For Martin, Sgt. Pepper was, without question, the highlight of his production career, a hallmark that would be difficult to equal, much less surpass. Writing twenty years later, George was still lost in the moment, describing Sgt. Pepper as “a musical fragmentation grenade, exploding with a force that is still being felt. It grabbed the world of pop music by the scruff of the neck, shook it hard, and left it to wander off, dizzy but wagging its tail. As well as changing the way pop music was viewed, it changed the entire nature of the recording game—for keeps. Nothing even remotely like Pepper had been heard before. It came at a time when people were thirsty for something new, but still its newness caught them by surprise.” But for George, Sgt. Pepper’s cultural apotheosis wasn’t all pomp and circumstance. For the Beatles’ producer, it would ultimately come at a price. A few months after the LP’s release, Time magazine devoted a cover story to herald the Beatles’ “New Incarnation.” In the accompanying article titled “The Messengers,” Christopher Porterfield accords the bandmates with a host of platitudes, describing them as “creating the most original, expressive and musically interesting sounds being heard in pop music. They are leading an evolution in which the best of current post-rock sounds are becoming something that pop music has never been before: an art form. ‘Serious musicians’ are listening to them and marking their work as a historic departure in the progress of music—any music.” But when he finally arrived at the heart of the matter, Porterfield reserved some of his greatest accolades for the older man with the posh voice: “With the help of their engineer, arranger and record producer, George Martin, they plugged into a galaxy of space-age electronic effects, achieved partly through a mixture of tapes run backward and at various speeds.” Later describing Martin as “the producer whose technical midwifery” made Sgt. Pepper possible, Porterfield unknowingly set off a brushfire that would trail the producer for years and be echoed across the record industry by musicians and techies alike. Like other music consumers of the day, Rick Wakeman, the keyboard-playing virtuoso of the progressive rock band Yes, recalled hearing Sgt. Pepper for the first time in June 1967 and being “gobsmacked. It was pushing the bounds of technology. It really showed you what George Martin could do.” In this way, the Beatles’ producer was suddenly emerging as a much-vaunted auteur in his own right. Interpreted in a less-than-favorable light, he might even have been seen as competing with, if not overshadowing, the bandmates themselves. And he would later discover, much to his own chagrin, that such accolades hadn’t escaped their notice.16
While George and the bandmates reveled in adulation at the beginning of what would come to be known as the Summer of Love, not all of their listeners had been buoyed by the aural experience of Sgt. Pepper. For Brian Wilson, the Beatles’ world-beating long-player punctuated months of professional and personal setbacks as he attempted to put the finishing touches on the Beach Boys’ Smile, the album that Hit Parader had heralded as the next great pop masterwork during the previous December. Only by this point, Wilson hadn’t even come close to fulfilling the rock magazine’s great expectations, much less his own. For Brian, Sgt. Pepper had proven to be heartbreaking in more ways than one. In a sense, he found the album to be a heartrending revelation. Back in April, Paul had previewed “She’s Leaving Home” for the Beach Boy and his wife Marilyn during his West Coast jaunt. As Brian later recalled, “We both just cried. It was beautiful.” But in another sense, Sgt. Pepper had proven to be heartbreaking for Brian in a highly personal fashion. Its release and subsequent fanfare had left him shattered, having exposed his inability to bring Smile to fruition. “Time can be spent in the studio to the point where you get so next to it,” Brian later observed, that “you don’t know where you are with it, [and] you decide to just chuck it for a while.” Within days of Sgt. Pepper’s release, the other Beach Boys gathered at Brian’s Bel Air estate, where they began a series of harried recording sessions to complete a stripped-down version of Smile in order to meet their contractual obligations with Capitol Records. By that point, Van Dyke Parks was long gone, having begun recording his solo debut Song Cycle.17
With a July deadline looming, the Beach Boys didn’t have the option of chucking the project, which was rechristened as Smiley Smile and released in mid-September. But by then, Brian’s mystique, so carefully cultivated with the twin masterstrokes of Pet Sounds and “Good Vibrations,” had vanished. Smiley Smile topped out at number forty-one in Billboard while still managing to eke out a top-ten showing in the United Kingdom, where an NME reviewer panned the album, writing that “by the standards which this group has set itself, it’s more than a grade disappointing.” For Brian, Smiley Smile was a hollow version of his original vision for the group’s successor for Pet Sounds. But even still, he recognized that Sgt. Pepper was in a class all its own. Years later, when he was asked how his original conception of Smile compared with the Beatles’ long-player, Brian didn’t mince words. “It wouldn’t have come close,” he exclaimed. “Sgt. Pepper would have kicked our ass.”18
By the time that Martin reunited with the Beatles on the evening of Thursday, June 1—the official date of Sgt. Pepper’s much-anticipated release, no less—he was itching to get back to work. During his absence, the group had not only tackled “All Together Now” but had made inroads into a comedy number titled “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)” and a new Harrison composition that went under the working title of “Too Much.” For the latter song, they had been working at De Lane Lea Music Recording Studio, a somewhat clinical facility housed in a Kingsway-area office building where Jimi Hendrix had recently recorded significant portions of his debut album, Are You Experienced? Like Regent Sound and Olympic Sound Studios, De Lane Lea was an independent shop, which meant that Emerick and Lush were prohibited from working the sessions. But Martin and the Beatles trudged on without them, anxious to capture their latest ideas on tape without benefit of EMI Studios, which was booked with other artists at the time. De Lane Lea’s Dave Siddle and Mike Weighell served as George’s makeshift production team. In a similar vein to the May 9 session, when the band produced a virtually unusable, meandering instrumental jam, the June 1 affair was an even more unfocused mess. Once again, the Beatles produced a tortuous, even slipshod and unprofessional at times, muddle of a session, with the bandmates overloading their instruments with reverb and mindlessly scraping their guitar strings. As Mark Lewisohn has astutely observed, “The single-minded channeling of their great talent so evident on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band did seem, for the moment, to have disappeared.”19
The very next evening, Friday, June 2, Martin and the group had returned to De Lane Lea, where the producer supervised an overdubbing session for Harrison’s “Too Much,” which had now been elongated as “It’s All Too Much.” The song’s brass and woodwind superimposition included four trumpets and a bass clarinet. On hand that evening was David Mason, who was frustrated with Harrison, who didn’t seem to know what he wanted in terms of the session musicians’ participation. Without benefit of a score, the musicians were left to their own devices. For his part, Mason lifted a section of baroque composer Jeremiah Clarke’s Prince of Denmark’s March (commonly known as the Trumpet Voluntary), which afforded Harrison’s composition with a robust flavor of Englishness. As usual when working outside of Abbey Road, Martin and the Beatles were also without benefit of Emerick. By this point, Emerick had begun engineering a new project at EMI Studios, a long-player by the Zombies that would come to be known as Odessey and Oracle. Geoff was assisted by John Kurlander, a newly minted Abbey Road tape operator. As for Martin, the rest of the June 2 session was dominated by yet more of the same unfocused jamming that had permeated the previous one. For his part, George could only watch from his place in the control booth, hoping against hope that the Beatles would find their way. This was uncharted territory for the bandmates in the studio, where they had so often found solace and a sense of artistic drive. In earlier years, George had made tactical withdrawals, at times, in order
to support their ideas and creative energies. But these kinds of mindless, directionless sessions were very different.
Fortunately, things took a turn for the better on Wednesday night, May 17, when George and the Beatles returned to Studio 2 and the familiar faces of Emerick and Lush. That evening, the band picked up where they had left off with “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number).” Perhaps the bandmates’ sudden concentration had as much to do with the friendly confines of Abbey Road as is it did with the material, which was truly up Martin’s street. Chock-full of the very kinds of comedic elements that George had mined back in his Parlophone days with the likes of Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan, “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)” was a vehicle around which everyone, the production team included, could rally. Even the song’s origins were zany, having emerged after Lennon happened to glance at a London telephone book that was embossed with the words “You know the name, look up the number.” That evening, the Beatles established a rhythm track consisting of electric guitar, drums, and tambourine, along with some shoddy flute adornment. The next night, June 7, George and the bandmates’ efforts became even more concentrated after they selected take nine as the best realization of the rhythm track. At this juncture, they began a series of overdubs, including piano, drums, lead guitar, bass, and vibraphone tracks. The great highlight of the evening involved an appearance by the Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones, who provided a bluesy alto sax solo. The session came to a close with several additional superimpositions, including harmonica, bongos, piano, and, absurd as it may seem, a bird whistle, which they had presumably lifted from the studio’s trap room. For the time being, the band’s work on “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)” reached its conclusion that Friday night, when George conducted a control room session to create a mono mix for the song, which at this point was an instrumental. While the song’s purpose seemed entirely unclear at this juncture—and it was difficult to imagine that it would have any place on the impending Yellow Submarine soundtrack—“You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)” had been a concerted effort, in contrast with “It’s All Too Much,” which the band seemed to have been making up as they went along. And it was certainly better than the earlier, tortuous jam sessions that had inaugurated their post-Pepper effusions. What the Beatles really needed, at this point, was a project around which to coalesce their considerable talents.
Fortunately, in the Beatles’ mid-1960s universe, events and opportunities always seemed to turn on a dime, and June 1967 was no different. A few months earlier, Epstein had made one of his rare appearances at Abbey Road, although it had scarcely registered a blip on their radar at the time. “Boys,” he announced, “I have the most fantastic news to report. You have been selected to represent England in a television program which, for the first time ever, will be transmitted live around the world via satellite. The BBC shall actually be filming you making your next record.” As Emerick later recalled, the bandmates barely reacted to their manager’s news, and, after sensing Epstein’s dismay at their nonchalance, chided him for not including them in the decision. “Well, Brian, that’s what you get for committing us to doing something without asking us first,” said Lennon. For the next several weeks, George and the Beatles seemed to have all but forgotten about the BBC program, working intensely to complete Sgt. Pepper at the time. During George’s post-Pepper holiday, the issue came up again during the session for “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number),” with Paul nonchalantly asking John, “How are you getting on with that song for the television broadcast? Isn’t it coming up fairly soon?” Once again, the matter was neglected—even after signing their formal performance contract on May 18—until after their producer’s return. Exasperated by the Beatles’ continuing inertia, Brian dropped into the studio yet again to make another pass at stoking the passions of his jaded clients. As George later recalled, “Brian suddenly whirled in and said that we were to represent Britain in a round-the-world hook-up, and we’d got to write a song. It was a challenge. We had less than two weeks to get it together, and then we learnt there were going to be over 300 million people watching.”20
By this point, George recognized the precariousness of their position, especially given their seeming inability to generate the requisite enthusiasm for the event. Titled Our World, the program was the brainchild of BBC producer Aubrey Singer and had been some ten months in the making. As George later recalled, the Beatles initially planned to come up with something at the last minute: “‘But you can’t just go off the cuff,’ I pleaded with them. ‘We’ve got to prepare something.’ So they went away to get something together, and John came up with ‘All You Need Is Love.’ It had to be kept terribly secret, because the general idea was that the television viewers would actually see the Beatles at work recording their new single.” With the chips down and the bandmates in desperate need of new material, they had come through in the nick of time with a composition that, in Martin’s words, “seemed to fit with the overall concept of the program.” Years later, he would describe the song as an “ideal, lovely” composition, but when John first debuted “All You Need Is Love,” the composer reportedly sat at the piano and performed it in a “dirge-like” fashion. At one point, Martin turned to McCartney and muttered, “Well, it’s certainly repetitive.” But for George, the real issue was whether or not the Beatles could even succeed in performing the song in a live setting—particularly one that would be further complicated by the pressure of being a global simulcast. If George knew anything after the Beatles’ latest bout of studio disarray, he understood implicitly that there was virtually no way that they could simulate the act of recording for a live audience—let alone, several hundred million viewers. He and his production team would have to be fully prepared for any hitches that might emerge in the process. What the Beatles needed, George reasoned, was a foolproof backing track with which to play along during the simulcast. “I was still worried about the idea of going out totally live,” Martin later wrote. “So I told the boys: ‘We’re going to hedge our bets. This is how we’ll do it. I’ll have a four-track machine standing by, and when we go on the air I’ll play you the rhythm track, which you’ll pretend to be playing. But your voices and the orchestra will really be live and we’ll mix the whole thing together and transmit it to the waiting world like that.’”21
And it was with this mind-set, on Wednesday, June 14, that they finally settled down to work on “All You Need Is Love.” With Abbey Road unavailable on such short notice, George and the band returned to Olympic, with Eddie Kramer serving as engineer and George Chkiantz sitting in as tape operator. With the musical flavor for “All You Need Is Love” still in a state of evolution, John asked to sing his guide vocal from the control room, where he could converse with George. To accomplish this end, Kramer had to think quickly on his feet: “We rigged the talkback mike so that it could be used for vocals,” Kramer later recalled, “and he sang through that.” As John performed his vocal, the Beatles went about the business of establishing a basic rhythm track. Lennon took his seat behind the studio’s harpsichord, where he led the group through the basic chord structure. Meanwhile, with Starr behind the drum kit, Harrison took up a violin and McCartney played a double bass, both of which had been left over from a previous orchestral session at Olympic. After the session, Martin was left with an invoice for ten guineas for the use of the harpsichord, although he was more concerned with Harrison’s impromptu attempt at playing the violin. “I remember that one of the minor problems was that George [Harrison] had got hold of a violin, which he wanted to try to play, even though he couldn’t!”22
From the outset, Martin and the Beatles had concocted the idea of deploying “La Marseillaise,” the French national anthem, as the instrumental motto for “All You Need Is Love.” And with that, the idea of orchestral backing was born. As John observed at the time, “So then we thought, ‘Ah, well, we’ll have some more orchestra around this little three-piece with a drum.’” While their original intention had b
een to conclude the song with some kind of chaotic demonstration—they had “wanted to freak out at the end and just go mad,” in Martin’s words—the bandmates ultimately gave him free rein to compose the score in any way that he saw fit.23
But in keeping with the frenzied timetable of that incredible week, they had waited until the eleventh hour in order to make their intentions known to their producer. As Geoff later recalled, “Adding to the chaos was John’s insistence on making a last-minute change to the arrangement, which sent George Martin into a tizzy—he was doing the orchestral score and had to rapidly come up with new sheet music for the musicians, who milled around impatiently waiting for him. To his credit, George came up with a spectacular arrangement, especially considering the very limited time he had to do it in and the odd meters that characterized the song.” Years later, Martin would remember things more charitably, as was his typical wont, writing that the Beatles told him to “write absolutely anything you like, George. Put together any tunes you fancy, and just play it out like that.” In addition to “La Marseillaise,” Martin culled the play-out section of his score from “a Bach two-part invention, ‘Greensleeves,’ and the little lick from ‘In the Mood.’ I wove them all together, at slightly different tempos so that they all still worked as separate entities.” In so doing, George created one of pop music’s first mash-ups.24
With Harrison and McCartney still plying the strings with varying degrees of success, along with Lennon’s harpsichord and Starr’s drums, Martin conducted thirty-three takes of “All You Need Is Love.” The group carried out each new performance with rapid-fire precision, with John counting off a new take in the same instant in which the previous one had concluded—or, in some cases, had collapsed in a false start or some other sort of instrumental breakdown. Before leaving Olympic that night, acetates were created, with Martin taking the long weekend to begin concocting a score. On Monday, June 19, George and the Beatles were back in the friendly confines of EMI Studios, where things quickly became more businesslike—as well they should: they had just six short days to get their act together for a global audience. After selecting take ten as the best of their motley bunch of attempts back at Olympic, they began adding overdubs to “All You Need Is Love.” After the requisite tape reduction, track two consisted of Martin’s piano and Lennon’s banjo. Lead and backing vocals—including the song’s seminal “love, love, love” chorus—were adorned on tracks three and four.
Sound Pictures Page 36
