Before they tried their hand at recording “When I’m Sixty-Four,” George led the bandmates through the production of Christmas greetings recorded expressly for the United Kingdom’s pirate radio set. As an alternative to the BBC’s broadcast monopoly—not to mention the network’s demure programming—pirate radio stations like Radio Caroline and Radio London broadcast across Great Britain from their moorings beyond the coastline. With Martin and his production team in the Studio 2 control room supervising the recording of dozens of messages for the listeners and staffs of Radio Caroline and Radio London, the group—McCartney, in particular—began experimenting with various instruments and sound effects. Eventually, McCartney asked the Beatles’ producer to overlay their messages with tape echo, to which Martin sarcastically replied, “Do you want to make a production out of it?” Harrison continued the joke, saying “Yeah, let’s double-track everything!” As if mocking Martin and the bandmates’ increasing penchant for treating their vocals and instrumentation with studio effects, Lennon piped up next, remarking that Martin “can double-splange them. That’d be great!”13
For “When I’m Sixty-Four,” George led the bandmates—namely, Paul—through their standard rehearsal with the tape running. As they attempted to capture the basic rhythm track, Paul worked on piano and bass parts, with Ringo playing brushes on his snare. Two takes were completed, with take two being selected as the best. Two days later, during an afternoon session on Thursday, December 8, work continued on “When I’m Sixty-Four” without the other Beatles present. With Martin and Emerick up in the booth, McCartney continued working on take two as he tried his hand at recording a lead vocal for the snappy vaudeville number. As the dinner hour approached, Martin and Emerick took their leave. Hence, when Paul and the other Beatles arrived at seven that evening for another one of their famous overnight sessions, George and Geoff were no longer in evidence. As technical engineer Dave Harries later recalled, Martin and Emerick “had tickets for the premiere of Cliff Richard’s film Finders Keepers and didn’t arrive back until about 11 o’clock.” After having ensured that the group’s microphones and instruments were lined up properly, Harries was surprised when “the Beatles arrived, hot to record.” With no other choice—and a quartet of EMI’s most valuable clients at the ready—Harries supervised the bandmates as they took another go at establishing the rhythm track for “Strawberry Fields Forever.” “There was nobody else there but me so I became producer/engineer,” Harries remembered. “We recorded Ringo’s cymbals, played them backwards, Paul and George were on timps [timpani] and bongos, Mal Evans played tambourine, we overdubbed the guitars, everything. It sounded great. When George and Geoff came back, I scuttled upstairs because I shouldn’t really have been recording them.” But of course, he never really had any other viable option. By this point in their career, the Beatles weren’t waiting for anyone. Not even Martin.14
For his part, Emerick had been bothered that Martin wanted to attend the premiere in the first place. “George was quite adamant that we go, which really annoyed me,” he later wrote. “I felt our place was with the Beatles, and I felt certain that they were going to be unhappy about us taking time off so early into an album project. In retrospect, I think it may have been a psychological ploy on George’s part to show them who was in charge.” If it had indeed been a psychological ploy—rather than Martin simply wanting to be seen at a major industry event, especially given the new startup he was spearheading—it failed miserably. If Martin had wanted to attend simply to enjoy the film, he was likely severely disappointed. Directed by Sidney Hayers, Finders Keepers was roundly panned. Like Gerry and the Pacemakers’ big-screen bomb, Ferry Cross the Mersey, back in 1965, Finders Keepers proved that rock musicals in the wake of the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night feature film almost inevitably seemed like pale imitations of the Fab Four’s natural wit and incomparable sound. Still, A Hard Day’s Night—which had premiered some eighteen months earlier—seemed like a distant memory in comparison with the Beatles of December 1966, who scarcely resembled their former selves both outwardly and artistically.
After the movie, the producer and his engineer returned to Studio 2, “only to find the four Beatles still hard at work with maintenance engineer Dave Harries,” Emerick wrote, “who had been recruited to start the session in our absence. In the end, only part of what he recorded ever made its way onto the final release version; George and I stayed on until nearly dawn and ended up redoing most of it.” For his part, Martin had been stunned by the scene that greeted him that night:
When Geoff and I strolled in, Studio 2 was in the grip of a controlled riot. The boys had decided it would be fun to lay down an “unusual” rhythm track for “Strawberry Fields Forever” on their own, with anyone and everyone available simply banging away on whatever came to hand. The racket as we walked in was like something from a very bad Tarzan movie. John and Paul were bashing bongo drums, George was on huge kettledrums, joined sporadically by Paul; Neil Aspinall was playing a gourd scraper, Mal Evans a tambourine, and George’s friend Terry Doran was shaking maracas. Somebody else was tinkling away on finger cymbals. Above it all, Ringo was struggling manfully to keep the cacophony together with his regular drum-kit.15
In fact, during the producer’s absence, the bandmates had worked out a number of issues with the structure associated with “Strawberry Fields Forever.” It was John who piped up first, eager to share what they had learned—and seemingly oblivious to George and Geoff’s absence. While the heart of the band’s production team had been away in Central London, Harries led the Beatles through fifteen additional takes—takes nine through twenty-four—as they continued to refine the rhythm track. At this point, Lennon and his mates selected fifteen and twenty-four—two different, incomplete versions of the song—as the best.
As he and Emerick cleaned up shop in the wee hours of Friday, December 9, Martin replayed the recordings from that evening’s “controlled riot.” He discovered that he was particularly keen on a section “towards the end of this rogue track,” he later wrote, where “everyone was whooping or yelling, and John can clearly be heard chanting very slowly, and in time to the rough-and-ready beat: ‘Cranberry sauce, cranberry sauce . . .’ Why cranberry sauce? Why not? It was coming up to Christmas!” Perhaps this aspect of that “wild and wacky recording” would be of use at some later juncture.16
By 2:30 that same afternoon, Martin and the Beatles were already back at work in Studio 2. With “Strawberry Fields Forever” continuing to chew up plenty of real estate, Martin and Emerick dealt with the inherent limitations of four-track recording by mixing down the edit of takes fifteen and twenty-four and reducing them to a single track, which was dubbed as take twenty-five. With three empty tracks at their disposal, Martin and the bandmates provided a series of overdubs. Track two was composed of Starr playing various percussion, along with Harrison playing a swarmandal. After preparing a mono mix to facilitate new acetates, additional overdubs were carried out, including the recording of backward cymbals. Not unlike the backward guitar solos on Revolver’s “I’m Only Sleeping,” capturing the cymbals on tape was fraught with difficulty. Breaking out pencil and paper, Martin and Emerick worked out the song’s structural pattern so as to ensure that the backward cymbals were synchronized in the appropriate instances.
In the intervening days before the next session for “Strawberry Fields Forever” commenced, Lennon sought out Martin to express his disappointment over the song’s progress at this juncture. For his part, George was astounded, having felt that the song had already been exquisite back on November 24. With Emerick waiting in the wings, Lennon told the Beatles’ producer that “he still wasn’t entirely happy with what we had done,” Martin later wrote. “The song kept eluding him: he could hear what he wanted, in his head, but he couldn’t make it real.” As the others attempted to reassure him, John “kept mumbling, ‘I don’t know; I just think it should somehow be heavier,’” according to Geoff. As Martin questioned the Beatle
about his concept of heaviness, Lennon replied, “I dunno, just kind of, y’know . . . heavier.” At this point, McCartney interceded. Observing how pleased John had been with the Mellotron flute stops, Paul suggested that orchestral ornamentation might be an option for beefing up the sound of “Strawberry Fields Forever.” Quite suddenly, John’s enthusiasm had returned. He was particularly taken with the idea of cello and trumpet accompaniment for the song. All the producer had to do was come up with the appropriate score. “Do a good job, George,” John instructed as he left the control room. “Just make sure it’s heavy.”17
With only a few days to spare, Martin went about the business of organizing the instrumental accompaniment for “Strawberry Fields Forever.” As usual, George booked a powerhouse of session aces when it came to securing studio musicians for the Beatles. For the purposes of his trumpet quartet, George selected Greg Bowen, Tony Fisher, and Stanley Roderick, the players who had made their name as the “007” trumpet section for the early James Bond films. Rounding out the brass was Derek Watkins, late of Billy Ternent’s London Palladium orchestra. Martin’s trio of cellists was composed of John Hall, Norman Jones, and Derek Simpson, a long-standing member of the renowned Aeolian Quartet. Knowing that he needed to concoct something “heavy,” Martin set straight to work. “I believe in economy in music,” he later wrote, “to get a clarity that using too many instruments will sometimes cloud. I had less than a week to write the score that John was looking for. I knew he wanted the brass to be bright and punchy, but I felt the chords needed a bit of reinforcement on some of the changes.” As he worked at the piano at the home he shared with Judy on Manchester Square, George consulted the latest “Strawberry Fields Forever” acetates. As he later recalled, “Having a basic recorded track to write to was a great advantage. It meant I could see where to put the flesh on the bones. I decided the cellos should speak with one voice, in unison, forming a bass counterpoint to the melody. The trumpets I wrote either in simple triad (i.e., three-finger) chords, or with a unison staccato emphasis, blasting away on one note.”18
For the purposes of inspiration, George drew from the quintessentially American sound that had stirred the Beatles so vividly prior to beginning work on Revolver. In addition to concocting a punchy brass score, he found himself confounded by the backward cymbals that he and the bandmates had appended to the latest version of the song. With his own penchant for experimentation on full display, George decided to score the cellos in contrast with Ringo’s percussion: “I confess I had heard a lot of American records with very groovy horn sections by this time, and lifted one or two ideas from them,” he later wrote. “As the song developed further it seemed natural to use the trumpets as a harmony behind the voice, sounding the same phrase as in our lovely intro. Then came the only section I had qualms about. At this particular point, the tempo is held together by a fast rhythm from a cymbal that Ringo recorded backwards—never an easy sound to latch on to. The cellos worked against this urgent beat with a slower, triplet tie motif, and I was not at all sure that it was going to work.” As he completed work on his orchestration for “Strawberry Fields Forever,” George was forced to contend with a long-standing issue that he had observed throughout the song’s labyrinthine production: the Mellotron’s tape-replay system had proven to be idiosyncratic in terms of maintaining a steady pace, so much so, in fact, that with “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “our rhythm track would vary even from one bar to another!” This presented a problem, of course, when it came to studio musicians, who understandably “take it for granted that if they are overdubbing, their basic track never varies its tempo.” For this reason, George “felt that Ringo’s drumming on this song is some of his best. His quirky figures accented it in exactly the right way from the outset, complementing John’s phrases beautifully throughout all the changes the song underwent.”19
When George and the bandmates reconvened on December 15, they were joined by the trumpeters and cellists for an afternoon session in Studio 2. Scored in the key of C major, Martin’s orchestration was captured in short order and superimposed on the available third and fourth tracks. At this point, Emerick conducted another tape reduction mix, with take twenty-five becoming take twenty-six. For the remainder of the session, which finally broke up around midnight, additional overdubs were undertaken, including Lennon’s double-tracked lead vocal and Harrison performing descending arpeggios on the swarmandal. The remnant of Lennon muttering “cranberry sauce” from the madcap December 8 session was in evidence, having been earlier spliced onto the end of take twenty-four. The latest remake of “Strawberry Fields Forever,” with the “heavy” orchestration, Ringo’s powerful, rhythmic drums, and Lennon’s newly minted lead vocals, offered a dramatic contrast to the original, gentler November 24 version of the song. For the time being at least, “Strawberry Fields Forever” seemed to be on the verge of completion.
For the next few days, the studio went dark for George and the Beatles. Martin and McCartney were attending to business involving The Family Way, which premiered on the evening of Sunday, December 18, at London’s Warner Theatre. The film enjoyed generally strong notices for being “sincere” and “sympathetic”—especially in comparison with the Boulting brothers’ earlier movies, including the satirical I’m All Right, Jack starring Peter Sellers, which were known for their irreverence. McCartney and Martin’s soundtrack received praise for contributing to the film’s “understated” tone. On December 23, United Artists released the single “Love in the Open Air” backed with “Theme from The Family Way.” Credited to the George Martin Orchestra, the record didn’t chart. Earlier that day, Lennon and McCartney had been shocked to learn that their friend Tara Browne, the twenty-one-year-old heir to the Guinness fortune, had succumbed to injuries that he had suffered the previous evening in an Earl’s Court automobile accident. With his girlfriend, Suki Potier, by his side, Browne had been speeding in his Lotus Elan through the narrow streets of the city when he swerved to avoid an oncoming car and collided with a parked truck. The next day, December 19, saw a swathe of posters being affixed around the city advertising the upcoming Million Volt Light and Sound Rave. Scheduled for January 28, 1967, the festival’s centerpiece would be a psychedelic light show by Ray Anderson and music by Unit Delta Plus, a freelance outfit associated with the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop, the same folks who had worked with George (using the pseudonym Ray Cathode) to produce his 1962 electronic concoction “Time Beat.” The poster for the Million Volt Light and Sound Rave made note of a special musical piece composed by none other than Paul McCartney.
On Tuesday, December 20, George and the Beatles returned to the friendly confines of Studio 2, where they resumed working on “When I’m Sixty-Four,” which had been abandoned since December 6. With the Beach Boys’ avant-garde hit “Good Vibrations” nearing the end of its thirteen-week assault on the British charts, the Beatles began putting the finishing touches on the vaudeville-throwback number. During the overnight session, McCartney, Harrison, and Lennon superimposed harmony vocals onto “When I’m Sixty-Four,” with Starr providing bell sounds to accent the verses. Afterward, Martin and his regular production team of Emerick and McDonald carried out two reduction mixes from take two, with the second being selected as the best. The next day, Wednesday, December 21, George made great strides toward the completion of “When I’m Sixty-Four” with a woodwind overdub courtesy of a trio of studio musicians. Working a two-hour session in Studio 1 that evening, Martin had prepared a score for two clarinets and one bass clarinet. The idea for the clarinet arrangement had apparently been McCartney’s brainchild as an effort to mitigate the possibility that “When I’m Sixty-Four” would be taken as an unwelcome departure into corniness. As George later observed, “Paul got some way round the lurking schmaltz factor by suggesting we use clarinets on the recording ‘in a classical way.’” With Paul’s recommendation in hand, George set about the business of composing the score. He took McCartney’s dictum seriously, appropriating his orc
hestration as a means for shaping the composition’s larger thematic impetus. As Martin later observed, “The classical treatment gave added bite to the song, a formality that pushed it firmly towards satire. Without that, the song could have been misinterpreted—it was very tongue-in-cheek.”20
Drawing upon his many years of experience as an arranger—not to mention his formal training at the Guildhall School—“When I’m Sixty-Four” offers a primer for understanding the manner in which Martin approached the art of crafting a score: “The arrangement of this song is deceptively simple, but in a way it underlines my constant belief in simplicity in orchestration,” George later wrote. “By restricting ourselves to three instruments only,” he pointed out, “we could hardly be lush. Every note played had to be there for a purpose.” With his score complete, George once again recruited London’s finest to perform on a Beatles record. As with his work throughout Revolver, George never slacked when it came to providing the Beatles with the best available talent. As he later wrote, “We overdubbed two clarinets and a bass clarinet on to track 2, played by the best clarinet players you could get in the business then: Robert Burns, Henry MacKenzie, and Frank Reidy.” Years later, Martin recalled recording the woodwind overdub in the “cavernous Number One studio at Abbey Road and thinking how the three clarinet players looked as lost as a referee and two linesmen alone in the middle of Wembley Stadium.” After the studio players departed, George supervised three mono mixes of “When I’m Sixty-Four.” At this point, the third attempt was considered the best, although merely for acetate purposes. But in terms of George and the Beatles’ standards, the song wasn’t quite there yet.21
Sound Pictures Page 22
