by Bob Spitz
Without waiting for the details of Martin’s future role to be sorted out, the Beatles began working on the new album, entering a period during which their efforts together once again produced a groundbreaking style that would change the course of popular music. “For the first time we began to think of albums as art on their own, as complete entities,” Martin explained. That sounded suspiciously highfalutin, as unnecessary floss for rock ’n roll, but in no way did it seem to hamstring the recording process. In the sessions that followed, the Beatles, along with their faithful producer, struck a groove that had never been mined before, in which the sound, the way a song was approached and recorded, played as important a part as the music itself. The composition turned more experimental. “The studio itself was full of instruments: pedal harmoniums, tack pianos, a celeste, and a Hammond organ,” George remembered. “That’s why we used all those different sounds on our records—because they were there.”
Harrison had already become fascinated, if not yet proficient, with the sitar, an Indian lute popularized by Wendy Hanson’s friend Ravi Shankar, and he worked out a subtle arrangement that helped dramatize “Norwegian Wood.” In retrospect, it seems like a minor piece of musical construction, adding a string accompaniment, but that sitar managed to turn more than one head inside out. As far as Ringo was concerned, it was “a mind-blower,” a change of direction, if not a reshaping of the band’s attitude. “We were all open to anything when George introduced the sitar,” he said. From then on, “you could walk in with anything as long as it was going to make a musical note.”
Such experiments were hastened by Martin. “He’d come up with amazing technical things, slowing down the piano and things like that,” John recalled. “They were incredibly inquisitive about the recording process,” Martin recalled. “They wanted to know what they could do that people hadn’t [already] done.” A guideline was immediately established: no idea, however vague or outlandish, was too risky or off-limits. Martin knew better than to dismiss their penchant for experimentation. For every trial concept that crashed and burned, there were four that not only took off but soared.
When it came to musical terminology, however, they couldn’t speak the language. Not only didn’t any of the Beatles have formal training, none could read a note. To stem the lack of communication, they developed a rapport with the eloquent Martin that facilitated discussions about music free of theory-loaded jargon. “Give it some color here,” they might suggest. “Make it punchier.” On one number, “In My Life,” which required an instrumental bridge between the verses, John’s instruction got whittled down to “play it like Bach.” Exchanges like that galvanized Martin, who took up each of their abstract ideas as a challenge.
Play it like Bach. That one especially intrigued him. They needed to fill about twelve bars with a piano solo that would lend the song a classical feel. Martin felt he could swing it. Not a pianist by training, he could still manage a fairly decent passage that would approximate “something baroque-sounding,” as John expressed it. “I quickly wrote out a Bach two-part invention [for piano],” he recalled, “ but it was too fast for me to play. So I lowered the speed of the tape to half speed… and then speeded it up [on playback],” an engineering trick that allowed him to simulate an Elizabethan-style harpsichord. Another time, he wove a few sheets of newspaper through the strings of the piano “to make it sound different.” He wrote the middle figure of “Michelle” as well, taking the song’s basic chord structure and inverting it as an instrumental that he played in a duet with John against George’s guitar solo. Martin called these departures “just manipulations of the resources we had at the time,” but that would be akin to playing Hamlet just by putting on the clothes. Resources take resourceful people to manipulate them, and the Beatles, with George Martin’s able assistance, injected originality and daring into the mix that hinted at the great artistic recordings to come.
“This was the departure record,” Ringo said. By any name, it was a masterpiece. The Beatles had already settled on a concept for the cover: it would be a fashionable photograph of the band from among those taken by Bob Freeman in the garden of John’s house in Weybridge. They’d worn new suede outfits for the occasion along with a new look: mannered, self-assured, candid. Freeman had shot more than a dozen rolls of film at the session, necessitating a consultation with the Beatles in order to choose the right photo. Everyone assembled in the parlor of a London flat one night to view the proof sheets that Freeman had converted to slides. “Whilst projecting [them] onto an album-sized piece of white cardboard, Bob inadvertently tilted the card backwards,” Paul remembered. “The effect was to stretch the perspective and elongate the faces.” What a groovy effect! It reminded them of hallucinations during an acid trip, where everything was out of whack. Was it possible to print the photo that way? they wondered. Freeman’s response—a resounding “yes!”—triggered some discussion about an American blues artist’s reaction to the Rolling Stones. “Well, you know they’re good,” he’d commented, “but it’s plastic soul.” Plastic soul! What a hoot, they thought. It had a clever ring to it, and it was irreverent. A potential album title? Very close. But Freeman’s elasticized photo stretched the phrase in another direction, which everyone felt hit the mark. The name of the album, they agreed, would be Rubber Soul.
MASTERY
Chapter 29 Just Sort of a Freak Show
[I]
Rubber Soul broke everything open,” says Steve Winwood. “It crossed music into a whole new dimension and was responsible for kicking off the sixties rock era as we know it.” Almost everyone echoed his belief that the Beatles had “raised the bar” in a way that made musicians reconsider how they wrote and recorded songs. Newsweek, a scant two years after tweaking the Beatles’ haircuts and improbable talent, reversed itself, calling them the “Bards of Pop” and their songs “as brilliantly original as any written today.” And the New York Times, whose grouchy critic, Jack Gould, had famously referred to the Beatles as “a fine mass placebo” and their act as “dated stuff,” delivered a glowing tribute in a five-page Sunday magazine article under the friendlier byline of Maureen Cleave.
Rock ’n roll had always been an easy beat to peg—and disdain—but the Beatles, as one classical convert noted, had succeeded in “push[ing] the music into more conventional modes,” especially with Rubber Soul, in which they were able to blend “gospel, country music, baroque counterpoint and even French popular ballads into a style that is wholly their own.”
On December 17, 1965, a handful of Sinatra protégés, along with Cilla Black, Esther Phillips, Henry Mancini, Marianne Faithfull, Ella Fitzgerald, and a seriously stoned Peter Sellers, paid tribute to the Beatles in a television extravaganza titled The Music of Lennon and McCartney. Even John and Paul put in an appearance to plug their new single, “Day Tripper” and “We Can Work It Out,” which, in an extraordinary occurrence, were both being marketed as A-sides. As expected, the show touched off an explosion of interest by entertainers to cover their songs, with everyone from Ray Charles to Count Basie sifting through the Northern Songs catalogue. By mid-1966, an astounding eighty-eight Lennon-McCartney songs had been recorded in over 2,900 versions. Gershwin finally had competition.
While the cover versions multiplied and the critics traded accolades, the Beatles themselves scattered like errant billiard balls, disappearing into various pockets of London that catered to their precious anonymity. The Lennons, the Starkeys, and George and Pattie conveniently lived in neighboring communities, less than a ten-minute drive apart, and although their individual interests took them on different courses, their bond to the larger family remained very much intact. The Beatles continued to have “a strong hold on each other,” as Ringo recalled. Even though they had worked together nearly every day over the past eight years, there was an attachment, a real devotion, that was indelibly drawn. They still socialized and took vacations together; Christmas was usually an extensive group affair.
But as tributaries of
the Thames threatened to freeze early in an unusually cold winter, John, George, and Ringo clung dearly to their neighboring homes in Surrey, with Paul camped out in the Ashers’ Wimpole Street attic. Welcome was the cancellation of a British tour in the spring (in fact, they would never tour Britain again), but Brian refused to rule out a short, last-minute sprint around the aging cinema circuit. Nevertheless, the Beatles finally found themselves with valuable time on their hands.
John, who was becoming politicized by fractious world events, took the opportunity to catch up on the news, which he devoured ravenously, scouring “all the daily newspapers published in Great Britain” as well as watching endless hours of daytime television coverage on the set in a tiny morning room at the back of the house. The intensifying civil rights movement, America’s involvement in Southeast Asia, and the allure of psychedelics were all issues that captivated him. At night, he languished in front of episodes of The Power Game, Danger Man, and The Rat Catchers. Work on a new book was postponed in favor of television—“it’s supposed to be out this month but I’ve only done one page!” he boasted.
Ringo spent ample time doting on his family. “Nothing made him happier than sitting at the kitchen table, eating Corn Flakes, with Maureen and Zak,” says Ken Partridge, who helped design Sunny Heights (which included a private club over the garage, complete with a mirrored bar, pool table, jukebox, and, reverently, a portrait of John and Paul). Otherwise, Ringo had developed a passion for fine photography, thanks to a fancy Nikon and an above-average eye, and wasted no opportunity to record “all the important events in his [son’s] life.” Ringo had no other grand visions. While he loved material wealth and was a rich man despite his fractional share of the Beatles’ profits, his dreams, like those of many hardworking Scouse men, were incongruously modest. A house in the country was more than he’d ever expected from life. Having a good job—a very good job—and an adoring family was enough to seal his contentment, and aside from a few material indulgences, he refrained from the temptation to set his sights higher.
Taking the opposite view, Paul tore around London gorging himself on culture, as if he had only a short time left to live. “People are saying things and painting things and writing things and composing things that are great,” he breathlessly told a reporter. “I must know what people are doing.” To facilitate his acculturation, Paul took piano lessons from a teacher at the Guildhall School of Music, George Martin’s alma mater, studying composers Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luciano Berio, and read avant-garde poetry, which he plucked from the cluttered stalls at Better Books. “It was a very free, formless time for me,” he recalled. Most evenings, he capered about town in the company of John Dunbar and his wife, Marianne Faithfull, or turned up at Barry and Sue Miles’s bohemian flat, curling up amid the clutter on their unusually hard chaise longue, to get “wrecked” and discuss “all these crazy ideas” about life and art while listening to jazz. Robert Fraser became his art guru, and through him Paul met Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, and Jim Dine, as well as arty filmmakers such as Michelangelo Antonioni, who was in the midst of shooting Blow-Up. Surrounded by the right people, Paul delighted in those circumstances where his celebrity mattered naught.
George publicly surfaced from his romantic interlude with Indian music—“Sometimes before I go to sleep,” he fantasized, “I think what it would be like to be inside Ravi’s sitar”—in mid-January to announce that he’d married Pattie Boyd. The wedding itself came as no surprise; Beatles fans had been expecting it for months. But the timing of it, on January 21, while John and Ringo were vacationing in Trinidad, caught most friends unaware. He and Pattie gave their families only a few days’ notice to join them in a quiet ceremony at the Leatherhead and Esher registry, in Epsom, near his home, with Paul and Brian serving as best men. George was now the third of the Beatles to be “taken out of circulation” (if in name only), and he was quick to underscore the onus it placed on the single-minded Paul. “Now he’s the only Beatle left…. He won’t get a moment’s peace.”
But Paul had something else on his mind. He and John finished “Paperback Writer” and “Rain,” as well as “Here, There and Everywhere,” which they’d originally blocked out in Austria, during the filming of Help! And during his final days as a lodger at the Ashers’ flat, before moving to St. John’s Wood, Paul began an ambitious new song. On those dismally gray afternoons when Margaret Asher wasn’t giving oboe lessons, Paul used to disappear into the cluttered, low-ceilinged basement music room to, as he so blithely put it, “have a fiddle around.” There, hunched over the rugged upright piano, he produced an achingly haunting line of melody while vamping on an E minor chord. “Ola Na Tungee / Blowing his mind in the dark / With a pipeful of clay” were the lyrics that Donovan recalled hearing when Paul showed up at his flat to jam a few days later. The words were meaningless, just filler or suitable phrases to push him through the composing process. “Often you just block songs out and words just come into your mind,” Paul explained much later. They became “insinuated into your consciousness… and when they do it’s hard to get rid of them.” But not long afterward, the lyric had evolved as “Dazzie-de-da-zu / Picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been.” Picks up the rice in the church…Paul remembered how “those words just fell out”; it was one of those accidents, those magical moments that had befallen him over the years, seemingly immaterial at first, “but they started to set the tone of it all.”
Dazzie-de-da-zu officially became Eleanor Rigby in March. Paul says he borrowed the first name from Eleanor Bron, their comely Help! costar, with whom “John had a fling,” and grafted it onto Rigby, the name of an old shop, Rigby & Amp, in the Bristol dock area that he’d stumbled over during a visit to see Jane perform at the Old Vic. It was so deliciously “ordinary”: Eleanor Rigby. He had no trouble envisioning someone by that name picking up rice in a church, waiting by a window, dying alone. And those images helped him “piece all the ideas together”—the melody and the chords, everything—before taking the nearly finished song to John for a polish.
John had also been busy sketching songs, working late afternoons in the small smoke-filled music room at the top of his house. There, despite Julian’s interruptions and his growing estrangement from Cynthia, he eschewed the artsy, Dylan-inspired epics like “Norwegian Wood” and “In My Life” and concentrated instead on producing a number of simpler, more hummable songs. There wasn’t much left to do on “She Said She Said,” which had been inspired by Peter Fonda’s hallucinating poolside rambling and pretty much fleshed out in Los Angeles (except for the title, which materialized during the recording session). But he’d gotten a head start on two well-put songs: the pithy, rhythmic “And Your Bird Can Sing,” with its exuberant guitar riff, and “Doctor Robert,” which was “a joke,” according to John, lambasting the socially prominent clientele who got scrip for casual drug use from a chichi New York internist. Without any consensus—or deadline—a new album was percolating.
[II]
The Beatles had always gone all out to make great-sounding songs; now it was time, they decided, to make great-sounding records. If you listened to American records, they argued, there was a natural brilliance to them, an excitement emanating from the technical side that made the performances pop. Even on 45s, the bass sound was thick and rich, the trebles clear as crystal. “The Americans seemed to be ahead of us in those days,” admitted Norman Smith, the Beatles’ crackerjack engineer. And it frustrated the Beatles no end. They had impeccable ears; they could hear the difference.
Listening, however, wasn’t going to help matters. Abbey Road was still in the Dark Ages as far as technical practices were concerned. The four-track machines used to record every artist—from the London Philharmonic to Herman’s Hermits—were regarded as dinosaurs elsewhere in the world. Microphone setups were outmoded. Engineers were advised against getting creative—executives called it tampering—with the equipment. There were still regulations, overseen by a tyrannical studio au
thority, about how bright the sound could be. “The Beatles… were screaming for more sophisticated equipment, more flexible equipment, that could give better definition,” Smith explained.
No one, however, was holding his breath. If their request for a better atmosphere in the studio was any indication, they were in for a long haul. “What EMI did for them was to put in special lighting,” George Martin recalled, laughing, “… [which amounted to] three fluorescent tubes—one white, one red, and one blue.” What about Memphis? someone suggested. Those relentless, hard-driving rhythm sections, the punchy horns, that uninhibited, gospel-inspired groove recently reborn as soul—the high-voltage energy that came through on Bobby Bland’s and Otis Redding’s records under the auspices of Booker T and the MG’s—all that plus a real studio. Without even discussing it with George Martin, the Beatles dispatched Brian Epstein to Memphis, Tennessee, the last week in March to “look over the recording studios” there and to cut a deal with guitarist Steve Cropper to produce the sessions. George and John were especially excited to relocate overseas. “It’ll shake up everything,” George insisted. “You don’t grow as a band unless you shake things up, you know.”
But getting a fair shake in the States came at too high a price. For all Cropper’s attempts to accommodate them, it remained too much of a gamble. “They wanted a fantastic amount of money to use the facilities there,” Paul recalled, and he suspected that it had nothing to do with overhead and everything to do with the Beatles. “They were obviously trying to take us for a ride.” With that, the Beatles immediately booked time to record at Abbey Road.