Scott: Sorry George, what did you say?
Harrison: I said it’s no point in Mr. Martin being uptight.
McCartney: Right.
Harrison: You know, we’re all here to do this, and if you want to be uptight—
Martin: I don’t know what to say to you, George.
Harrison: I mean, you’re very negative!
By this juncture, Martin was clearly not immune to the growing tensions in the studio. Blessed relief eventually came when the band regrouped long enough to attempt another stab at “Sexy Sadie,” with the unusually good-humored Lennon shouting up to the control booth, “See if we’re all in tune, George!” before launching into twenty-one passes at the still-unfinished song. When the session finally came to a close, Lennon can be heard remarking, “I don’t like the sound very much for a kickoff. Does anybody?”11
As work on the long-player moved inexorably forward, Martin found himself back in his element during a Monday, July 22, session in cavernous Studio 1. That evening, George conducted his score for “Good Night” with a raft of top-flight London session players. George’s stirring orchestration called for twelve violins, three violas, three cellos, a harp, three flutes, a clarinet, a horn, a vibraphone, and a string bass. After capturing the score in twelve takes, the producer bade goodbye to the musicians and welcomed the Mike Sammes Singers back to Abbey Road. After recording the choir of four male and four female voices, George turned to Ringo, who recorded his lead vocal with charm and grace aplenty. In between takes, the Beatles’ drummer can be heard cracking jokes and chatting good-naturedly with Martin and Scott. All in all, it was a convivial session in contrast with the “Sexy Sadie” affair during the previous week, and for their part Lennon and McCartney were satisfied with the results. “The arrangement was done by George Martin,” Paul remarked during a 1968 interview, “because he’s very good at that kind of arrangement, you know, a very lush, sweet arrangement.”12
Over the next several days, George and the Beatles seemed, for the time being at least, to be gathering a much-needed sense of momentum. They finally completed work on “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey,” with Lennon making the inevitable request that his vocals be refashioned with studio trickery. As Richard Lush recalled, “As usual, John was wanting his voice to sound different. He would say, ‘I want to sound like somebody from the moon or anything different. Make it different!’” In the end, John opted to double-track his lead vocal, later overdubbing a raucous layer of backing vocals with Paul. Together, they chanted “come on” ad nauseam in order to accent the cacophony. That same week, Martin and the group made great progress on “Sexy Sadie” before turning to the first Harrison composition of that summer. Indeed, it was Thursday, July 25—nearly two months into the sessions for their new album—when they finally got around to “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” Inspired by the I Ching—namely, “The Book of Changes”—“While My Guitar Gently Weeps” explores the Eastern notion about life’s interconnectedness. As Harrison later recalled, “I always had to do about ten of Paul and John’s songs before they’d give me the break.” As he would later admit, Martin was just as guilty as Lennon and McCartney for shunting Harrison aside as a kind of junior member of the Beatles’ partnership. While they may have diminished Harrison’s role in the group at times, Martin recognized something greater in the quiet Beatle. To Martin’s mind, Harrison had “something stronger than power. He had influence. Witness the fact that all of the boys followed him to India to sit at the feet of the Maharishi.” And that night in the studio, Martin began to see the guitarist in a different light, just as he had begun to do with Sgt. Pepper’s “Within You, Without You.” With Harrison singing his lead vocal with his acoustic guitar as his sole accompaniment, Martin was enchanted by the new composition. When Harrison completed work on the brief recording, he shouted up to Martin in the control booth, “Let’s hear that back!” to which the Beatles’ producer eagerly obliged.13
For Martin and the Beatles, the studio was dark the next day, as Lennon and McCartney worked at the latter’s Cavendish Avenue home, putting the finishing touches on a new composition titled “Hey Jude.” The bandmates and their producer may have had their trials and tribulations during the summer of 1968, but as Ringo observed years later, nothing excited the group more than working on a great new track. Inspired by Paul’s recent visit with John’s son Julian, “Hey Jude” had single written all over it. On Monday, July 29, with Martin taking a rare night off, McCartney debuted the song in Studio 2 with Ken Scott and new tape operator John Smith working up in the booth. The band recorded six takes of the song during the ensuing rehearsal, with McCartney on piano and lead vocals and Lennon’s acoustic guitar, Harrison’s electric guitar, and Starr’s drums. By the time that Martin joined them at Abbey Road the next evening, “Hey Jude” was quickly taking shape as a Beatles song of inordinate length. “In the case of ‘Hey Jude,’” George later recalled, “when we were recording the track, I thought that we had made it too long. It was very much a Paul song, and I couldn’t understand what he was on about by just going round and round the same thing. And of course, it does become hypnotic.” But even still, George could see the song’s obvious hitmaking potential. The session itself was a muddled affair in spite of the Lennon-McCartney masterwork unfolding in Studio 2. For one thing, there was a film crew present from the National Music Council. They were on hand to film the Beatles for a documentary to be titled Music! As Ken Scott later recalled, “The film crew was supposed to work in such a way that no one would realize they were there, but of course they were getting in everyone’s way and everyone was getting uptight about it.” In the surviving footage, Harrison can be seen up in the booth with Martin and Scott. The quiet Beatle had sought refuge in the control room after McCartney rebuffed his suggestion that his lead guitar part echo McCartney’s lyrics in a call-and-response fashion. For his part, Harrison felt the sting of McCartney’s rejection. “Personally, I’d found that for the last couple of albums,” Harrison later observed, “the freedom to be able to play as a musician was being curtailed, mainly by Paul.” In situations such as the “Hey Jude” session, said Harrison, “Paul had fixed an idea in his brain as to how to record one of his songs. He wasn’t open to anybody else’s suggestions.” When the session came to an end in the wee hours of the morning, Martin took home a rough stereo mix of “Hey Jude” for the purposes of scoring an orchestral arrangement.14
By this point, Martin had booked a half orchestra for an August 1 session at Trident Studios, a brand-new, five-month-old facility in London’s St. Anne’s Court. The studio was the brainchild of Norman Sheffield. “I’d opened the studio thinking it could be something very different to the antiseptic, almost laboratory atmosphere of Abbey Road and the other big studios,” he later wrote. “People there wore white coats and behaved like boffins. It sucked the creative life out of artists. From the outset I’d wanted Trident to be a place where musicians could be free to express themselves. I wanted a different vibe.” For McCartney and Harrison, Trident was already familiar territory, given the former’s recent sessions there with Mary Hopkin and Harrison’s work with newly minted Apple artist Jackie Lomax. But for Martin and the Beatles, Trident’s real attraction was its Ampex eight-track recording capabilities.15
As it happened, EMI Studios had had three 3M eight-track recorders in its possession since May, although the machines were still in the hands of Abbey Road’s maintenance personnel, who were putting the recorders through their paces and making various adjustments. “Whenever we got in a new piece of equipment at Abbey Road it went to Francis Thompson, our resident expert on tape machines, and he would spend about a year working on it,” Ken Townsend later recalled. “The joke was always that when he’d finished with it he’d let the studios use it! He was unhappy with the overdub facility, it didn’t come directly off the sync head as it did with the Studer four-track, and there was no facility for running the capstan motor varispeed from
frequency control. Francis had to make some major modifications.” For his part, George had known about the studio’s 3M machines, but had kept it to himself. For Martin and the Beatles, the studio’s recalcitrance had been an ongoing source of frustration, especially when they seemed disinterested in ramping the studio’s technology up to contemporary standards. As Townsend recalled, “I remember George Harrison asking why we hadn’t got one—‘When are you going to get an eight-track, Ken?’—and we had a wooden replica of the new desk EMI was making to go with it. He said, ‘When are you going to get a real one, not a wooden one?’”16
On the evening of Wednesday, July 31, Martin and the Beatles acclimated themselves to Trident. Working outside of EMI Studios meant that Ken Scott was unable to participate. Barry Sheffield, one of Trident’s co-owners, worked the boards instead. With the tape running, the bandmates remade “Hey Jude” and began working on a carefully layered basic rhythm track featuring McCartney playing the studio’s magnificent Bechstein grand piano and singing a guide vocal, Harrison on electric guitar, Lennon playing his Jumbo acoustic, and Starr on drums. After recording four takes, Martin and the bandmates selected take one as the best before calling it a night. When they reconvened the next afternoon at Trident, the Beatles superimposed a number of overdubs to “Hey Jude,” including McCartney’s lead vocal and bass part, as well as three-part backing vocals from Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison. At that point, they were joined by Martin’s thirty-six-piece orchestra, with the players including ten violinists, three violas, three cellists, two flautists, a bassoon, a contra bassoon, two clarinets, a contrabass clarinet, four trumpets, four trombones, two horns, two string basses, and a percussionist. By this juncture, Martin had come to see his score as an antidote to the song’s extraordinary length, especially given the lengthy play-out chorus that concludes it. As George later recalled, “I realized that by putting an orchestra on you could add lots of weight to the riff by counter chords on the bottom end and bringing in trombones, and strings, and so on until it became a really big tumultuous thing. So that was my only real contribution to that. The real credit goes to Paul for thinking up the song in the first place, and the riff, and the way it extended.” But still, “even when we’d finished, I was terrified because it was so darn long.”17
With the orchestra tuned up and ready to play, Martin recorded the session players during an evening session from eight to eleven that night. As Chris Thomas later recalled, “The studio at Trident was long and narrow. When we did the orchestral overdub, we had to put the trombones at the very front so that they didn’t poke anyone in the back!” With the eight-track machine providing twice the usual real estate, the producer wiped Paul’s bass part, consigning the newly liberated track to afford the string section with more separation. Bill Jackman, one of the flautists and one of the sax players on “Lady Madonna,” remembered playing the “refrain over and over—the repeated riff which plays in the long fadeout.” After recording Martin’s score, the session players were invited to provide backing vocals and handclaps to the song’s play-out section. For the most part, the musicians good-naturedly joined in; as with previous Beatles session players, they were keen on gaining the bragging rights associated with one of the Fab Four’s recordings. But better still, the chance to provide backing vocals on “Hey Jude” doubled their session fees. However, not everyone was thrilled at the opportunity, with one of the players walking out of Trident in a huff, saying, “I’m not going to clap my hands and sing Paul McCartney’s bloody song!”18
Over the next several days, George conducted mono and stereo mixing sessions for “Hey Jude” at Trident, with Barry Sheffield assisting. As Martin worked to adjust the track to the Beatles’ specifications, their producer repeated his concerns about the song’s length, which clocked in at more than seven minutes. The bandmates immediately countered with the example of Richard Harris’s “MacArthur Park,” which had notched a top-five US and UK hit that June. Composed by Oklahoma-born songwriter Jimmy Webb, who had made his name in the mid-1960s with “Up, Up, and Away” and “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” “MacArthur Park” had enjoyed massive airplay and international sales with a length of seven minutes and twenty-one seconds. But George remained unconvinced, given that “Hey Jude” had a substantial length, for a Beatles track at least, of seven minutes and eleven seconds. “It was a long song,” he later observed. “In fact, after I timed it, I actually said, ‘You can’t make a single that long.’ I was shouted down by the boys—not for the first time in my life—and John asked, ‘Why not?’ I couldn’t think of a good answer, really, except the pathetic one that disc jockeys wouldn’t play it.” And that’s when John played his trump card: “They will if it’s us,” he told the producer. There was also the matter of manufacturing a 45 rpm record with the appropriate fidelity for a song of such length. Clearly, the folks at Harris’s label—ABC Records’ Dunhill subsidiary—had managed to handle the unusual length posed by “MacArthur Park.” But for his part, McCartney wasn’t worried. EMI’s technical team had already overcome a number of manufacturing challenges in the past. “It was longer than any single had been,” Paul observed, “but we had a good bunch of engineers. We asked how long a 45 could be. They said that four minutes was about all you could squeeze into the grooves before it seriously started to lose volume and everyone had to turn the sound up. But they did some very clever stuff, squeezing the bit that didn’t have to be loud, then allowing the rest more room. Somehow, they got seven minutes on there, which was quite an engineering feat.”19
But when it came to “Hey Jude,” George and the Beatles weren’t quite out of the woods just yet. On Thursday, August 8, Ken Scott began listening to the Trident mix in the Studio 2 control room. “Back at Abbey Road,” Scott recalled, “I got in well before the group. Acetates were being cut and I went up to hear one. On different equipment, with different EQ [equalization] levels and different monitor settings, it sounded awful, nothing like it had at Trident,” where he had observed the Beatles working during the previous week. When George arrived shortly afterward, he asked Ken about the Trident mix, and the engineer didn’t mince his words. “Well, when I was at Trident,” Scott replied, “I was blown away, but listening to it here, it sounds like shit.” And that’s when John stepped into the control room, and George drolly informed the Beatle that “Ken thinks the mix sounds like shit.” In short order, the other Beatles joined George and Ken in the booth in order to play back the Trident mixes, which, sure enough, sounded murky. Not long afterward, George happened to bump into Geoff Emerick in the corridor outside the control room. Sensing an opportunity, George invited Geoff into the booth to listen to the problematic mix from Trident. Emerick could tell right away that “Hey Jude” was “a great, catchy melody, but the recording quality was poor, with no top end whatsoever.” For their part, the Beatles were elated to see their estranged engineer. “Ah, the prodigal son returns!” Lennon exclaimed. Sitting in front of the console, Geoff worked the controls on a Beatles session for the first time in a month. “Eventually we got it to sound pretty good,” he later recalled, “although the track still didn’t have the kind of in-your-face presence that characterizes most Beatles recordings done at Abbey Road.” A few moments later, standing with Geoff in the studio corridor, George asked him to reconsider his decision to abandon his work with the Beatles, which Geoff politely declined. But he could see the disappointment on the producer’s face. “I understand, Geoff, I understand,” he replied, with a hint of sadness in his voice.20
With “Hey Jude” on the straight and narrow, sonically speaking, the Beatles’ eighteenth UK single—and inaugural Apple Records release—was finally ready for the music marketplace. For his part, McCartney, like Martin, was slightly concerned about the song’s length. A few days before the single’s release, the Beatle gathered feedback about “Hey Jude” from none other than the Rolling Stones’ front man. “I remember taking an acetate down to the Vesuvio,” he later recalled, “a three-in-the-m
orning-dossing-round-on-beanbags type club in Tottenham Court Road. As it was a suitable time in the evening, I got the DJ to put it on. I remember Mick Jagger coming up to me and saying, ‘It’s like two songs, man. It’s got the song and then the whole na, na, na at the end.’” As it turned out, Lennon’s brash confidence about “Hey Jude” was right on the money. Not only did DJs play the song in heavy rotation, but consumers bought it in droves. Released in the United Kingdom on August 30, the “Hey Jude” backed with “Revolution” single proved to be the band’s strongest commercial release to date. By September 14, “Hey Jude” sat atop the UK charts, where it was supplanted a few weeks later by Hopkin’s “Those Were the Days.” Needless to say, Martin was elated to learn that “the roll” would remain unabated. By mid-September, NME reported UK sales of more than two million copies. Stateside, “Hey Jude” backed with “Revolution” proved to be a veritable blockbuster, where it held Billboard’s number-one spot for an incredible nine straight weeks. For his part, John was thrilled to see his boast validated by the single’s runaway success, but he was still miffed about George and the bandmates’ dismissal of “Revolution” as a potential A-side. As he later remarked, “I wanted to put it out as a single, but they said it wasn’t good enough. We put out ‘Hey Jude,’ which was worthy—but we could have had both.”21
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