George’s philosophy about affording the Beatles with maximum artistic freedom—but at the same time, preventing them from going “off the rails”—was shortly put to the test when they revisited “A Day in the Life” on the evening of Friday, February 3, in Studio 2. But there was a pall over the proceedings that evening, and it understandably found its roots in the terrible news out of North London. The white-coated personnel at Abbey Road were shocked to learn that Joe Meek had died at age thirty-seven from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Before turning the shotgun on himself, he had killed his landlord, Violet Shenton, in a fit of rage. Even as recently as the previous week, Sir Joseph Lockwood had met with Meek at EMI House in a last-ditch attempt to bring him on at Parlophone. For Meek, Martin’s old job would have been a lifesaver—at least, financially speaking. He had been mired in a protracted lawsuit with French composer Jean Ledrut, who alleged that Meek had borrowed the melody for “Telstar” from Ledrut’s “La Marche d’Austerlitz,” a standout composition from the composer’s score for the 1960 film Austerlitz. Incredibly, in spite of all of the renown that he had enjoyed from “Telstar,” the lawsuit, which was settled posthumously in Meek’s favor, prevented him from earning any royalties from his most acclaimed recording. But even Lockwood’s offer—an incredible risk on the chairman’s part, given Meek’s troubled state—wasn’t enough to rouse the beleaguered producer from his depression and make a new start.
As the February 3 session proceeded, George and the Beatles worked from take six as they began to rerecord several key aspects of “A Day in the Life.” Having listened to acetates over the intervening days, they were particularly disappointed in the rhythm section. For his part, McCartney overdubbed a new bass part along with a new lead vocal for the middle section. Before recording the new vocal, McCartney had a long discussion with Emerick. “He explained that he wanted his voice to sound all muzzy,” Geoff later recalled, “as if he had just woken up from a deep sleep and hadn’t yet gotten his bearings, because that was what the lyric was trying to convey. My way of achieving that was to deliberately remove a lot of the treble from his voice and heavily compress it to make him sound muffled. When the song goes into the next section, the dreamy section that John sings, the full fidelity is restored.”2
But when it came time to superimpose Paul’s new vocal onto the existing take, George and his production team ran into trouble. As second engineer, Richard Lush was tasked with editing the vocal into the track. As Geoff later recalled, Paul’s vocal “was being dropped into the same track that contained John’s lead vocal, and there was a very tight drop-out point between the two—between Paul’s singing ‘and I went into a dream’ and John’s ‘ahhh’ that starts the next section. Richard was quite paranoid about it—with good reason—and I remember him asking me to get on the talkback mic to explain the situation to Paul and ask him not to deviate from the phrasing that he had used on the guide vocal.” Years later, Geoff admired Richard’s initiative in this instance. “I thought it showed great maturity to be proactive that way,” he later wrote. “John’s vocal, after all, had such great emotion, and it also had tape echo on it. The thought of having to do it again and re-create the atmosphere was daunting—not to mention what John’s reaction would have been! Someone’s head would have been bitten off, and it most likely would have been mine. But Paul, ever professional, did heed the warning, and he made certain to end the last word distinctly in order to give Richard sufficient time to drop out before John’s vocal came back in.”3
But the big story that day was Starr’s second attempt at fashioning a drum part for the evolving song. One of the track’s finest aspects, Starr’s drum fills for “A Day in the Life” were performed in sharp contrast to his typically understated approach to working his kit. At Paul’s urging, Ringo agreed to try out a more aggressive style for the recording. “Come on, Paul, you know how much I hate flashy drumming,” he replied. With Lennon and McCartney cheering him on, Starr turned in a remarkable overdub during the February 3 session, characterized by a host of inventive and at times quirky drum fills. To accommodate Starr’s incredible overdub, Emerick made several sonic adjustments up in the booth with Martin, as well as on the studio floor below with Starr’s kit. “We were looking for a thicker, more tonal quality,” Geoff later recalled, “so I suggested that Ringo tune his toms really low, making the skins really slack, and I also added a lot of low end at the mixing console. That made them sound almost like timpani, but I still felt there was more I could do to make his playing stand out. During the making of Revolver, I had removed the front skin from Ringo’s bass drum and everyone was pleased with the resultant sound, so I decided to extend that principle and take off the bottom heads from the tom-toms as well, miking them from underneath.” In order to accomplish this last feat, Emerick was forced to improvise: “We had no boom stands that could extend underneath the floor tom, so I simply wrapped the mic in a towel and placed it in a glass jug on the floor. For the icing on the cake, I decided to overly limit the drum premix, which made the cymbals sound huge. It took a lot of work and effort, but that’s one drum sound I was extremely proud of, and Ringo, who was always meticulous about his sounds, loved it, too.”4
For his part, George was chuffed, as he so often was, with Ringo’s steadiness behind the kit, later remarking that “Ringo has a tremendous feel for a song, and he always helped us hit the right tempo first time. He was rock solid, and this made the recording of all the Beatles’ songs so much easier.” As the session wound down in the wee hours of February 4, Lennon and McCartney hatched their plans to effect what they hoped would be a stunning climax for “A Day in the Life.” As George later recalled, “The question was, how were we going to fill those twenty-four bars of emptiness? After all, it was pretty boring! So I asked John for his ideas. As always, it was a matter of my trying to get inside his mind, discover what pictures he wanted to paint, and then try to realize them for him. John said, ‘I want it to be like a musical orgasm. What I’d like to hear is a tremendous build-up, from nothing up to something absolutely like the end of the world. I’d like it to be from extreme quietness to extreme loudness, not only in volume, but also for the sound to expand as well. I’d like to use a symphony orchestra for it. Tell you what, George, you book a symphony orchestra, and we’ll get them in a studio and tell them what to do.’” As it turned out, McCartney may have been the culprit behind Lennon’s sudden desire to hire out an entire orchestra. “I sat John down and suggested it to him, and he liked it a lot,” Paul later recalled. “I said, ‘Look, all these composers are doing really weird avant-garde things and what I’d like to do here is give the orchestra some really strange instructions. We could tell them to sit there and be quiet, but that’s been done, or we could have our own ideas based on this school of thought. This is what’s going on now; this is what the movement’s about.’”5
While he admired the concept of recording the sound of apocalypse, Martin also recognized that Lennon’s approach to recording an orchestra would only serve to irritate the studio musicians as opposed to inspiring any creativity. Years later, George recalled his reply to John’s preposterous suggestion: “‘Come on, John,’ I said, ‘there’s no way you can get a symphony orchestra sitting around and say to them, “Look fellers, this is what you’re going to do.” Because you won’t get them to do what you want them to do. You’ve got to write something down for them.’ ‘Why?,’ asked John, with his typically wide-eyed approach to such matters. ‘Because they’re all playing different instruments, and unless you’ve got time to go round each of them individually and see exactly what they do, it just won’t work.’” And then there was the matter of the expense associated with hiring a symphony orchestra and booking time for some ninety session players. George knew that with Sgt. Pepper they were already well over their typical budget for producing a long-player. Emerick later recalled the conversation in the booth with Martin and the Beatles, observing that “George Martin liked the idea, but, mindful of
the cost, was adamant that there was no way he could justify charging EMI for a full 90-piece orchestra just to play 24 bars of music.” George was beside himself with anxiety over the idea. “You cannot, cannot have a symphony orchestra just for a few chords,” he complained. “Waste of money. I mean you’re talking about 90 musicians! This is EMI, not Rockefeller!’” For Martin, the issue over booking a full orchestra offered a stark reminder of the precarious position in which he and the Beatles found themselves. On the one hand, studio time was cheap for the EMI Group, which owned the studios at Abbey Road outright. Hence, the Beatles’ inordinately long hours in the studio were never an issue for the record conglomerate but rather an internal accounting transaction. “They didn’t bilk at our spending all that time,” George observed at the time. “They knew that we were doing something worthwhile.” On the other hand, expenses associated with hiring session players came under a very different kind of scrutiny of which George was all too keenly aware, having toiled at EMI Studios since 1950.6
Years later, Martin couldn’t help dressing himself down for being so cheap, EMI’s miserly ways be damned, when it came to the Beatles. “Thus spake the well-trained corporate lackey still lurking somewhere inside me,” he later wrote, even going so far as to deride himself as a “cheeseparer!” According to Geoff, “It was Ringo, of all people, who came up with the solution. ‘Well, then,’ he joked, ‘let’s just hire half an orchestra and have them play it twice.’ Everyone did a double take, stunned by the simplicity—or was it simple-mindedness?—of the suggestion. ‘You know, Ring, that’s not a bad idea,’ Paul said. ‘But still, boys, think of the cost,’ George Martin stammered. Lennon put an end to the discussion, ‘Right, Henry,’ he said [to George], his voice carrying the tone of an emperor issuing a decree. ‘Enough chitchat, let’s do it.’”7
And that’s exactly what they did. With the Beatles completing their four-day video shoot in Sevenoaks, Kent, on February 5 and 7, George would have the next several days at his leisure in order to put the finishing touches on the score for “A Day in the Life.” In spite of his protestations back in the Studio 2 control room, George was intrigued by the idea of an orchestra of session players backing “A Day in the Life.” “I thought very hard,” he later wrote. “The song did need a grand flourish of some sort. This crazy idea might just work. We had never used a symphony orchestra before; we’d used a string quartet, an octet, the odd trumpet or sax section, so the notion of a great leap forward into a full-sized orchestra was very appealing—and kind of logical. It is one of the biggest toys you can play with.” At the same time, George knew that top symphonic studio musicians would never deign to work in the freewheeling way that John had described. When it came to the musicians, George wrote, “I knew it was of little use telling them to improvise. They were used to working from written parts, no matter how strange. I suppose it was difficult for the Beatles to fully understand that. They had never needed a note of written music in their lives. Why should anyone else? Of course, if we had approached the symphony musicians in those days without a prepared score they would have laughed us out of court.”8
And so George set to work on the piano at his home near Manchester Square. Working painstakingly from the acetate, George counted on his earlier conversations with John in order to concoct the orchestration. “When I sat down to write the score,” George later recalled, “I realized that John had not come up with anything for the first few notes the orchestra would have to play, after he stops singing, ‘I’d love to turn you on.’ He sings this line in a very characteristic manner, the tune wavering between semitones. This, I thought, would be a great phrase to echo, so I wrote a very slow semitone trill for the strings, bowing with a gentle portamento and increasing gradually in frequency and intensity. This gives a suitably mysterious effect, making a good introduction or bridge to the now famous dissonant orchestral climb that is unique to this song.” Martin’s consultation with McCartney also helped frame the score’s musical style. “Paul had been listening to a lot of avant-garde music by the likes of John Cage, Stockhausen, and Luciano Berio,” George wrote. “He had told John he would like to include an instrumental passage with this avant-garde feel. He had the idea to create a spiraling ascent of sound, suggesting we start the passage with all instruments on their lowest note and climbing to the highest in their own time.”9
But creating the sound of “the end of the world”—the searing climax to “A Day in the Life”—was another matter altogether. “That climax was something else again,” George recalled. “What I did there was to write, at the beginning of the 24 bars, the lowest possible note for each of the instruments in the orchestra. At the end of the 24 bars, I wrote the highest note each instrument could reach that was near a chord of E-major. Then I put a squiggly line right through the 24 bars, with reference points to tell them roughly what note they should have reached during each bar. I marked the music ‘pianissimo’ at the beginning and ‘fortissimo’ at the end. Everyone was to start as quietly as possible, almost inaudibly, and end in a (metaphorically) lung-bursting tumult.” Having scored the song’s climactic orchestral ascent, George turned his attentions to the section immediately following Paul’s line, “somebody spoke, and I went into a dream.” For this portion of his score, George “wrote out the music for the part where the orchestra had proper chords to do.” Working to establish a sense of foreboding after Paul’s “bouncy” interior section, George composed a preface for John’s concluding verse—the moment where “big pure chords come in,” in George’s words, and prepare the listener for the Beatles’ final onslaught of sound and mayhem.10
During the incredible lead-up that week to the orchestral session for “A Day in the Life,” George and the Beatles tried out two new compositions for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. At the outset of the overnight session in Studio 2 on Wednesday, February 8, John debuted “Good Morning, Good Morning,” a song that had been inspired by a Kellogg’s Corn Flakes cereal commercial. With the tape running, the bandmates recorded eight takes in order to capture the basic rhythm track, which intrigued Martin, given the song’s unusual structural qualities. “‘Good Morning, Good Morning’ has a strange form. It starts off conventionally enough with an eight-bar introduction,” George later recalled, “followed by a raucous chant of the title from the boys. But the first verse has only 10 beats in it. . . . In a 10-beat phrase, there has to be an uneven bar somewhere, or else two bars of 5/4—rare enough in pop music today and unheard of in 1967.” In addition to Lennon providing a guide vocal, the song featured drums, tambourine, and rhythm guitar. By this early juncture, Lennon made it known to Martin that he wanted to beef up the sound; hence, when the session ended, Emerick and Lush prepared an acetate for Martin to take with him for scoring purposes. “The basic tune was quite simple,” he later wrote, “but John wanted a very hard-driving sound to punch it along. This is where the horns came in. I thought the way to do it would be to have a mixture of saxophones, trumpets, and trombones playing either in unison or in octaves, and sometimes on spread chords.” As it happened, the eventual horn parts would only be the beginning of the overdubs that would transform “Good Morning, Good Morning” before George and his production team brought the song to fruition.11
The very next evening, Thursday, February 9, George and the Beatles were back at it again. Paul was ready to debut a new confection titled “Fixing a Hole,” and he was itching to get something down on tape. The new compositions were coming fast and furious by this point—so fast, in fact, that George was unable to secure any space at Abbey Road to conduct the session. With nothing available at EMI Studios—and Paul working “on heat”—George rounded up space on short notice at Regent Sound’s Tottenham Court Road location. For George and the bandmates, it would mark the first time they had logged any studio hours outside of Abbey Road since Pathé Marconi in Paris in January 1964 and CTS in London two years later. For his part, George was nonplussed by the thought of working at Regent Sound, whic
h “was little more than a demonstration studio, in the heart of Tin Pan Alley. It was a low-ceilinged, boxy little room with a low-ceilinged boxy little sound to it.” But the venue wouldn’t be the only issue that they encountered that evening. Writing “on heat” came with its attendant issues beyond a mere change of venue. Working there also meant a change of personnel. As George later recalled, “We weren’t allowed to take our engineers with us: Geoff Emerick was employed by Abbey Road in those days and that contractually prevented him from recording elsewhere.”12
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