While McCartney was proud to extol the manner in which he was broadening his horizons, he was loath to discover that not everyone was open to cultural change, that in art as in life, we have a tendency to pigeonhole each other. Paul was shortly to experience a referendum, of sorts, on the sonic strides that George and the Beatles had been attempting in the studio of late. After the BBC interview with Matthew had concluded, Lennon and McCartney traipsed off to Dolly’s, a trendy mid-1960s nightclub in Central London. With roadie Neil Aspinall and Rolling Stones guitarists Keith Richards and Brian Jones in tow, they met up with Bob Dylan, who was in the city on a layover on the eve of his upcoming European tour. Later that evening, the group joined Dylan in his suite at the Mayfair Hotel. With an acetate of “Tomorrow Never Knows” at the ready, McCartney couldn’t wait to gauge the American folk luminary’s reaction to the Beatles’ avant-garde creation. “Oh, I get it,” Dylan said blankly after listening to the track, “you don’t want to be cute anymore.” Quite suddenly, McCartney felt that he had been put in his place, that to people like Dylan—artists the Beatles had revered, even engaged in a kind of hero worship—they were a mere pop act. Worse yet, they were still those four mop-tops in Dylan’s eyes, the product of good looks, catchy tunes, and great marketing. For his part, Martin had experienced the illusion of Beatlemania firsthand in February 1964, on the very same weekend in which the band had made its unforgettable American splash on The Ed Sullivan Show. In an image that he would carry for the rest of his life, Martin recalled walking along Fifth Avenue and seeing middle-aged men caught up in the furor and wearing Beatle wigs.7
In Martin’s mind, it was a “collective madness” that didn’t have any relation to the group’s music or the incredible creative trajectory that he had witnessed as it developed over their ensuing albums, with each one trumping the last in artistry and scope. Back in his suite at the Mayfair Hotel, Dylan had no sooner finished listening to the Beatles’ most experimental recording to date—and questioning their motives for making it in the first place—than he began sharing tracks from his latest, as-of-yet unreleased album, Blonde on Blonde. Like the Beatles’ latest project, it would be a smorgasbord of styles and genres. And it would even make thinly veiled references to Rubber Soul both in terms of its slightly out-of-focus cover photograph, as well as Dylan’s “4th Time Around,” which borrowed liberally from the melody of John’s “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown).” Had Dylan somehow missed the strides that Martin and the Beatles had made in 1965—the seminal varispeed piano adornment for “In My Life” or the groundbreaking string arrangement for “Yesterday,” which had topped the US singles charts? Or the “plastic soul” inherent in such ear-popping tracks as “Drive My Car” and “Day Tripper”? Or even the British folk writ large in songs like “Norwegian Wood” and “Girl”?
A few weeks later, John and Paul would be treated to yet another eye-opening release—this time, in the form of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. Introduced by the Who’s Keith Moon to the Beach Boys’ Bruce Johnston at the Scotch of St. James, Lennon and McCartney later joined Johnston at a party in his suite at the Waldorf Astoria. As the festivities got underway, Johnston spun the Beach Boys’ still-unreleased long-player on a portable mono phonograph. Producer Kim Fowley was also in attendance, and he vividly recalled observing John and Paul playing canasta as Pet Sounds filled the room. As he looked on, the two Beatles drifted over to a piano, fingering various chords and whispering to each other as the tracks unfolded. “They were there to see what the competition was,” Fowley later remarked. But “they didn’t steal lyrics, or notes, or chords. They stole emotional impact and pathos.” As Steve Turner astutely observed, the Beatles’ principal songwriters witnessing firsthand the latest wares from the likes of Dylan and the Beach Boys was “the pop equivalent of an arms race.” Years later, McCartney didn’t mince words about the occasion in Johnston’s suite, remarking that Pet Sounds “blew me out of the water.”8
When they rejoined Martin at Abbey Road on Thursday, May 5, the Beatles were well rested and ready to resume work on their own long-player. Not surprisingly, they were eager to one-up their rivals, which they began doing in fine style by recording backward guitar solos for “I’m Only Sleeping” in a six-hour session that would last into the wee hours of May 6. As Martin supervised the protracted, late-night session in Studio 3, Harrison was determined to afford Lennon’s dreamy composition with an otherworldly guitar duet. As Emerick looked on, the Beatles’ lead guitarist created the melodic solo, and then, over the next few hours, began to plot out the order of the notes in reverse order. Martin recorded Harrison playing the solo on his electric guitar and then later playing the same solo using a fuzz box. In the final recording, the second guitar was superimposed on top of the first, affording a surrealistic feel to the recording. In addition to Harrison’s backward guitar solo, Martin and Emerick recorded Harrison and McCartney playing a backward guitar duet for the song’s outro. The result was a revelation, with the Beatles achieving a unique, previously unrealized sound on their guitars—even more groundbreaking, if that were possible, than the ethereal guitar work on “Tomorrow Never Knows.” The next day, Martin and Emerick carried out tape reductions in order to combine the guitar parts. George and his production team were keenly aware of the need to carry out tape reductions in order to free up more recording real estate, as well as of the attendant dangers associated with overdoing it—tape being an inherently “lossy” medium. “On analog tape,” Martin later wrote, “every time you transfer one track to another, you multiply the signal-to-noise ratio. Dirt comes up, all the background hiss and audio clutter, and this noise multiplies by the square of each tape-to-tape transfer. Two copies create four times the amount of noise; a third generation increases the noise by nine times! So I had to be very disciplined in keeping the track usage together.” After carrying out the tape reduction for “Tomorrow Never Knows,” the available fourth track on “I’m Only Sleeping” was deployed with Lennon double-tracking his lead vocal and McCartney and Harrison providing harmonies. Aside from a dose of ADT during the mixing phase, “I’m Only Sleeping” was finally complete.9
During an evening session in Studio 2 on Monday, May 9, Martin and the Beatles tried their hand at a new McCartney composition titled “For No One.” Originally titled “Why Did It Die?” the song had been written during the Beatle’s March Swiss ski vacation with his longtime girlfriend Jane Asher. With the tape running, George conducted ten takes in order to create the basic rhythm track, with Paul refining a piano part on track one and Ringo playing the drums on track two. After take ten had been selected as the best, Martin and McCartney hit upon the idea of adorning the track with a clavichord to enhance the song’s baroque ambience. With a five-pound rental fee debited to the band’s standing EMI recording budget, Martin helpfully procured a clavichord from his AIR London studios on nearby Park Street. At variance with EMI records, Martin would remember things differently: “On ‘For No One,’ the track was laid down on my own clavichord. I brought it in from my home, because I thought it had a nice sound. It was a very strange instrument to record, and Paul played it.” A European keyboard that creates sound when a series of tiny metal blades known as tangents strike the instrument’s brass or iron strings, the clavichord seemed to be the perfect complement to McCartney’s nostalgic, bittersweet effusion about a fading, increasingly emotionless romance. With the borrowed and/or rented keyboard ready and available in Studio 2, McCartney overdubbed the clavichord on the available third track, with Starr providing maracas and hi-hat cymbal.10
Martin and the Beatles would not continue work on their unnamed long-player until the following week on May 14. In the meantime, Martin and Emerick conducted an afternoon mixing session in the Studio 3 control room on Thursday, May 12. EMI had recently been contacted by Capitol Records, the record conglomerate’s US subsidiary, with a request for three tracks slated for the Beatles’ new album. As had long been the American company’s practice, they pla
nned to release a new album of original material for the US marketplace. To be titled Yesterday . . . and Today, the album had been devised by Capitol as a means for exploiting the chart-topping success of the American “Yesterday” backed with “Act Naturally” single. Since the early days of American Beatlemania, Capitol had been consistently skimming material from the bandmates’ official British releases in order to create more product for the bustling US record marketplace. Most recently, Capitol had culled tracks from the UK Help! and Rubber Soul releases in order to begin stockpiling songs for a new American long-player. But Capitol execs still needed a few tracks to fill out the planned album. Martin and the Beatles had been aware of this practice since its inception, but EMI’s prevailing contract with their American subsidiary prevented them from doing anything about it.
The bandmates had complained about the state of affairs vis-à-vis their American discography as recently as August 1965 during a press conference associated with their appearance at the Hollywood Bowl. The Beatles could barely hide their disgust, with Harrison remarking that “the thing is, Capitol issues all sorts of mad stuff, you know. It’s nothing to do with us. We take 14 tracks to be put out, but they keep a couple and put them out later.” In itself, this practice countermanded the group’s evolving notions of the long-player as more than a mere collection of songs but rather as an artistic statement. Capitol’s discrepant American releases were “a drag, because we make an album to be like an album, a complete thing,” McCartney observed. “We plan it, and they wreck it,” Lennon added. Forced to comply with Capitol’s request, Martin selected three new tracks—“Doctor Robert,” “I’m Only Sleeping,” and “And Your Bird Can Sing”—for inclusion on the American Yesterday . . . and Today album. With Emerick in tow and Jerry Boys sitting in the second engineer’s chair in place of McDonald, Martin conducted mono mixing sessions for the three recordings, which were dutifully shipped to the United States via courier. He pointedly supervised the session knowing that additional mixing would very likely be necessary in order to capture fully the Beatles’ vision for the tracks, much less his own.11
There was also yet another prevailing issue at play, and one that George and the group had found to be incredibly insulting over the past few years. George had long harbored ill will over Capitol Records’ treatment of the Beatles. As Beatlemania broke in the United Kingdom, EMI’s American subsidiary refused to release them stateside, believing—falsely, of course—that they wouldn’t appeal to the North American marketplace. Much of this stonewalling had been at the hands of Dave E. Dexter Jr., the company’s international A&R representative. Martin had been so incensed at the time that he blanched when Capitol Records president Alan Livingston referred to the Beatles as Capitol recording artists during their triumphant visit to American shores in February 1964.
In subsequent years, Capitol’s studio personnel—under Dexter’s orders—had taken to subjecting Martin’s original Beatles mixes to the American company’s so-called Duophonic sound. Capitol execs had long maintained that Martin’s mixes were unsuitable for the vagaries of AM radio airplay. To remedy this issue, they subjected Martin’s mixes to heavy doses of echo and reverb without Martin and the Beatles’ consent. More recently, a new practice had developed at Capitol in which Martin’s mono mixes would be transformed into Duophonic mixes to simulate a stereo sound for the American marketplace. To this end, Capitol personnel would create a Duophonic mix by simply redirecting the signal from Martin’s mono mixes and splitting the left and right channels. To produce this fake stereo sound, the high end would be filtered in one direction, and the low end would filter toward the other. In so doing, these Duophonic mixes would create the sonic illusion of separation—and, hence, of true stereo. As Beatles historian Robert Rodriguez has noted, “The crassness with which their music was being treated in the world’s largest market annoyed the Beatles, Brian, and George Martin to no end, but at this point in time they were powerless to stop it.” While Martin may not have approved of Capitol’s repackaging of Beatles albums during this period, he understood the pressure that the American company was under to provide new product for an insatiable record-buying marketplace. As Martin remarked at the time, “We now spend more and more time in the studios than ever before. The Beatles have come to accept that recording is their way of life. They accept their voluntary imprisonment of being in the studio as long as 14 hours at a time.” And while consumers may hunger for yet more product, “there are no secret unissued Beatles tracks in case of emergency. Everything that the Beatles have recorded has been released. It has to be this way. The demand is so strong; it is difficult even keeping up with it.”12
After another long weekend, Martin and the Beatles reconvened on Monday, May 14, for a recording session devoted to their new British long-player. After working through April at breakneck speed, May had been comparatively less productive for the band, who were staring at a looming June deadline for completing the album before embarking upon a series of German and Far Eastern tours and concluding the summer with another concert swing across the United States. Working an eleven-hour session in Studio 2 from early afternoon until well after midnight, Martin and the bandmates returned to Harrison’s “Granny Smith,” which they had abandoned more than a month earlier on April 13, as well as “Taxman,” “Tomorrow Never Knows,” and “For No One.” Much of the session had been devoted to preparing a master reel of the best mixes of the songs thus far. For “Taxman,” Martin instructed Emerick to append McCartney’s April 21 count-off, while also creating four mono mixes of the song—none of which would be ultimately used for the long-player. The highlight of the session was McCartney’s lead vocal overdub on “For No One.” The Beatle can be heard practicing the opening lyrics and prepping for the recording by requesting “silence for the studio, over and out.” Paul’s vocal was recorded on the available fourth track and carried out with the tape running slow in order to increase the pitch of his voice during playback.13
The next afternoon, Wednesday, May 18, Martin and the bandmates returned to Studio 2 for an extended twelve-hour session to complete “Got to Get You into My Life,” which hadn’t seen any effort since April 8, when the rhythm track had been perfected. During the May 18 session, “Got to Get You into My Life” took a hard left turn from British pop fare into the world of American Motown flair with a big brass sound. Perhaps today was the day when the Beatles would finally catch that Stax Studio sound that they had yearned for only a few months earlier. But even “Got to Get You into My Life” was not standard Motown flair, just as “Mark I” was by no means a prototypical number from any beat band with provincial North Country origins—or any band anywhere in the history of time, for that matter. Over the past few weeks, McCartney had decided that the song’s missing element was a horn section—indeed, “Got to Get You into My Life” would be the first Beatles recording with brass accompaniment. A few days earlier, Paul had begun to make good on that vision by inviting Jamaican trumpet player Eddie “Tan Tan” Thornton to work the session. Paul had seen Eddie, who was a member of Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames, performing at the Scotch of St. James on the same night that John and Paul first heard the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds in its entirety. The brass section also included tenor sax player Peter Coe, another member of the Blue Flames who landed the gig at the last minute after baritone sax player Glenn Hughes fell ill. A trio of freelance studio musicians—trumpeters Ian Hamer and Les Condon and tenor sax player Alan Branscombe—rounded out the brass section.
When they arrived at the session that afternoon, the studio musicians for “Got to Get You into My Life” enjoyed a rare glimpse inside the largely unseen world of Martin and the Beatles. As Coe later recalled, “The Beatles wanted a definite jazz feel,” and from what the sax player could tell, “Paul and George Martin were in charge.” Condon remembered that the experience “was interesting and unusual. I’ve never done a session quite like it before. The tune was a rhythm and bluesish sort of thing. We were only on on
e number. Apparently, the Beatles felt it needed something extra.” But if the musicians arrived that day expecting sheet music, they were in for quite a surprise. In contrast with his earlier practices for such arrangements as “Yesterday,” “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” and, most recently, “Eleanor Rigby,” Martin hadn’t prepared a score in advance for the musicians who were set to play on “Got to Get You into My Life.” As Condon recalled, “As for the song’s arrangement, well, they didn’t have a thing written down! We just listened to what they had done and got an idea of what they wanted. Then we went ahead from there and gradually built up an arrangement. We tried a few things, and Paul and George Martin decided between them what would be used.” Coe added, “There was nothing written down but Paul sat at the piano and showed us what he wanted and we played with the rhythm track in our headphones. I remember that we tried it a few times to get the feel right and then John Lennon, who was in the control room, suddenly rushed out, stuck his thumb aloft and shouted ‘Got it!’” As for the other Beatles, Harrison was only slightly involved in the session, according to Coe, and Starr sat in a corner playing checkers.14
With the studio musicians having jotted down their own arrangements based upon McCartney’s directives from the piano bench, Martin prepared to run the quintet through their paces. First, he instructed Emerick to free up space by erasing two of the original tracks. Second, Emerick purposefully set up the microphones in a configuration that was at variance with standing EMI policy in order to capture the big brass sound that McCartney desired. As Emerick later recalled, “I close-miked the instruments—actually put the mics right down into the bells instead of the standard technique of placing them four feet away—and then applied severe limiting to the sound.” By recommending that the mics be placed at least a yard away from the instruments, EMI’s guidelines had been designed to control the amount of air pressure to which the microphones would be subjected to avoid damage to their interior diaphragms during the recording process. But Emerick didn’t care—and neither did Martin, for that matter. As had been clear throughout the sessions for their latest long-player, the Beatles’ production team was willing to go to any lengths to satisfy their clients. Well, almost any lengths, that is.15
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