 in the personal and professional histories of Martin and the bandmates. It had been precisely four years since the Beatles—John, Paul, George, and Pete at that juncture—first ambled into EMI Studios, unpolished and bedraggled, and changed their producer’s life forever in myriad and unexpected ways.

  As far as Martin and the Beatles were concerned, the studio was dark on June 7, with the band spending the day at Harrison’s Esher home, Kinfauns, where they rehearsed for the upcoming tour. Slated to begin with a pair of shows on June 24 in Munich, the Beatles were a long way from being concert ready. Save for the May 1 Poll Winners appearance, they hadn’t performed live since December. Their diminutive eleven-song set list told the story, by omission, about how far the group had come in just four years under Martin’s tutelage. “Paperback Writer” was the only recent addition to the lineup, save for “Day Tripper” and Rubber Soul’s “If I Needed Someone” and “Nowhere Man.” Outside of a scaled-down version of “Yesterday,” along with the high-octane, show-closing “I’m Down,” the rest of the set was composed entirely of early Beatles, a band that they barely resembled as they rehearsed in Harrison’s home studio. And none of the entries on their set list reflected the remarkable technological strides that Martin and the group had made since Rubber Soul. Songs like “Eleanor Rigby” and “Tomorrow Never Knows” were all but impossible to reproduce in a live setting in the summer of 1966. Meanwhile, songs like Rubber Soul’s “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” and “In My Life,” with sitar and windup piano adornments, were hardly worth the trouble. And why reproduce weak versions of such stellar recordings in the first place? They’d worked too hard to advance their musicianship and recording artistry. Why diminish their attainments with second- or even third-rate performances of their most sublime recordings? But rehearsing their meager set list was only part of the bargain. When they left for West Germany later that month, they would be traveling tens of thousands of miles between late June and the tail end of August, a period in which they were scheduled to play thirteen shows in West Germany, Japan, and the Philippines, respectively, followed by nineteen concerts in the United States and Canada.

  On Wednesday, June 8, the bandmates were back in Studio 2 to try their hand at a new McCartney composition. At the time, it was known as “A Good Day’s Sunshine”—the working title of the song that would shortly become “Good Day Sunshine”—and like Lennon’s “I’m Only Sleeping,” it owed a clear debt of influence to the Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Daydream,” which had recently topped out at number two on the UK charts. Interestingly, it was also on June 8 that sitar
virtuoso Ravi Shankar appeared on the British teen music program A Whole Scene Going. Incredibly, roughly seven months after Harrison had debuted the sitar for a Western popular audience on Rubber Soul, the sitar was going mainstream, demonstrating yet again how deftly Martin had assisted the Beatles in widening their demographic since the early days of Beatlemania. In its own way, “Good Day Sunshine,” with its pleasing lilt and gently rolling melody, had all the makings of a mainstream pop tune—a far cry, indeed, from the early, beat-music days at the onset of the Beatles’ recording career with Martin. In yet another twelve-hour session that would roam into the wee hours of Thursday, June 9, the bandmates made short work of “Good Day Sunshine.” With the tape running, they recorded three takes, with take one being selected as the best of the lot. The basic rhythm track featured bass, piano, and drums, with McCartney adding a lead vocal on a second, along with Lennon and Harrison providing spirited harmony vocals. The song’s placid feel is belied by its time signature, which shifts among common, 5/4, and 3/4 time.

  On Thursday, June 9, George and the Beatles would, for the most part, put the finishing touches on “Good Day Sunshine.” During the approximately six-hour session that day, Martin and his production team supervised a series of overdubs and edits in the course of bringing McCartney’s latest song to fruition. In addition to supplementing the song with more handclaps and well-placed cymbal crashes, the highlight of the day was Martin’s honky-tonk-style piano solo. Performed on Studio 2’s Hamburg Steinway baby grand, George recorded the solo for the middle eight of “Good Day Sunshine” using his windup piano effect. Over the years, he had deployed varispeed recording on Beatles records to great effect, including such gems as the solo portions of “A Hard Day’s Night” and “In My Life.” Recorded at half speed and an octave lower, Martin’s honky-tonk piano was allotted to the recording’s available fourth track. Recording the solo at fifty-six cycles per second afforded Martin’s piano part with a gentle, rolling quality on playback. During the mixing phase, Paul’s vocal for “Good Day Sunshine” was treated with ADT, imbuing it with greater texture. George and his team carried out six remixes before the session concluded, with the sixth being selected as the best. But like other tracks on the album, “Good Day Sunshine” would be remixed yet again before the long-player was put to bed. George and the Beatles’ penchant for perfectionism—even in the face of looming deadlines—was growing by the day.

  The studio would be dark for George and the Beatles on Friday, June 10—most likely, so that John and Paul could polish up new material to round out the long-player—but the day was loaded with significance in their world, which was shifting by the moment. The big story in the UK part of Beatledom that day was the much-anticipated release of “Paperback Writer” backed with “Rain”—the first new 45 rpm record from the band since back on December 3, with the release of “Day Tripper” backed with “We Can Work It Out.” It had been twenty-seven weeks since the band’s last single, which meant that Martin and Epstein’s best-laid plans back in 1963 for four singles and two albums per year were not merely in great jeopardy but in all likelihood kaput as far as the 1966 calendar year was concerned. Not surprisingly—and almost automatically for George and the Beatles at this point—“Paperback Writer” emerged as a worldwide hit, eventually topping the charts in both the UK and US marketplaces. But somehow “Paperback Writer” would prove to be slightly different in the coming days, not shooting to the top of the pops in quite the same manner—and with somewhat less velocity—than the Beatles’ previous chart-toppers. In contrast with all of their previous singles releases up to this point, “Paperback Writer” was a slick narrative about pop authorship as opposed to heteronormative romance, those trials and tribulations of conventional love that had seen the Beatles break sales records across the globe. But with a live BBC television performance set for the following week, the single was in for a major shot in the arm. Still, its sales receipts would be the weakest for any Beatles single since “Love Me Do” backed with “P.S. I Love You,” which was released way back in October 1962. If Martin and the Beatles were concerned that the clear shift in their subject matter from romantic love to impressionist, narrative-driven composition would risk decreasing or even losing their audience, they didn’t show it.

  Back in the United States, “Paperback Writer” was faring much better, underscoring the Americans’ insatiable appetite for new Beatles material. But another issue had been brewing for the past several days, and, for the pop-music juggernaut that George and Brian had so carefully built, it was a troubling harbinger of things to come. Capitol’s repackaging of old and new Beatles material for the purposes of releasing the Yesterday . . . and Today album to tide over American consumers had created the band’s first—and worst, at least for the next several weeks—instance of negative publicity that they had experienced thus far. It could all be traced back to Whitaker’s photograph of the white-coated Beatles posing among doll parts and raw meat. Having selected the photo as the album’s cover art—in spite of the fact that, according to the participants, that had never been Whitaker or the bandmates’ intention—Capitol put the Beatles’ largely pristine brand and squeaky-clean image at incredible risk. Alan Livingston would later claim that it was McCartney’s idea to use the photograph as the album’s cover as a commentary on US involvement in the Vietnam War. Regardless of agency, the cover photograph for Yesterday . . . and Today had emerged as a full-scale PR disaster during the fortnight before its scheduled release date of June 20. Advance copies had been sent to DJs and music reviewers, and the negative reaction was immediate and intense. The EMI Group’s chairman, Sir Joseph Lockwood, ordered an immediate recall. On June 10, Capitol invoked what its executives dubbed as Operation Retrieve, recalling some 750,000 copies of the LP from its distributors. With the company’s record plants in Los Angeles, California; Scranton, Pennsylvania; Winchester, Virginia; and Jacksonville, Illinois, working at full throttle, new covers were printed that featured the comparatively benign image of the bandmates playfully posing around a steamer trunk.

  In the end, the cost for replacing the album cover and conducting the recall was approximately $250,000, although it proved to be a shrewd investment. By the end of July, Yesterday . . . and Today had ascended to the pinnacle of the American charts and was certified as the Beatles’ latest gold record in a whole sea of the things. While Lennon and McCartney seemed puzzled by the backlash over the album cover and derided their critics as being “soft,” Martin didn’t mince words. He had toiled too long and too hard with Epstein to build the Beatles’ empire, and risking everything over something as trivial as an album cover, and for what amounted to a compilation in his eyes, bordered on the ridiculous. He would later cite the decision to release the photograph as his first disagreement with the bandmates: “I thought it was disgusting and in poor taste. It suggested that they were madmen.” For his part, Harrison later admitted to regretting his participation in the photo session, deriding Whitaker’s concept as “gross, and I also thought it was stupid. Sometimes we all did stupid things thinking it was cool and hip when it was naïve and dumb; and that was one of them.” While many of the discarded covers for Yesterday . . . and Today were relegated to a landfill, thousands survived when personnel at Capitol’s record plants resorted to pasting the new cover over what came to be known as the “butcher” photograph, creating in the process what became one of the most sought-after Beatles artifacts among collectors.14

  While they may not have fully realized it at the time, the Beatles and their brain trust had dodged a bullet with the fiasco regarding Yesterday . . . and Today. When Martin reconvened the band on June 14 in Studio 2, they were in the homestretch as far as their next album was concerned. Titled “Here, There, and Everywhere,” Paul’s breathtaking new composition had been inspired by his repeated listenings to the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds—especially, their exquisite multivoiced harmonies. Much of the session was spent with Martin directing and perfecting Lennon’s, McCa
rtney’s, and Harrison’s own harmonies, one of the trademarks of their sound since their earliest days with the producer, who had a knack for vocal arrangement. As Martin later recalled, “The harmonies on that are very simple, just basic triads which the boys hummed behind and found very easy to do. There’s nothing very clever, no counterpoint, just moving block harmonies. Very simple to do, but very effective.” As usual, George’s own inherent modesty betrayed his skill in drawing out the bandmates’ finest performances, especially as vocalists. As Geoff has observed, “George’s real expertise was and still is in vocal harmony work, there’s no doubt about that. That is his forte, grooming and working out those great harmonies.” During the June 14 session, “Here, There, and Everywhere” would witness just four takes, with vocals being added to take four.15