Sound Pictures

by Kenneth Womack

  And then, before the clock struck eleven on that fateful night, George put down his baton and said, “Thank you, gentlemen, that’s a wrap.” As Emerick looked on from the booth, “everyone in the entire studio—orchestra members, Beatles, and Beatles friends alike—broke into spontaneous applause. It was a hell of a moment.” Looking on from his position beside Emerick, Lush couldn’t hide his ebullience, saying, “Wow, I can’t wait for people to hear this!” For his part, George was elated. “When we’d finished doing the orchestral bit,” he later remarked, “one part of me said, ‘We’re being a bit self-indulgent here.’ The other part of me said, ‘It’s bloody marvelous!’” To everyone’s great relief, Townsend’s gambit had paid off, and the synchronized tape machines had done their work. The sounds of the orchestra—four of them, to be precise—now played alongside the words and music of the Beatles in exquisite harmony. And for one night at least, ambiophonics hadn’t been all that phony at all. Dutton’s brainchild had ensured that the orchestral reverb enjoyed an arresting, artificial echo that served to heighten the song’s dramatic intent. For George and the Beatles, the stars had truly aligned on the night of February 10. On that rarest of occasions in Studio 1, the system had worked like a charm—and exactly as Dutton had imagined it would. By 1971, studio personnel, frustrated by ambiophonics’ hit-or-miss nature, gave up on Dutton’s design and removed the system from Abbey Road altogether.23

  After the studio musicians packed up and left for the night, Paul ushered the Beatles and their friends around the microphones for one last recording that evening. At this juncture, George’s score called for the half orchestra to conclude with an E major chord, which they had duly recorded that evening. George knew that the Beatles wanted to create an arresting conclusion for “A Day in the Life,” and for the moment at least, the orchestral flourish brought the recording to a close. As George later recalled, “It was Paul’s idea to do something really tumultuous on the song, something that would whack the person listening right between the ears and leave them gasping with shock. He didn’t know quite what it was he wanted, but he did want to try for something extremely startling.” Lennon and McCartney had already decided that the orchestral coda was a place-saver. As Geoff remembered, “Paul asked the other Beatles and their guests to stick around and try out an idea he had just gotten for an ending, something he wanted to overdub on after the final orchestral climax. Everyone was weary—the studio was starting to smell suspiciously of pot, and there was lots of wine floating around—but they were keen to have a go. Paul’s concept was to have everyone hum the same note in unison; it was the kind of avant-garde thinking he was doing a lot of in those days. It was absurd, really—the biggest gathering of pop stars in the world, gathered around a microphone, humming, with Paul conducting the choir. It was a fun way to cap off a fine party.”24

  As mid-1960s concepts go, McCartney’s notion of having the assembled glitterati chant om represented the emerging counterculture’s nod to Eastern philosophy. In the tradition of Transcendental Meditation, om is the primordial sound—the sound that we know from the womb, as well as the sound of nothingness and everything all at once. The om connotes that part of humanity that is stardust, that is the sound of the universe. In this sense, the gigantic om that Paul had in mind made for a potentially powerful conclusion to the Beatles’ magnum opus. As they gathered around the studio microphones, the bandmates and their guests attempted several takes. “Eight beats, remember,” Paul instructed them. A few of the takes collapsed, understandably, into fits of laughter. Finally, take eleven was selected as the best, and the Beatles and their friends recorded three overdubs to create a massive sound. But George was unimpressed, later describing the om chant as “one of those bright ideas that just didn’t work. We thought of all the ideas of Buddhist monks chanting. We thought it’d be a great idea to have everybody messed in the studio doing ‘Ommmm,’ hanging onto it, and multiply it many times. And the result was—pathetic!” A proper coda, it seemed, would have to wait for another day.25

  Before the session concluded around one o’clock in the morning, George, the bandmates, and their remaining guests crowded into the control room to listen to the playback from the day’s efforts. Everyone was curious about how the recording had turned out, and for the folks who were fortunate to be there in the wee hours of Saturday, February 11, the results were mesmerizing. Many people listened from the hallway, with the Beatles’ friends spilling out of the tiny control booth. Disc-cutter Tony Clark stood just outside the door. “I was speechless, the tempo changes—everything in that song—was just so dramatic and complete,” he later recalled. “I felt so privileged to be there. I walked out of the Abbey Road that night thinking, ‘What am I going to do now?’ It really did affect me.” George’s partner Ron Richards was there—just as he had been at the Beatles’ legend-making first session with George back on June 6, 1962. “I just can’t believe it,” Richards exclaimed. “That’s it, I think I’ll give up and retire now.” EMI mastering engineer Malcolm Davies later observed that Richards was no slouch himself, producing the Hollies at the time and working with a number of top acts. “I think he knew that the Beatles were just untouchable,” said Davies. “It blew him away.”26

  But as it invariably happened, the Beatles and their brain trust didn’t take a break from working on their latest project to ponder what they’d just accomplished. By Monday, February 13, work continued unabated in Studio 2, where George and his production team created a mono remix of “A Day in the Life” for demo purposes. But the main event that evening was a new Harrison composition going under the unsubtle working title of “Not Known.” For his part, Harrison had been uncommonly distant during the early sessions for the Beatles’ new long-player. As he later recalled, “I’d just got back from India, and my heart was still out there. After what had happened in 1966, everything else seemed like hard work. It was a job, like doing something I didn’t really want to do, and I was losing interest in being ‘fab’ at that point.” While Harrison recognized that “there was a more profound ambience to the band,” he also felt that the Beatles were back on the record industry’s treadmill, that “we were just in the studio to make the next record, and Paul was going on about this idea of some fictitious band. That side of it didn’t really interest me.” As his contribution to Sgt. Pepper, “Not Known” was composed by Harrison as a “joke relating to Liverpool, the Holy City in the North of England. In addition, the song was copyrighted Northern Songs, Ltd., which I don’t own, so it doesn’t really matter what chords I play, as it’s only a Northern Song.”27

  But for Martin, Emerick, and the other Beatles, working on Sgt. Pepper was hardly a joke. Rather, it was shaping up to be a moment of intense artistic engagement. That evening, the Beatles finally got around to creating a basic rhythm track around midnight. The group attempted nine takes during the session, with Harrison plying the Hammond organ, McCartney on bass, and Starr behind the drum kit. With take three selected as the best, the band closed up shop for the night. But Martin and Emerick stayed behind in the control room, perturbed at Harrison’s seeming nonchalance about his contribution to Sgt. Pepper. To Emerick’s mind, “Not Known,” which later morphed into “Only a Northern Song,” “seemed like such an inappropriate song to be bringing to what was generally a happy, upbeat album.” Martin chose his words carefully, telling Emerick, “I’m disappointed that George didn’t come up with something better.” Geoff understood George’s frustration, but he also understood why the producer had to be cautious about his remarks: “He was always on his guard because he didn’t ever want disparaging comments to be reported back. The other Beatles were clearly underwhelmed, too. John was so uninspired, in fact, that he decided not to participate in the backing track at all.”28

  Martin had long been concerned about Harrison’s subordinate place in the band’s calculus. “George Harrison was what you might call the Beatles’ Third Man—always there, yet somehow elusive,” Martin later wrote. “The e
lectricity that crackled between Paul and John, and that led to such great music, rather left George out in the cold. He had only himself to collaborate with. If he needed help from the other two, they gave it, but often rather grudgingly. It was not so much that Lennon and McCartney did not believe in Harrison; more that their overwhelming belief in themselves left very little room for anything—or anybody—else.” But in retrospect, Martin knew that he, too, had contributed to Harrison’s junior status among the Beatles’ songwriters. “As for my own role, I am so sorry to say that I did not help George much with his songwriting, either. His early attempts didn’t show enormous promise. Being a very pragmatic person, therefore, I tended to go with the blokes who were delivering the goods. I never cold-shouldered George. I did, though, look at his new material with a slightly jaundiced eye.”29

  The very next evening, Tuesday, February 14, Martin and the Beatles continued working on “Only a Northern Song” with similar and pointedly less than spectacular results. The session began with a tape-to-tape reduction of take three in order to free up additional recording space. Much of the lengthy session was devoted to the superimposition of two Harrison vocals onto the track. As the other Beatles—namely, Lennon and McCartney—were keenly aware, “Only a Northern Song” originated from Harrison’s overt dissatisfaction with the band’s financial state of affairs vis-à-vis Northern Songs. The publishing enterprise that Martin’s friend and business associate Dick James had established in February 1963 with the release of the band’s third single, “From Me to You” backed with “Thank You Girl,” Northern Songs provided for a fifty-fifty split between Dick James Music and NEMS, which had generated astounding profits for Brian Epstein along with Lennon and McCartney as the band’s primary composers. The February 14 session came to a sudden end around 12:30 AM—early by Martin and the Beatles’ standards—when a dejected McCartney exclaimed, “Look, let’s knock it on the head for the night.” By this point in the brief recording history of “Only a Northern Song,” the writing was already clearly on the wall. Required to play the heavy in his role as the band’s producer, Martin pulled Harrison aside for the purposes of a difficult, albeit highly necessary, conversation. “I had to tell George that as far as Pepper was concerned, I did not think his song would be good enough for what was shaping up as a really strong album,” Martin later wrote. “I suggested he come up with something a bit better. George was a bit bruised: it is never pleasant being rejected, even if you are friendly with the person who is doing the rejecting.”30

  On Thursday, February 16, Martin and the Beatles returned to “Good Morning, Good Morning.” Working with the basic track from February 8, Lennon recorded a lead vocal while McCartney provided a bass guitar overdub. During a rough remix, John’s vocal was treated with ADT, and a tape-to-tape reduction mix was carried out to free up additional space for future overdubs. The next day, Friday, February 17, made for another Beatles milestone, with the release of the “Strawberry Fields Forever” backed with “Penny Lane” single. But it was also the day when Lennon’s old circus poster came into play in Martin and the Beatles’ universe. “Lennon always had a precise title for each of his songs, and woe betold any of us who didn’t get it correct,” Emerick later recalled. “I learned that the hard way one night when I slated a take in a hurry and mistakenly shortened the title to ‘For the Benefit of Mr. Kite.’ John immediately corrected me in an irritated tone of voice: ‘No, that’s ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!’” As it happened, John’s lyrics were borrowed, nearly verbatim, from the Victorian advertisement. “The song is pure,” he later remarked, “like a painting, a pure watercolor.” For John, recording the song would only be possible with the correct ambience. As Martin later wrote, Lennon told him, “I’d love to be able to get across the effects of a really colorful circus. The acrobats in their tights, the smell of the animals, the merry-go-rounds. I want to smell the sawdust, George.”31

  Martin saw “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” as yet another opportunity to experiment. For George, any chance to try out something new was welcome—and in many ways, it was no different from his early days at EMI as Oscar Preuss’s assistant. An opportunity to push the boundaries of the technology, just as he had done all those years ago in the company of Peter Ustinov with “Mock Mozart.” But like in the old days, George didn’t waste any time grasping for ideas. With the Beatles, “very rarely did we waste time groping in the dark. We were always looking to bring something new to the music, but it had to be focused experimentation, and be very deliberate.” For “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” Martin imagined a “kind of hurdy-gurdy sound.” When they pooled their ideas, John said, “I’ve always loved the sound of the music on that children’s program The Magic Roundabout.” Suddenly, George realized that they were on the same wavelength. “Funny you should say that,” he replied. “I had in mind the little organ in Disney’s Snow White, the one the dwarfs had: a very pipy sound. The real equivalent, though, would be a steam organ, a calliope—what they have on carousels.”32

  With their new concept in mind, George and the bandmates recorded a basic rhythm track for “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” consisting of Lennon’s guide vocal, McCartney on bass, Starr on drums, Harrison on tambourine, and Martin playing the studio’s harmonium, “the big beast that was part of the furniture at Abbey Road.” For the Beatles’ producer, pumping the instrument proved to be an unusual physical challenge, as the group played through one take after another in order to capture the backing track:

  I remember only too well pumping away with my feet at that bloody harmonium for hour after hour, trying to get it right, and being absolutely knackered, heart going at about 130 beats to the minute. It was like climbing up a steep flight of stairs non-stop. We would complete a take, I’d heave a sigh of relief, mop my sweaty brow, and then a dreaded call would come from John: “I wouldn’t mind doing that again, George. You all right there?” The harmonium was a good idea, though, because it established a vaguely circus atmosphere to the song straight off.

  Eventually, Martin’s exertions got the best of him. As Emerick later recalled, the song’s basic track necessitated several takes. “It did take quite a few tries to nail it down,” Geoff wrote, “which caused problems for George, because the harmonium required pedaling to get air through its bellows, kind of like riding a bicycle. After playing it nonstop for hours on end, he finally collapsed in exhaustion, sprawled out on the floor like a snow angel—a sight that gave us all great amusement.” For Lush, the sight of Martin splayed on the studio floor was a revelation, with the usually staid producer having eclipsed his usual bounds of gentlemanly comportment. As the engineer later recalled, “George Martin looked especially straight, he always had a tie and shirt and suit. Every now and again he’d take his tie off and we’d go like ‘Wow! Gosh! What’s going on here?’”33

  Before the session wrapped up that evening, Martin received an unexpected blast from the past courtesy of Lennon, who was eager to continue discussing how they might establish the song’s circus-like atmosphere. John can be heard suggesting that they bring the Massed Alberts in for an overdub, referring to an obscure novelty act that George had recorded back in the 1950s. Working with Spike Milligan and Eric Sykes, George had produced the eccentric brass band on the zany track “You Gotta Go Oww!” For his part, George seemed to feel the sting of John’s barb—“Oh, honestly!” George can be heard replying to the Beatle—but in truth, the producer was having the time of his life. The Sgt. Pepper project saw George and the Beatles taking the producer’s long-held ambition for making sound pictures to a new level, and he was absolutely loving it. On Monday, February 20, George stretched the Beatles’ creativity even further still. He was determined to acquire a calliope in order to achieve the “swirly” sound that John desired. But to his great disappointment, George was unable to locate one of the old steam organs for the recording session. And he quickly realized that “manufacturing our own calliope for a single track just wasn�
��t on”—and it certainly wasn’t cost-effective.34

  And that’s when George hit upon the idea of creating the artifice of a circus instead. To establish the illusion, George opted to layer a series of organ sounds. “What we shall do is to create a special backing track with organs and mouth-organs—a pumping kind of sound,” the producer told Lennon. With the existing harmonium track already in place, “we had to overlay the special effects using a Hammond and a Lowry organ, together with our well-beloved roadie Mal Evans playing a massive bass harmonica. John and I had great fun,” George later recalled, “giggling helplessly as we tried to sort out the organ runs and interrupting one another.” For the song’s maniacal “Henry the Horse” waltz interlude, George imagined a “tremendous chromatic run up on an organ” in order to mimic the sound of a whinnying horse. Realizing that he couldn’t play the sequence in tempo, George resorted to his windup piano technique. “The only way I could do it was to slow the tape down to half speed, which allowed me to play the notes nice and slowly, at a pace I could manage.” But as George also reckoned, “It is a fact of physics that if you slow the tape down to half speed, then the frequencies are halved, and the sound drops down an octave lower exactly. I duly played the notes an octave down, recording them at that speed, then on playback speeded the tape back up to normal.” And to his great relief, “Eureka! It worked!”35