But for Emerick, the May 30 session would be memorable for reasons well beyond the unexpected appearances of Ono and Thomas. As the session got underway, Geoff could tell that the Beatles were playing louder than ever before, with John’s amp turned up to “an ear-splitting level.” As George looked on in silence, Geoff was especially concerned because of the sonic leakage from John’s amp into the other microphones. After politely suggesting that John lower the volume so that he could adequately capture the recording, Geoff was stunned by the Beatle’s response over the talkback: “I’ve got something to say to you,” John caustically replied. “It’s your job to control it, so just do your bloody job.” At that point, George and Geoff exchanged knowing glances. And that’s when the Beatles’ producer told Geoff, “I think you’d better go talk to him.” Moments later, Emerick had joined Lennon down in the studio. “Look,” John calmly explained, “the reason I’ve got my amp turned up so high is that I’m trying to distort the shit out of it. If you need me to turn it down, I will, but you have to do something to get my guitar to sound a lot more nasty. That’s what I’m after for this song.” As Geoff began to make his way back to the booth, already imagining a solution to John’s dilemma, he was thunderstruck when the Beatle sneered, “Come on, get with it, Geoff. I think it’s about bloody time you got your act together.”27
When Geoff returned to the booth, he was met by George, who asked, impassively, “What’s he on about?” But for his part, Geoff was speechless in the face of John’s bluster. “I was so mad I couldn’t even answer,” the engineer later recalled. “After taking a few minutes to regain my composure, I decided to overload the mic preamp that was carrying John’s guitar signal.” Geoff was essentially drawing on the same remedy that had been devised to afford John’s voice with additional texture during the sessions devoted to “I Am the Walrus.” As the “Revolution 1” session progressed, with John’s guitar resonance having been rendered to his liking, Geoff had become transfixed by the evening’s unsettling ambience. “That first night’s session was uncontrolled chaos, pure and simple,” he wrote, “and George Martin had looked puzzled and concerned from start to finish. He and I knew that something was not quite right here.”
For his part, George had also registered the difference in the Beatles’ atmosphere, and he strategically fell back on the calculated approach that had served him well in previous years. He self-consciously enacted a “tactical withdrawal,” just as he had done during the production of the Help! long-player and, more recently, during the post-Pepper era. To his mind, this approach allowed him to be available as a resource for the Beatles while carefully navigating his way among their understandably towering egos after years of unparalleled success. But in the ensuing days and weeks, he began adopting a different guise in the studio, arriving early, as he had always done, but purposefully carrying a thick stack of daily London newspapers along with a large Cadbury bar. Outfitted in this fashion, he would recline in the control booth, occupying his mind until he was needed. Withdrawn and catching up on the news of the world, to be sure, but also eminently ready to answer the Beatles’ every beck and call.28
On Friday, May 31, Martin and the bandmates returned to “Revolution 1,” which grew further still as McCartney and Harrison provided intentionally disconcerting “shooby doo-wop” backing vocals to the raucous tune. They were joined by twenty-three-year-old American Francie Schwartz, yet another new face in the studio that week. Introduced as Paul’s new girlfriend, Francie was a budding screenwriter and one of the legion of would-be artists who had descended upon Apple Corps after John and Paul’s open-ended offer of patronage to the world. In short order, Francie made her way into Apple’s offices, where she met Paul and found her way into the Beatle’s heart. In a matter of days, McCartney’s engagement and long-standing relationship with Jane Asher was effectively over. During the May 31 session, Paul added a bass part and John double-tracked his lead vocal. Before George and his production team closed up shop for the night, John and Yoko had begun assembling a sound collage during the six-minute coda for “Revolution 1.”
During the next session, held on Tuesday, June 4, Martin reconvened the recording of “Revolution 1,” with Peter Bown instead of Emerick sitting in the engineer’s chair. George was absolutely livid. Alan Stagge, Abbey Road’s new studio head, had recently adopted a practice in which he planned to regularly shuttle different engineers among the studios’ sessions and recurrent acts as if they were interchangeable. Stagge believed that the only thing that mattered in the world of recording artistry was technical expertise. With the appropriate training and experience, Stagge reasoned, anyone could work a session. In terms of Emerick, the practice would be decidedly short lived after Martin went over Stagge’s head, complained to his superiors, and had Emerick reinstated to all Beatles sessions thenceforward.
During the Emerick-free June 4 session, as technical engineer Brian Gibson recalled, Lennon opted to rerecord his lead vocal for “Revolution 1” in a most unusual fashion. “John decided he would feel more comfortable on the floor,” Brian recalled, “so I had to rig up a microphone which would be suspended on a boom above his mouth. It struck me as somewhat odd, a little eccentric, but they were always looking for a different sound, something new.” That same evening, Bown took special note of an offhanded remark by Lennon when the Fairchild limiter, which was often deployed to modulate Lennon’s vocals, was on the fritz. “The fucking machine has broken down again?” Lennon asked, aghast at the state of EMI’s equipment. “It won’t be the same when we get our own studio down at Apple.” Meanwhile, the bandmates continued adding more overdubs to the song, with McCartney providing an organ part, Harrison and McCartney adorning the coda with yet more harmonies—including a bizarre call-and-response cadence of “mama, dada”—and Harrison turning in raunchy electric guitar work on a heavily distorted Fender Stratocaster.29
For the next session, June 5, Emerick was back in his familiar place in the booth, courtesy of Martin’s tirade earlier that same day with Stagge’s EMI superiors. That evening, Starr debuted a new composition that went under various working titles—“Ringo’s Tune” and “This Is Some Friendly”—before settling on “Don’t Pass Me By.” At this juncture, Ringo had been working on the song for nearly five years. After capturing the basic rhythm track in three attempts, Ringo gleefully shouted up to the control booth, saying, “I think we’ve got something there, George!” At this point, the bandmates began adding overdubs, including perhaps most strangely a holiday sleigh bell. The next evening, Paul superimposed a bass part onto “Don’t Pass Me By,” while Ringo provided various bits of percussion. As work proceeded apace, Ringo and Paul’s piano turns were recorded through a Leslie speaker in order to afford them with greater texture. Meanwhile, John had begun reshaping the collage that served as the coda for “Revolution 1” into a freestanding work of musique concrète that came to be known as “Revolution 9.” With assistance from Yoko, he supplemented the experimental recording with tape loops, bits of conversation, tinkling piano sounds, and assorted vignettes from the EMI tape library’s fabled green cabinet. By the week of June 10—with John occasionally working alone in the studio with Yoko by his side—the collage was now composed of twelve different sound effects, several of which were labeled as “Various,” with the other seven being identified by John as “Vicars Poems,” “Queen’s Mess,” “Come Dancing Combo,” “Organ Last Will Test,” “Neville Club,” “Theatre Outing,” and “Applause/TV Jingle.” All the while, George thumbed through the daily papers and quietly munched on his chocolate. During one outtake, he can even be heard absentmindedly singing Chubby Checker’s 1962 hit “Let’s Twist Again.”30
On the evening of Tuesday, June 11—with Starr and Harrison traveling abroad in the United States—Martin and his production team shuttled between Studio 3, where Lennon was toiling away at “Revolution 9,” and Studio 2, where McCartney debuted a new composition titled “Blackbird.” For the most part, John was left to
his own devices, occasionally dispatching Chris Thomas or Phil McDonald to ferret out new sound effects from the tape library, while George and Geoff attended to Paul’s gentle ballad. Playing his Martin D-28 dreadnought-style acoustic guitar, McCartney made thirty-two attempts at recording “Blackbird.” To augment the recording, Geoff helpfully placed a microphone near Paul’s tapping foot on the floor of Studio 2 in order to capture the sound of the Beatle keeping time. After recording the song’s basic rhythm, Paul double-tracked his lead vocal. George and Geoff finished the song off with the sound of a chirping blackbird, which they had culled from the EMI tape library’s Volume 7: Birds of a Feather. As yet another effect compiled by Stuart Eltham, the sound of the blackbird had been recorded in the engineer’s garden back in 1965. For Emerick, the session had been a joy. Working alone with Martin and McCartney “came as a blessed relief to me after all the stress of the preceding sessions,” he later remarked. “It always was a lot easier to deal with one Beatle.”31
Thursday, June 20, proved to be an unprecedented day in the life of Martin and the Beatles. With McCartney traveling stateside, Lennon worked alone with Ono on “Revolution 9,” save for occasional non sequiturs from Harrison. In fact, John had commandeered every available space in the complex—Studios 1, 2, and 3—for the purposes of completing the basic soundscape for the experimental sound collage. With Yoko by his side, John worked at the recording console, fading the tape loops in and out of the mix in order to bring the collage to fruition. In the final version of the pastiche, Martin’s heavily echoed voice can be heard saying, “Geoff, put the red light on.” Also in evidence was an extract from the February 10, 1967, orchestral overdub for “A Day in the Life.” During the June 20 “Revolution 9” session, John also happened upon the collage’s distinctive “number nine, number nine” introduction, which had been culled from an examination recording for the Royal Academy of Music in the EMI tape library. As Richard Lush later recalled, when John discovered the “number nine” voice, he “thought that was a real hoot. He made a loop of just that bit and had it playing constantly on one machine, fading it in or out when he wanted it, along with the backwards orchestral stuff and everything else.” As the session came to an end that night, Martin and Emerick imbued “Revolution 9” with a heavy dose of STEED (single tape echo and echo delay) in order to afford the pastiche with a live-sounding echo effect, just as they had done three years earlier with tracks like Beatles for Sale’s “Rock and Roll Music” and “Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby.”32
The very next afternoon, Martin and Emerick observed as Lennon overdubbed one last batch of sound effects on the “Revolution 9” montage. As Emerick later recalled, “Every once in a while, Lennon would shoot a glance at George Martin and me to see if we approved of what he was doing. Personally, I thought the track was interesting, but it seemed as though it was as much Yoko’s as it was John’s. Certainly, it wasn’t Beatles music.” Later that evening, George assembled a group of session players to perform a brass arrangement for “Revolution 1.” Working from Martin’s score, the instrumentation consisted of two trumpets and four trombones. Before the session concluded, Harrison superimposed a sizzling lead guitar part on “Revolution 1,” adding further zest to the song’s cacophony of competing styles and genres.
As the month of June came to a close, Martin supervised several additional sessions in which Lennon’s songs held sway. Like McCartney for much of 1967, Lennon was clearly working on heat. The next week, John debuted yet another new composition, eventually titled “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey.” By this point in the production of the new long-player, George and the bandmates had evolved a different means of approaching new songs. In contrast with their most recent efforts on Revolver and Sgt. Pepper, this new approach involved not only rehearsing their songs with the tape running but treating the rehearsals themselves as actual recordings, complete with individual take numbers. It was an indulgent and time-consuming method to be sure, especially in contrast with the comparatively economical Sgt. Pepper, but it illustrates the pains to which the bandmates were willing to go to capture their sonic visions. For Emerick, it meant hours upon hours of close attention to the Beatles’ every move. But for George, it spelled one session after another in which he studied the London news and feasted on Cadbury chocolate bars.33
With July looming on the horizon, “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey” began as a hulking mess of a song on June 26, only to be transformed, via the bandmates’ new rehearsal/recording practice, into a taut and rhythmic basic track. With Lennon and Harrison’s distorted electric guitars, McCartney’s thundering bass, and Starr’s highly compressed drum sound, courtesy of Emerick, “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey” took shape over the next several sessions. Eventually, the Beatles added a host of percussion, including a fire bell and a chocalho, the metal shaker that they had previously deployed on “She’s a Woman.”
On June 28, John unveiled yet another new composition, a gentle serenade titled “Good Night.” Working in Studio 2 with Emerick up in the booth, Martin took the bench in front of Abbey Road’s Steinway grand and delivered a deft accompaniment for Lennon’s beautiful lullaby for his estranged son, Julian. Astutely turning the lead vocals over to Starr, whose baritone was pitch perfect for the tune, Lennon strummed his Gibson Jumbo along with Martin’s smooth piano glide. As the session progressed, Ringo charmingly donned his fatherly guise and tried out a range of spoken introductions, at one point saying, “Come on children! It’s time to toddle off to bed. We’ve had a lovely day at the park and now it’s time for sleep.” As the song evolved even further, John hit upon the idea of accompanying Ringo’s warm vocal effusions with a lush orchestral score—“corny” even, in John’s vision. That same night, the producer dutifully prepared an acetate, which he took home with him in order to begin concocting the score for “Good Night.” Perhaps George would finally succeed in making inroads into the Beatles’ new long-player after all.34
17
The Great Tape
Recorder Robbery
* * *
ON WEDNESDAY, JULY 17, 1968, the Yellow Submarine animated feature film premiered at the London Pavilion. As with A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, it was an evening redolent with the fanaticism of Beatlemania’s great onslaught in its early days. The scene around Piccadilly Circus was appropriately raucous, with the Beatles having traded in their psychedelic finery for the upscale Carnaby wear that was coming into vogue. And George and Judy were there, too, looking out of place as usual, dressed to the nines as if they were at a Hollywood opening circa 1955, with the Beatles’ producer wearing a sleek tuxedo and his wife donning a fancy gown.
For Martin and Al Brodax, Yellow Submarine proved to be a vindication in every sense of the word. The film enjoyed rave reviews both at home and abroad, and even the Beatles warmed to the occasion, having come to realize that the animated feature was a far cry from the King Features cartoons that they claimed to despise. After the premiere, the bandmates stopped distancing themselves from Yellow Submarine and actually began to embrace it. Writing for the New York Times later that year, Renata Adler captured the magic of the animated feature, as well as the Beatles’ uncanny portability across nearly every genre and demographic: “Yellow Submarine is a family movie in the truest sense,” Adler wrote, “something for the little kids who watch the same sort of punning stories, infinitely less nonviolent and refined, on television; something for the older kids, whose musical contribution to the arts and longings for love and gentleness and color could hardly present a better case; something for parents, who can see the best of what being newly young is all about. Hard Day’s Night and Help! were more serious, and more truly Beatle saturated. But Yellow Submarine, with its memories of Saturday morning at the movies, and its lovely Oswald the Rabbit in Candyland graphics, makes the hooking up and otherwise commingling very possible. When invited to, the whole audience picks up the �
��all together now’ refrain and sings.”1
In the space of a single compact paragraph, Adler had managed to capture the essence of what Martin and Brian Epstein had achieved with the Beatles. Riding on the backs of the bandmates’ enormous songwriting talent and musicianship, the group’s brain trust had shrewdly sought out a range of vehicles for showcasing their otherworldly gifts to new and increasingly diverse audiences at every turn. And as Harrison, one of the most vocal critics of the project back in 1967, later observed, “That film works for every generation—every baby, three or four years old, goes through Yellow Submarine.”2
In spite of the movie’s astounding success—it turned over millions of pounds in ticket sales on a relatively meager budget—the Yellow Submarine soundtrack album would be delayed until January 1969. First, there was the issue of the Beatles’ new long-player, which would require the balance of 1968 to complete. But there was also the matter of the soundtrack itself, which Martin wanted to rerecord for posterity. On October 22 and 23, the Beatles’ producer convened his forty-one-piece George Martin Orchestra in Abbey Road’s Studio 1 to record the Yellow Submarine score in a pair of three-hour sessions, with his AIR colleagues John Burgess and Ron Richards on hand as coproducers, Geoff Emerick working as engineer, and Nick Webb serving as tape operator.
Sound Pictures Page 44
