by Tim Riley
Sure enough, this Trident eight-track tape they brought back to EMI sounded funky. The EMI playback equipment gave Ken Scott fits. Scott had actually snuck into Trident to help with the session (even though the EMI headmasters considered such “sneaking around” scandalous) and remembers being satisfied with what he had heard.12 But when he played back the master tape at Abbey Road the next day, he couldn’t explain the murky sound to George Martin. “Just at that moment, John Lennon walked in,” Emerick writes. “George Martin, in his inimitable manner, turned to John and said bluntly, ‘Ken thinks the mix sounds like shit’ ”13 Luckily, Emerick happened to be picking up some personal effects, and Martin grabbed him to help fix the Trident sound. When Emerick reappeared to help Scott, Lennon cried, “Ah, the prodigal son returns!”
“Paul hit a clunker on the piano and said a naughty word,” Lennon gleefully crowed, “but I insisted we leave it in, buried just low enough so that it can barely be heard. Most people won’t ever spot it . . . but WE’LL know it’s there.”14 The group voted to put “Hey Jude” out as the next single, with the new, rockier version of “Revolution” as its B side. The “Penny Lane” single pattern reasserted itself: Lennon had fussed over “Revolution” just as he had over “Strawberry Fields Forever” the previous year, but the McCartney track got far more airplay. In the battle for hits, McCartney’s star presence began to upstage Lennon’s.
As if this weren’t plenty to keep track of, the band pulled the plug on their Baker Street retail-clothing store, which had devolved from its previous year’s headlines, and sponsored an open raid on the final stock, which turned into a near riot. Despite their first business division collapse amid the constant onslaught of tabloid coverage, the Beatles’ ability to focus on music reveals how far their ensemble groove carried them from one crisis to the next—where the business, relationships, and outside activities caused friction, the music held them together.
With “Hey Jude” reviving that ensemble, and the Apple label’s first single appearing to dizzying triumph, the band went straight back to work on two more numbers that didn’t even make the final cut. Once Emerick had helped equalize the Trident sound, Harrison led the band through “Not Guilty” over two nights, staying until 5:45 A.M. on August 8 to go through over one hundred takes. On August 14, Lennon laid down a zany track called “What’s the New Mary Jane,” which had the frazzled, ditzy air of a pothead rounding some cosmic bend, credited to Lennon-McCartney even though Lennon more likely wrote it with Alex Mardas.
Also in August, they finished “Yer Blues” and added horns to McCartney’s solo “Mother Nature’s Son,” before Harrison brought in Eric Clapton for “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” which Harrison suggested to him out of the blue as they pulled up to the studio. “I was quite taken aback by this and considered it a funny thing to ask, since he was the Beatles’ guitar player,” Clapton writes. “I was also quite flattered, thinking that not many people get asked to play on a Beatles record. I hadn’t even brought my guitar with me, so I had to borrow his.” It would not be the last time Harrison would revive sessions by inviting a surprise guest.
Clapton’s read of this session portrays Lennon and McCartney as critical of both Harrison and Starr, wisely interpreting Harrison’s invitation as more about group politics than virtuosity. (One of Harrison’s finer musical traits was to steer clear of the whole “guitar hero” playbook.) “George would put songs forward on every project only to find them pushed into the background,” Clapton remembered. “I think that he felt our friendship would give him some support, and that having me there to play might stabilize his position and maybe even earn him some respect. . . . We did just one take, and I thought it sounded fantastic.” John and Paul, however, were “noncommittal.” But their behavior slowly relaxed. Together, the band listened to the track over and over in the control room. After adding some effects and assembling a rough mix, the group then played some of the other songs they were sitting on—an event rare enough that Clapton felt as though he’d “been brought into their inner sanctum.”15 Here was a band confident enough in its work to turn a guest spot into a small listening party with an acknowledged rival, and they knew word would spread about what Clapton heard.
Clapton’s perceptions reflect Lennon and McCartney’s attitude toward both Harrison and Starr, and anticipate the next wallop. One day, Emerick recalls, John and Ringo happened upon McCartney’s brass overdub to “Mother Nature’s Son” and “shattered” the good vibe; but after they left, the bassist laid down two more songs: “Etcetera,” which has never appeared, and “Wild Honey Pie,” a wacky throwaway (as if responding to Lennon’s “Mary Jane”; there was more than one pothead in this band). Finally, at the end of a long, grinding summer when song takes stretched out indefinitely and wait times lasted even longer, Ringo Starr simply walked out.
It’s hard to emphasize how dramatic a move this must have been, coming from its most insecure member, the last to join, and its most politically adept. To drum on Lennon and McCartney songs his whole career would have been more than enough to keep any player with less self-respect groveling until the act hit Vegas. But Ringo had always been the perfect fit for the band precisely because of his humility, which many still mistake for dumb luck. With two of the biggest egos in the business running sessions, and a third figuring out how to gain a foothold with his original material, Ringo’s sturdy presence on the stool in back anchored the band’s dual monarchy as nothing else could. So far, disputes had tended to be between Lennon and everybody except Ringo; these sessions are a first, where McCartney’s veto of Harrison’s “Hey Jude” lines signaled greater political tension.
Ringo’s abrupt walkout measures the band’s deteriorating purpose. Far more than in any previous sessions, group interactions had turned into political quicksand; his peers treated him like a hired hand and made him play a waiting game on a daily basis. You might think Harrison would have joined Ringo’s protest for moral support, but the other three simply forged ahead: McCartney’s “Back in the USSR” spilled out with its author on drums, Harrison on guitar, and Lennon on bass (for the first time). That same day in August, Cynthia served Lennon with divorce papers. McCartney laid down two more drum tracks the next day, and then put down his own bass track and lead vocal, and Lennon and Harrison sang along with handclaps. They all felt quite sure Ringo would return in a day or two, and they kept the whole incident quiet from the press (which shows just how much control they exercised around their image).
Then they tackled Lennon’s “Dear Prudence” all over again at Trident studios, with McCartney impersonating Ringo on drums (he may imitate Ringo even better than he imitates Little Richard). The next day brought overdubs and lead vocals. They mixed “Prudence” at the end of August as the “Hey Jude” / “Revolution” single hit stores, their first record with the new, frankly enigmatic green Apple label, designed by Gene Mahon.
Through gallery owner Robert Fraser and Barry Miles, McCartney had begun collecting paintings by the surrealist René Magritte, one of which was an oversize apple sitting inside a typical morning room (The Listening Room, 1958). As the new logo for their company, it sat inside the 45-rpm grooves as a photographic still life, with a hole in the middle suggesting a donut, as if the subtext read, “This is not an apple.” Along with their string of witty album covers and packages, it was another design coup.
After a band meeting where egos were massaged, Ringo returned to EMI on September 3, and the group prepared for a David Frost (Frost on Sunday) TV appearance. McCartney smothered his drums with flowers. Ringo’s walkout got resolved just before George Martin left for a long-planned vacation in September.
Martin’s departure became an index of the indecision and miscommunication among principals—he was clearly as much a part of the band’s dysfunction as their own superstar preoccupations. Martin, who had sat by for all manner of madness, including a Lennon acid trip in the middle of Sgt. Pepper, was stumped by the band’s current quandary. The s
essions dragged on far beyond what anybody had planned, and they already had more than enough material for a very strong album. They had simply failed to tell their producer that they were intent on creating a double record to complete a contractual matter with EMI and move ahead with Apple. Martin’s departure (or escape) was his way of throwing up his hands; he had always been against a double album. McCartney was so self-involved he didn’t seem to realize Martin would take a break. Chris Thomas was absolutely petrified. Martin had simply left him a note saying, “Feel free to attend Beatles sessions.” “But Paul walked in and he was obviously a bit knocked about the whole thing,” Thomas remembers. “ ‘Well, if you want to produce us, then produce us. But if not, then you can just fuck off!’ And I just went ‘What?! Nobody said anything about producing.’ ”16
Thomas, at just twenty-one, had to prove himself very quickly to appease the four-headed monster. “It was more like, ‘Well we’ll give you a try, and if you don’t measure up, you’re out.’ ” A storied producer now, with a thousand credits, Thomas can laugh about it.17 Over the first several days remaking “Helter Skelter,” he proved his musical smarts and quickly won the band’s trust. He got producer credits on session logs, and Lennon insisted his name get listed on the album credits. In a small way, the band’s sealed perimeters opened up to include a new engineer, which may have helped convince them that Martin was not the “essential” man he made himself out to be. Another side benefit to Martin’s absence came as the Beatles liberated the new 3M eight-track machine from EMI technical engineer Dave Harries for the remaining work, doubtless using the competing Trident machine as leverage.
“Hey Jude” sounds like a benediction, and it gave the Beatles’ relationship with their audience the jolt of recognition everybody had been waiting for. Finally, the summer of turmoil and loss took refuge in a perfect single from the band that had always reflected the audience’s best hopes back to itself. But the song also trumpeted the Beatles’ new company, Apple, and everyone agreed it needed a proper televised launch, especially after the retail-clothing fiasco on Baker Street. It had been more than a year since their last formal album (Sgt. Pepper), and with the world reeling from war, revolution, and student protest, the band’s spring oldies romp, “Lady Madonna,” began to sound like cheery tokenism (and couldn’t quite atone for Magical Mystery Tour).
The Frost on Sunday appearance on September 8 kicked “Hey Jude” into the stratosphere. Already, radio had made the song inexorable; it soared beyond everything else it followed that summer, including Otis Redding’s aching, posthumous “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay” and Archie Bell and the Drells’ “Tighten Up,” as well as strong work from Simon and Garfunkel (“Mrs. Robinson”) and The Doors (“Hello, I Love You”). The stiffest aesthetic competition to “Hey Jude” came from Lennon’s old sparring partner, now a mumbling god: Bob Dylan had put out a quiet, commanding acoustic album, John Wesley Harding, back in December 1967. As 1968 wore on, its fiercely obscure tone seeped through rock’s heavier textures. These were the competing sounds that sound-tracked Chicago’s days of rage.
For both “Hey Jude” and “Revolution” on TV, the instrumental background came from the master track, and the vocals were done live. This gave McCartney’s close-up shots immediacy and freshness, with Lennon, newly hippified, harmonizing beneath. “Revolution” added McCartney and Harrison doing their doo-wop “bow-ohm, shoo-be-do-wah, bow-ohm, shoo-be-do-wah” rejoinders to the faster tempo, an instant collectible, the irresistible new groove giving leftists fits: the song was a tour de force of rock classicism, but they chafed at Lennon’s seemingly deliberate irony. “There is freedom and movement in the music, even as there is sterility and repression in the lyrics,” Greil Marcus wrote. “The music doesn’t say ‘cool it’ or ‘don’t fight the cops’. . . . The music dodges the message and comes out in front.”18
Again, the debate over this song brings a case where all sides make valid points. Taped on September 4, Lennon reiterates his “count me out—in” hedge, which got criticized as fence-sitting, but could just as easily be construed as emphasizing awareness of the left’s setbacks in Paris, Chicago, and Prague since Lennon’s first take on the same lyric in early June. In interviews, Lennon insisted on the equivocation. For all the controversy surrounding “Revolution,” and how it disappointed radicals, close attention to Lennon’s comments reveals ambivalence vying with principle. To Lennon, revolution for the sake of revolution seemed as wrongheaded as the politics that had steered the system wrong in the first place. Wiping out the existing order would only create a vacuum, he argued. Just where had any modern, all-inclusive “revolution” succeeded—Communist China? Lennon’s Mao reference puts the onus on “revolutionaries” to come up with something better—“We’d all love to see the plan”:
But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao
You ain’t gonna make it with anyone any-how . . .
Why should any social “revolution” necessarily refer to Communism? Lennon asked. Mao may have found Marx useful, but he was clearly a cautionary counterexample: in Lennon’s view, backing China’s Communist tyrant equaled enforced abstinence. Paradoxically, Lennon’s “Revolution” makes Winston Churchill’s famous argument about democracy: that it’s the most oppressive system tried “except all those other forms.”
The song became a flash point, and Lennon did his best to answer for it in interviews with the leftist press. On September 17, Robert Fraser brought journalist Jonathan Cott to Lennon’s apartment for his first lengthy interview for Rolling Stone, the San Francisco bimonthly that had debuted with Lennon (as Private Gripweed) on its cover the previous year. Like the faster “out/in” version of “Revolution” he sang on Frost on Sunday, this interview took place just weeks after the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, somehow an American rejoinder to Russian tanks that had rolled into Prague, wiping out Prague Spring hopes. Lennon’s attitude shifted markedly from when he wrote and recorded either version of the song, and yet his candor remains decisively nonviolent and antimilitant. “There’s no point in dropping out because it’s the same there and it’s got to change,” Lennon told Cott. “But I think it all comes down to changing your head and, sure, I know that’s a cliché.” What would Lennon say to a black power guy, for example?
“Well, I can’t tell him anything ’cause he’s got to do it himself,” Lennon replied. “If destruction’s the only way he can do it, there’s nothing I can say that could influence him ’cause that’s where he’s at, really. We’ve all got that in us, too, and that’s why I did the ‘Out and in’ bit on a few takes and in the TV version of ‘Revolution’—‘Destruction, well, you know, you can count me out, and in,’ like yin and yang. I prefer ‘out.’ But we’ve got the other bit in us. I don’t know what I’d be doing if I was in his position. I don’t think I’d be so meek and mild. I just don’t know.”19
While the White Album sessions had already produced more than the usual walkouts and musical standoffs, the wonder is how many gratifying rhythmic waves the Beatles still shaped. “Birthday” turned into an all-night affair: the bassist, first to arrive, at 5 P.M., reworked yet another Bobby Parker “Watch Your Step” circular riff, and the Beatles laid down twenty takes of the track, until eight-thirty, and then broke to watch The Girl Can’t Help It at McCartney’s house with Chris Thomas and Pattie Harrison. Revived by the energy from Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, Fats Domino, Little Richard—and a bodacious Jayne Mansfield—they returned to the studio to finish nine more takes and overdubs (with Pattie Harrison and Yoko Ono singing backup, Yoko’s first) for a final mono mix at five-thirty in the morning.
In October, they finished off “Honey Pie,” “Savoy Truffle” (without Lennon), “Martha My Dear” (without Lennon), Harrison’s “Long Long Long” (without Lennon), “I’m So Tired,” “Bungalow Bill,” and “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” (featuring McCartney and Ringo alone). If “I’m Only Sleeping” was one long slow leak of a song, “I’m So
Tired” was the flat tire of celebrity tedium flopping around in Lennon’s head. Singing “curse Sir Walter Raleigh” while dragging on a cigarette, Lennon exhales with an addict’s anguish over the physical compulsion, the inability to quit, and the profiteer’s trickery that got him hooked in the first place. “I’m So Tired” also became a song that expressed everything about the sessions that made them both unbearable and worthwhile, exhausting and yet meaningful, Lennon turning fame’s fatigue into an exercise in redeemed contempt. If “Birthday” celebrated the heights the band could still plunge into, “I’m So Tired” conveyed the weariness that was setting in.
Finally, on October 13, four months and a lifetime after starting, Lennon recorded the last song, the open-wound ballad named for his mother, “Julia,” by himself. It still captures the isolated dread, confounding fear, and free-fall grief his mother’s death summoned in him, and it’s hard to imagine he would have found this same emotional pitch in front of the others. Alongside “Look at Me” (written in India), “Julia” hints at the amplified anguish to come on 1970’s Plastic Ono Band.
The tracks completed, Harrison and Starr fled, and Lennon and McCartney put The White Album to bed with Chris Thomas over one final, grueling session where they mixed, sequenced, and mastered all thirty numbers in twenty-four hours to meet EMI’s November 22 release date for the Christmas market. “Not many people realize, sequencing comes at the end and it can be tricky,” Thomas remembers. “You think certain tracks go together and then you try it and they don’t, so you go back and try it again . . . and you go round for a bit like that. It can be a brain-boxer.”20 At one point, Thomas came upon McCartney sprawled across a mixing board, completely conked.