Sound Pictures

by Kenneth Womack

  With time quickly running out, the studio was dark yet again on June 15, when the Beatles were out getting their inoculations in advance of their extended foreign travel, as well as rehearsing for their live appearance on the popular weekly BBC music program Top of the Pops. The next evening, the Beatles—adorned in dark suits—mimed performances of “Paperback Writer” and “Rain” in order to promote their latest single to a rabid national television audience in their homeland. The event marked their final appearance on the TV program that, in the United Kingdom at least, could make or break a pop release. Joined by such contemporaries as Herman’s Hermits, Gene Pitney, the Yardbirds, Cilla Black, and the Hollies—with the former two being fellow AIR artists—the Beatles would not be broken. The program also featured a prerecorded video by the Beach Boys, the Beatles’ most relevant artistic competitors for the moment, for “Sloop John B.” While they would briefly be denied the top spot by Frank Sinatra’s classic “Strangers in the Night,” “Paperback Writer” would unseat Old Blue Eyes the very next week. The moment wasn’t lost on Patrick Doncaster, the Daily Mirror’s entertainment reporter, who ascertained that neither track on the new Beatles song had “any romance about them. Gone, gone, gone are the days of luv, luv, luv.” Asked about this shift in the Beatles’ compositions, McCartney remarked that “it’s not our best single by any means, but we’re very satisfied with it. We are experimenting all the time with our songs. We cannot stay in the same rut. We have got to move forward.” And then, in his most telling observation about the shape of things to come, McCartney added, “Our new LP is going to shock a lot of people.”16

  On Thursday, June 16, George and the Beatles had very nearly brought that new long-player to fruition. In a nearly nine-hour session, they remade “Here, There, and Everywhere” over nine takes. After perfecting the basic rhythm track, which included McCartney’s bass, Starr’s drums, and Lennon’s electric guitar, they began adding overdubs and edits to take thirteen, which had been deemed as the best. Take thirteen also featured Harrison playing his electric guitar using a volume pedal in order to ornament the song with a series of delicate swells. Martin’s arrangement for Lennon’s, McCartney’s, and Harrison’s gorgeous harmonies was overdubbed, along with McCartney’s bass part, which was afforded its own track, as had become their recent practice in order to give the low end of the song increased definition and prominence. All four tracks had been rounded out by Starr’s finger-brushed cymbals, along with well-timed finger clicks and assorted percussion. At that point, Martin instructed Emerick to carry out a tape-to-tape copy in order to free up available space for McCartney’s lead vocal, which was recorded with the tape running slow in order to sound faster—and hence, brighter—on playback.

  During this decidedly late moment in the production of the album, the bandmates had begun making overtures to Klaus Voormann, an old friend from their Hamburg days, as well as an artist and bass player in his own right, about devising a hand-drawn cover, perhaps a collage. They may not have had anything resembling a title at this point, but their vision about doing something different, about “shocking” their massive fan base, remained undeterred. Their original idea, vague as it was at this point, had been to assemble a montage of black-and-white photographs by Robert Freeman, the photographer behind all of their album covers, save for Please Please Me. After rejecting Freeman’s attempt at fashioning the long-player’s cover art, they had turned to Voormann, who had immigrated to the United Kingdom, where he played bass for a time in a trio out of Liverpool—managed by Epstein, quite naturally—called Paddy, Klaus, and Gibson. Lennon approached Voormann about the cover art shortly after Voormann’s group had disbanded, and the Beatles’ old German friend was eager to take up the challenge. Determined to capture the spirit of their new LP in his cover, Voormann joined Martin and the Beatles at Abbey Road, where they played him several of the tracks, including “Tomorrow Never Knows.” At the artist’s request, the bandmates collected old photographs of themselves, which would become part of Voormann’s collage, arranged around four line drawings—crafted in the style of the Victorian art nouveau movement’s Aubrey Beardsley—of Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr.

  The big unveil was held shortly thereafter at EMI Studios, with the Beatles, George Martin and his fiancée Judy Lockhart Smith, and Brian Epstein in evidence. As the assemblage eagerly awaited Voormann’s creation, he propped his cover art on top of a file cabinet. At first, his artwork was met with a kind of stunned silence—this was, after all, a very different Beatles album cover in comparison with everything that had come before. Voormann later recalled that he mistook the initial silence as indicative of a coming shockwave of abject disapproval. But his fears were entirely mistaken. McCartney finally broke the silence, pointing at the cover art and saying, “Hey! That’s me sitting on a toilet!” At that point, the others inched closer to Voormann’s collage. And sure enough, there was Paul perched on a toilet in an old Hamburg photo. “Well, we can’t have that,” said Martin. “No, it’s great,” McCartney countered. But Martin’s reproachful voice carried the day, and the image was subsequently removed. Up next was Epstein, still feeling the sting of recent Beatles cover photographs gone awry. “Klaus, this is exactly what we needed,” he remarked. “I was worried that this whole thing might not work. But now I know that this cover, this LP, will work. Thank you.” No doubt concerned after the recent Yesterday . . . and Today PR disaster, Epstein was clearly relieved, reportedly even weeping at the sight of Voormann’s work. But it was more than that, of course. Beatlemania’s architect would have been fine with George and the bandmates moving forward in the same musical vein that they had been mining during the early years. Their recent, protracted bout of avant-garde experimentation, while brash and impressive even to the cautious Epstein, was a lot to take. How, he had to be wondering at this late date, would their audience take it once the new long-player had been loosed upon the world?17

  While Epstein might have been concerned about audience share, Martin didn’t harbor even remotely the same level of disquiet. As he later remarked to Melody Maker, “By this time we were so established that we could afford to take risks. . . . If people didn’t like it, hard luck. It was . . . an indulgence, if you like, and we thought it was worthwhile.” In and of itself, Voormann’s design made for a novel, arresting cover, unlike anything in the contemporary pop-music marketplace. By design, the album’s name wouldn’t appear on the cover—not that they had a title at this juncture anyway. Consumers would be confronted by Voormann’s stark line-drawings of the Beatles, expressionless amid a sea of mind-boggling images adorned among the bandmates ever-ranging locks of hair, the most conspicuous aspect of their celebrity in the heady days of early Beatlemania.18

  On Friday, June 17, Martin convened the band for yet another session of tidying up loose ends. Up first was “Got to Get You into My Life,” for which Harrison provided a sizzling guitar solo on his Sonic Blue Fender Stratocaster. The additional guitar overdub meant that Martin and Emerick had to discard previous mixes of the song. After rendering five new mixes, they selected the last one as the best before turning back to “Here, There, and Everywhere.” At this point, McCartney recorded a new lead vocal overdub to supplement his existing vocals, thus necessitating a fresh remix. But Martin and the Beatles, rarely satisfied with anything short of perfection, would revisit the song at a later date—not that there were many more left at this point.

  On Monday, June 20, George conducted a mixing session in the control room of Studio 1 with Geoff and the Beatles present. After carrying out a final remixing session for “Got to Get You into My Life” in order to bolster the song’s brass accompaniment, Martin was able to close the book on the track that had taken the longest to record at this point in 1966—it was a record that would easily be eclipsed much later in the year. Work had begun way back on April 7, the second day of recording sessions for the album, and concluded on what would amount to the penultimate session for the untitled long-player.
June 20 also marked the stateside release date for Yesterday . . . and Today, complete with new cover art in place of Whitaker’s now notorious “butcher” photograph. It was somewhere around this time that Martin realized that they only had thirteen tracks in the hopper for an album that, like their previous efforts up to this point (save A Hard Day’s Night), clocked in at fourteen songs, their standard allotment for their UK releases. While the number of tracks may seem trivial, it was a key issue for the record-buying public during that period. As Emerick later pointed out: “The LPs of that era were a lot more concise than today’s CDs, but if they were too short, there would be complaints—or worse yet, returns—from consumers. Not only was there a release date set, and a hungry public clamoring to hear the finished album, but the Beatles were booked to begin a European tour just days after the sessions ended, so there was no time to spare.”19

  With just over thirty hours before they had to be on a jet bound for Munich, the bandmates joined Martin on Tuesday, June 21, in Studio 2 to record one last track for the long-player. But first, Martin conducted a three-hour mixing session in the Studio 3 control room. Harrison’s “Granny Smith”—soon to be rechristened as “Love You To”—was treated to a stereo remix, as was “I Want to Tell You” and “Here, There, and Everywhere.” The control room blitz continued at 2:30 PM in Studio 2, where Martin’s production team concocted mono and stereo mixes for “For No One,” “Taxman,” and “Doctor Robert,” the latter two of which required additional edits to come to fruition. At 7:00 PM, the scene shifted to the floor of Studio 2, where Martin and the group began taking their passes at recording a new Lennon composition titled, somewhat apropos under the circumstances, “Untitled.” Later to be renamed as “She Said She Said,” the song memorialized the Beatles’ acid-infused party with David Crosby and Peter Fonda in Los Angeles’s Benedict Canyon back in August 1965. In particular, “She Said She Said” made reference to Fonda’s near-death experiences on the operating table. As Fonda recounted his otherworldly sensations, a drug-addled Lennon asked the actor, “Who put all that shit in your head?” Written into the composition’s lyrics as “who put all those things in your head / Things that make me feel like I’m mad / And you’re making me feel like I’ve never been born,” the song’s narrative provided a near-perfect bookend for the LSD-influenced “Tomorrow Never Knows,” which had inaugurated the current LP’s sessions on April 6.

  By this point, everyone was feeling the pressure. Deadline fever had claimed not only George and his production team, but the Beatles themselves. Even the band’s roadies Neil Aspinall and Mal Evans had to work double-time to bring the album in for its photo finish. Having recently transferred the group’s gear for transport to West Germany, Aspinall and Evans were forced to haul the bandmates’ instruments back to Abbey Road in order to record the fourteenth song. For the next several hours, Martin and the bandmates toiled over “She Said She Said,” only for the first time, McCartney would not be among their number, having become the first Beatle to walk out on a session. At least for Paul’s sake, he wouldn’t have to go very far, with his newly renovated home on Cavendish Avenue just around the corner from Abbey Road. As Neil and Mal set up the gear in Studio 2 that evening, Paul wilted under the mounting pressure—and possibly even John’s cavalier attitude about recording “She Said She Said” from scratch. As Geoff later recalled, “John had always been the basher in the group—his attitude was ‘Let’s just get it done’—so it was no big surprise that we got the entire song recorded and mixed in nine hours, as opposed to the more than three days we spent on ‘Here, There, and Everywhere.’ Still, he made the group run through the song dozens of times before he was satisfied with the final result.” But McCartney wouldn’t be around to see it. As Paul later remembered, “I’m not sure, but I think it was one of the only Beatle records I never played on. I think we’d had a barney or something, and I said, ‘Oh, fuck you!’ and they said, ‘Well, we’ll do it.’ I think George [Harrison] played bass.”20

  With the tape running, Martin and the remaining Beatles rehearsed some twenty-five takes of “She Said She Said” before attempting a basic rhythm track. Captured in three takes, the rhythm track featured Starr’s drums, Harrison sitting in on bass, and Lennon and Harrison’s electric guitars. After selecting take three as the best, Lennon’s lead vocal was overdubbed onto the recording, along with Lennon and Harrison’s backing vocals. At this point, Martin instructed Emerick to create a tape-to-tape reduction onto which additional overdubs were adorned, including another electric guitar and Lennon’s organ part. Not wasting any time, Martin immediately conducted three mono remixes, and the song—and the album proper—was effectively complete at 3:45 AM on June 22. As Geoff later recalled, “For all of that, it still sounds scrappy and rough to me, it’s got the ragged feel of a track that was done in the middle of the night, under pressure.” But Geoff, for one, was hardly bothered by the breakneck pace that George and the Beatles had been running across their years together—and most especially since the sessions for Rubber Soul. He accepted their penchant for sprinting to the finish line as part of the chemistry that made Martin and the Beatles’ relationship purr. “Incredibly,” Emerick later wrote, the album “had been completed in just over ten weeks (we had most weekends off), with many songs taking only a few hours to get down on tape. It was always a matter of capturing the moment, and when you were working with the Beatles it had to be right. Exhausting as it was, both mentally and physically, it was a good way to work—really, the only way to work.”21

  After “She Said She Said” was put to bed, Martin quickly followed suit, remarking to the others as he left the studio that morning, “All right, boys, I’m just going for a lie-down.” But as it turned out, there would be no rest for the weary. By 7:00 PM on Wednesday, June 22, he would be back in the Studio 3 control room with Emerick and Jerry Boys by his side to carry out a nearly seven-hour mono and stereo remixing session for several tracks, including “Eleanor Rigby,” “She Said She Said,” “Good Day Sunshine,” “Yellow Submarine,” and “Tomorrow Never Knows,” which joined the other eight tracks already in the hopper.22

  By this point, the Beatles had already left for Munich to begin their latest concert tour. Only this time, Martin wouldn’t be along for the ride, as he had occasionally been in the past. Two days later, with the latest still-untitled Beatles album behind them for the most part, George and Judy made the short trip from her place at Manchester Square to the Marylebone Registry Office, where they made their vows for the public record. Judy’s sixty-three-year-old father, Kenneth Lockhart Smith, and his old friend Ron Goodwin served as the couple’s witnesses. With his divorce from Sheena having been finalized the previous February, George and Judy had certainly waited long enough. Sixteen years after they first met at Abbey Road, with George wearing his Fleet Air Arm great coat and the glint of an unknown future in his eye, they were man and wife. With Judy smiling brightly by his side, George had never been more certain about anything in his life. After the Beatles had returned to the United Kingdom, Brian Epstein held a dinner party in the newlyweds’ honor. “All four Beatles came, with wives and girlfriends,” George later recalled, “but Brian had no one, so we were 11 to dinner. As we started dinner, everyone took out their napkins. Brian looked around the table and said, ‘Now, everyone, when you finish the meal, I want you to pass all your napkin rings back to Judy and George because you’ll see on them. . . .’ He broke off, and looked at us with pleased anticipation. We looked at the little rings. Each had an ‘M’ engraved on it.” For George, “it was a lovely thing to do. But he was like that: immensely generous, imaginative, and impulsive.”23

  And now, with George and the Beatles’ dazzling creation having finally come to fruition, it was all but impossible at that moment to imagine that the Beatles could top their brave new long-player, with its air of mystery and experimentation, slated for release in mid-August. The whole enterprise had begun with the notion of borrowing the distinctly American
rhythm-and-blues sound that they thought they could glean with the likes of Steve Cropper and Stax Studio. But instead, they had discovered something different—something of their own making. As McCartney later recalled, when Martin and the bandmates finally completed the album, “we realized that we had found a new British sound almost by accident.” And with Emerick coming to the fore, they had seemingly pulled out every stop, generated a handful of studio innovations in the bargain, and even advanced their sound to yet another level, with Lennon and McCartney having bested themselves as composers—and even Harrison getting in on the act and coming up aces. What more could they possibly accomplish?

  7

  The Jesus Christ Tour

  * * *

  WHAT GEORGE AND THE BEATLES needed now—and quickly—was a title. The album was mixed for mono and stereo, Klaus Voormann’s magisterial cover was set, and the long-player was all but ready for release. But when it came to naming their latest masterwork, the bandmates kept coming up empty. Even before the Beatles departed for their world tour, they had bandied about a variety of titles—some of which were inexplicable, while others were clearly acts of desperation. It was Paul, in particular, who fretted about the long-player’s presentation and ultimate reception. In the June 11, 1966, issue of Disc and Music Echo, he figured, “We’ll lose some fans with it, but we’ll also gain some. The fans we’ll probably lose will be the ones who like the things about us that we never liked anyway.” At one point, he listened to the latest mix of the album as he traipsed around West Germany with the other Beatles. In his already heightened state of paranoia about the LP, Paul deluded himself into believing that the entire album was out of tune. The other bandmates succeeded in allaying his fears, which most likely resulted from the extensive use of ADT and varispeed, with which Martin and his team had treated the album. Paul finally regained his confidence after John, his roommate during the band’s West German gigs, observed, “I think your songs are better than mine.” For McCartney, it was high praise indeed coming from his songwriter partner, who rarely complimented anyone about anything.1