Later that evening, during the mixing portion of the May 18 session, McCartney complained that the studio musicians’ performance, given that there were only five of them, had fallen short of his vision. “I wish we could make the brass sound bigger,” he remarked to Martin. “Well, there’s no way we’re bringing them back in for another session,” the Beatles’ producer replied, “we’ve got to get the album wrapped up and there’s no more budget for outside players anyway.” Amazingly, in spite of Martin and the bandmates’ incredible contribution to EMI’s bottom line since “Please Please Me” had topped the charts in early 1963—and the unbreakable string of hit singles and albums that continued into the present day—EMI held the Beatles to a strict budgetary allotment. And for his part, Martin was in no position to create any overruns, which might very well cut into AIR’s percentage of the Fab Four’s sales receipts. But as usual, Emerick was ready with a solution. As he later recalled, “I came up with the idea of dubbing the horn track onto a fresh piece of two-track tape, then playing it back alongside the multitrack, but just slightly out of sync, which had the effect of doubling the horns.” Quite suddenly, McCartney’s brass quintet had been amplified into a dectet.16
With the brass track having come to fruition, Martin and Emerick were faced with a four-track tape that was filled to the brim. By this juncture, McCartney was no longer happy with his original lead vocals, which were deleted during a tape-to-tape deduction. With two additional tracks now free, the existing recording was labeled as take nine and was composed of the original bass/drums rhythm track and the decuple brass section. At this point, Paul added a fresh vocal to “Got to Get You into My Life,” turning in a high-octane performance that left his colleagues dazzled. As Geoff remembered, “I loved Paul’s singing on that song, too—he really let loose. At one point, while Paul was recording the lead vocal, John actually burst out of the control room to shout his encouragement—evidence of the camaraderie and teamwork that was so pervasive” during that period. After the available fourth track was appended with harmony vocals and an electric guitar overdub, Martin and Emerick created more mono mixes of “Got to Get You into My Life” and finally called it a night. The five studio musicians had been treated to the unique experience of being able to observe Martin and the Beatles working at EMI Studios. But perhaps even more significantly for them in the short run, the musicians enjoyed a financial boon after news of their work on a Beatles session was leaked in the trade papers. “That led to a lot of extra work for me,” Thornton recalled. “Through working with the Beatles, I played with Jimi Hendrix, Sandie Shaw, the Small Faces, and the Rolling Stones.”17
As with the “Got to Get You into My Life” session the night before, Martin and the bandmates’ session on the evening of Friday, May 19, would prove to be yet another defining moment in terms of their increasing activities with studio musicians and their interactions with creative external forces vis-à-vis the Beatles’ sound recordings. John, Paul, George, and Ringo had already spent much of the day working in the cavernous Studio 1 with American director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who was shooting promotional videos for their upcoming single release, “Paperback Writer” backed with “Rain.” In 1965, Lindsay-Hogg had broken into the British pop scene as the director of several episodes of Ready Steady Go!, the popular ATV vehicle with the slogan “The weekend starts here!” and on which entertainers of the day debuted their latest wares. After completing their work with Lindsay-Hogg, the Beatles took a dinner break and then joined Martin and Emerick in cozy Studio 3, where they met Alan Civil, a thirty-six-year-old horn player. McCartney felt that a French horn solo would make for a sublime adornment to “For No One,” and the Beatles’ producer readily agreed. “We wanted a very special sound” for the baroque-sounding composition, “and French horn was what he [McCartney] chose.”18
As Paul later recalled, “Occasionally we’d have an idea for some new kind of instrumentation, particularly for solos. . . . On ‘For No One,’ I was interested in the French horn, because it was an instrument I’d always loved from when I was a kid. It’s a beautiful sound, so I went to George Martin and said, ‘How can we go about this?’ And he said, ‘Well, let me get the very finest.’ That was one of the great things about George. He knew how to obtain the best musicians and would suggest getting them. On this occasion, he suggested Alan Civil, who, like all these great blokes, looks quite ordinary at the session—but plays like an angel.” After a long and distinguished career, Civil would very shortly be named as the principal horn player for the BBC Symphony Orchestra. A much sought-after musician, he had recently been approached by the Berlin Symphony Orchestra. Had he accepted a role as principal in Berlin, he would have been the first non-German to be appointed to such a culturally esteemed position in a nation where classical musicians are deeply revered.19
For his part, Civil was delighted to work with Martin again. The idea of working with the Beatles was a bonus. At this juncture, fewer than twenty studio musicians had contributed to Beatles songs, and Civil was about to find himself, for the space of a single evening at least, in the heart of the bandmates’ world. As Civil remembered, “George Martin rang me up and said, ‘We want a French horn obbligato on a Beatles song. Can you do it?’ I knew George from his very early days at EMI because I’d been doing a lot of freelance work then. So I turned up at Abbey Road and all the bobbysoxers were hanging around outside and trying to look through the windows.” What happened next is a matter of some dispute. Civil recalled thinking that “the song was called ‘For Number One’ because I saw ‘For No One’ written down somewhere. Anyway, they played the existing tape to me, which was complete. . . . Paul said, ‘We want something there. Can you play something that fits in?’ It was rather difficult to actually understand exactly what they wanted so I made something up which was middle register, a Baroque-style solo. I played it several times, each take wiping out the previous attempt. For me it was just another day’s work, the third session that day in fact, but it was very interesting.” But what, exactly, did Civil play that evening? And who actually scored it—if anyone?20
In Civil’s memory, it was McCartney who asked him to improvise a solo—“to make something up,” as it were, in a baroque style. In itself, this level of ambiguity in terms of authorship would have rendered the notion of another Lennon-McCartney original even more vague than it had already become in recent years. But Civil was certainly up to the job. His skills as a horn player were beyond reproach, having been playing since his teen years, when he performed with the Royal Artillery Band and Orchestra at Woolwich. In 1955, he first ascended as principal with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra when he was barely twenty-six years old. During the year in which he first met the Beatles, he was appointed as a professor at the Royal College of Music, leaving little doubt that he had the skills and acumen to carry out fewer than twenty seconds of improv. McCartney’s memories of the session vary dramatically from Civil’s. The Beatle later recalled humming the melody to Martin, who dutifully adapted McCartney’s vision into musical notation. As Paul remembered, “George asked me, ‘Now, what do you want him to play?’ I said, ‘Something like this,’ and sang the solo to him, and he wrote it down.”21
A scenario in which Martin created a written score makes eminently more sense, especially given what happened next. Up to this point, Martin had scored all of the notation for Beatles studio musicians—save for “Got to Get You into My Life,” for which Paul had banged out the notes on the piano in full view of the players—and there is no reason to believe that Civil’s session for “For No One” would be any different. According to Emerick, by this point the issue with studio musicians had little to do with the idea of bringing in outside help to generate new sounds for pop arrangements—the Beatles were quite comfortable with shaping the direction of their recordings with the freelance classical musicians in Martin’s stable. Rather, it was a matter of their own professional musical limitations. After all, they had limited knowledge of instruments
outside of the guitars, bass, and drums with which they were extremely familiar, much less any knowledge of how to compose notation for professional symphonic players like Civil. As Geoff later wrote, “The Beatles were perfectionists, and they didn’t always understand the limitations of musical instruments. In particular, Paul’s attitude toward outside musicians was ‘You’re being paid to do a job, so just do it.’” But it was more than that, of course. The pop-music scene was shifting rather precipitously, especially given the Beatles’ apotheosis in world music. It was, to borrow Emerick’s words, the makings of a generational, even a cultural clash: “My sense was that the classical musicians had had it so easy for so long, but that things were now changing. There was also a generational clash, because most of those outside musicians were quite a bit older than the Beatles. They were pleased to be there, pleased to have the credit on their resumes, but they didn’t know how to relate to the music or the musicians—and the Beatles didn’t really know how to relate to them, either. George Martin served as the middleman, as the bridge between the two generations.” This aspect of the Beatles’ evolving artistry had become apparent, most recently, during the “Eleanor Rigby” session in which Paul was unable to ascertain the difference between string performances with and without vibrato. In short, the Beatles simply didn’t possess the vocabulary or the experience to understand the classical musicians’ approach to their sessions with Martin and the band.22
With Martin’s score for “For No One,” this overarching issue reared its head, first, when it came to tuning up, and second, when Civil finally got a glimpse of the producer’s arrangement. When the horn player first heard the recording of “For No One,” he “thought it had been recorded in rather bad musical style, in that it was ‘in the cracks,’ neither B-flat nor B-major,” he commented. “This posed a certain difficulty in tuning my instrument.” Worse yet, Civil felt that studio trickery, which Martin and Emerick often employed in order to alter a song’s pitch, was a poor substitute for solving the tuning problem. “I think they had a method of raising or lowering the pitch in this case,” he said, “but it made the horn part for me a very, very awkward key, purely because these fellows just tuned their instruments to themselves and not to an A on the piano.” This was the crux of the matter, of course, because rock performers in that era lacked today’s electronic tuners and typically tuned the strings of their guitars to themselves without benefit of working against a well-tuned piano.23
Which brings us to the horn part itself. As noted, Martin most likely transcribed McCartney’s humming into a musical score for Civil’s benefit. But the problems didn’t end there. As McCartney remembered the events of the day, “Towards the end of the session, when we were getting the piece down for Alan to play, George explained to me the range of the instrument: ‘Well, it goes from here to this top E,’ and I said, ‘What if we ask him to play an F?’” In Paul’s recollection, “George saw the joke and joined in the conspiracy. We came to the session and Alan looked up from his bit of paper: ‘Eh, George? I think there’s a mistake here—you’ve got a high F written down.’ Then George and I said, ‘Yeah,’ and smiled back at him, and he knew what we were up to and played it. These great players will do it. Even though it’s officially off the end of their instrument, they can do it, and they’re quite into it occasionally. It’s a nice little solo.” On yet another occasion, Paul remembered the events as being friendly, even whimsical: “On the session, Alan Civil said, ‘George?’ and looked at us both. He said, ‘George, you’ve written a D [sic],’ and George and I just looked at him and held our nerve and said, ‘Yes?’ And he gave us a crafty look and went, ‘Okay.’” Was this an instance in which Martin had acted as a “middleman,” not only translating McCartney’s ideas into a musical score but working as a buffer between the pop star and the classically trained musician?24
As it happened, Emerick took away a very different experience from the Beatles’ interaction with Civil that day—one that was bolstered by Martin’s own remarks, as well as the ensuing events that would transpire over their future recording sessions with studio musicians. As Geoff later wrote, “Alan was under a lot of pressure doing that overdub, because it was so hard to hit the high note in the solo. In fact, most people would have never written that part for a French horn player because it was too high to play, but that was the note Paul wanted to hear, and so that was the note he was going to get. We felt that Alan, being the best horn player in London, could actually hit it, even though most horn players couldn’t. Alan was reluctant to even try it; he was actually breaking out into a sweat, telling everyone it really shouldn’t be done. But eventually he gave it a go and pulled it off.” Martin concurred with Emerick’s description of the events that day in Studio 3, later recalling that “Paul didn’t realize how brilliantly Alan Civil was doing. We got the definitive performance, and Paul said, ‘Well, okay, I think you can do it better than that, can’t you, Alan?’ Alan nearly exploded. Of course, he didn’t do it better than that, and the way we’d already heard it was the way you hear it now.”25
Acting as middleman in this instance enabled Martin to quell Civil’s concerns and draw an exemplary performance from the horn player while also keeping McCartney’s professional naïveté and natural persistence in check. Both parties were satisfied with the result, with McCartney remembering Civil’s “nice little solo” with great regard. For his part, Civil was delighted with the end result. As Emerick later recalled, “Though Alan was a wreck by the time he left that session, he was well pleased with what he’d done, because it was the performance of his life. In fact, he became a star in his own right because of that, but the problem was that, from that day on, arrangers would expect other horn players to be able to do what he had done, and they were often disappointed if they gave parts to other players of lesser ability.” While it may have been touch-and-go when it came to hitting the high note, Civil would look back on his experience with Martin and the Beatles with a special fondness: “My friends would ask, ‘What have you done this week?’ and I would say, ‘Oh, I played with Otto Klemperer and Rudolf Kempe’—that didn’t mean anything to them. But to say that you’d played with the Beatles was amazing. The day would almost go into their diaries as being the day they met someone who’d played with the Beatles. Even now, while only a few people come up to me and say ‘I do like your Mozart horn concertos,’ so many others say, ‘See that big grey-haired old chap over there?—he played with the Beatles!’” Given his stature among London’s classical music set, Civil received a top-drawer session fee of fifty pounds for his work on “For No One.” Perhaps even more significantly, when the eventual long-player was released, Civil was credited on the album sleeve, making him the first studio musician to be identified as a contributor to a Beatles recording.26
On Friday, May 20, Martin supervised a session in the Studio 2 control room with Emerick and McDonald. Meanwhile, the Beatles were across town with Lindsay-Hogg at Chiswick House, where they were carrying out additional photography among the eighteenth-century estate’s lush gardens and conservatory for the “Paperback Writer” and “Rain” promotional videos. During the control room session back at Abbey Road, Martin prepared stereo mixes of “Doctor Robert,” “I’m Only Sleeping,” and “And Your Bird Can Sing,” the same three songs for which he had created mono mixes a week earlier for inclusion on the Yesterday . . . and Today long-player, Capitol Records’ upcoming American release. The ninety-minute session was remarkably brief in comparison to the production team’s recent activities, and each song only required two iterations to perfect. As usual, Martin dispatched the mixes by courier to Capitol’s famous Los Angeles headquarters at Hollywood and Vine. As it turned out, the stereo mixes of “Doctor Robert,” “I’m Only Sleeping,” and “And Your Bird Can Sing” must have arrived too late for the purposes of EMI’s American subsidiary. With a June 20 release date scarcely a month away, nervous Capitol technicians produced fake stereo versions of the songs using the mono masters t
hat Martin had shipped to California the previous week. They were ersatz versions, to say the least—and hardly up to Martin’s standards. But this would be a minor consideration, as events would have it, after Yesterday . . . and Today finally made its way into American record shops in late June.27
Over the next week, Martin and the Beatles enjoyed a much-needed break. The Beatles were a month away from embarking upon a world tour, and George was overwhelmed with AIR business. He and his partners were determined to grow their talent pool beyond the paucity of acts that they had brought to their fledgling company in 1965. Martin was responsible for bringing the Beatles into the fold, of course, along with Cilla Black, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, and the Fourmost. For his part, Burgess’s stable included Adam Faith, Manfred Mann, and Peter and Gordon. While Ron Richards counted P. J. Proby and the Hollies among his acts, Peter Sullivan was producing the likes of Lulu, Tom Jones, and Engelbert Humperdinck. In many ways, AIR’s artists made for an impressive roster of mid-1960s pop acts, but the record business was a fickle game, as Martin well knew, and he was always on the lookout for the next fireproof act that could keep the company humming along for years. In those post–British Invasion years, critics and industry stalwarts alike were invariably crowing about this or that pop act being nothing more than “a flash in the pan” or, worse yet, a “one-hit wonder.” In some cases, the derision was the express result of the so-called generation gap in which elders mocked their youthful progeny’s taste in style and culture. Even in the heady days of 1966, the Beatles were still being hounded by such claims, as if theirs was a very ephemeral art—as if they would be here today, gone tomorrow. The Beatles themselves had always been cognizant of this possible career-ending fate. But by this point, there was little doubt that their place in the popular culture of their day was here to stay—even if they never managed to land another hit record again. In her March 1966 exposés of the four Beatles in the London Evening Standard, Maureen Cleave made this distinction clear: “It was this time three years ago that the Beatles first grew famous,” she wrote in her article devoted to Lennon. “Ever since then, observers have anxiously tried to gauge whether their fame was on the wax or on the wane; they foretold the fall of the old Beatles, they searched diligently for the new Beatles (which was as pointless as looking for the new Big Ben). At last they have given up; the Beatles’ fame is beyond question. It has nothing to do with whether they are rude or polite, married or unmarried, 25 or 45; whether they appear on Top of the Pops or do not appear on Top of the Pops.” Simply put, Cleave concluded, “they are famous in the way the Queen is famous.”28
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