Sound Pictures

by Kenneth Womack

  As George pondered what to do next with David and Jonathan’s flagging career, Gerry and the Pacemakers—one of the mainstays that he had counted among his perennials when he founded AIR—were at a crossroads. Outside of the Beatles and Cilla Black, Gerry and the Pacemakers were easily George’s best-selling act. In just three years, they had landed nine top-forty hits on the UK charts, with their first three singles—“How Do You Do It,” “I Like It,” and “You’ll Never Walk Alone”—topping the charts. In 1964, they even seemed, for a time at least, as if they would be genuine rivals for the Beatles as the Mersey beat’s most revered act. Inspired by his band’s success, Gerry Marsden had begun making his name as a songwriter with such compositions as “It’s All Right,” “I’m the One,” “Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Cryin’,” and “Ferry Cross the Mersey.” In 1965, George and the group were dealt a major blow when the Brian Epstein–produced Ferry Cross the Mersey rock musical was widely panned for being a pale imitation of the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night film. For Gerry and the Pacemakers, the movie’s highly public failure had been difficult to overcome. “Walk Hand in Hand” backed with “Dreams,” the band’s most recent single in the United Kingdom, had been released way back in November 1965 and barely made it into the top thirty. A cover version of a 1956 composition by Johnny Cowell and popularized by Andy Williams, “Walk Hand in Hand” was an even bigger failure stateside, where it failed to crack Billboard’s Hot 100. Throughout 1966, George had recorded a spate of material with Gerry and the Pacemakers. Their February release, “La La La” backed with “Without You,” registered yet another flop, becoming the group’s first single that failed to make the UK charts.

  For George, Gerry and the Pacemakers had proven to be enigmatic as far as generating sustained record sales was concerned. In the United Kingdom, they had generally made their name on the back of their singles releases. While their first album, How Do You Like It?, notched a number-two showing back in November 1963—unable to unseat With the Beatles from the top slot—they had since been unable to land a hit long-player in their home country. At one point, when Martin and Epstein’s Mersey acts were ruling over the charts, Martin was forced to stagger the latest releases by Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, and Cilla Black, which may have hampered Gerry and the Pacemakers from accruing the kind of momentum that they needed in order to consolidate their fame. In the United States, the group had managed a number of singles and LP successes, but they were likely impeded by the limited reach of Laurie Records, the tiny label that acted as their American distributor.

  In September 1966, George convened Gerry and the Pacemakers at Abbey Road to take one last stab at capturing the energy and excitement of their heyday. With George in the control booth, they recorded “Girl on a Swing,” a cover version of a composition by jazz bassist Robert Miranda. Martin was also preparing a new album for release on the Laurie Records label. Titled Girl on a Swing, the long-player was released stateside in November and included the title track, which had been identified as the band’s next singles release, along with a raft of songs that they had recorded during that long year of soul-searching for Marsden and his bandmates. The strangest of the lot, a cover version of Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine,” seemed to take Gerry and the Pacemakers far afield from their original, beat-band comfort zone. Paul Simon’s lyrics sounded positively bizarre emanating from Gerry Marsden’s lips as he sang,

  people have a tendency to dump on you?

  Does your group have more cavities than theirs?

  Do all the hippies seem to get the jump on you?

  Do you sleep alone when others sleep in pairs?

  In its own way, “The Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine” encapsulated Gerry and the Pacemakers’ slow demise as they sampled yet another musical style, dilettante like, having roamed from beat music (“How Do You Do It”) and symphonic bombast (“You’ll Never Walk Alone”) to balladry (“Ferry Cross the Mersey”), jazz (“Girl on a Swing”), and now a mid-1960s American satire of consumerism.

  In many ways, George had only himself to blame. Perhaps he had been more concerned with guiding the Beatles’ career, as earlier acts like Shirley Bassey and the Fourmost had once complained, than with tending to the likes of Gerry and the Pacemakers, who had been allowed to sprawl away from the genre that had made their name. When it was released on October 22, 1966, “Girl on a Swing” notched a number-twenty-eight showing in the United States, while failing, as with “La La La,” to crack the British charts. Adorned with bizarre, quasi-psychedelic cover art, Girl on a Swing didn’t even chart. But by then, it hardly mattered, as Gerry and the Pacemakers had disbanded, calling it quits before the “Girl on a Swing” single even made it to the manufacturing plant.

  As September gathered steam, Martin watched as the Beatles, fresh from their sojourn to America for the Jesus Christ tour, dispersed in an array of different directions. While he was always hankering to go into the studio with the bandmates, the Beatles’ producer lauded this much-needed four-headed respite. “There was no doubt that the year 1966 had been a disaster for the Beatles,” he later observed. “The world was caving in on them. Newton’s First Law, that for any given action there is an equal and opposite reaction, had come into play. The universal hysteria was producing its inevitable kickback.” Up first was John Lennon, who flew out to Hanover, West Germany, to begin principal photography on Richard Lester’s How I Won the War. On the set of Lester’s film, John would take up the role of Private Gripweed, a part for which the Beatle began wearing steel-rimmed spectacles. After completing work in West Germany, the production shifted to Almería in southern Spain. Lennon quickly discovered that a movie set without the other Beatles in tow could be a spectacularly monotonous place to be. “It was pretty damn boring to me,” he later recalled. “I didn’t find it at all very fulfilling.” Eventually, he began spending the hours, sometimes days, between takes by working out a new composition on his acoustic guitar. As his costar and housemate Michael Crawford later remembered, John “used to sit cross-legged on the beach or on the bed, working out a melody. I heard him playing the same bar over and over again until he got the right sequence.” With a dreamlike mood, John’s new composition featured deep, impressionistic lyrics: “Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see.”2

  In mid-September, George Harrison and Pattie Boyd traveled to Bombay for an extended visit to India, where the quiet Beatle would continue his sitar study under Ravi Shankar’s tutelage. Fresh off the stimulating experience of working on Revolver—with his unprecedented three original compositions in “Taxman,” “Love You To,” and “I Want to Tell You”—Harrison had been inspired to further his knowledge of Indian instrumentation. “The first time I heard Indian music,” he later recalled, “I felt as though I knew it. It was everything, everything I could think of. It was like every music I had ever heard, but twenty times better than everything all put together. It was just so strong, so overwhelmingly positive, it buzzed me right out of my brain.” He soon discovered that mastering the sitar was a considerable challenge, not merely in terms of learning its intricate tonalities but also in regard to learning how to properly hold the instrument. Harrison’s studies with Shankar quickly morphed into a budding friendship founded upon their shared love of Indian music, as well as the Beatle’s growing interest in the study of Hinduism and Eastern philosophy. For Harrison, visiting India had emerged as a point of departure into new ways of living and thinking. “Ravi and the sitar were excuses,” he later admitted. “Although they were a very important part of it, it was a search for a spiritual connection.”3

  For his part, Ringo enjoyed his extended time away from the Beatles’ life on the road. When he wasn’t in the bosom of his young family with Maureen, he sought out the company of his friends, even visiting John for a time in Spain. As usual, the most active Beatle was Paul, who spent the first portion of Martin and the Beatles’ unscheduled sabbatica
l in France, where he donned disguises, milled about with the other tourists, and experimented with photography. In November, Paul would travel with Mal Evans to Kenya, where the pair would go on safari. But the big moment came at the end of the trip, as the Beatle and the roadie flew home from Nairobi on November 19. Sitting with Mal in first class, Paul began imagining a concept for a new Beatles album in which the bandmates would assume alter egos and step outside of the constricting world of Beatlemania. “I thought, ‘Let’s not be ourselves.’” To Paul’s mind, they could “put some distance between the Beatles and the public.” Mal quickly got into the spirit of Paul’s idea, especially when the Beatle happened upon the notion that they take on the personae of an entirely different band. And that’s when Mal began absentmindedly playing with tiny packets marked “S” and “P,” before asking Paul what they meant. “Salt and Pepper,” he replied. And then it came to him: “Sergeant Pepper.”4

  Not surprisingly, as the weeks rolled by with scant news about the Fab Four, the media had begun to register the Beatles’ extended absence from their broadcasts and their pages. In a September 20 issue of the Daily Express, Judith Simons finally penned the words that fans across the world had feared: “Teenagers may be dismayed at the way the Beatles are splitting off in all directions in pursuit of their separate careers.” Across town, whiling away the lonely hours in his Belgravia home, Epstein began to wonder, understandably, if there would be a place for him in the Beatles’ post-touring universe. Even more gravely, he was on the verge of losing Cilla Black as a client. During that same period, Cilla came within moments of severing their professional relationship, only to be thwarted by Brian’s impassioned plea: “Please don’t leave me,” he begged. “There are only five people in the world I care about other than my family: the Beatles and you. Please don’t leave me, Cilla.” She quickly relented, later remarking, “How could I leave a fellow who said that? He said he was on top of everything at his work. We decided to give it another go.”5

  Things became even more precarious after Brian was subjected to a succession of blackmail attempts by Dizz Gillespie, who had absconded with the manager’s briefcase while Brian dined at the Beverly Hills Hotel with Nat Weiss instead of attending the Beatles’ Candlestick Park finale. Unfortunately for Brian, the briefcase contained $20,000 in cash, the Beatles’ touring contracts, and, most damaging of all, a parcel of illegal barbiturates. Knowing the power of bad publicity in the wake of the Jesus Christ tour, Gillespie had bartered for hush money from Epstein in exchange for the briefcase. The situation was resolved when Weiss came to the rescue, recovered the briefcase in a sting operation, and had Gillespie arrested. But for Epstein, it was all too much. In late September, Brian’s increasingly dire existence came to a head when his assistant Peter Brown discovered the Beatles’ manager unconscious in his bedroom. Brown hastily arranged for Epstein’s emergency visit to a private hospital, where his stomach was pumped. After he regained consciousness, Brian dismissed the episode as “a foolish accident.” But the next day, when Brown returned to Epstein’s home, he discovered an empty vial of Nembutal, along with a note, written in Epstein’s hand, reading “I can’t deal with this anymore. It’s beyond me, and I just can’t go on.” At that point, Brown realized the gravity of the situation and checked Epstein in for a fortnight’s stay at a private sanitarium so that he could wean himself off of what had become a steady diet of pills and alcohol. Brian’s brother Clive would later attempt to minimize the situation, commenting that “Brian was not distressed, but he was sorry that the touring days were over. He felt that he couldn’t make the same contributions to the Beatles’ everyday life as he had done. Obviously there were going to be new singles and new albums but that didn’t absorb as much of Brian’s time as touring. Also, many of NEMS Enterprises’ other bands were not featuring as frequently in the charts.”6

  But for Brian—and, to a certain extent, George—there were yet other issues looming on the horizon, including rumors that two of the Beatles may have held a secret meeting with Allen Klein, the crude American business manager who had recently taken up with the Rolling Stones, for whom he earned a huge advance on their standing contract with Decca. For his part, George recognized the gravity in Brian’s rapidly deteriorating psychology, later writing that, at the core of things, “Brian was forced to face up to something he had never dreamed he would have to confront: that the Beatles would refuse to perform live again. He had signed them for five years, in 1962, to do just that.” Suddenly, the Beatles’ manager could no longer glean a sense of purpose in his professional life. “They just said ‘no’ to his concert dates, and went on saying it,” George later wrote. “Going by the received wisdom of the day, this amounted to commercial suicide. Many groups at the time did no recordings at all, relying entirely on live performances for their success. The idea that the Beatles wanted to stop performing and spend months recording an album . . . shook Brian terribly. He thought it was the end.”7

  In October, George and Brian were confronted with the reality that the Beatles would not be providing EMI with a new long-player for the holiday season, as they had done for three straight years in the form of With the Beatles, Beatles for Sale, and Rubber Soul. In fact, it was looking increasingly like the Beatles wouldn’t be providing EMI—and, in terms of George’s interest, AIR—with a new single either. In the United Kingdom, that meant that the sum total of the band’s 1966 output would include the “Paperback Writer” backed with “Rain” and “Yellow Submarine” backed with “Eleanor Rigby” singles and the Revolver long-player. For EMI, this state of affairs simply wouldn’t stand. With seemingly no other choice, George agreed to compile a greatest hits package in order to keep EMI’s coffers sated while also attending to the ravenous consumer demand for more Beatles product. As the band’s first greatest hits package, the compilation was titled A Collection of Beatles Oldies (but Goldies!). Preparing the long-player in time for the holiday sales rush required Martin to put in several hours of studio time with Geoff Emerick in order to ensure that the compilation was in stores by December 10, the release date set by EMI. On October 31, Martin and Emerick created a stereo remix in the Studio 1 control room for “Paperback Writer.” In contrast with Revolver, none of the bandmates attended the sessions associated with A Collection of Beatles Oldies. Martin and Emerick had originally planned to remix “Paperback Writer,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and “She Loves You” for stereo, but the complexity of the former’s stereo remix forced them to reconvene on Monday, November 7, when they completed the stereo remix for “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Once again, Martin was surprised by the time it took to remix the band’s earlier output. The lion’s share of the singles releases had never been mixed for stereo. To accomplish the remixes, Martin and Emerick worked from the original twin- or four-track recordings, generally relegating the rhythm track to the left channel and vocals to the right.

  The next day, November 8, Emerick was left alone to contend with “She Loves You.” The original twin-track recordings had been destroyed, leaving only the single’s mono master with which to work. To remedy an otherwise impossible situation, Emerick devoted some ninety minutes in Abbey Road’s Room 53 to fashion a “mock stereo” version. He fabricated a new version of “She Loves You” by deleting the high frequencies on the left channel, which created a low bass sound. At the same time, he deleted the low frequencies from the right channel to create a treble sound. In this way, they combined to create a faux-stereo version of the song. Martin’s team had also intended to create a stereo remix for “From Me to You,” although no one, it seems, ever got around to it. Instead, the original twin-track recording was deployed, with the instruments relegated to the left channel and the vocals pushed to the right. On Thursday, November 10, the remainder of the work on the forthcoming compilation was completed, albeit with neither Martin nor Emerick—and certainly none of the Beatles themselves—in evidence. Clearly, A Collection of Beatles Oldies was the sole priority of EMI by this
juncture. Peter Bown served as engineer for the session, with Graham Kirkby standing by as his second engineer. Bown had worked with Martin for years, particularly during his pre-Beatles days as Parlophone A&R head. Bown and Kirkby created stereo remixes for “Day Tripper” and “We Can Work It Out” before taking up work on a stereo mix for “This Boy.”

  As it turned out, the latter remix had been a mistake. A miscommunication had occurred between the staff in EMI’s Manchester Square offices and the folks at Abbey Road, and “This Boy” had been confused with “Bad Boy,” the Larry Williams composition that Martin and the Beatles had recorded back in May 1965. The confusion wouldn’t be discovered until the compilation made it to the cutting room. With no time to spare, the existing mix of “Bad Boy” was deployed in place of “This Boy.” EMI had lobbied for the inclusion of “Bad Boy”—which hadn’t previously been released in the United Kingdom, having been expressly recorded to round out the contents of Beatles VI, one of Capitol’s repackaging projects for the American marketplace—in order to provide British consumers with a reason for buying A Collection of Beatles Oldies. An embarrassment of riches composed of thirteen UK chart-toppers along with “Yesterday” and “Michelle,” the album’s sixteen cuts, save one, were already available in British shops. The completists among Beatles collectors would presumably purchase the compilation in order to get their hands on “Bad Boy.” The album’s cover art featured a painting by David Christian, who was also tapped by EMI to prepare artwork for the cover of the group’s annual Christmas message; Christian’s work for the holiday Flexidisc was later relegated to ad copy after McCartney submitted a design of his own. For A Collection of Beatles Oldies, Christian’s cover art depicted a young man donning his Carnaby Street finery, while the back cover of the album sleeve featured a photograph of the Beatles in Tokyo, taken by Robert Whitaker during the band’s Far East tour.