Working with McDonald and Parsons up in the booth that same evening, Harrison carried out rough stereo remixes of “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun.” Having decided that both songs would benefit from orchestration, acetates were provided for Martin so that he could compose the scores at home at his leisure. Knowing that he already planned to superimpose orchestral overdubs for “Golden Slumbers”/“Carry That Weight” and “The End,” George began working with EMI’s Laurie Gold to start lining up the requisite session musicians. With “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun” now also on the docket, it made increasing sense to organize a single, large-scale session in which to carry out the orchestral overdubs. When Martin returned to Abbey Road on Tuesday afternoon, he arrived to find McCartney working in the Studio 3 control room with a plastic bag of tape loops that he had fashioned at his nearby St. John’s Wood home on his Brenell tape machine. Working with George and his production team, Paul transferred the mono loops—which included variant sounds of birds, bells, and chirping crickets—onto four-track tape. At this point, Emerick replaced the cross-faded organ note that served as the sonic joint between “You Never Give Me Your Money” and “Sun King” with McCartney’s soothing layer of ambient noise.
During the evening session, the bandmates—namely, Harrison—began experimenting with the quiet Beatle’s recently purchased Moog Series III synthesizer. Harrison had bought one of the keyboard instruments directly from its inventor, Robert Moog, in advance of working on his solo LP Electronic Sound for the short-lived Zapple label. The Moog system worked by generating electronic signals that allowed users to create unique sounds when they depressed the keys and activated a series of modules, which could subsequently be manipulated further still by means of an internal oscillator. In this way, the user could produce unique soundscapes with a Moog synthesizer in contrast with a Mellotron, which only worked with a static series of prerecorded tape loops. Fortunately for Harrison, Martin had recently bought a Moog Series III for AIR after taking an introductory course in San Francisco offered by Moog’s colleagues Bernie Krause and Paul Beaver. Together, the two Georges were able to make good use of the Moog synthesizer. Only days earlier, Harrison had transported his Moog Series III from Kinfauns to Abbey Road. Unlike later, portable versions of the instrument, the Moog synthesizer circa 1969 consisted of an unwieldy two-tiered keyboard setup, complete with a massive bank of wires and other attendant cabinetry. But with the Moog still in its relative infancy, Martin recognized that the best way to approach the instrument was through trial-and-error experimentation. As he later remarked, Moog synthesizers were essentially “sound generators—sine waves, sawtooth, and so on—and you just had to learn how to make sounds with it, which was fascinating stuff.” Martin brought in Mike Vickers, who had developed a steep working knowledge of the instrument, to help program the Moog to meet the Beatles’ creative needs. As Kurlander later recalled, “The Moog was set up in Room 43, and the sound was fed from there by a mono cable to whichever control room we were in. All four Beatles—but particularly George—expressed great interest in it, trying out different things.” The bandmates were quick studies, making shrewd use of the instrument on “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” for example. “On that particular one,” Martin later recalled, “I suppose we were still influenced by real sounds and we were still trying to get sounds that were like instruments we knew, more than synthetic sounds but nevertheless, there was a floaty mystical thing about the sound on ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.’” One of the first Moog overdubs was for “Because,” for which Harrison executed a contemplative backdrop that echoed Martin’s harpsichord part.30
As work on George and the Beatles’ new long-player was coming briskly to a close, with the bandmates often working in different studios simultaneously to carry out overdubs and apply an array of finishing touches, tensions were becoming heightened yet again. There was no more powerful example of this aspect of the Beatles’ working relationship during this period than the Thursday, August 7, session in Studio 2, which began in the early afternoon and concluded at midnight. The trouble started when the bandmates were sitting in the control booth with Martin, Emerick, and Kurlander, listening to playbacks of “Come Together” during a remixing session. As Kurlander looked on with the others, they could see Ono down in the studio below, where she slowly rose out of bed and tiptoed across the room to Harrison’s Leslie speaker cabinet. As they watched, Yoko picked up one of the guitarist’s digestive biscuits from where he stored them atop the cabinet and began slowly unwrapping the package. “That bitch!” Harrison yelled. “She’s just taken one of my biscuits!” At that point, Emerick recalled, “Lennon began shouting back at him, but there was little he could say to defend his wife (who, oblivious, was happily munching away in the studio), because he shared exactly the same attitude toward food. Actually, I think the argument was not so much about the biscuits,” Emerick continued, “but about the bed, which they had all come to deeply resent,” even Martin, who always tried to do his level best to stay out of the fray.31
But what Kurlander would remember most about that day was the way in which the tempest so quickly blew over. Only a short time later, the feuding Beatles seemed to have forgotten all about the explosion up in the Studio 2 control room. Working in Studio 3, Harrison and Lennon put aside their differences to perform a fusillade of guitar solos for the rock ’n’ roll revue that concluded the medley. With McCartney on his Fender Esquire, Harrison on his Gibson Les Paul Standard, and Lennon on his Casino, each guitarist succeeded in improvising a two-bar solo for the ages. As Emerick later recalled, “John, Paul, and George looked like they had gone back in time, like they were kids again, playing together for the sheer enjoyment of it. More than anything, they reminded me of gunslingers, with their guitars strapped on, looks of steely-eyed resolve, determined to outdo one another. Yet there was no animosity, no tension at all—you could tell that they were simply having fun.” Like Kurlander, Starr had been thunderstruck by the virtuosic performance. “Out of the ashes of all that madness,” said Ringo, “that last section is one of the finest pieces we put together.”32
The next day, August 8, the Beatles arrived early at the studio to finally resolve the lingering matter of their new album’s cover art. Since early summer, the title had been a running issue among the group, with several names being bandied about, including Four in the Bar, All Good Children Go to Heaven, and the absurd Billy’s Left Foot. One of the strongest contenders had been to name the album Everest in honor of the brand of cigarettes that Emerick smoked. “We were stuck for an album title,” McCartney later recalled, “and the album didn’t appear to have any obvious concept, except that it had all been done in the studio and it had been done by us. And Geoff Emerick used to have these packets of Everest cigarettes always sitting by him, and we thought, ‘That’s good. It’s big and it’s expansive.’” The bandmates ultimately balked at the idea when they realized that they didn’t want to go to the enormous trouble of journeying to Tibet to shoot the album’s cover art. Besides, Paul added, “You can’t name an album after a ciggie packet!” Suddenly out of options, they turned to the studio from whence they had made their name. “Fuck it,” Ringo reportedly said. “Let’s just step outside and name it Abbey Road.” And that’s exactly what they did. At the appointed time, the Beatles gathered outside the stately gates of 3 Abbey Road for the photo shoot. While the London Metropolitan Police helpfully cleared the area of traffic, photographer Iain MacMillan stood atop a ladder and took the famous cover shot of the bandmates walking single file across the crosswalk only a few yards from the main entrance to EMI Studios.33
A few days later, George conducted the monumental orchestration session for Abbey Road, second only in size and scope to the February 1967 session in Studio 1 for “A Day in the Life.” Working in that very same studio on Friday, August 15, Martin conducted the session musicians, whose music and images were transmitted by closed-circuit television to the Studio 2 control room, where
Emerick, McDonald, and Parsons monitored the proceedings. As Alan Brown later recalled, “It was a mammoth session. We had a large number of lines linking the studios, and we were all walking around the building with walkie-talkies trying to communicate with each other.” Up first that day was “Golden Slumbers”/“Carry That Weight,” for which Martin had scored arrangements for twelve violins, four violas, four cellos, a string bass, four horns, three trumpets, a trombone, and a bass trombone. By this juncture, Martin had perfected the art of orchestration as a means for complementing not only the Beatles’ compositions but also the production style that he deployed in order to bring their creativity to life. “Production and arranging are two different jobs, even though they go hand in hand,” he later remarked. “If you can score, if you can orchestrate, it’s obviously a tremendous help to realize the production ideas that you have. You know what to write in order to get the right sound in the studio. Similarly, if your production end tells you what you need to write, you’re working hand-in-glove with yourself so to speak. And that’s where your orchestrating style affects your production style.”34
With “Golden Slumbers”/“Carry That Weight” under his belt, Martin turned to “The End,” which, in terms of sheer cost per second, was the most exorbitant recording on the day. With the same musicians working in Studio 1, Martin conducted the powerful coda for “The End.” As the medley thundered to a close, a series of guitar flourishes coalesce with George’s orchestration, establishing a sense of an ending amid the warmth of the musicians’ harmonics. In contrast with “A Day in the Life,” which climaxes in a darker hue—with the inherent tension and uncertainty of an E major chord—Martin’s score for “The End” reached the finish line with the comparative serenity of C major. As Brown later observed, “The orchestral overdub for ‘The End’ was the most elaborate I have ever heard: a 30-piece playing for not too many seconds—and mixed about 40 dBs down. It cost a lot of money: all the musicians have to be paid, fed, and watered; I screw every pound note out of it whenever I play the record!”35
After taking a break to arrange the new configurations of musicians and prepare the next set of scores, Martin turned to “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun.” The Beatles’ producer had concocted a pair of exquisite orchestrations for Harrison’s contributions to Abbey Road. His arrangement for “Something” called for twelve violins, four violas, four cellos, and a string bass. As the most complex recording on the day, the session for “Something” found the composer sharing the podium with Martin, as well as taking up his electric guitar to record, live in the studio with the players arrayed nearby, his sublime solo for the middle eight. As Emerick later recalled, “The problem was that there was only one track available, and we needed to use that for the orchestra. The only solution was for him to play it live, right along with the orchestra, so we could record them simultaneously on the same track. I was enormously impressed when he nonchalantly said, ‘Okay, let’s do that’—it took a lot of nerve and self-confidence to be willing to put himself under that kind of pressure. George had to play the solo correctly all the way through, without punch-ins, because the sound coming from his guitar amp would leak onto the other mics, and he wouldn’t get a lot of whacks at it, because it was costing quite a lot to have that orchestra there. But he managed to play the intricate solo with ease.” Later, for “Here Comes the Sun,” Martin’s score called for four violas, four cellos, a string bass, two clarinets, two alto flutes, two flutes, and two piccolos. In this instance, Martin’s deft arrangement perfectly complemented Harrison’s buoyant, optimistic lead vocals, as well as the delicate layers of his acoustic guitar and Moog overdub, the latter of which he would record on the following Tuesday. By the wee hours of Saturday, August 16, the orchestrations for Abbey Road were complete.36
By Monday, August 18, Martin and the Beatles were nearly there. On that day, the medley had been completed, for the most part, with a final overdub for “The End” that featured McCartney’s four-second piano track followed by his final lyrical flourish, “And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.” In so doing, McCartney succeeded in concluding the medley with a quasi-Shakespearean couplet—“a cosmic, philosophical line,” in Lennon’s words. By Wednesday, George and the Beatles were working in Studio 3 in an effort to complete “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” the song that had kicked things off back in February at Trident, when Glyn Johns and Billy Preston were still on the scene. Back on August 8, Lennon had superimposed a layer of white noise that he produced on the Moog Series III. During the August 18 session, Martin supervised the final mixing and editing of “I Want You (She’s So Heavy).” For the song’s distinctive ending, with its powerful sonic buildup, John offered careful instructions in order to ratchet up the intensity. “Louder! Louder!” Lennon implored Emerick during the mixing process. “I want the track to build and build and build, and then I want the white noise to completely take over and blot out the music altogether.” With only twenty-one seconds remaining of the original recording, “all of a sudden he barked out an order” to the Beatles’ engineer, “Cut the tape here!”37
And with that, “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” was complete, as were all of the tracks for Abbey Road. All that was left, as far as George and the Beatles were concerned, was to define the running order, as well as to compile and band the final master tape. Working in the Studio 2 control room from the dinner hour through just past one o’clock the following morning, Martin and the bandmates, joined by Emerick, McDonald, and Parsons, set about formatting each side of the album. They had recently been debating whether to situate the medley on side one or side two—in contrast with their perspective back in early May. In one instance, Lennon had even floated the idea of placing all of his songs on side one and all of McCartney’s on the other, McDonald later recalled. But with the medley effecting a potentially dramatic climax for the album, there was little point in reversing their original plans. Besides, they now had the bookended high points of the sudden, startling conclusion of “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” on side one, balanced with the explosive rock ’n’ roll revue of “The End” on the other. The only other matter was a relatively minor one, with George and the bandmates debating whether to place “Octopus’s Garden” before “Oh! Darling” on side one or vice versa. In the end, they opted to go with “Oh! Darling” first. As for the openers for each side, they followed Martin’s long-held precept about starting with the strongest material, which Abbey Road had in spades. Side one began with “Come Together” and “Something”—a one-two punch, if ever there were one—while side two opened with Harrison’s “Here Comes the Sun,” the LP’s finest track as far as Martin was concerned.
Although Paul still preferred Sgt. Pepper, for George’s money, Abbey Road was a fine album, indeed—possibly even their best. As the assembled group made their way into the cool summer air of early morning, they could hardly have known that they would never pass that way again—at least collectively, that is. But for his part, George couldn’t help feeling that the Beatles seemed to be on their last legs as a working unit. The Get Back sessions had taken their toll, and there was no mistaking the bandmates’ continuing animus in the studio. From George’s perspective, Abbey Road had been an uplifting experience, but the bandmates were clearly running on fumes, and there was no denying an inevitable breaking point. He had recognized this fact, as had John, scant days after Brian Epstein’s untimely demise. But what their producer couldn’t possibly have known—wouldn’t have even have believed at the time—was that he was only just getting started as far as the Fab Four were concerned. For George, unlike the bandmates themselves, the end of the Beatles would be a long way off—decades even. And quite possibly for the rest of their producer’s life.
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Sentimental Journeys
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WHEN IT WAS RELEASED on September 26, 1969, Abbey Road was met with largely rave reviews, although a few critics took issue with what they perceived to be t
he album’s glossy production and sound effects. Writing in the Times, William Mann attacked this notion, remarking that “if adverse reviews elsewhere have dissuaded you from buying Abbey Road, the Beatles’ new LP, do not hesitate any longer. It teems with music invention—mostly by Lennon and McCartney, though all four contribute songs—and the second side, as a piece of musical construction, is altogether remarkable and very exciting indeed,” adding that the album will only be “called gimmicky by people who want a record to sound exactly like a live performance.” In Melody Maker, Chris Welch went even further, proclaiming the Beatles’ new album is “just a natural born gas, entirely free of pretension, deep meanings, or symbolism.” For Welch, “While production is simple compared to past intricacies, it is still extremely sophisticated and inventive.” Stateside, Abbey Road was similarly lauded as a masterpiece, demonstrating Martin and the bandmates at the height of their powers. “That the Beatles can unify seemingly countless musical fragments and lyrical doodlings into a uniformly wonderful suite, as they’ve done on side 2, seems potent testimony that no, they’ve far from lost it, and no, they haven’t stopped trying,” observed John Mendelsohn, writing in the November 15 issue of Rolling Stone. “No, on the contrary, they’ve achieved here the closest thing yet to Beatles freeform, fusing more diverse intriguing musical and lyrical ideas into a piece that amounts to far more than the sum of those ideas.” By contrast, a minority of American critics such as Life’s Albert Goldman derided the album—and the medley in particular—as seeming “symbolic of the Beatles’ latest phase, which might be described as round-the-clock production of disposable music effects.”1
Sound Pictures Page 54
