by Bob Spitz
The first song they recorded, on April 6, 1966, established the pace for everything that was to come. Just after 8 P.M. the Beatles, along with their trusty acolytes Neil Aspinall and Mal Evans, George Martin, and a new, embarrassingly young engineer named Geoff Emerick who had been promoted to replace Norman Smith (otherwise engaged with his new discovery, Pink Floyd), assembled in Studio Three at Abbey Road to begin work on a song with the mysteriously obscure title of “Mark 1.” The time of the session itself was quite extraordinary. Studio discipline dictated that all evening sessions end at ten o’clock, thanks to a long-standing ordinance by the local council that imposed a midnight curfew on recording in what was primarily a residential area. The rule was strictly observed for twenty-five years—that is, until the Beatles shoved it out the door. According to Vera Samwell, who booked the four studios, “the Beatles just recorded whenever they wanted to. They went into the studios and didn’t come out until they’d finished and nobody ever had the nerve to ask them to leave.” So the session that night ran—officially—from seven to ten, but as the clock struck twelve, and then one, the Beatles continued to work.
From the beginning, John’s fertile imagination had conceptualized “Mark 1” in a special way. Paul recalled that the seed for it germinated on an afternoon in early March, when he and John visited the newly opened Indica Bookshop, ostensibly to encourage a few sales. John requested a book by an author whose name he pronounced as “Nitz Ga,” and only after a long, ineffectual search did Barry Miles finally turn up The Portable Nietzsche. In the interim, John browsed the stalls and pounced on a copy of The Psychedelic Experience, by Dr. Timothy Leary. Opening the book, he read: “Whenever in doubt, turn off your mind, relax, float downstream.” In fact, Leary had pinched most of that directly from The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which, in turn, gave John license to help himself to the lines. Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream. It was an irresistible mantra—for so many different reasons. Rushing home, John dropped acid according to Leary’s instructions. “I did it just like he said in the book,” John recalled. Almost immediately, the words came: inscrutable strings of words started threading around ever more gauzy abstractions. Lay down all thoughts, surrender to the void… That you may see the meaning of within… It was an acid freak’s bonanza!
He played a verse of it for Paul a few days later during a meeting at Brian Epstein’s flat. Incredibly, it “was all on the chord of C,” according to Paul. Somehow, John had stripped the music to its most basic structure, the level at which melody and rhythm contract to an unmodulated drone, in the fashion of Indian music. He had bored into the pores of the song until it vibrated with clarity. Paul was intrigued but wondered how George Martin would deal with it, especially considering their reputation for churning out melodic three- and four-chord hits. To his credit, Martin “didn’t flinch at all when John played it to him,” Paul recalled. “He just said, ‘Hmmm, I see, yes. Hmm hmm.’ ” Martin, from Paul’s standpoint, thought it was “rather interesting.”
Interesting—but unfinished. The lyric was as stark as the melody: only one verse in length. “We worked very hard to stretch it into two verses,” Paul explained. “We wracked our brains but couldn’t come up with any more words because we felt it already said everything we wanted to say in the two verses.” Nor did the structure allow for a middle eight. At that length, the track would come in at just over a minute. They had to find a way to make it longer while still preserving its originality.
It was Paul who came up with a solution: tape loops. From his growing infatuation with Stockhausen, especially Gesang der Jünglinge, a composition that fused vocal and electronically produced notes, he’d discovered a process of recording whereby if he removed the erase head from a tape recorder and replaced it with a loop of tape, he could play a short phrase or sound that would ultimately saturate itself. As George Martin described it: “It went round and round and overdubbed itself until the point of saturation, and that made a funny sound.” Martin said recording technicians called it musique concrète, or reinforced music. There were infinite combinations of sounds that could be produced by this method, from which Paul made a number of “little symphonies.” He demonstrated it for the others in the studio, encouraging George and Ringo to make loops as well. Then, Martin “listen[ed] to them at various speeds, backwards and forwards,” in order to integrate them into the recording.
Meanwhile, John discussed several ideas for the vocal with his producer, each one a conceit of his overactive imagination. “He wanted his voice to sound like the Dalai Lama chanting from a hilltop,” Martin recalled. Most producers would have dismissed such a cheeky idea out of hand, but Martin, a wise and patient man, gave the Beatles enormous leeway. Their ideas might sound like gibberish initially, but he recognized that because of their lack of formal musical training, they often only needed someone to “translate” what they meant, to express it in terms that made sense to structured technicians, and in that respect Martin viewed his role as “the official interpreter.” In any case, he struggled to create some kind of a Tibetan influence or effect in the studio, realizing that ordinary echo or reverb wouldn’t do the trick. Recording out of doors was also out of the question; there was no way to contain or control the sound. And John’s suggestion—that “we suspend him from a rope in the middle of the studio ceiling, put a mike in the middle of the floor, give him a push, and he’d sing as he went around and around,” according to Geoff Emerick—was met with a meaningful, albeit barely tolerant smile. (When pressed by John, they were always said to be “looking into it,” Emerick recalled.)
It was the nineteen-year-old Emerick who eventually came up with an inventive solution. He suggested putting John’s voice through a Leslie speaker and re-recording it as it came back out. To a straitlaced, formalistic EMI technician, this sounded about as nutty as suspending John from a rope, but the more Martin thought about it, the more he saw its possibilities. A Leslie was a speaker with variable rotating baffles that was usually paired with a Hammond console organ. “By putting his voice through that and then recording it again, you got a kind of intermittent vibrato effect,” Martin explained. It was a revolutionary idea—but considered taboo at Abbey Road, where engineers were discouraged from “playing about with microphones.”
With Martin’s “support and approval,” Emerick happily rigged the mikes for the Leslie. (“It meant actually breaking into the circuitry,” Emerick recalled.) The rest was a matter of simply forcing John’s vocals through the vibrato, much like vegetables through a ricer. “I remember the surprise on our faces when the voice came out of the speaker,” Emerick said. “It was just one of sheer amazement.” The Beatles were beside themselves with glee. Stoned—which they were most of the time in the studio—the experiments became part prank, part innovation. In that kind of dreamy, altered—impractical—state, the possibilities were limitless. Recording became no longer just another way of putting out songs, but a new way of creating them.
Of course, once the Beatles got their hands on the controls, they found it impossible to leave them alone. “The group encouraged us to break the rules,” Geoff Emerick recalled. “It was implanted… that every instrument should sound unlike itself.” As well as each of the Beatles. John flirted with the idea of having “thousands of monks chanting” in the background of “Mark 1,” a prospect about as likely as booking the Dalai Lama as a sideman. A way to simulate it, however, was to double-track John’s voice—that is, to re-record John singing a duplicate vocal and superimpose it over the original as a way of thickening the texture—but the sound was severely limited by the lack of available tracks. Besides, John dreaded redoing a vocal—he absolutely hated it.
In a rather magnanimous gesture, Ken Townsend, the studio’s manager of technical operations, decided to tackle the problem himself. He went home that night, amid much grousing and chin-rubbing, and came up with a solution that would forever change the state of recording. Hunched over a cannibalized tape recorder, he
concluded that if you took the signals off both the recording and the playback heads and delayed them, it produced two sound images instead of the usual one. Moreover, he discovered that by varying speed and frequencies, you could make adjustments to deliver a desired effect. Artificial double-tracking—or ADT, as it became known—revolutionized not only the recording process but the way in which vocals were subsequently heard. Eventually every artist and producer put it to good use on sessions. What’s more, it opened the frontiers of experimentation to all sorts of electronic recording devices.
John was especially “knocked out” by the sound. It shaved hours, maybe days, off the recording process, let alone the annoying inconvenience of having to sing vocal take after vocal take. Tell me again what it is? John wondered. How does it work? “Well, John,” Martin replied earnestly, seizing the opportunity to have some fun at his artist’s expense, “it’s a double-bifurcated sploshing flange.” A sploshing flange! According to Martin, John knew he was putting him on, but from that point on, the technique known throughout the recording industry as flanging was practiced.
After sampling the wattage behind the spooky-sounding “Mark 1,” which they eventually retitled “Tomorrow Never Knows,” it was virtually inevitable that the Beatles would want to tinker in some way with every new song. A good case in point was the subsequent session for “Got to Get You into My Life,” which had begun, according to studio notes, as “a very acoustic number.” Paul had not composed it in a romantic gist, as the lyric might indicate, but ironically as an ode to drugs. “It was a song about pot actually,” he admitted—not about acid, as John later suspected (Paul hadn’t taken acid yet)—written to a great extent after Bob Dylan turned on the Beatles in New York. At first, the Beatles recorded it as a standard rhythm track, with George Martin sitting in on the organ. In the initial eight takes done over two days (April 6 and 7), familiar Beatlesque backing vocals—John and George repeating “I need your love” behind the refrain—were still discernible beneath the layers of overdubs. But nearly a month and a half later, they were scrapped for an entire brass section—two trumpets and three saxophones—to give the song “a definite jazz feel.” Everyone felt they were on the right track. The horns managed to open up and brighten the song in tantalizing ways. It was clear upon playback, however, that the jazz feel was way too precious, too sedate; the song didn’t rock enough. Moreover, the horns didn’t scream like those on American records. Once Geoff Emerick reevaluated the setup, he hit on a method designed to sharpen the arrangement. Instead of recording the brass in the standard way, by placing the horns a polite six feet away from the mikes, he sandwiched the works—bringing “the mikes… right down in the bells of the instruments”—which fairly electrified the track, giving it liftoff. Then, to launch it into orbit, they overdubbed an additional three trumpets in the coda to match the intensity of Paul’s vocal ad-libs, sealing in a blazing pop R&B feel.
In the sessions that followed, covering “And Your Bird Can Sing” and “Doctor Robert,” the Beatles reverted to fairly straightforward recording techniques. On “Paperback Writer,” which John and Paul composed in an epistolary construction, they relied on a “heavier,” rock ’n roll sound utilizing “a guitar lick on a fuzzy, loud guitar,” as John recalled, but otherwise kept it fairly straight. The only special effect employed was to tweak the bass by using a loudspeaker as a microphone so that the throbbing sound practically jumped off the grooves.
“Rain,” however, was a whole other issue. As far as the writing went, it was “a co-effort,” according to Paul’s account, but they ran into problems the minute it was brought into the studio. No matter how the Beatles ran it down, they “couldn’t get a backing track” to work. They couldn’t find a groove; there was just no punch to it. At some point in the proceedings, they remembered how full and meaty certain instruments sounded when they were slowed down. Drums especially took on serious weight, providing “a big, ponderous, thunderous backing” like “a giant’s footstep.” That gave them another idea. If they played the rhythm track faster than normal and then slowed it down on playback, it thickened the whole texture of the song. They used the same effect for John’s sleepy vocal. But even that didn’t satisfy the Beatles’ thirst for experimentation.
No one is certain exactly whose idea it was to run the tape backward. John claimed it was accidental, following an extremely late night at Abbey Road. The Beatles were halfway through work on “Rain,” according to George, who recalled how each of them took home a rough mix of the song on a reference tape tails out, which meant that the engineer had not rewound it on the tiny four-inch spools before handing it to them. Apparently, John had forgotten that by the time his smoke-filled car pulled into Kenwood. “I got home from the studio and I was stoned out of my mind on marijuana,” he recalled. Just in case he wasn’t wrecked enough, however, he lit up another fat joint before threading the tape onto his recorder, tails out, and played it—backward. In the confusion, John must have experienced a whopper of a paranoid flash; the sound was unlike anything he’d ever heard before, a piercing scronnnch whuppp-whuppp-whuppp bisected by shreds of keening feedback. By John’s account, it sparked an epiphany. “I ran in the next day and said, ‘I know what to do with it, I know…. Listen to this!’ ”
Perhaps. George Martin, however, always maintained that the effect at the end of “Rain” was his idea. “The Beatles weren’t quite sure what to do at that point,” he recalled. “While they were out having a break one evening, I lifted off a bit of John’s voice. [I] put it onto a bit of tape and turned it around and shoved it back in—slid it around until it was in the right position…. And I played it to John when they came back.”
There is probably some truth to both accounts because of the intense collaboration that paced the recording of the album. It’s entirely likely that John conjured the effect, and every bit as likely that Martin perfected it. What is indisputable is that the excitement was contagious. Everyone in the studio reveled in the process, running instrument and vocal tapes in myriad directions. They used it on “Taxman” and throughout George’s guitar solo on “I’m Only Sleeping.” There is even some reverse backing on “She Said She Said.” At some point, however, it had gotten out of hand. “And that was awful,” Martin recalled, “because everything we did after that was backwards. Every guitar solo was backwards, and they tried to think backwards in writing.”
Backward or forward, the work was producing amazing results. There was a sense of real adventure—and real accomplishment—in the studio. Ideas were ricocheting off the walls, the boys were playing way over their heads. “We were really starting to find ourselves in the studio,” Ringo observed. Some of the residual magic he attributed to drugs, which “were kicking in a little more heavily,” but even with the added chemical stimulation, the Beatles’ focus remained razor-sharp. “We were really hard workers… we worked like dogs to get it right.”
While the Beatles thrived in the sanctuary of the studio, other events continued to build on their astounding legacy. A month or so after they began work on their next album, Capitol Records issued a self-styled Beatles album titled Yesterday… and Today that featured a hodgepodge of songs left off the American abridged versions of Help! and Rubber Soul, along with the singles “Paperback Writer” and “Rain” and three tracks raided from the Revolver sessions. It was an odious but common enough practice; Capitol had done it intermittently as a way of customizing the Beatles catalogue—getting an extra album or two out of a popular band by packaging leftovers and material in the vault under an innocuous title. And even though the Beatles complained about it, the royalty windfall from its sales served to mitigate their grievances.
At Capitol’s request, the Beatles were to supply a cover for the LP. Specifically, the label asked for a standard picture of the band, encouraging them to use something from an old Bob Freeman session, but the prospect of another posed portrait, like Beatles for Sale or even Rubber Soul, didn’t appeal to them at all. “We [
wanted] to do something different,” John recalled. They had felt constrained by the boring composition of the previous covers and, as early as February, discussed several other options for Revolver, including the use of negative imagery and religious iconography. Now, with a smaller American release, it would give them a chance to test some of the more extreme ideas that had been kicking around.
Brian put them in touch with an Australian photographer named Bob Whitaker, who “was a bit of a surrealist,” according to John, and admired the imagery of Dalí disciple Merit Oppenheimer and German artist Hans Bellmer, author of the controversial book Die Puppe, which contained pictures of bizarrely dismembered toy dolls. Whitaker inveigled the Beatles with a concept that would depict how “he, as an outsider, viewed the world’s perception of the Fab Four.” Even though the album was called Yesterday… and Today, he proposed they subtitle it A Somnambulant Adventure so that they could place past and present within the context of mortality.
If this was all a bit of pseudophilosophical bullshit, it nonetheless appealed to the Beatles’ sense of the avant-garde, as well as to their pot-indulged fantasies. Meanwhile, it would help put an end to the Beatles’ innocent image. “We were supposed to be sort of angels,” bemoaned John, who “wanted to show that we were aware of life.”
Even so, the Beatles didn’t know what to expect when, on March 25, they arrived at Whitaker’s rented studio on the Vale, in a fashionable area of Chelsea. The props they saw that day were mostly remnants collected from a butcher shop and doll factory: pungent sausage links, a grotesque pig’s head, joints of raw meat, white smocks, dismembered dolls with distorted faces, and numerous lifelike glass eyes. Working quickly to oblige the Beatles’ notoriously short attention span, Whitaker whipped through several outlandish setups. He photographed John, Paul, George, and Ringo holding a string of sausages in front of a young girl; John clutching a cardboard box, with the number 2,000,000 written on it, over Ringo’s head; George banging carpenter’s nails into John’s head. He then dressed the Beatles in the butcher’s smocks, positioned them on a bench, and arranged the meat on their laps, draping an extra joint carefully over John’s shoulder. The poses felt “gross… and stupid” at first. No one had any idea what the imagery was supposed to reflect. Eventually, however, the Beatles “got into it,” smirking like schoolboys when Whitaker placed four decapitated dolls in between each of them and handed them the heads.