Lennon

by Tim Riley

  The cause of Sutcliffe’s suffering and death are still in dispute. Certainly, drinking heavily while getting off pills would exacerbate any existing brain condition. One report has a German X-ray returned to Liverpool eighteen months later, where a small tumor revealed itself. Millie and Pauline traced the indenture of the skull found there back to the bloody fisticuffs that Lennon and Best rescued him from in 1959 (an episode reimagined at the opening of Backbeat). But a two-and-a-half-year calm before a final half year of accelerated suffering doesn’t make as much sense as a possible injury from the 1961 brawl after a gig at Seaforth’s Lathom Hall.

  Pauline Sutcliffe, Stu’s younger sister, has written about the possibility that Lennon’s own Reeperbahn fight with Sutcliffe upon leaving the band (April 1961) may have contributed to his condition. This theory presumes a lifelong sense of guilt in Lennon, who never seems to have discussed it with anybody.33 Just as plausible, though, was no injury at all: perhaps a simple, inexplicable aneurysm created an inoperable blood clot.

  Paradoxically, the person to speak most glowingly of Lennon’s mood after Sutcliffe’s death was Astrid, who as late as 2005 remembered his warmth, empathy, and good counsel. Lennon soothed Astrid almost as if he knew too well how to console a grieving lover. Unlike George or Paul, who tried to reassure her by saying “everything will be fine,” Lennon spoke without sentimentality, or the superficial cant that many people trade off as comfort. In his words to Astrid, you can hear what Lennon told himself:

  “Well, you have got to decide what you want: do you want to live or do you want to die? Decide that, but be honest.” And that helped me tremendously to go on. And then he said that there are so many things we haven’t even discovered yet, and life has got to go on, and you can’t sit down and cry all the time, you have got to get on, and if it’s not for me, he said, it’s for Stuart. And he said that in a very harsh voice, not like nice and sweet, but very directly.34

  Already intimate with death, Lennon knew how the bereaving soul clutches at reality, however dim, beyond the hollow platitudes that infect misguided small talk. The loss of Stuart, as both a friend and an artist, was unbearable, and would remain unbearable, for as long as anyone would remember. For the rest of her life, even though she married, Astrid slept with a picture of Stuart at her bedside. Tellingly, Epstein had talked about having Sutcliffe do design work for the band; and later, his face was immortalized on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s menagerie of celebrities and as part of Richard Hamilton’s White Album collage. And he earned himself a hallowed place in Lennon’s heart. Lennon, typically described as cool and remote during this episode, made the most sentimental request: he asked for Sutcliffe’s winter scarf, which, like his uncle George’s tattered overcoat, he wore for years afterward.

  Chapter 9

  Isolation

  The Beatles’ first British recording contract and sessions came fitfully, after great persistence from Epstein, through a comedy label. An impossibly long three months passed before Epstein heard back from George Martin, which he took as one more bad omen. Martin had simply been busy with sessions, and returned Epstein’s message to schedule a second appointment for May 1962. Lennon fumed about the missed opportunity at Decca, and played out his lingering disappointment through a telling political omission: he, McCartney, and Harrison never told Pete Best that Decca had turned them down. For all Best knew, or couldn’t be bothered to find out, the slow wheels of industry were still turning. The drummer’s freeze-out was well under way before George Martin heard Best play live.

  Leaving the Beatles in Hamburg, Epstein returned from the Sutcliffe trauma in mid-April to a welcome surprise in London: Martin finally offered him an EMI recording contract on an accelerated schedule. Instead of hearing the band perform for him in person, Martin’s ears felt confident enough in his early impressions to book a studio date and take care of some paperwork along the way. This sudden reversal mystifies historians, especially since it inexplicably trips recording history forward. For a long time there was confusion about whether this “studio” session was an audition or an actual recording date, with tape rolling for a possible release. Epstein and the Beatles clearly viewed it as a professional session. Martin may have booked it as such, but probably looked at it more as an “artist test,” an engineering audition where they figured out the ideal setup and levels for instruments and vocals.1 This was customary, but parties remember these details differently. Did Martin conceal the true nature of this booking to capture the Beatles off guard, wind them up before making his commitment?

  This was an unusual way of proceeding, but Martin had unusual powers. He had been made head of Parlophone in 1955, at age twenty-nine, and in those days that was quite young—especially within EMI, a company that prided itself on being even stuffier than Decca. In its lofty EMI offices in Manchester Square, Parlophone was looked on not so much as a boutique label as eccentric, an unlikely imprint to become a pop dynamo. The label was branded not with a fancy pound sign (£), as many assumed, but with a German L, for Carl Lindström, the man who founded the imprint.2

  Martin had grown up in London’s Drayton Park. Unlike Lennon, he enjoyed a stable, working-class home; his father was a wood machinist. Young George taught himself the piano, and composed his first piece at the age of seven (“The Spider’s Dance”). He dreamed of piloting airplanes for the elite Royal Air Force, and settled for the Fleet Air Arm. His timing was bad: after he was commissioned in 1945, the war suddenly ended, and he spent a year as a clerk before entering the Guildhall School of Music on a veteran’s grant. There he picked up the oboe and studied orchestration, theory, and conducting, but his real education came in the recording studio. While Martin’s full biography still awaits serious scholarly attention, some highlights of his early career seem like blueprints for his later work with Lennon.

  After Guildhall, he cataloged scores for the BBC for a few months in 1950 before being hired as an assistant by Parlophone’s Oscar Preuss, at age twenty-four. Parlophone also suffered bad timing: during the war, its big-label classical acts had been siphoned off by Columbia and HMV, leaving the roster lean. Even with the label’s relatively thin catalog, though, the early years at Preuss’s side exposed Martin to every mode of the era’s recording practice: from soloists to orchestras, jazz groups to children’s choirs and remote recordings in Scotland of Jimmy Shand’s country dance band using EMI’s mobile recording van. As the oddball division of Britain’s largest recording firm, Parlophone hovered one rung on EMI’s corporate ladder above its Salvation Army Band imprint, Regal Zonophone.

  The hardscrabble streets of Liverpool were a long way from London’s illustrious St. John’s Wood. Previous decades saw giant composers and conductors like Sir Edward Elgar, Sir Malcolm Sargent, and Sir Thomas Beecham stroll down from their stately homes in lush Westminster to record with the London and Royal Philharmonics inside the enormous Georgian town house at 3 Abbey Road. This huge EMI building, with its humble domestic façade, dated back to 1830. Martin routinely shared recording studios there with the other subsidiaries, and the high-ceilinged, wood-paneled rooms were as likely to host the London Symphony Orchestra as they had swing bands like the Glenn Miller Orchestra or piano soloists like Arthur Rubinstein. In this rotation, Martin was the wild card. Preuss gradually handed over more and more responsibility to his able assistant, who was virtually running the label on his own by 1955. When Preuss retired in the spring of that year, Martin, at age twenty-nine, stepped in to replace him, making him the youngest label head in Britain. Martin realized that to keep the imprint afloat—and to keep himself employed—Parlophone needed to compete. While not forsaking its usual material, he carved a niche for the label through comedy and novelties.

  With Preuss’s encouragement, Martin had begun exploring the possibilities of the relatively new medium of magnetic recording tape as early as 1951, when the two coproduced a recording with bandleader Jack Parnell. “The White Suit Samba,” the theme from Alec Guinness’s The Man in
the White Suit (1951), utilized an electronic sound effect from the movie as a rhythmic element. Here Martin dressed the tape experiments of the French avant-garde’s musique concrète in the guise of a pop instrumental. A Peter Ustinov single followed in 1952, “Mock Mozart,” wherein Martin painstakingly overdubbed the vocals by recording on one mono tape, then playing that recording to another machine while simultaneously recording another vocal part. Repeating this process, he stacked up four harmonizing parts.

  Alongside comedy, Martin recorded a number of well-known children’s records in the 1950s, including “Nellie the Elephant” and “Little Red Monkey,” and in 1953, with Peter Sellers, he attempted a children’s space-fantasy record called “Jakka and the Flying Saucers.” An ambitious production, Martin treated it with the same primitive overdubs as the Ustinov single, as well as numerous tape edits, sound effects, and variable-speed recording. The record bombed; as technical experiment, though, “Jakka” was an advance on “Mock Mozart.”

  Most biographers rank Martin one of music’s luckiest producers. His background tells a more nuanced story about how preparation met opportunity. Long before he ever met Lennon’s Beatles, Martin was skilled in an emergent new medium that took the art of recording from live performance to the recording of multiple performances atop one another to create a detailed, layered production. Far from simply sticking a microphone in front of comics, or feeding radio broadcasts directly onto a master tape, Martin liked to tinker. As the EMI front office dragged its heels during the industry’s transition from direct-to-disc lacquers to analog tape, and from 78s to twelve-inch LPs and seven-inch 45s, throughout the late 1940s and early fifties, Martin dabbled with how comparatively elastic the new tape medium was. Beyond all this, Martin was not satisfied with tape editing, and often tweaked his productions with variable-speed recording and evocative effects like compression to create what he would later call “sound pictures.” Martin’s skill lay somewhere between “live-to-radio” and “performance-on-tape.”

  Once Martin took over Parlophone, his recording studio increasingly resembled a workshop, a place where chasing sounds led to serendipitous accidents. To Martin’s ear, comedy presented the perfect foil for tape tricks, allowing him to incorporate outlandish production ideas to ornament scatterbrained voices and gags. Before he became a movie star, the young Peter Sellers became a partner in this pursuit, scoring hits with a skiffle parody, “Any Old Iron,” in 1957 and then with a ten-inch LP entitled The Best of Sellers in 1958.

  Also in 1957, Martin issued an LP of a popular West End revue featuring Michael Flanders and Donald Swann called At the Drop of a Hat. More Sellers singles and two Sellers LPs followed in 1959 and 1960, each increasingly ambitious in scope. In 1961, Martin spent three days splicing together the tapes for an LP of another revue, Beyond the Fringe, which would launch the coming “satire boom” in British comedy. At the same time, he produced Charlie Drake’s hit “My Boomerang Won’t Come Back.” The silliness of “Boomerang,” which reached number 14, belied its sharp arrangement. The next year brought hits with Bernard Cribbins, most significantly “Right Said Fred,” and two LPs that revealed just how far Martin’s production skills had come. None of these records would have been nearly as funny without his careful attention to sonic detail, and he filed every skill into his database of tricks for his work to come.

  For one of those 1962 LPs, Martin and former Goon Michael Bentine fashioned an album out of Bentine’s absurdist television show It’s a Square World, using multiple overdubs on the new four-track EMI machines, sound effects, and clever editing. The other LP contained a full-length parody of The Bridge on the River Kwai, produced during the second half of the year, when Martin began working with the Beatles. It benefited from an elaborate yet subtle production of overdubbed effects Martin constructed to bring the scenes behind the dialogue to life. (The album was ultimately renamed, nonsensically, The Bridge on the River Wye, because of a threatened lawsuit.) In an era when the British music industry was still in thrall of whatever was happening in the United States, Martin’s comedy records were the product of homegrown talent of a particularly English sensibility. Even if the rest of the industry looked down their noses at these records, they were hits, and the savvier ears in the business heard ingenuity behind the laughs.

  Inside EMI, Martin was the “suit” who courted trouble. In 1956 he made a recording with the Goons called “Unchained Melody,” an elaborate parody of Les Baxter’s American hit from the movie Unchained. As was the custom, other acts quickly hopped the same train; Jimmy Young, Al Hibbler, and Liberace all had top-ten UK hits with the tune that spring. But EMI feared the Goon demolition would result in a lawsuit from the publisher and refused to release it. Incensed, Spike Milligan went to Decca, which had no problem releasing a record tied to the BBC’s most popular radio show. The label promptly scored two top-ten Goon hits: “I’m Walking Backwards for Christmas” in June and “The Ying Tong Song” in September. Lennon treasured his copy of the loopy “Ying Tong Song,” most likely bought (or pilfered) from Epstein’s Whitechapel shop.

  Even on novelties Martin left his fingerprints. Ditties like John Dankworth’s “Experiments with Mice,” a top-ten hit in 1957, fused jazz with comedy. The Temperance Seven earned him his first number-one hit in 1961 with “You’re Driving Me Crazy.” Perhaps most tellingly, Martin worked with the Vipers, a skiffle outfit that rode the Donegan wave to produce successful covers of “Cumberland Gap,” a song Lennon sang with the Quarrymen, and its B side, “Maggie Mae” (the Scouser prostitute ditty immortalized by Lennon’s outburst on the Let It Be soundtrack). When Martin signed the Vipers in early 1956, he took a pass on their lead singer, Tommy Steele, who jumped to Decca and became a rock idol. While he probably regretted letting Steele slip by, Martin still squeezed hits from his band. Unlike Rowe and all the others, Martin could tell the difference between a lead singer and backup band. (Martin’s decision regarding the Beatles in this matter would be finely nuanced.)

  The Vipers also scored with a non-skiffle treatment of Bobby Helm’s country song “No Other Baby,” in 1958, which featured the slap-back echo Lennon adored from the Sun-label Memphis rockabilly of Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins. Another producer, like HMV’s Walter J. Ridley, might have assigned the Vipers something on the order of “The Birds and the Bees,” which Ridley chose as the surefire follow-up to Johnny Kidd and the Pirates’ “Shakin’ All Over” in 1960 (with Joe Moretti’s ominous, forbidding guitar). It bombed. By contrast, the classically trained Martin had no problem letting skiffle be skiffle.

  When Epstein first called from Coleman’s office, Martin was attending to singers like Matt Monro, whose “When Love Comes Along” became the follow-up to his February hit, “Softly As I Leave You” (which had reached number ten, his third top-ten hit since late 1960). Like most EMI producers, Martin’s formal office was at EMI headquarters across town in Manchester Square, where the Beatles posed for their first album cover.

  In this pre-rock era, pop was an afterthought, never mind taken at all seriously. It was seen as a necessary sop to the public which helped pay for the loftier classical product, much the same way Epstein financed his jazz and classical stock at NEMS. Martin was not even a member of London’s “pop” circle, really—the hits he had came mostly from novelties—and while sturdy in terms of engineering practice, as a producer he was among the least likely men in the recording industry to be pegged a “comer.” In retrospect, it’s uncanny that the man who signed on the Beatles, and helped shape their work, had this dual background in comedy and, in BBC terms, “Light Programme” classical music. Martin’s early interest in aeronautic engineering sprouted into technical wizardry when applied to sound, while his background as an oboe player gave him a flair for winds.

  For Lennon, Martin’s connection to the Goons proved compelling. But inside EMI, this comedy-classical connection was double-edged: while relatively free of the typical pop constraints, Martin didn’t enjoy pop budgets to develop
talent. Then again, the whole idea of “pop development”—giving a band three or four records to find their way in the medium—barely existed. His profile gave him the freedom he needed to take a chance on just such a band as the Beatles, unproven yet promising—the kind of gamble that might pay off if the planets aligned. It’s still unclear how much attention Martin paid to the charts at the time, whether he cared where rock ’n’ roll came from or where it might be headed. He was happy for the hits, even if they didn’t buy him credibility at his own label. But he didn’t have a vision for where the music could go. Martin’s taste was probably closer to Epstein’s: that of an educated man who went home to listen to classical records, not teenage stuff or R&B or C&W. So in this context, Martin was not signing what he thought was the next huge pop act. He heard the Beatles as a regional fad that just might break wider. And he picked up on their comic edge: if they stalled, he could always steer them toward novelties.

  Epstein and Martin recognized each other in ways that transcended musical taste. Martin was charmed by Epstein’s affection for the band; he seems to have capitulated more to Epstein’s charisma than to the Decca lacquers. Of course, his colleague Coleman had arranged for a publishing deal, a strong referral: if a publisher thought this band’s material had value, that was already one vote from a trusted ear.