Sound Pictures

by Kenneth Womack

  For George, his Italian holiday was laden with risk. For six breathtaking years, he had done everything he possibly could to consolidate his place in the Beatles’ world—to bring their musical aspirations to life in the studio but also, just as surely, to enrich himself, both artistically and financially. Like the Beatles, he had desired an opulent lifestyle. He had made no bones about it years earlier, when he set his sights on finding a beat band to ride to the top of the hit parade. His goal, plain and simple, had been to lay his hands on a new E-Type Jaguar like the one owned by Norrie Paramor, his archrival at EMI. And in recent years, with the success or failure of AIR in the balance, the stakes had grown even higher. There were his partners to think about, of course. On a personal level, George knew that his decisions held larger implications beyond himself. He had an ex-wife and two children in the suburbs who depended on him and a growing family with Judy in the city. But still, George took a leap of faith in his relationship with the Beatles. That long summer of despair had left him in a state of doubt about his place in the band’s chemistry—and about whether they even needed him at all at this juncture outside of the occasional orchestration or some such musical arrangement.

  When George finally rolled back into London on September 26, with Judy and baby Lucie safely ensconced at home, he was met with a set of acetates for the songs that Chris and the Beatles had completed during his absence. The bandmates had clearly been working on heat, George discovered. “Cry Baby Cry” and “Helter Skelter” had progressed considerably during his absence, and “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” had seen a tremendous transformation, with its latest incarnation sporting a searing guitar solo from Eric Clapton. Meanwhile, Lennon’s impressive pace had continued, with a strange, satirical effusion called “Glass Onion” nearing completion, along with an intricate, multilayered song that had been inspired back in the summer after George had presented John with a magazine, its cover emblazoned with the unsettling words HAPPINESS IS A WARM GUN. And then there was “I Will,” a romantic acoustic ballad from Paul, and “Piggies,” an acerbic political critique from Harrison. Thomas and the Beatles’ efforts during Martin’s absence were rounded out by “Birthday,” a high-octane number that they had improvised in the studio. But most importantly, what George discovered upon rejoining the Beatles at Trident Studios on Tuesday, October 1, 1968, was that they were acting like a band again.

  As he played the acetates, George was ecstatic, telephoning Chris to congratulate him on a job well done. His protégé, it seemed, had been exactly the caretaker that George hoped he would be—and more. “George Martin couldn’t believe it. He phoned me up so excited and happy,” Thomas later recalled. “When George came back from holiday the whole thing gathered more and more momentum. We were working in different studios with different guys and it all became sort of a factory.” Ken Scott later chalked up the Beatles’ reversal of fortunes to Ringo’s return to the fold. “Once Ringo left, suddenly they realized that they couldn’t quite take this all so much for granted,” Ken later remarked. “When he returned, that was really the sort of high spot when they became a band again. All four would be down in the studio working hard. We got more done during that period of time when George Martin was on holiday and Chris Thomas took over for him. It was phenomenal.” But Scott also recognized what Martin had observed amid the group’s calculus over the past year. With the Beatles’ most recent studio practices, “once the basic was put down, the songwriter was the one that would be in charge for the rest of the recording, and the others might not even show up for days on end until the song was finished,” Scott wrote. “If Paul had to come in to put a bass track on one of George’s songs, Paul would come in that day, do his thing, and then leave. Every song was very much like that. The individual songwriter took control of the process.”2

  George was absolutely blown away. The Beatles may not be a working unit, yet they had found a way to work together, even if their approach meant elevating the desires of the individual over the group. But at the same time, as George played the acetates yet again, he could hear a space, just as he had done in years gone by, where he could make the bandmates’ latest batch of songs even better. When he arrived at Trident on October 1, George was presented with a new number from Paul, a jazzy throwback called “Honey Pie.” That evening, the bandmates rehearsed a basic rhythm track with McCartney’s piano and guide vocal, Harrison’s bass, Starr’s drums, and Lennon’s electric guitar. By the end of the session, McCartney had begun to imagine a brass and woodwind arrangement. And Martin was all too happy to oblige, taking home an acetate of “Honey Pie” in order to concoct a score. But as it happened, the Beatles wanted to welcome him back to the studio in fine style. Only for George, the celebration wouldn’t involve flowers but rather a prank. That night, Jimmy Webb, the budding songwriter behind “MacArthur Park,” was also working at Trident. Spotting Webb, McCartney took a break from rehearsing “Honey Pie” and invited the American into the studio, where he introduced Webb to Martin as “Tom Dowd from Atlantic Records.” As Jimmy later recalled, “I was so terrified and so overawed by where I was that I did not correct this impression, and they proceeded to treat me as though I were Tom Dowd. They were asking me what I thought of this guitar solo and that guitar solo, and I was doing the best I could. I didn’t want to disappoint them by telling them that I was only Jimmy Webb! Finally, after what I thought was entirely too much of it, George Harrison tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘By the way, man, I loved those strings on “MacArthur Park.”’” Realizing that they’d been had—that the Liverpudlians had had a laugh at their expense—Martin and Webb joined in on the merriment. During that same period, a young Birmingham musician named Jeff Lynne also found himself in the bandmates’ orbit when he was performing with the Idle Race. “To be in the same room as the four of them caused me not to sleep for, like, three days,” Lynne later recalled.3

  A few days after work had convened on “Honey Pie,” Harrison presented a new composition titled “Savoy Truffle,” a hard-driving confection that found its roots in Mackintosh’s Good News chocolates, his friend Eric Clapton’s favorite dietary vice. With Harrison imagining a “beefy” sax sound to accompany his song, Martin dutifully began preparing a score, just as he would begin doing the following week after McCartney debuted a piano ballad, “Martha My Dear,” which had been inspired by his sheepdog. That same evening, Friday, October 4, Martin recorded his score for “Honey Pie,” which called for seven session players, including a raft of saxophones and clarinet. And with Paul working on heat with “Martha My Dear,” George readily obliged the songwriter’s wishes, conducting fourteen musicians for his hastily prepared brass and string arrangement. At the end of the night, George even managed to engage in the kind of sound trickery that he adored. Given the Jazz Age feel of “Honey Pie,” they had decided to record the sound of an old phonograph record being cued up at the start of the song. With McCartney singing “now she’s hit the big time in the USA!” Martin clipped the high and low ends of the frequency range associated with the Beatle’s vocal and recorded the sound of a scratch 78 rpm record to complete the sonic picture.

  As mid-October approached, the songs were coming in a deluge. In short order, Martin supervised lengthy sessions devoted to Harrison’s somber “Long, Long, Long,” as well as to Lennon’s breezy “I’m So Tired” and yet another number from Rishikesh, the crowd-pleasing “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill.” For the latter, everyone got in on the act, with Chris Thomas contributing an elegant Mellotron part and Yoko Ono making her Beatles singing debut. Meanwhile, McCartney continued working in the margins—this time, as he made progress on a bluesy rocker titled “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road.” In short order, Martin’s orchestral work had returned with a vengeance. Up first was “Glass Onion,” which, in Thomas and the Beatles’ production, featured an avant-garde outro involving the sound of breaking glass and the voice of football commentator Kenneth Wolstenholme screaming, “It’s a goal!” Martin rep
laced the song’s bizarre ending with an understated string arrangement played by an octet of studio musicians, which imbued the coda with a much-needed sense of irony. With the same players in tow, Martin turned to Harrison’s “Piggies,” with his score affording the song a buoyant dose of English pomp and circumstance. That same week, the producer completed work on Harrison’s “Savoy Truffle” with a heavy sax overdub. As Brian Gibson later recalled, “The session men were playing really well—there’s nothing like a good brass section letting rip—and it sounded fantastic. But having got this really nice sound, George [Harrison] turned to Ken Scott and said, ‘Right, I want to distort it.’ After Scott complied and doused the track with ADT, Harrison announced to the sax players, ‘Before you listen, I’ve got to apologize for what I’ve done to your beautiful sound. Please forgive me—but it’s the way I want it!’”4

  By the week of October 15, Martin and the Beatles were entering the home stretch. In the days since George’s return, his production team had been carrying out mono remixing sessions even as he supervised new material with the Beatles, including “Julia,” John’s heartrending ballad memorializing his late mother, who had died in July 1958. And with that, the long-player was all but complete, save for a few housekeeping duties such as Chris Thomas’s work on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” to ensure that, at Eric Clapton’s request, the guitar solo was appropriately modulated to sound more “Beatley.” “I was given the grand job of waggling the oscillator on the ‘Gently Weeps’ mixes,” Thomas later recalled. “So we did this flanging thing, really wobbling the oscillator in the mix. I did that for hours. What a boring job!” Meanwhile, Ken Scott often worked closely with the bandmates, usually McCartney, in order to carry out the mono and stereo remixing sessions. With Paul shifting the faders up and down, Ken observed as the Beatle pointedly mixed two different versions of “Helter Skelter.” For the stereo remix, Paul included Ringo screaming “I’ve got blisters on my fingers!” during the coda. Yet for the mono version, he purposefully omitted the non sequitur. When Scott asked McCartney about his decision, he told the engineer that Beatles fans were listening for the different versions of songs, so Martin and the Beatles had begun trying to make mono and stereo different. That way, die-hard fans would buy both the stereo and mono versions of the album. At this juncture, all that was left were the attendant sequencing activities for the voluminous and often-enigmatic collection of songs. But as it happened, only two Beatles would be available to see the album through to fruition. That very week, Ringo had gone abroad for a family vacation in Sardinia, where he lounged on Peter Sellers’s yacht. On one occasion, the yacht’s captain spoke movingly about octopuses. “He told me that they hang out in their caves,” Ringo later remarked, “and they go around the seabed finding shiny stones and tin cans and bottles to put in front of their cave like a garden. I thought this was fabulous.” A few days later, Harrison flew out to Los Angeles, leaving Lennon and McCartney alone with Martin at Abbey Road to bring the long-player in for a landing.5

  At five o’clock in the evening on Wednesday, October 16, Martin, Lennon, and McCartney, along with a production team that included Ken Scott and John Smith, assembled at Abbey Road for the most remarkable mixing and sequencing session of the Beatles’ career—perhaps of any career. Commandeering Studios 1, 2, and 3, along with Rooms 41 and 42 in EMI’s complex, George held a twenty-four-hour session in order to sequence, band, and cross-fade thirty-one Beatles tracks, including the McCartney snippet “Can You Take Me Back?” recorded in mid-September but omitting “Not Guilty” and “What’s the New Mary Jane,” which were no longer in contention for the album. Not surprisingly, assembling the long-player’s running order took some figuring out, given the motley assorted songs’ wide-ranging genres and styles. Eventually, they settled on a thematic approach in order to remedy the situation while still attempting to adhere to Martin’s long-held notion that the best approach is to begin each long-playing side with a stirring, upbeat track. In order to accent the LP’s sense of variety, Harrison’s songs were spread out across all four sides of the double album. With “Back in the USSR” launching the record into action with a rock ’n’ roll punch, side B was devoted to the numerous animal songs that had been accrued—namely, “Blackbird,” “Piggies,” and “Rocky Raccoon”—with side C serving as the site of the album’s heavier rock numbers, including “Birthday,” “Yer Blues,” “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey,” and “Helter Skelter.” In perhaps the LP’s brashest move, they opted to conclude the album with the eerie snippet “Can You Take Me Back?” and the experimental, apocalyptic “Revolution 9,” followed closely on its heels by the intentionally syrupy closer “Good Night.” Even stranger still, “Revolution 9” now sported a spoken-word introduction in the form of a conversation between Martin and Apple office manager Alistair Taylor, who begs the producer’s forgiveness for some unknown slight:

  Taylor: . . . bottle of claret for you if I’d realized. I’d forgotten all about it, George. I’m sorry.

  Martin: Well, do next time.

  Taylor: Will you forgive me?

  Martin: Mm, yes.

  Taylor: Cheeky bitch.

  With the running order having been decided, George took a page out of his own book and began sequencing the songs together using a series of cross-fades, just as he had done on Sgt. Pepper. Working as a team, Martin, Lennon, and McCartney identified key moments between songs in order to weave them together—and often in highly innovative fashion, such as the manner in which “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill” explodes into “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” or later when Jack Fallon’s meandering fiddle collides with the blues power of “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?”

  Years later, audio tech Alan Brown recalled the sight that welcomed him to EMI Studios on the morning of Thursday, October 17. “I remember arriving at the studios to find the Beatles still there,” said Brown, “They had been there all night, finalizing the master tapes. . . . They were all over the place, room 41, the front listening room—anywhere—almost every room they could get. It was a frantic last-minute job.” Martin, too, must have felt that the effort was slapdash, that it paled in comparison to the painstaking work that had concluded Sgt. Pepper. At some point, he took Ken Scott aside and “did something that will endear him to me forever,” the engineer later wrote. “Ken, I have to be honest,” said Martin, standing alone with Scott in the studio corridor. “I don’t want you to feel bad about this, and I don’t want you to take this personally, but I don’t think that this album is going to win a Grammy,” Martin said, before adding that “it’s no reflection on you.” To Scott’s mind, Martin “meant it in all kindness because the Beatles were expected to do something even greater than Sgt. Pepper and keep on winning Grammys. It was obvious that this one wouldn’t because it was such a different album from what they’d done previously. George was looking after me in a fatherly way.” Scott would never forget that moment when the most celebrated record producer in the world took a few minutes to reassure a young engineer. “Just the fact that he made the effort blew me away,” he wrote.6

  By the time that Martin, Lennon, and McCartney wrapped things up that night, the album was ready to be mastered and shipped off to the manufacturing plant. As frantic and chaotic as things had seemed at times, they had succeeded in completing the long-player with plenty of time to spare in order to ensure a holiday release. For several months, the group considered naming the album A Doll’s House at the suggestion of Lennon, who wanted to pay homage to Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. They even went so far as to commission a cover illustration by Scottish artist Patrick (John Byrne). But with the July 1968 release of Family’s Music in a Doll’s House, the Beatles were forced to go back to the drawing board. At the suggestion of Robert Fraser, McCartney met with pop-art designer Richard Hamilton, who proposed that the cover effect a dramatic contrast with the colorful albums of the band’s recent psychedelic past. Hamilton recommended a plain w
hite cover imprinted with individual numbers in order to assume the exclusive quality of a limited edition—although in this case it was a limited edition composed, quite ironically, of some five million copies. At Hamilton’s urging, the bandmates decided to name the album The Beatles, a deliberately simple title in relation to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. But as the album’s title, The Beatles never really stood a chance. With its stark white cover art, the two-record set became known as The White Album within scant days of its release. The White Album’s packaging included four individual color shots of the Beatles taken by John Kelly, the photographer behind Cilla Black’s recent album Sher-oo!, along with a poster-sized lyric sheet adorned with a collage of additional photographs.

  Released on November 22—exactly five years after With the Beatles—The White Album quickly ruled the charts. With eighteen months having passed since the Beatles’ last studio album, the new LP was easily the most anticipated rock release of the year. In the United Kingdom, The White Album debuted in the top spot, eventually lording over the charts for eight weeks. Stateside, the long-player was even more successful, with Capitol turning over receipts for 3.3 million copies in the album’s first four days of release. All told, the album held Billboard’s top spot for nine weeks. The critical response nearly, but not quite, matched the records’ overwhelming commercial success. Writing in the Sunday Times, Derek Jewell observed that “of course, the new Beatles double LP is the best thing in pop since Sgt. Pepper. Their sounds, for those open in ear and mind, should long ago have established their supremacy. . . . They have misses, but there aren’t many. It’s a world map of contemporary music, drawn with unique flair. Musically, there is beauty, horror, surprise, chaos, order. And that is the world; and that is what the Beatles are about. Created by, creating for, their age.” Meanwhile, the Times’ William Mann was less generous, writing that “the poetic standard varies from inspired (‘Blackbird’) through allusive (‘Glass Onion’) and obscure (‘Happiness Is a Warm Gun’) to jokey, trite, and deliberately meaningless. There are too many private jokes and too much pastiche to convince me that Lennon and McCartney are still pressing forward,” he argued, but at the same time, “these 30 tracks contain plenty to be studied, enjoyed, and gradually appreciated more fully in the coming months.” Writing in Rolling Stone, which had just celebrated its first anniversary, Jann Wenner hailed The White Album as the Beatles’ best work to date, as well as a portrait of “the history and synthesis of pop music.” Intuitively understanding the Beatles’ aesthetics vis-à-vis 1968, Wenner added that the group’s multigenre, hybridized approach to rock music is “so strong that they make it uniquely theirs, and uniquely the Beatles. They are so good that they not only expand the idiom, but they are also able to penetrate it and take it further.”7