But to George’s mind, “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” still lacked the calliope sound that he had originally envisioned. At this juncture, he turned to Emerick, “who by this stage was more than my engineer on our extraordinary album, he was my co-conspirator,” and they reasoned that they could simulate the circus ambience via artificial means. Having scoured the EMI archives for recordings of calliopes and organs, Martin and his production team selected a series of musical snatches from the sound-effects records, which Emerick dutifully transferred to tape. “We’re going to try something here,” Martin explained to his engineer. “I want you to cut that tape there up into sections that are roughly 15-inches long.” Soon, Martin, Emerick, and Lush had “a small pyramid of worm-like tape fragments piled up on the floor at our feet. ‘Now,’ I said, ‘pick them all up and fling them into the air!’” As George later recalled, “It was a wonderful moment—it snowed pieces of tape all over the control room. I had an instant flashback to the day I was demobbed out of the Fleet Air Arm in 1947. The last thing the Navy gave me was my gratuity of £260, all in single pound notes. It was the largest amount of money I had ever had. When I arrived home, the first thing I did was to take out that wodge of massive old pound notes, fling them all over the room, and rush about trying to catch them. Wonderful!”36
Selecting the pieces of tape at random, George and his team spliced the pieces of tape together. “Strangely enough,” George recalled, “Sod’s Law being what it is, some of the pieces of tape went back together almost where they’d started. We got round that by turning anything that sounded like it might be in the correct sequence around and splicing it in back to front.” The result was a “chaotic mass of sound: it was impossible to identify the tunes they had come from, but it was unmistakably a steam organ. Perfect! There was the fairground atmosphere we had been looking for. John was thrilled to bits with it.” Later, on March 29, Martin superimposed the tape loop, which consisted of nineteen separate organ snatches, onto the basic rhythm track for “Being for the Benefit for Mr. Kite!” and the madcap song had finally been captured. On Tuesday, February 21, George and the bandmates returned to “Fixing a Hole,” picking up where they’d left off at Regent Sound back on February 9. After carrying out a reduction mix, Martin recorded a new lead vocal by McCartney, which the Beatle subsequently double-tracked.37
At this point, George and the bandmates were completing new tracks at an impressive clip. The next evening, Wednesday, February 22, saw the most important finishing touch superimposed onto “A Day in the Life.” Working in Studio 2, George instructed Abbey Road personnel to gather up as many pianos as they possibly could. The assembled keyboards included two Steinway grand pianos, a Steinway upright—slightly out of tune in order to produce a honky-tonk effect—a “blond-wood spinet,” and Martin’s harmonium, which was screened off in the rear of the studio given the ambient sound produced by the instrument’s bellows. All of the Beatles participated in the overdub—save for Harrison, who was late in arriving that evening—along with Mal Evans and Martin. Having agreed with their producer that the gigantic om was “pathetic,” the Beatles wanted to replace the hummed E major chord with something far more powerful and arresting. A thundering piano crash seemed like it might just do the trick. “To get as strong an attack as possible, everyone decided to play standing up instead of sitting down,” Geoff later recalled. “John, Mal, and George Martin each stood behind a different piano, while Ringo and Paul shared the out-of-tune Steinway upright.” With McCartney taking charge of the proceedings, the Beatle counted the players in for take one:
McCartney: “Have you got your loud pedal down, Mal?”
Evans: “Which one’s that?”
McCartney: “The right hand one, far right. It keeps the echo going.”
Lennon: “Keep it down the whole time.”
McCartney: “Right. On four then. One, two, three. . . .”
Given the inherent difficulty of four players attempting to achieve absolute synchronicity, the bandmates required nine takes to carry out the E major crash. While take seven made for the longest of the iterations at fifty-nine seconds, take nine was selected as the best. Martin overdubbed the harmonium part to beef up the coda, which clocked in at nearly fifty-four seconds. The only blemish occurred when Ringo shifted his body on the piano bench, emitting a slight squeak as the massive sound decayed into oblivion.38
Up in the control room, Emerick struggled to capture the deafening chord at the mixing desk. “It seemed clear to me that the solution lay in keeping the sound at maximum volume for as long as possible,” he later wrote, “and I had two weapons that could accomplish this: a compressor, cranked up full, and the very faders themselves on the mixing console. Logically, if I set the gain of each input to maximum but started with the fader at its lowest point, I could then slowly raise the faders as the sound died away, thus compensating for the loss in volume: in effect, I could counteract the chord getting softer, at least to some degree.” With the breathtaking piano chord having been recorded, Harrison finally strode into the session, accompanied by the Byrds’ David Crosby. “Nice of you to turn up, George,” John remarked. “You only missed the most important overdub we’ve ever done!” With the superimposition complete, Martin supervised the mono mixing session for “A Day in the Life.” Townsend was on hand to assist Emerick and Lush in synchronizing the two four-track machines that had been deployed for the orchestral overdub. Even still, maintaining the machines’ synchronization proved to be a source of great difficulty throughout the session. As Emerick later recalled, “Often, by the time we got to the orchestral bit, they would drift noticeably out of time with one another. Everyone dealt with the problem in good humor, though. . . . In the end, we were all actually laying down bets as to whether the machines were going to stay in sync or not; we’d be thrilled on the few occasions when it worked perfectly.”39
But with Martin looking on, Emerick wasn’t finished with “A Day in the Life” just yet: “To enhance things further still, I lowered the volume level of the orchestra at the very beginning of the passage, thus making the mix much more dynamic than the original performance was. No one sitting in that control room with us could believe how much bigger I was able to make everything sound by doing that.” For his part, Martin was astounded by the sound of the mixes of “A Day in the Life”—and especially by the awe-inspiring power of the chord that punctuated its conclusion and the unerring silence that followed in its wake. “By the end, the attenuation was enormous,” he later remarked. “You could have heard a pin drop.” But while he understood that the Beatles were exploring revolutionary vistas of sound in those relatively early days during the production of Sgt. Pepper, George was still nervous about what was happening at Abbey Road, about whether or not they were the purveyors of a newfangled art or merely self-indulgent poseurs. Were the Beatles and their producer taking their senses of experimentation and whimsy too far? Would they risk losing their massive audience, as Paul had wondered aloud during the Revolver sessions? “I suppose I had been worried that we might be leaving our public behind,” Martin later wrote, that we were “getting a bit too fast in front.”40
For George, sweet relief from these anxieties arrived in the usual guise of Alan Livingston, the Capitol Records president whose organization had rejected the Beatles’ American release on several occasions back in 1963, only to eat their words with the trailblazing success of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and Meet the Beatles in the first weeks of 1964. But Sgt. Pepper was a creative universe away from the nature of George and the bandmates’ work together during the heady days of Beatlemania. “What helped me have confidence in the album was that the imperious Alan Livingston flew over to London to find out what we were up to,” George later wrote. “This was just after we had finished recording ‘A Day in the Life.’” In earlier times, Brian Epstein might have served as his sounding board. But after the fallout from the Jesus Christ tour, and given Epstein’s increasingly brittle psychological
state, those days were gone. And the producer certainly wasn’t turning to EMI’s Len Wood for succor. As far as George was concerned, Livingston would do just fine as a test audience. Sitting alone in the studio with the American record man, George played the newly mixed “A Day in the Life” for him, and not surprisingly “it knocked him sideways. He was flabbergasted by it.” But for Martin, the best aspect of Livingston’s response was revealed by what he didn’t say. “He was in no way perturbed by any aspect of the song, by its relatively bizarre lyrics, or its avant-garde production,” George later wrote, “only speechless in admiration. I knew then that we were home and dry.”41
12
The Song That Got Away
* * *
WHEN GEORGE AND THE BANDMATES convened for a Thursday, February 23, session in Studio 2, they tried their hand at a new composition, Paul’s “Lovely Rita,” a bouncy, colorful number about a comely meter maid. With the tape running, the Beatles worked out a basic rhythm track consisting of Harrison and Lennon playing their acoustic guitars on tracks one and two, Starr’s drums on track three, and McCartney’s piano on track four. After having selected take eight as the best version, Martin carried out a tape reduction, and McCartney recorded a bass guitar part, which would mark the evening’s only overdub. By this point, Paul had developed a practice of working out his bass parts, meticulously crafting their progression from one note to the next. As Emerick later recalled, “He would do those overdubs in the wee hours, long after everyone else had gone home. It would be just Richard [Lush] and me up in the control room, with Paul sitting on a chair out in the middle of the studio, away from his usual corner, working assiduously to perfect his lines, giving all he had to the task at hand. Richard would painstakingly drop the multitrack in and out of record, one section at a time, until every note was articulated perfectly and Paul was satisfied with the result.”1
The next evening, Friday, February 24, saw McCartney overdubbing his lead vocals for “Lovely Rita,” which Martin recorded at forty-six and a half cycles per second in order to afford McCartney’s voice with a faster, brighter sound on playback. After taking a long weekend, George and the Beatles were back at Abbey Road on Tuesday, February 28, when John unveiled a new composition, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” which the bandmates rehearsed for nearly the entirety of the eight-hour session. John’s inspiration for the song found its origins in his three-year-old son Julian’s description of his painting of a classmate—“it’s Lucy, in the sky, with diamonds,” he told his father. In John’s creation, the song presented a magical netherworld of “plasticine porters and looking-glass ties.” Lennon would later tell Martin’s old friend Spike Milligan that such zany moments in the song’s lyrics found their inspiration in old Goon Show dialogue. On the same evening that the Beatles debuted “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” Life magazine reporter Thomas Thompson observed the proceedings as they unfolded in Studio 2, later quoting Martin, who remarked that “we are light years away from anything tonight. They know it is awful now, and they’re trying to straighten it out. It may be a week before they’re pleased, if ever. They’re always coming up with something new they’ve just learned, something I wouldn’t dream of. They never cease to amaze me.”2
Years later, EMI Studios’ Peter Vane described the frustration that would inevitably set in as the Beatles spent hour upon hour struggling with the act of creation:
Although they’d use the studio as a rehearsal room you couldn’t just clear off because they might be trying something out—just piano or bass or drums—and they’d want to come up and listen to the thing before carrying on. So you couldn’t just disappear or nod off, you had to be around all the time. The nights were so long when you had nothing to do. While they were actually working on the records, wonderful—all those great sounds, wonderful—but what people don’t realize is the boredom factor. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band took four months to record and for probably more than half that time all the engineers were doing was sitting around waiting for them to get their ideas together.3
By the very next evening, Wednesday, March 1, George and the bandmates had clearly worked things out to their satisfaction and then some when it came to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” That night, they recorded a basic rhythm track with Harrison’s acoustic guitar and occasional piano from Martin on track one, McCartney’s Lowrey organ on track two, Starr’s drums on track three, and Lennon’s guide vocal and maracas on track four. By the time that they reached take seven, Martin’s piano had disappeared from the arrangement and Harrison’s tamboura drone had emerged instead. But George didn’t miss his piano part in the slightest, feeling that the Lowrey created the perfect ambience for John’s magical song. “It was more like a modern synthesizer than a conventional organ,” he later wrote. “The great thing about the Lowrey was that, whereas with the Hammond it was almost impossible to get any decay, with the Lowrey it was easy.” For George, Paul’s prefatory piece and John’s melody were the making of the composition: “The beginning of ‘Lucy,’ that hesitant, lilting introductory phrase, is crucial to the staying power of the song. It is also a marvelous piece of composition, based around five notes only, and so simple that virtually anyone can play it. Schubert would have been proud of it. Nothing in the world is more difficult than to write a first-class melody—especially one that uses as few notes of the scale as we find in ‘Lucy.’ It is the mark of a great composer: and something that both Lennon and McCartney could do—and did often.”4
The next evening, Thursday, March 2, George and the Beatles completed work on “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” making it the quickest production of any song thus far for Sgt. Pepper. With the rhythm track in hand from the previous night’s work, they set up creating a series of overdubs for the song, which was easily one of the album’s most complex arrangements. As George later wrote, “‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ is like ‘A Day in the Life’ in that it is virtually two separate songs. The middle section is a completely different tempo and has a completely different time signature to the opening. John had us jump, quite suddenly, from the opening 3/4 into a big 4/4 rhythm. There was no possibility of making a smooth transition at this point in the song. The big change of tempo had to kick in with a great big bang, a bit like making a clutchless gear change in a car: it crunches, but it keeps you moving forward. The blaring worked and was the most effective way of doing the song.” Knowing that the tempo shifts would be invariably abrupt, George ensured that the Beatles’ overdubs afforded the song with plenty of ambience, heavily treating the vocal contributions with varispeed. “The vocals on ‘Lucy’ weren’t recorded at normal speed,” he later recalled. “The first track was recorded at a frequency of 45 cycles, our normal frequency being 50 cycles. In other words, we slowed the tape down, so that when we played it back the voice sounded 10 percent higher: back in the correct key, but thinner-sounding, which suited the song. It gave a slight Mickey Mouse quality to the vocals. In fact, Paul was also singing on two tracks, lending John a spot of harmony. I also added the odd bit of tape echo to the voices. The second voice track was recorded at 48½ cycles per second to see what that sounded like. ‘Lucy’ has more variations of tape speed in it than any other track on the album.” To compound the atmosphere, Martin recorded McCartney’s bass and Harrison’s fuzz-box lead guitar at normal speed. In so doing, Martin ensured that “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” worked from a host of competing sounds and rhythms in keeping with the magical world that Lennon wanted to simulate in the studio.5
The next evening, Friday, March 3, George and the Beatles returned to “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” for the first time since February 2. Up first that night was a brass overdub to account for the mythical Sgt. Pepper’s band of lonely hearted players. Without having prepared a score in advance, George rounded up a quartet of horn players, including James W. Buck, John Burden, Tony Randall, and Neil Sanders. As the session men looked on, McCartney shared his vision for the horn interludes, wh
ich would be superimposed on track three. “They didn’t really know what they wanted,” Burden later recalled, so “I wrote out phrases for them based on what Paul McCartney was humming to us and George Martin. All four Beatles were there, but only Paul took an active interest in our overdub.” After obtaining Beatles autographs, which had become a regular practice among visiting session men, the players left Abbey Road and the spotlight turned to McCartney, who turned in a sizzling lead guitar on track three. Paul’s grungy guitar licks vividly recalled the sound of Jimi Hendrix’s debut at the Bag O’Nails back in November 1966. It wouldn’t be the last time that the American guitar hero’s influence would be heard on the Sgt. Pepper album. Before they closed up shop for the evening, Martin and his production team revisited “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” which was treated to a significant dose of ADT during the creation of the song’s mono mixes.6
With the weekend behind them, George and the bandmates reconvened on Monday, March 6, in Studio 2, where Paul experienced a eureka moment. “It was about three or four weeks before the final session when they started thinking about the running order of the songs,” Geoff later recalled. “The concept of it being Sgt. Pepper’s band was already there when Paul said, ‘Wouldn’t it be good if we get the atmosphere? Get the band warming up, hear the audience settle into their seats, have the songs as different acts on the stage?’” With this notion in mind, Emerick rifled through the orchestral overdubs that they had conducted back on February 10. Four outtakes from the earlier session had already been duly stored in EMI’s tape library. In short order, Emerick spliced a segment of the half orchestra warming up and dropped it into track three as a musical preface for “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” For the song’s remaining sound effects, Martin and Emerick drew upon an extract from Volume 28: Audience Applause and Atmosphere, Royal Albert Hall and Queen Elizabeth Hall to simulate the murmuring audience during the orchestral warm-up. The song’s canned laughter and audience applause arrived courtesy of the satirical British stage revue Beyond the Fringe, which had been borrowed from the EMI tape library’s Volume 6: Applause and Laughter. The latter found its origins in Martin’s live recordings of the comedy troupe at London’s Fortune Theatre back in 1961.7
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