Even as that first session for “A Day in the Life” concluded during the wee hours of January 20, George and his production team could tell that they were in the presence of something remarkable. But it was already different even than their recent experience with “Strawberry Fields Forever,” a song with more concrete structure in evidence during its debut than the current number. The germ of the idea for this latest song would necessitate even more layering to bring the crude track off. At this point, “A Day in the Life” consisted, for the most part, of John’s beautiful, echo-laden verses, Paul’s piano flourishes, and Mal’s blustery counting. But it was an evolving work of art nonetheless. By the time that George and the bandmates reconvened in Studio 2 some seventeen hours later, they were itching to get back to work. Martin’s first task at hand involved leading the Beatles—Lennon, mainly—through an extensive review of the previous evening’s lead vocals. As Geoff later recalled, “Our job was to decide which of John’s lead vocals was the ‘keeper.’ We didn’t have to necessarily use the entire performance, though. Because we had the luxury of working in four-track, I could copy over (‘bounce’) the best lines from each take into one track—a process known as ‘comping.’ . . . All we were really listening for when we were comping John’s vocal was phrasing and inflection; he never had trouble hitting the notes spot on. Lennon sat behind the mixing console with George Martin and me, picking out the bits he liked. Paul was up in the control room, too, expressing his opinions.”21
With the comping process complete, the folks up in the control room had to carry out some important studio housekeeping, with George instructing Geoff to create a reduction mix for take four into three separate mixes—takes five, six, and seven, each with different console settings. After selecting take six as the best, the Beatles added overdubs of yet another vocal from John, Paul’s bass, and Ringo’s drums. With the basic rhythm track and other adornments for “A Day in the Life” now in place, George and his production team turned their attention to Paul’s lead vocal for the middle eight. As George later recalled, “Paul had written a scrap of a song, which John liked.” Paul’s middle eight found its origins in a passage from Dorothy Fields’s 1930 hit “On the Sunny Side of the Street.” McCartney had also supplied the phrase “I’d love to turn you on” for the purposes of the song’s one-line chorus, which Lennon described as a “damn good piece of work.” As it happened, Mal’s ringing alarm clock served as an unintentional but well-timed introduction to the first line of Paul’s middle eight, “Woke up, fell out of bed.” At this point, George flagged Paul’s performance as a guide vocal, given the expletive that he uttered after flubbing one of the lines.22
For George and the Beatles, Abbey Road would be dark for the next ten days, largely due to the four-day film shoot associated with the “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane” promotional videos. Meanwhile, Martin convened his production team, which included the always reliable Emerick along with Richard Lush—making his first appearance working a Beatles recording since way back on April 13, 1966—for a control room session in Studio 3 on Monday, January 30. The ninety-minute session found George supervising a mono remix of “A Day in the Life” for demo purposes. At this point, he realized that the Beatles’ song needed more time to percolate, to develop into something that they hadn’t quite imagined just yet. As he later wrote, “I loved the song: John’s dry, deadpan voice, Paul’s bouncy middle segment acting as a foil to that, and I really liked the chords that got us back to John’s section, which was in a different key. We were not sure then what else we wanted to do to it, so we left it for a bit, to think. We often worked in this way, starting something new to give us more time on another song in progress. It was the painter laying aside the canvas, starting a new work, then coming back to the first work afresh, able to see at once what was good or bad about it, and what needed to be done by way of improvement.”23
With this notion in mind, the bandmates rejoined George in Studio 2 on Wednesday, February 1, and set “A Day in the Life” aside in favor of the concept that Paul had concocted on the flight home from Nairobi back on November 19 and transformed into a song back home at Cavendish Avenue on January 27. Titled “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” the song had quickly emerged as the title track for their new album, which now counted three songs to its name, along with “When I’m Sixty-Four” and “A Day in the Life.” With “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” Paul had discovered a means for the bandmates to adopt new identities in their post-touring years:
We were fed up with being the Beatles. We really hated that fucking four little Mop-Top boys approach. We were not boys, we were men. It was all gone, all that boy shit, all that screaming, we didn’t want any more, plus, we’d now got turned on to pot and thought of ourselves as artists rather than just performers. There was now more to it; not only had John and I been writing, George had been writing, we’d been in films, John had written books, so it was natural that we should become artists. Then suddenly on the plane I got this idea. I thought, “Let’s not be ourselves. Let’s develop alter egos so we’re not having to project an image which we know.” It would be much more free. What would really be interesting would be to actually take on the personas of this different band. We could say, “How would somebody else sing this? He might approach it a bit more sarcastically, perhaps.” So I had this idea of giving the Beatles alter egos simply to get a different approach; then when John came up to the microphone or I did, it wouldn’t be John or Paul singing, it would be the members of this band. It would be a freeing element. I thought we can run this philosophy through the whole album: with this alter-ego band, it won’t be us making all that sound, it won’t be the Beatles, it’ll be this other band, so we’ll be able to lose our identities in this.
For Martin, McCartney’s concept was a revelation. For years, he had been observing as the bandmates had seen their personalities become subsumed by their media-constructed identities. Perhaps being a member of Sgt. Pepper’s band would allow them to recapture their own senses of self in Beatlemania’s prodigious wake.24
For his part, George particularly admired the concept of Sgt. Pepper and his Lonely Hearts Club Band serving as stand-ins for the Beatles themselves. But he also recognized that Paul’s notion of the album as a liberating mechanism was loaded with risk. Sure, it afforded them with a means for feeding mass culture’s demand for more and ceaseless Beatles product; and perhaps more importantly for their purposes, it also allowed them to abandon life on the road in favor of the friendly confines of the recording studio. But would the Beatles’ gambit actually work? The music business had become set in its ways, with artists earning the lion’s share of their income as road warriors, while record companies typically reaped the profits associated with music retail. For his part, George could pinpoint the genesis of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” to a very specific inspiration:
In a bizarre way, it may have been the king himself, Elvis Presley, who had inspired the idea. Apparently, he once sent his Cadillac on tour without accompanying it. This crazy ploy was something the Beatles marveled at and often joked about, so an idea was spawned which grew in all their minds: “Why don’t we make an album that is a show, and send that on tour instead of ourselves?” This was a radical, even fanciful idea at that time, but the Beatles could immediately see the possibilities and potential in it. It might just be a way round the problem of their not touring any more.
For George, the issues associated with this strategy were legion. He harbored significant concerns about its commercial viability, and, while he was confident in the Beatles’ musical gifts, he was uncertain about whether their multitude of fans the world over would continue to support them without the promise of live performance: “Could an album, however good, be an effective substitute for a live tour?”25
During the overnight session on February 1, George supervised nine takes as the Beatles refined the song’s rhythm track, which consisted of two electric
guitars, played by Harrison and McCartney, Starr on drums, and Lennon on bass. As Martin later recalled, “I did not have much to do with the musical arrangement of the ‘Sgt. Pepper’ track. The boys took to the simple tune like the proverbial ducks to water and made up the arrangement as they went along. You could tell how much they enjoyed playing a straight-forward rocker because it fairly hummed along.” The difference in the bandmates’ standard instrumentation came at the behest of McCartney, who said to his songwriting partner, “Let me do the rhythm on this; I know exactly what I want.” Without a word of protest, Lennon simply picked up a bass guitar, and with that, Martin commenced the recording session for “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” The track’s high energy was evident from the outset; at one crucial juncture in the middle of the basic track, McCartney can be heard letting out a whoop of pure joy, egging his friends on in the process. Given that Lennon’s bass part was considered to be a placeholder, Martin suggested that they record Lennon’s fret work on a separate track using direct injection so that it could more easily be replaced later by McCartney. Direct injection, the process of recording the instrumentation directly into the recording console without the necessity of using an amplifier and a microphone, afforded George with a means for skirting the issue of suffering any sound bleed or microphone leakage from John’s bass onto the other instruments.26
Direct injection had been deployed in other studios by other audio personnel in the past—most notably, by Joe Meek in London and by Motown engineers since the early 1960s. Meek had crafted his own homemade “black boxes” out of tobacco tins, which he strapped together with cellophane tape. At Abbey Road, the ever-reliable Ken Townsend had recently been experimenting with fashioning his own direction-injection boxes for use at EMI Studios. At least part of the maintenance engineer’s inspiration came from the inherent difficulties in recording low-end sounds. “One of the most difficult instruments to record was the bass guitar,” said Townsend. “No matter which type of high-quality microphone we placed in front of the bass speaker, it never sounded back in the control room as good as in the studio.” With take nine having been selected as the best—and with the instrumentation, excepting Lennon’s bass part—recorded on track one, McCartney picked up his Rickenbacker to replace Lennon’s guide piece with a new bass overdub. With Townsend’s direction-injection box at the ready, McCartney fashioned a new bass part, with the signal being fed directly from his guitar into the recording desk. As Townsend explained the function of the direction-injection box to the bandmates, Lennon was suddenly intrigued by the notion of having access to yet another one of Townsend’s famous shortcuts. As with ADT, direct injection seemed to be a new avenue for transforming his vocals with veritable ease. After learning about the mechanics of direct injection, Lennon informed “George Martin that he’d like to have his voice recorded that way, too,” Emerick later recalled. “Tongue planted firmly in cheek, George explained why we couldn’t do that: ‘For one thing, John, you’d have to have an operation first so we could implant a jack socket in your throat.’ Even then, Lennon couldn’t quite grasp why it wasn’t possible. He simply didn’t like taking no for an answer.”27
The next evening, Thursday, February 2, George and the Beatles’ work on “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” continued. The overnight session commenced with the superimposition of McCartney’s lead vocals and the bandmates’ harmony vocals onto tracks three and four, respectively. This same evening, the brief song’s structure and instrumentation evolved even further to include brass ornamentation. For this reason, Martin and his team carried out a tape-to-tape reduction in order to free up a pair of tracks for additional overdubs at a later date. An acetate was also prepared for the producer’s benefit in order to score the brass parts. By this juncture, George was coming to realize that his role in the Beatles’ artistry had made yet another shift. Even as recently as the Revolver sessions, George was working around the Beatles’ schedule and providing as much—or as little—input as they desired. But now,
they were becoming even more demanding. They would ring up and say, “We want to come in tonight at eight o’clock,” and everybody had to be there—whatever else they might have on. I had reconciled myself to the fact that they would be my number-one priority. The long hours were more a problem for me with regard to other recording artists than they were in terms of a personal life. Judy accepted it; so did I. But quite often Neil Aspinall would ring up in his role as the Beatles’ road manager and say, “Look, George, we’ve got to have the studio at seven tonight,” and I would have to try to rearrange a session booked with somebody else who was quite important—but not as important as the Fab Four. Then the Beatles would turn up at ten! When it came right down to it, we were all their minions.28
And while George may have performed a subsidiary role with the band—as did Brian, Neil, and Mal at times—he had also come to recognize his privileged, even essential place in their creative ecosystem. “By the time of Pepper,” he later wrote, “the Beatles had immense power at Abbey Road. So did I. They used to ask for the impossible, and sometimes they would get it. At the beginning of their recording career, I used to boss them about—especially for the first year or so. By the time we got to Pepper, though, that had all changed: I was very much the collaborator. Their ideas were coming through thick and fast, and they were brilliant. All I did was help make them real.” At the same time, he understood that his role dissipated very quickly once the Fab Four roamed beyond the hallowed hallways of Abbey Road. “In the studio,” he later wrote, “I was very much part of them; every voice was heard equally. But once they left the studio, out into the night, they closed themselves off again, reverting to their hermetically-sealed unit. Even Brian Epstein didn’t get inside that shell. As for the way they viewed me, I was very ‘twelve-inch,’ in Ringo’s memorable phrase. (Back in the fifties we used to issue ten-inch and twelve-inch vinyl records. The ten-inch records were the ‘rhythm-style series,’ what we now call pop, and the twelve-inch were the cantatas and symphonies: the classical. Ten-inch was common; but twelve-inch—that was a cut above!)” Tony King, a close friend of John’s and AIR’s publicity agent, echoed Ringo’s sentiments, describing Beatles sessions as something akin to experiencing “all the fun of the fair. Everybody would have these funny sort of sixties smiles on their faces; and among all this madness was the Duke of Edinburgh, as we used to call George Martin.” The Beatles’ producer valued the inherently complimentary nature of such characterizations—and in truth, he was more than a little fond of being referred to in such a “classical” manner—but he also shrewdly recognized, at this relatively early moment in the life of this new phase of the Beatles, that Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was shaping up to be very different from their previous efforts.29
That difference, as Martin came to understand it, was the simple but all-important matter of time. It was something that he and the bandmates so rarely had during their years together. Even Revolver felt rushed in spite of the artistic and sonic strides that they had accomplished. George had to hand it to the Beatles: they had earned their place in the industry through well-honed talent and toil, and they were determined to make the most of the very moment in which they could call their own shots, determine their destiny as recording artists. As Martin later wrote, “It was their dreams we were realizing, nothing more or less. Music requires mechanics, people banging, or blowing, or scraping, or strumming; but in the end, it is intangible, it is dreams. You can’t get hold of music, you cannot look at it. You may think you can look at it by picking up a score, but that is just a piece of paper. Music does not exist without a pair of serviceable ears, and time. That is why I think it is the most wonderful art of all—why I get so ecstatic about it. Above all other things, music needs time.” In addition to the bandmates themselves, the members of George’s production team were buoyed by their extended time in the studio. “One of the benefits of working with the Beatles,” Richard Lush later recalled, “
was that, unlike other artists, they had the luxury of time. As a result, we’d spend hour after hour recording them, which would give Geoff and I the opportunity to work out exactly what sounded good and what didn’t. Same for mixing—we were able to rehearse our moves over and over again and get them just right.”30
But the issue of time, as George well knew, inevitably requires a financial commitment, as well as a show of faith. And he had been working for—or, in terms of his AIR partnership, with—EMI for long enough to understand that the record conglomerate wouldn’t be giving an inch as far as the bottom line was concerned. Not for the Beatles, not for anybody. And certainly not for George.
11
Home and Dry
* * *
WITH WORK SET to resume on “A Day in the Life,” George was especially mindful about the expenses that he had already accrued in producing Sgt. Pepper, as well as the “Strawberry Fields Forever” backed with “Penny Lane” single, which wouldn’t officially make its way into record shops until mid-February. As it turned out, Ringo’s observation back in November 1966 about EMI allowing the Beatles to gobble up all of the studio time that they wanted was only half true. What Ringo likely didn’t realize at the time was that, for all of the millions upon millions of pounds that the Beatles had generated through record sales by that point, they were kept on a strict studio budget by the EMI brass. George and the Beatles had immense power with EMI, but power inevitably has its limits. In many ways, it was no different from George’s days as Parlophone A&R head. But with the Beatles’ new avant-garde sound already advancing beyond the frontiers that they had explored with Revolver, George had been forced to meet with Len Wood in order to placate EMI’s managing director about the band’s rapidly shifting creative direction. “My own view is and always has been that artists should be able to grow, to blossom,” George later wrote. “They should not have to stand still for reasons of simple profit. When the Beatles announced that they were going into the studio for an indefinite period, before Pepper, I had some interesting and fairly taut discussions with the powers that be at EMI, who were understandably nervous about what would come of it all.” But to his great credit—and ever since the bandmates had heeded his suggestions and amped up “Please Please Me” back in September 1962—George was brimming with confidence about the group’s short- and long-term prospects for continuing to be able to mine rock gold. “Luckily for me, the Beatles never let me down,” he later recalled. “Whenever I said, ‘Give them their heads, let them do different things,’ they came up with things that were as good as, if not better than, the material they had been doing before. And it always sold. One of my main jobs with the Beatles, as I saw it by 1967, was to give them as much freedom as possible in the studio, but to make sure that they did not come off the rails in the process.”1
Sound Pictures Page 26
