by Bob Spitz
Groups like the Doors and those psychedelic boogie bands that were emerging out of San Francisco put listeners on notice that rock music was growing up. Within the next few years, they would be joined by virtually the entire sixties rock pantheon: Pink Floyd, Janis Joplin, Traffic, Jethro Tull, Sly and the Family Stone, the Band, the Chambers Brothers, Ten Years After, the Jefferson Airplane, Elton John, Credence Clearwater Revival, the Allman Brothers, Joni Mitchell, Led Zeppelin, as well as the entire Motown and Stax/Volt rosters—all of them swept in in the aftermath of the British invasion and subsequent demise of the Brill Building factory sound. “To those of us making music for a living,” said Pete Townshend, “it seemed like, finally, rock ’n roll had found a perfect groove.” Pop playlists began mixing more progressive “album cuts” with singles, so that songs such as “Windy,” “Happy Together,” and “Somethin’ Stupid” were programmed with “For What It’s Worth” and “A Whiter Shade of Pale.”
As all participants scrambled for a piece of the rock, the Beatles watched impassively from the sidelines. Throughout the first four months of 1967, they remained secluded in Abbey Road, working steadily, fussily, on the new album. Never had they enjoyed such a luxury of time to record. In the past there had always been a deadline looming, always a last-minute crunch to write enough material and get it down before the next tour began. For four years EMI had cracked the whip to ensure that the Beatles released four singles and two albums a year—an output unthinkable by today’s standards. But now, at last, they had time, precious time. No deadlines, no tours, no commitments—no nothing.
The studio, always off-limits to outsiders, erupted under a crossfire of loud, jangly, exotic—indescribable—sounds competing like car horns at rush hour. George Martin considered it the Beatles’ “playground,” but a laboratory was more like it. No song was safe. Ideas that once might have been polished off in a day or two were turned inside out, upside down, to see what might happen. They pounced on “every trick brought out of the bag,” according to George Martin. At any time, a “final take” consigned to the can might attract someone’s attention and be reworked entirely the next day. At home following a long night’s work, when a well-deserved joint unleashed some profound, spacey insight, John, Paul, or George might listen to an acetate of the day’s work, pick up a guitar, and bang out a riff that sent everyone back to the drawing board. Instead of learning a new song and recording it, as was customary, there was more a tendency to let it develop organically, idea by idea, overdub by overdub.
The effects of this technique began to pay off immediately. By the middle of January, when they began work on the epic “A Day in the Life,” in essence the first entirely new piece for the album,* the Beatles were able to build the song’s magnificent production, take by take and layer by layer, at their leisure, from the ground up.
They began on January 19 with a simple, two-track rendition, laying down the basic rhythm—Paul on piano, Ringo on bongos, and George on maracas—accompanied by John’s despairing, spectral vocal saturated in echo “because he wanted to sound like Elvis Presley on ‘Heartbreak Hotel.’ ” The middle section had yet to be written, so an arbitrary twenty-four bars were left blank, each counted down aloud by Mal Evans, who indicated the end by setting off a noisy alarm clock that was eventually put to good use.
Even in the early run-through, the song showed unmistakable brilliance. The gorgeous melody, as stark as it is soulful, stands as one of the Beatles’ finest accomplishments. John’s “dry, deadpan voice” aches with disbelief as he comments on both tragic and inane news items that defy common logic. The lyric came, he maintained, during a stretch at the piano, with the January 17 edition of the Daily Mail propped open on the music stand in front of him. “I noticed two stories,” he explained. “One was about the Guinness heir”—Tara Browne, a friend of Paul’s—“who killed himself in a car.* That was the main headline story…. On the next page was a story about four thousand potholes in the streets of Blackburn, Lancashire, that needed to be filled.”* Paul’s contribution, he said, was “the beautiful little lick ‘I’d love to turn you on’ ” that had been “floating around” unused.
Or so John claimed. Like all Beatles’ recollections, parts of that account were, indeed, accurate, while other parts improved with age. In fact, John was inspired by the newspaper inasmuch as he set out to write a lyric based on actual events. But when he arrived at Paul’s house to work on the song, only the first four lines existed, along with a bit of the second verse and the melody. “The verse about the politician blowing his mind out in a car we wrote together,” Paul recalled. As far as he could remember, there was no discussion about Tara Browne. “The ‘blew his mind’ was purely a drug reference, nothing to do with a car crash.”
They spent the next few hours constructing the rest of the song, filling in “funny… little references” and adapting the Blackburn potholes story from John’s newspaper. It was a delicious bit of absurdity, blithely surreal and apropos of, well… nothing: perfect! In the meantime, they stitched in the “woke up, fell out of bed…” sequence that Paul borrowed from another song he’d been fiddling with—“a little party piece of mine”—leaving the rest for improvisation in the studio.
Back at Abbey Road, the Beatles were encouraged by a happy coincidence. The “woke up, fell out of bed…” sequence fit into the song exactly at the point where Mal’s alarm clock rang! It was almost too good to be true. But they still had twenty-four bars to account for. The best they could hope for was an outrageously long middle eight to materialize.
But the gap whetted Paul’s appetite for a grander, more ambitious effort. Sometime during the second day’s work, it dawned on him: a big orchestral buildup. “It was a crazy song, anyway,” he rationalized. “We could go anywhere with [it].” As he kneaded it for a while, the idea leavened. He envisioned a magnificent instrumental interval, avant-garde in its approach, that produced a spiraling ascent of sound. Explaining it to John, Paul said: “We’ll tell the orchestra to start on whatever the lowest note on their instrument is, and to arrive at the highest note on their instrument. But to do it in their own time.” The effect would be “something really tumultuous… something extremely startling.” When he requested that George Martin book a symphony orchestra, however, the producer told him to forget it. The idea appealed to Martin. “But ninety musicians”—the standard symphony configuration—“would be… too expensive.” Martin already feared that the project was getting away from them. In the past, an evening session was called for seven o’clock sharp, with everyone ready to record. Now sessions operated on Beatles Time, which meant that while the staff assembled at seven, Ringo might arrive about 10:45, with the others trickling in before 11:30, in time to grab a cup of coffee or a smoke, maybe catch up with friends, before getting down to work. But—oh, the payoff! All anyone had to do was listen to Rubber Soul or Revolver as a reminder. Who could argue with that? So, after mulling it over, Martin suggested that half an orchestra might serve the same purpose. No one in his right mind would book forty-one musicians—from the prestigious London Philharmonic, no less—to play twenty-four bars of music, but book them he did. Nor did he bat an eye when the Beatles requested that everyone wear evening dress for the occasion.
In the meantime, they set to work on the title song, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” which Paul wrote, he claimed, “with little or no input from John.” With concentration and technical innovation, the track was hustled into shape in a lively two-day marathon, along with a basic reading of “Good Morning, Good Morning,” the theme of which John pinched from a Kellogg’s Cornflakes commercial.
Each new triumph by the Beatles created an urgent need for fresh material. John and Paul continued to write, both together and apart, delivering “With a Little Help from My Friends” and “Lovely Rita” in the intervening days. Another song was inspired by a “blurry and watery” painting John’s four-year-old son, Julian, brought home from nursery school. “The top wa
s all dark blue sky with some very rough-looking stars, [and] green grass along the bottom,” Julian recalled years later. Near the corner, he’d drawn a stick-figure girl—presumably his classmate Lucy O’Donnell, identified by her long blond hair. “I showed it to Dad and he said, ‘What’s that then?’ ” Julian blurted out the first thing that came into his mind: “That’s Lucy in the sky, you know, with diamonds.”
The moment Paul learned of it, over cups of steaming tea with John in the breakfast room at Kenwood, he flashed: “Wow, fantastic title!” Perfect for their next song, it was “very trippy” sounding, which meant they could ladle on the psychedelic imagery. John had already begun playing with a few lines inspired by the “Wool and Water” chapter of Through the Looking Glass, one of his and Paul’s favorite books. “Picture yourself on a boat, on the river…” You could go anywhere on the wings of a line like that! They immediately went upstairs and began writing, “swapping psychedelic suggestions,” Paul recalled, and “trading words off each other, as we always did.” He came up with “cellophane flowers” and “newspaper taxis”; John pitched in with “kaleidoscope eyes.” It came together very quickly. The result was sure to please George Martin. First, however, they had to finish “A Day in the Life,” which awaited a hot middle passage.
On February 10 the all-male orchestra, in full evening dress, assembled in Abbey Road’s Studio One, the cavernous, hangarlike hall near the entrance to the building, dotted with a hundred “ambiophonic” loudspeakers and accommodating up to a thousand musicians, where so many of EMI’s legendary symphonies had been recorded. The ghosts of Elgar, Caruso, Menuhin, Heifetz, Casals, Toscanini, Robeson, and Callas were banished to the rafters as the Beatles invaded sacred territory—not in tuxedos, as promised, but tricked out in a wildly flamboyant, neon-rainbow wardrobe and loaded with gag accessories that they distributed to the mortified musicians. The violinists were given red clown noses; their leader, the eminent Erich Gruenberg, fitted with a gorilla’s paw on his bow hand. Balloons were attached to the bows of stringed instruments. The brass and woodwind section wore plastic spectacles, with fake noses and funny hats. Badges, bells, and beads were affixed where applicable. John giddily handed out plastic stick-on nipples and fake cigars. “People were running around with sparklers and blowing bubbles through little clay pipes,” George Martin recalled. Most of the classical musicians remained bewildered. Many were contemptuous, offended, brimming with hostility. To them, it was an undignified way to behave in the studio. Still, it was a payday, and a good one at that, stretching on and on to accommodate the Beatles’ flights of fantasy.
The Beatles also invited a few musical friends of their own stripe, among them Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull, Donovan, Brian Jones, Mike Nesmith of the Monkees, Pattie Harrison, two Dutch designers—Simon Posthuma and Marijke Koger, who operated a firm called the Fool that would eventually play a role in another aspect of the Beatles’ career—and the Hollies’ Graham Nash, all dressed outrageously in flowing robes or waistcoats with long silk scarves and flared pants, all pleasantly stoned, all spectators for the happening that was about to take place.
Once the orchestra was given instructions, the two conductors—George Martin and Paul McCartney, the latter in a red butcher’s smock draped over a purple-and-black paisley shirt—led the ensemble through five separate performances, each one a cyclone swirl of rolling, vibrating babel. Martin more aptly termed it an “orchestral orgasm.” “It was a remarkable, breathtaking experience,” says Ron Richards, who took cover in a corner of the control room and, with head sandwiched between hands, was reported to have cried: “I just can’t believe it…. I give up!”
But the Beatles were just getting started. All five takes were mixed down onto one track, creating a monster symphonic effect that exceeded everyone’s expectations. But the high note that was reached at the end of the sequence just dangled there, unfinished. It needed a coda. But how could anything complement the sound of 205 turbulent instruments? What could, in effect, land the plane with as much panache as the flight? Initially, Martin dusted off one of John’s acid fantasies from Revolver, when he proposed the sound of four thousand monks chanting accompaniment to “Tomorrow Never Knows.” As nutty as that sounded, Martin thought it might actually work in this case—not four thousand monks, of course, but a chorus of eight or nine people chanting a mantra that could be overdubbed four or five times to create the illusion of thousands. The concept, which everyone responded to eagerly, was ditched after several rehearsals revealed that no one—most of them smokers—could hold the note for more than fifteen or twenty seconds.
Instead, they settled for producing “a gigantic piano chord” that would sustain for just over a minute. The staff rolled three grand pianos into Studio One, including the one reserved exclusively for Daniel Barenboim that was normally kept locked. On the count of four, ten hands—Paul, John, Ringo, Mal Evans, and George Martin—clamped down on an E chord as hard as humanly possible, letting it reverberate, enhanced by some complex technical magic (boldly employing heavy compression and increasing the gain by degrees), right up to the last ounce of fade. It took nine attempts to perfect but was well worth the effort. It was a magnificent—stirring—effect, as conclusive as it was dramatic, capping a dazzling thirty-four-hour arrangement that serves as perhaps the Beatles’ outstanding studio performance.
Much has been written over the years analyzing “A Day in the Life,” how it expresses John’s disillusionment and comments upon the hopelessness of society or redefines the “mythical” Sgt. Pepper’s band by interjecting a measure of sobering reality. Newsweek’s critic hailed it as the pop version of “The Waste Land.” Others singled it out as a case of acid reflux. But, one by one, these grand visions amount to nothing more than personal bias. The song was, after all, recorded before the album concept even took shape, and was written almost as an exercise, lifting random images from the pages of the Daily Mail that “got mixed together in a little poetic jumble,” according to Paul, so “that [it] sounded nice.” No one can argue with the song’s beauty or its astonishing power. Moreover, it reveals the Beatles’ skill and growing confidence as craftsmen—virtuosos—in the studio. John’s vocal, Paul’s musical daring, Ringo’s exquisite, inimitable drum fills are unparalleled. But whether it is profound remains purely subjective. Instead, “A Day in the Life” shines as one of the most innovative sessions in history, one in which the Beatles experimented with sounds and styles that refined the slapdash recording process into a feat of technical artistry. “I’d love to turn you on…,” they had teased, and in the end, it was a promise fulfilled.
[II]
Even in the midst of this “very productive period,” there were muted notes of discontent. Professionally, the Beatles felt the strain of wear and tear on a tightly yoked bond now entering its tenth year. They had been inseparable for the most part, shaping one another’s early attitudes toward life, as well as dreams about the future. As boys, they had clung tenaciously to one another—to the Beatles—for stability and even survival, but as men, they were already looking beyond the band in response to individual needs.
George, who suffered through a stretch of extreme growing pains and a preoccupation with all things Indian, found the “assembly[-line] process” of recording overdubs “a bit tiring and a bit boring.” To him, the whole Sgt. Pepper business was a turnoff, not so much for its concept, which wasn’t all that fascinating, as for the diminishing role he filled in the recording studio. “A lot of the time it ended up with just Paul playing the piano and Ringo keeping the tempo, and we weren’t allowed to play as a band so much,” he complained, and not unjustly. Certainly there was less for George to do on this album. Guitar parts seemed to have taken a backseat to technical fireworks. Most of the songs he proposed—a miscellany of mantras and ragas—had been rejected by John and Paul. The facade of Beatlemania that had been his pass into John’s and Paul’s world lost its luster, and now the old sense of alienation that he’d felt in
Liverpool and Hamburg was pecking at a nerve.
Whatever restlessness George felt in the studio was compounded by John’s personal burden of self-loathing and envy. The destabilizing effects of LSD, coupled with a stagnant marriage and twenty years of snowballing rage, sunk Lennon further and further into an emotional shell. “I was in a real big depression in Pepper and I know that Paul wasn’t at that time,” he recalled. Paul’s glaring “confidence,” as John saw it, only inflamed his outlook, and as a result, John said, “I was going through murder.”
The extent of his anguish is apparent in the volume of photographs that survive as a graphic account of the Sgt. Pepper sessions. In picture after picture taken throughout the months at Abbey Road, the sleepless nights begin to show. John looks miserable, achingly sad, his face dissipated from abuse, his eyes as flat and lifeless as a poached carp. Food no longer interested him, probably a condition caused by the drugs that were sustaining him. For hours, sometimes days, he remained transfixed in a cosmic consciousness, either staring at the ceiling like a zombie or giggling into his hands. Cynthia equated John’s LSD fixation with “religion” and wrote that, because of the incessant tripping, “it was becoming almost impossible to communicate with [him].” In one respect, she said, his “tensions, bigotry, and bad temper were replaced by understanding and love,” but the downside was tragic. During the winter and early spring of 1967, he reached an apogee of drug-taking and self-abuse unparalleled since art college. The nightly scenes when he returned home had lost their intimacy. John was often too spaced out, talking gibberish and behaving much like a child. And he brought home swarms of street freaks “as high as kites,” who tripped and drank and passed out in the house, causing havoc chez Lennon.
John’s problem, according to Paul, was that he was “stuck out in suburbia, living a middle-class life.” It wasn’t the John Lennon he knew at all. It was someone else pretending to be John, pretending to be a husband and father in a fake, alien world. The real John Lennon was the sharp-tongued bohemian from Liverpool, the guy he knew from art college who enjoyed dancing on the edge, going for broke, not the house husband in the ritzy-titsy Stockbroker Belt, as Weybridge was called, with boring neighbors and a seriously boring wife. Paul knew that wasn’t where John was at. And where it left John was plain to him: John was in hell.