Sound Pictures
Page 13
6
Abracadabra
* * *
DURING THE WEEK of May 23, Martin and the Beatles were no doubt pleased to learn that Rubber Soul had entered its twenty-fifth straight week in the UK top ten, suggesting that their commercial dominion would hardly be ebbing any time soon. George and the bandmates were scheduled to resume work on the band’s newest album on Thursday, May 26, in Studio 3, but as it turned out, George would be nowhere near the vicinity of EMI Studios. Instead, he was resting back in his flat on Baker Street, having been felled by a severe bout of food poisoning. In his place in the control room was none other than Judy Lockhart Smith, George’s fiancée. At thirty-seven years old, she was three years George’s junior. As far as the music business went, she held a longer tenure in the industry than her producer boyfriend, having joined Parlophone as a secretary in 1948, two years before Martin took a job as Oscar Preuss’s assistant A&R man. Born November 13, 1928, Judy was the daughter of Kenneth Lockhart Smith, the chairman of the UK’s Film Producer’s Guild, as well as a graduate of the Bedford School and St. James’s Secretarial College.1
As his bachelor days were nearing their end, George had enjoyed the company of a roommate in the form of his octogenarian father, Harry. Having worked as a journeyman carpenter for as long as he could, Harry had begun taking odd jobs as a caretaker or a night watchman in recent years in order to make ends meet. Things had come to a head in George’s relationship with his father when his marriage to his first wife, Sheena, had finally disintegrated as a result of his long-running affair with Judy. As George later recalled, “When my first marriage broke up, I was scared about telling him [Harry] because I was ashamed. One evening, I confessed what had happened, that it was no good—it was over. He was a dear man, and he said, ‘I’m so glad because I’ve known for a long time you haven’t been happy. Thank God for that.’” For his part, George had been relieved by his father’s understanding demeanor—especially after the untimely death of his mother, Bertha, during the early weeks of his marriage to Sheena. Having died in her sleep in February 1948, Bertha was just fifty-three years old. For George, his reunion with Harry had been a long time coming indeed.2
During their years sharing his “pokey little flat in Upper Berkeley Street,” George and Harry “got to know each other pretty well, and we even made some furniture together. I still have a sideboard he made. I used to take him along to recording sessions, which he loved, so he met people like Matt Monro, and was thrilled about what I did. He was knocked out by the success of the Beatles.” During those years, Harry also became reacquainted with his grandchildren, thirteen-year-old Alexis and nine-year-old Gregory. For George’s children, the sight of their grandfather lumbering in their direction was a source of great delight. “He was a true classic cockney,” Gregory later recalled. “Always sprucely dressed in the same three-piece tweed suit, a cap on his head perched at a jaunty angle, a smile on his face. ‘Pop,’ as I called him, would bend down, slipping a half crown into my palm as he greeted me. ‘There ya go, boy!’ he’d say.”3
By the time that the Beatles had begun recording their latest long-player, Harry had been unable to work. Indeed, he had recently been fired from his recent stint as a night watchman after he had fallen asleep on the job. Living on his pension, Harry had moved in with his sister in nearby Wimbledon as his son’s nuptials approached. Concerned about his father’s welfare, George had begun giving Harry a small allowance of ten pounds a week, which his father grudgingly accepted. To George’s further relief, Harry had developed a great fondness for Judy, “and they got on like a house on fire.” In many ways, George had Judy to thank for his latter-day reunion with his father. By the mid-1960s, and at his fiancée’s bidding, the trio had begun spending many happy evenings in each other’s company. For George, it was nothing short of a blessing after experiencing the familial trauma associated with his mother’s death and the pall that it had cast over his first marriage.4
For as long as Judy had known George—and certainly since they had begun their romantic relationship during the 1950s—she had been an unerring source of support for him. As George made his way at EMI, she stoked his ambitions as he took on greater responsibility. And she had been there, step by step, as he plotted his future with the Beatles, a risky enterprise, given the band’s North Country origins and unproven track record. When things really took off, Judy had been by George’s side, helping to promote the Beatles’ career through her offices at Parlophone. In a November 19, 1963, letter, she wrote movingly about the group’s increasingly national profile after their appearance on Val Parnell’s Sunday Night at the London Palladium, ground zero for British Beatlemania: “It is so exciting about the success of the Beatles—it is quite the most amazing thing the amount of excitement they have caused here. We have always been their great fans in the office and couldn’t be more thrilled and proud.” Shortly thereafter, she was by George’s side as the group performed their legend-making set during their Ed Sullivan Show appearance in February 1964. And in the fall of 1965, when George left the EMI Group and formed AIR with his partners, she was there yet again, handling the clerical duties and staffing the office for her fiancé’s new, highly risky venture.5
But on the evening of May 23, 1966, Judy was on the scene at Abbey Road to keep tabs on George’s most valuable commodity, even going so far as to take his regular seat in the Studio 2 control room. While the Beatles and their production team had known and loved Judy for a long time by this point, there was little doubt about why she was there. As Emerick later recalled, she was there “to keep an eye on things, and I suppose to make sure we all behaved ourselves! She sat in George’s place at the console making sure that the Beatles got everything they wanted, while I took the helm.” Martin’s absence cast a strange spell over the proceedings, as if the bandmates had been waiting for the opportunity to cut loose. As Geoff wrote, his sick day “had a liberating effect on the four Beatles—they behaved like a bunch of schoolboys with a substitute teacher filling in. As a result, there was a lot of clowning around that evening—silliness that George Martin would not have tolerated.” Eventually, it was John Lennon who called things to order after breaking into a protracted fit of the giggles: “Come on, it’s getting late and we still haven’t made us a record!” When they finally settled down, the Beatles were primed and ready to record “Yellow Submarine,” a new Lennon-McCartney composition written expressly for Ringo to sing. With the exception of A Hard Day’s Night, all of the Beatles’ studio albums had included a lead vocal from the band’s drummer, and this new long-player would be no different. As an added bonus, Paul had originally conceived the song with children as its intended audience. “There isn’t a single big word,” McCartney later observed. “Kids will understand it easier than adults.”6
With Judy up in the control room beside Geoff and Phil McDonald, the bandmates captured a basic rhythm track in four takes. Two tracks were composed of Lennon’s Gibson acoustic, Starr’s drums, and McCartney’s bass, with Harrison on tambourine. Ringo then overdubbed his vocal onto take four, with all four Beatles recording backing vocals on the remaining track. Emerick sweetened “Yellow Submarine” by recording the vocals with the tape running slow in order to give the bandmates’ voices a brighter quality upon playback. With the carefree atmosphere in the studio that evening, the Beatles were brimming with ideas, especially Lennon, who reveled in the song’s whimsical nature. “At a certain point,” Geoff later recalled, “John decided that the third verse needed some spicing up, so he dashed into the studio and began answering each of Ringo’s sung lines in a silly voice that I further altered to make it sound like he was talking over a ship’s megaphone.” Having recorded this section of the song—“And we live / A life of ease, / Every one of us / Has all we need”—Emerick closed the six-hour session by creating a tape reduction that combined the vocal and instrumental tracks into one.7
As it turned out, Martin and the Beatles wouldn’t be bringing “Yellow Subma
rine” to fruition just yet. In fact, George had become so ill that a solid week would elapse before he was ready to return to work at Abbey Road. On Wednesday, June 1, he returned to the friendly confines of Studio 2 for a twelve-hour session that would begin with a bit of controversy, albeit short-lived, only to end with one of the zaniest Beatles sessions on record. During George’s illness, Phil had accidently erased the initial portion of John’s megaphone overdub, the one in which he echoed Ringo’s voice singing “And we live / A life of ease.” Having deleted John’s first two lines, Phil was beside himself with fear. As Geoff later recalled, it was “one of the few times his usually accurate drop-in skills failed him. From his station in the machine room, he got on the intercom and let George and me know of his gaffe while the Beatles were out of earshot. I could hear the distress in his voice and could sympathize—almost every assistant had made a similar mistake at one time or another.” Sure enough, once John realized that the lines had been erased, he “wasn’t too happy about it,” Geoff remembered, “but rather than pin the blame on Phil, George and I quickly concocted a story about needing the track for one of the overdubs. We all tended to close ranks and protect one another at times like that, and I know that Phil was very relieved that he didn’t have to face John’s wrath.”8
For much of the day, George and Geoff had been raiding the EMI library’s sound effects records for ideas about how to bring the Beatles’ yellow submarine to life. Curated in a “rickety green cabinet” by George’s longtime friend and former colleague Stuart Eltham, the tape library was brimming with quirky outtakes and unique bits of sound—many of them originating from Martin’s heyday of making comedy records for Parlophone. “The collection began in about 1956,” Eltham later recalled, “when Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, Michael Bentine, and others used to make records at Abbey Road. We started to keep bits and pieces. If we did a location recording somewhere we’d keep what outtakes were possible. Then I and people like Ken Townsend used to make recordings in our spare time.” For Martin, looking for sound effects was a great joy, and he had a knack for ferreting out unusual sonic morsels from among EMI’s vast storehouse. After they finished searching for nautical sound effects, the producer and the engineer turned their attention to a glaring, two-bar gap in the song after Ringo sings, “And the band begins to play.” As Geoff later recalled, “Someone—probably Paul—came up with the idea of using a brass band. There was, of course, no way that a band could be booked to come in on such short notice, and in any event, George Martin probably wouldn’t have allocated budget to hire them, not for such a short section. So instead, he came up with an ingenious solution.” To George’s mind, the answer was somewhere in the EMI library. The producer sent McDonald to gather up a selection of marches for consideration. After listening to several brass bands, Martin and McCartney selected a march that was written in the same key as “Yellow Submarine,” likely choosing a passage from a recording of Georges Krier and Charles Helmer’s 1906 composition, “Le Rêve Passe.” At this point, Martin became concerned about the issue of copyright. According to British law at the time, reproducing more than a few seconds of a commercial sound recording required permission from the rights holder—most likely the publisher—who might opt to negotiate a royalty. Hoping to avoid the hassle of ferreting out the owner of the copyright for the march, Martin happened upon an idea: As Emerick later recalled, Martin “told me to record the section on a clean piece of two-track tape and then chop it into pieces, toss the pieces into the air, and splice them back together. The end result should have been random, but, somehow, when I pieced it back together, it came back nearly the same way it had been in the first place! No one could believe their ears; we were all thoroughly amazed.” With time running short, George asked Geoff to “swap over two of the pieces,” which the engineer then dutifully fed into the multitrack master tape, which he faded out very quickly in order to minimize the unauthorized usage. “That’s why the solo is so brief, and that’s why it sounds almost musical, but not quite,” Emerick later wrote. “At least it’s unrecognizable enough that EMI was never sued by the original copyright holder of the song.”9
By this point, the Beatles had reassembled in the studio and were ready to get back to work on “Yellow Submarine.” But what they did next may have been the most inexplicable moment across their recording career, which is saying something given the events later that night in Studio 2. Apparently, at some point during Martin’s absence, the bandmates had hit upon the idea of inserting a spoken-word introduction to “Yellow Submarine.” Years later, no one could remember exactly why a spoken-word intro was necessary for the song, but that didn’t stop the Beatles’ brain trust from whiling away several hours trying to turn it into something meaningful. Ringo’s monologue may have been intended to memorialize a recent and well-publicized charity walk by physician Barbara Moore, who had marched from Stepney to Utrecht, which made for an impressive trek from the southernmost tip of England to the northernmost tip of Scotland. Earlier, in July 1960, Dr. Moore had carried out a thirty-two-hundred-mile charity walk from Los Angeles to New York City. As Geoff later recalled, “John, who often had his head buried in a newspaper when he wasn’t playing guitar or singing, had written a short medieval-sounding poem that somehow tied the walk to the song title, and he was determined to have Ringo recite it, accompanied by the sound of marching feet.” To create the requisite sound effect, Emerick “pulled out the old radio trick of shaking coal in a cardboard box to simulate footsteps.” Sitting behind the microphone, Ringo recited John’s poem, which the Beatles’ drummer attempted to deliver in emotionless deadpan: “And we will march to free the day to see them gathered there, / from Land O’Groats to John O’Green, from Stepney to Utrecht, / to see a Yellow Submarine / We love it!” For Emerick’s money, “the final result was, in a word, boring.” Apparently, Martin and the bandmates agreed. Ironically, George and the Beatles would spend far more time and energy bringing the thirty-one-second monologue into being than they would devote to the rest of the song. And in the end, they would choose to delete the intro piece altogether, wasting considerable time in the process.10
And that’s when the hilarity ensued—fun and games the likes of which had scarcely been visited upon one of George’s sessions in all his years at Abbey Road. After a dinner break, the Beatles returned to Studio 2 with a bevy of friends in tow, including a number of contemporary rock’s reigning glitterati. The Abbey Road air was rife with the skunky odor of marijuana, and it was precisely in this state that Lennon came up with the idea of simulating the sound of a submerging submarine. Quick on the draw, Emerick grabbed a mic and recorded the sound of Lennon blowing bubbles into a glass of water. And that’s when “Lennon wanted to take things to the next level and have me record him actually singing underwater,” Emerick recalled. “First, he tried singing while gargling. When that failed (he nearly choked), he began lobbying for a tank to be brought in so that he could be submerged.” That’s when Geoff came up with the idea of recording John’s voice using a submerged microphone. With Martin looking on patiently, in spite of the inherent absurdity of the entire scheme, Mal Evans succeeded in waterproofing the mic by enclosing it inside a condom and then dunking it in a milk bottle filled with water. “Well done, Malcolm!” John exclaimed. “After all, we don’t want the microphone to be getting in the family way, do we?” Lennon quickly shifted his attentions after Emerick was unable to register a strong enough signal to conduct the experiment, with the engineer later realizing, to his horror, that the microphone had been live, which meant that the Beatle might possibly have been electrocuted. At this point, Martin intervened—perhaps because his budget for the album was nearing depletion or, more likely, fearing for Lennon’s safety. Things really got rolling when the group began raiding the trap room, the closet beneath the staircase in Studio 2 that was brimming with an odd assortment of sound effects. “The cupboard had everything,” Emerick later recalled, “chains, ships bells, hand bells from wartime, t
ap dancing mats, whistles, homers, wind machines, thunder-storm machines—everything.” By this point, Studio 2 had begun to resemble something “straight out of a Marx Brothers movie.”11
As George and the bandmates prepared to superimpose sound effects onto “Yellow Submarine,” even studio personnel got in on the fun, with John Skinner and Terry Condon providing the whooshing sounds that adorn the song’s engine room ambience. “There was a metal bath in the trap room,” Skinner recalled, “the type people used to bathe in in front of the fire. We filled it with water, got some old chains and swirled them around. It worked really well. I’m sure no one listening to the song realized what was making the noise.” The Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger and Brian Jones were there, along with Marianne Faithfull, Mick’s new girlfriend, and Pattie Boyd. In addition to Martin, roadies Neil Aspinall and Mal Evans joined in on the merriment, gleefully singing “we all live in a yellow submarine” to their hearts’ content. In one of his favorite memories, Geoff recalled that “there was one particular shout that John did. The door to the echo chamber behind Studio 2 was open so he went and sat there, singing all that ‘full speed ahead, Mr. Captain’ stuff at the top of his voice.” As if things couldn’t get any more bizarre, colossal Mal Evans took to marching around the studio with a bass drum strapped to his chest, as the raucous band gathered up behind him, conga style, singing the song’s catchy chorus. For George, recording “Yellow Submarine” made for one of his most cherished memories from his days with the Beatles. As he later remarked, “We used to try different things. That was always fun, and it made life a little bit more interesting. The most notable case was ‘Yellow Submarine,’ of course, where you can hear the noise of bubbles being blown into tanks, chains rattling, and that kind of thing. We actually did that in the studio. John got one of those little hand mikes, which he put into his Vox amp and was able to talk through. So all of that ‘Full steam ahead’ you hear was done live while the main vocal was going on, and we all had a giggle.”12