Sound Man: A Life Recording Hits with The Rolling Stones, The Who, LedZeppelin, The Eagles, Eric Clapton, The Faces . . .

by Glyn Johns

  I ran cables down the stairwell in the middle of the building to the control room in the basement and we were ready to go. The band were in an excellent mood and they needed to be, as it was a cold and windy winter’s day.

  As expected, the concert was stopped by the police after half an hour or so, but we did get a great version of “One After 909.” I had not heard it before so it came as a bit of a shock. Apparently it is the first song John and Paul wrote together.

  One morning before the others arrived at the studio, George asked me if I would stay behind at the end of the day to cut a demo with him of a song he had written, as he didn’t want to play it in front of the others. So we waited for everyone to leave and he went out into the empty studio and played “Something in the Way She Moves,” which might just be the greatest song he ever wrote. He came into the control room, and after having it played back to him, he asked what I thought of it, as he seemed unsure. I told him it was brilliant and that he must play it to the others. I can only assume that his confidence had been dented as a result of living in the shadow of John and Paul.

  • • •

  In the last week that we were recording at Savile Row, I came up the stairs from the basement at the end of the day, and as I turned the corner in the hallway on the ground floor I saw John Lennon opening the front door and greeting Allen Klein. I nearly fell back down the stairs with shock. Allen had bought The Rolling Stones’ management from Andrew Oldham in 1967. The Stones were never happy about the arrangement, most especially when they discovered that he had acquired the rights to all their masters and publishing until 1971. I was having dinner with Klein in London one night in 1968 when he announced that he was going to get The Beatles. I told him he was bonkers, but here we were a year later, him waving hello to me with the grin of a Cheshire cat as John ushered him into the office for what may have been their first meeting.

  After exactly a month, on the 31st of January, we finished at Savile Row with a proper performance of all the songs as we had discussed and went our separate ways.

  Children of the Future, Part Two

  The following day I returned to California to start the Steve Miller Band’s third album, Brave New World. We were getting on fine until I got a call from The Beatles, asking if Steve would let me go for a couple of weeks, to return home to London to do some sessions for what became Abbey Road. They made him an offer he could not refuse, saying they would pay all the expenses incurred by the delay to his recording schedule. So the band got to hang out in a hotel in L.A. courtesy of The Beatles, while I disappeared back to London for what proved to be a somewhat grueling few days.

  I went straight from the plane to Apple for a couple of days, and then to Olympic Studios for an all-night session with the Stones till six a.m. Then to Apple again in the afternoon before going on to the Albert Hall that evening to record Jimi Hendrix in concert.

  This was a complete disaster. The Albert Hall was originally designed for classical music and not in any way for loud rock and roll. I had recorded The Rolling Stones there a few years earlier but that was in the days when you could not hear a note of music for the wall of screaming teenage girls, and the amplifiers were considerably smaller, therefore not nearly as loud, so the acoustics were not so much of an issue. The acoustics have been improved dramatically in recent years but in 1969 it may have been the worst venue in the UK for Hendrix to play. It sounded like an enormous indoor swimming pool.

  • • •

  I spoke to Jimi after the soundcheck, suggesting that if he wanted anyone in the audience to hear a single note of what he played that he and Noel Redding, the bass player, should use much smaller amps and for them to play at a much quieter level than they were used to. I knew I was wasting my time, but I also knew that the recording would be useless if he did not make some kind of compromise.

  He was charming and said he understood the problem and would consider what I had said. When the show began, as I expected, he completely ignored my suggestion. If anything, he turned up and the net result was an unusable cacophony of sound.

  I was set up in a dressing room backstage, and as soon as I realized how bad it was I decided not to waste my time, and having told the assistant engineer to change reels when necessary, I went home.

  The following morning I got an extremely irate call from Mike Jeffery, Jimi’s manager, asking where the hell I was when they went backstage to listen to a playback after the concert. I politely told him that as Jimi had decided not to take my advice, which was entirely his prerogative, the recording was completely useless. Therefore there was little point in me sitting there all evening listening to the racket going onstage. This may well have been the last conversation I had with Mike and I was never to see Jimi again.

  • • •

  The next day I went into Trident Studios in Soho to record “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” with The Beatles. The session finished at five a.m. and I went home, grabbed my things, and left for L.A. that morning, starting back in the studio with Steve and the band the next day.

  A month later, we had almost finished Brave New World and I returned to London to spend the next few weeks working with The Beatles on material for Abbey Road, at both Olympic and Abbey Road, interspersed with the Stones, working on Let It Bleed at Olympic, and with George Harrison, producing an album with Billy Preston.

  After my first week back home, Steve decided to come to London to do some mixing with me and hang out for a few days. I had a session booked at Olympic on a Sunday with the Fab Four, and I invited him to come along to meet them. Unfortunately their office had inadvertently told only Paul and Mal Evans about the session. So we found ourselves with a studio full of Beatles instruments and no band. Not to be outdone by the situation, Paul asked Steve if he had a song. Steve replied that he didn’t but had an idea for one, and by five o’clock the following morning we had “My Dark Hour” finished. Paul played drums and bass and added the most powerful vocal harmony to the chorus, and Steve sang lead and played guitar. A good time was had by all and the song ended up on Brave New World.

  Steve had plenty of time to spare on the days we were not working, while I was darting from one session to the next. So he went to Anello & Davide, the famous boot- and shoemaker on the Tottenham Court Road, and ordered thirteen pairs of Beatle boots. They were not ready by the time he returned to the States, as they took several weeks to be made, and some months later I agreed to pick them up and take them to him in San Francisco. I had arranged to stop off in Boston on the way, to meet Phil Walden, the manager of the Allman Brothers, to discuss the possibility of producing their first album.

  My luggage was the last off the plane. I had two suitcases, one for my clothes and the other full of Beatle boots of various hues. The customs guy was really pissed off by the time he got to me, having just processed a large portion of the contents of a 747. He took one look at what stood before him and decided on a course of revenge for the way his day had gone thus far.

  I usually traveled dressed as conventionally as possible. The experience of traveling with the Stones across many borders had proven invaluable. However, on this occasion I was wearing jeans and a suede fringe jacket. This, coupled with the length of my hair, triggered the blue revolving lights in the bastard’s eyes. He opened the case containing my clothes first, searching every item until the entire contents were spread out on his table. Finding nothing untoward did nothing to quench his desire for a kill. He moved on to my briefcase, reading my phone book and diary from cover to cover. A regular bloody Sherlock Holmes. I had a packet of peppermints, which were pounced on with glee. “What have we here?” he muttered. “Peppermints,” came the reply. “Please, do have one.” The packet was ripped open without ceremony and the innocent little mints had their wrappers ripped off one by one. They were sniffed, licked, and inspected from every angle. All to no avail. Then he moved on to the second suitcase. “What’s in here?” he sneered
. “Boots,” I replied, my heart sinking. Now I was sure at the very least I was going to be done for boot smuggling. “I am bringing them here for a friend in San Francisco, he had them made for him on his last trip to London . . .” I trailed off, realizing that the more I spoke, the guiltier I appeared.

  Beatle boots, you may recall, have Cuban heels. This was clearly going to make his month. I was told to step back from the table while he set about Steve’s boots as one possessed, checking each heel for a false trapdoor, tapping and twisting his way through all twenty-six. On finding nothing, he started the whole routine all over again from the beginning. Finally, after nearly an hour, he gave up and begrudgingly told me to pack up my belongings, which were now in a large heap on the table, and to leave, as if I had delayed him and caused him the most awful inconvenience.

  Just as I lifted the last item onto my trolley I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was two plainclothesmen, who flashed their badges and asked me to accompany them to a small oblong room nearby. I have no idea if my name was on a list, by association with those I had been working and in some cases traveling with in the past or what, but these guys seemed quite convinced that I was up to no good, and it wasn’t boot smuggling they were trying to pin on me.

  I should reiterate that I am completely straight and have never taken drugs—hard, soft, liquid, or powder—at any time. Boring, but true. So, as you can imagine, after I’d spent the previous few years, six or seven days a week, with some of the most notorious users in the western hemisphere, my one big fear was getting busted, since I knew of more than one case of drugs being planted by the authorities so as to be sure of not having a wasted trip. Brian Jones told me that when he was busted at his flat in London the police planted hash in his sock drawer, and Pattie Boyd told me that when she was married to George Harrison the police raided their house in Esher and came out of the bedroom claiming that they had found drugs in a pair of George’s shoes. Whereupon she said, “There must be some mistake, as we keep our drugs in the bowl over there,” pointing to the coffee table in the middle of the room.

  I was particularly concerned as I entered the room with Tweedledum and Tweedledee. They played the classic good cop/bad cop routine. One spoke softly and almost apologetically, while the other stood menacingly a few paces away, only speaking in order to reinforce the darker side of why I was in that room. The nice guy asked me if I ever smoked grass. My reply was that I did not, but even if I did, did he really think I would discuss it with him?

  The unpleasant one told me to give him my jacket, took it to the other end of the room, and with his back turned to me, went as if to put his hand in the pocket. At this point I flipped, stating that I had cooperated completely for the last hour and that if he wanted to search my jacket he was very welcome to, but he had to do it in front of me where I could see what he was doing. He walked slowly back up the room, and I asked him to open his hand before putting it in my pocket. I thought for one awful moment that I had really blown it. There was a silent pause, filled with a deadly stare from the arsehole, that was broken by the good guy saying, “I don’t think we need keep you any longer, Mr. Johns. I’m sorry for any inconvenience we may have caused you.”

  I was out of there like a rat up a pipe, I can tell you. I was amazed to find Phil Walden still waiting in a completely deserted area outside customs. “Hi, Glyn,” he hollered, “welcome to America!”

  WITH THE BEATLES AT SAVILE ROW.

  Back to The Beatles

  On the 1st of May 1969, I got a call from John and Paul asking me to meet them at Abbey Road. I walked into the control room and was confronted by a large pile of multitrack tapes. They told me that they had reconsidered my concept for the album that I had presented to them in January and had decided to let me go ahead and mix and put it together from all the recording that we had done at Savile Row. I was thrilled at the idea and asked when they would be available to start. They replied that they were quite happy for me to do it on my own as it was my idea. I left feeling elated that they would trust me to put the album together without them, but soon realized that the real reason had to be that they had lost interest in the project.

  I went straight into the mix room at Olympic and spent the next three nights mixing and editing the album and, having finished, presented it to the band at the session we had at Olympic the following day.

  I had been retained originally as an engineer and was quite happy with that, even when I realized that George Martin was not producing. He did come to Twickenham a couple of times to check us out. He had arranged for the gear to be loaned for the recording at Savile Row and turned up on the day we did the filming on the roof, but had nothing to do with the production of the music. At the outset I was quite embarrassed when I realized he was not going to be involved. A couple of days into the project I asked Paul where George Martin was, only to be told that they had decided not to use him. By the time we moved to Savile Row, George, realizing I was in an awkward position, was kind enough to take me to lunch in order to put my mind at rest, saying I was doing a great job, everything was fine, and I was not stepping on his toes in any way. What a gentleman he is.

  Having delivered the mixed master of my version of Let It Be, I approached each member of the band separately, asking if I could have a production credit on the album when it was released. I made it quite clear that I was only asking for that and not a royalty. Paul, George, and Ringo had no objection to my request but John was suspicious and could not understand why I was not asking for a royalty. I explained that I felt, because of their stature, the sales of the album would not be affected by my involvement one way or another, so a credit would be a fair settlement for what I had done, as by association it could only be positive for my career in the future. I never got an answer from John.

  As it turned out, none of this mattered, as in the end, after the group broke up, John gave the tapes to Phil Spector, who puked all over them, turning the album into the most syrupy load of bullshit I have ever heard. My master tape, perhaps quite rightly, ended up on a shelf in the tape store at EMI. At least my version of the single of “Get Back”/“Don’t Let Me Down” had been released in April 1969.

  Since that first meeting in late January 1969, John had been pitching the idea to the others that Allen Klein was the man to manage them. Paul wanted his father-in-law, Lee Eastman, a New York lawyer, to take over the job and was not happy about Klein at all. As I had known Allen for a couple of years, through his involvement with The Rolling Stones, Ringo and George both approached me separately for my opinion of him. My relationship with Allen was quite amenable, as he had always treated me with respect, but was irrelevant as it had no bearing on the magnitude of what they were discussing with him. So my suggestion to both of them was to talk to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, as they had firsthand experience of the man as a manager and would be able to give a far more accurate picture of the guy than me. My advice seemed to fall on deaf ears, as they came out on John’s side and agreed to the idea. This left Paul isolated from the others and the object of Klein’s determination to win him over.

  Klein came to London with the sole objective of closing the deal, and having had an unsuccessful meeting with Paul in the morning, he left for Heathrow to return home to New York. Paul and I were working together in Olympic that afternoon, and there was a noticeable sense of relief when he heard that Klein had left for the airport. However, Klein had second thoughts about leaving and decided to have one more attempt at changing Paul’s mind face-to-face. Unannounced, Klein walked into the studio, and very quickly it became apparent that as voices were raised a private conversation was taking place. I turned off all the mics in the room and left them to it. The control room of a studio is isolated from the recording room where the musicians play, but even all that acoustic treatment was not enough to prevent me hearing Paul McCartney defend himself against Allen Klein’s attempt at bullying him into submission. It was extremely unpleasant to wi
tness.

  Klein got his way and he took over management of the band. After Brian Epstein’s death, they had been something of a rudderless ship and he had left them with an abysmally poor record deal with EMI. Renegotiating record deals was a forte of Allen’s and I am sure he earned his commission several times over with that one stroke. He came in at a tricky time. Paul’s original idea for Let It Be had not come to fruition, and they were left with a documentary film that was in a mess. Michael Lindsay-Hogg was a TV director of some note and was not used to using film. So he had ended up with hours and hours of footage from three or four cameras with little or no coordination or continuity kept between them. It took a year to sort it all out and for him to come up with a finished movie. We were all summoned to a viewing on the 3rd of October in the West End, when Allen Klein decided that there was too much footage involving other people and it should concentrate more on the four members of the band. So this meant that there was no interaction between The Beatles and anyone else, which, in my opinion, ruined what had been a much more interesting film, but then I would say that, as it was mostly footage of me that was cut.

  Once the film had been reedited to Klein’s specifications, John and Paul asked me to change some of the material on my version of the album. This included going in with John to redo his vocal on “Across the Universe,” a track that had been recorded in 1968. This was to be my last experience working with him. He was in a very strange mood. I put him in the vocal booth in the mix room at Olympic and ran the multitrack tape to get a recording level on his voice and to let him warm up and get into what he was doing. After one run-through, I suggested that we should take it. Whereupon he went ballistic, saying that he would never sing it like that again, asking why the hell I had not taken it the first time he sang it. I explained that it would not have been possible as I needed to get a level on his voice. He begrudgingly sang it again and left in a huff. He had been around the recording process long enough to know that what he was complaining about was ridiculous, so I put it down to him being under the influence of some substance. It was a sad way to finish after what had been a really pleasant working relationship up to that point. He was hysterically funny, having the quickest wit of anyone I have ever met.