Sound Pictures

by Kenneth Womack

  During the next session on Tuesday, March 7, George and the Beatles moved quickly apace, returning to “Lovely Rita” for a series of overdubs onto take eleven. Much of the work was devoted to a series of backing vocals, spearheaded by Lennon, and other assorted studio chatter. With Geoff as his confederate, John requested that the engineer treat his vocals, which included a running fusillade of screams, moans, and even an occasional “cha-cha-cha,” with heavy tape echo. There was also the lingering issue of an empty middle eight that, for the time being at least, would remain unresolved by McCartney, who couldn’t decide about which instrument (or instrumentalist) to highlight in a solo section. But even more importantly, the March 7 session in Studio 2 would go down in the annals of rock history for the peculiar instrumentation that the bandmates fashioned for the song’s play-out section. Several members of Pink Floyd were working in Studio 3 that same evening under the supervision of Norman Smith, who was producing the band’s debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, for Parlophone. A group of former architecture students at London Polytechnic, Pink Floyd had made their name of late as the house band at the UFO Club. Years later, they claimed to have observed, gobsmacked, as Mal Evans gathered up rolls of toilet paper from the Abbey Road restroom for the Beatles’ mysterious deployment. “There was a lot of off-the-cuff fooling around,” Martin wrote, “and we even resorted to a choir of paper and combs, as a mock brass section. They all blew through combs covered with regulation-issue EMI toilet paper to create a bizarre, kazoo-like sound.” As it happened, the quality of the EMI toilet paper had been a long-standing issue among the Beatles, especially Harrison. As Martin later recalled, the band’s lead guitarist “complained frequently to the EMI management about the horrible slippery hardness of its loo paper. (Each sheet had the legend ‘Property of EMI’ stamped across it!) He said it was okay for wrapping round a comb and blowing through, but as to using it for what it was intended, you could forget it!”8

  For George and the Beatles, Studio 2 was dark on March 8, when the bandmates took a brief sabbatical to prepare new material for the long-player. Meanwhile, Martin took the opportunity to provide Emerick and Lush with a couple of much-needed days off. As Geoff later recalled, “George Martin decided that Richard and I were being overworked and gave us an evening off. It’s true that we had been burning the candles at both ends—we still continued to do sessions for other artists on the days when the Beatles were not booked in—and we were now often staying behind long after George Martin would go home.” When the bandmates and their producer regrouped on the evening of Thursday, March 9, Emerick and Lush had been conspicuously replaced by a pair of EMI temporary stand-ins, balance engineer Malcolm Addey and the indefatigable Ken Townsend. Addey had been one of Abbey Road’s mainstay engineers since the late 1950s, when he recorded Cliff Richard’s debut hit “Move It,” with Norrie Paramor sitting in the producer’s chair. As Addey later recalled, the Beatles were very late in arriving to the studio on March 9. “They eventually straggled in one by one,” Addey reported. “Ringo came in about 11 and ordered fish and chips. The others arrived later, they all hung around and finally started work at about one in the morning. The ego trip of the big-time artists had started to set in.” For his part, Martin agreed with Addey’s assessment, writing that the Beatles “were beginning to take the people at Abbey Road a bit for granted.” Even still, Martin’s selection of Addey, even as a temporary replacement for his regular production team, made for a strange choice. It was no secret among the corridors of EMI Studios that Addey wasn’t very fond of Martin, claiming that he had a tendency to “inject himself into everything.” Believing that the producer felt socially “superior to everybody,” Addey took particular issue with Martin’s affected accent, which Addey derided as the result of personal reinvention—a kind of “mess-hall posh” in which young men like Martin join the service only to be discharged as “something quite different” from their earlier, homegrown selves. Given their interpersonal clashes, Martin and Addey pointedly avoided sharing the control room together. When he returned from his brief respite, Emerick had been surprised by Addey’s participation in a Beatles session. Describing Addey as “he of the cigar and never-ending chatter,” Emerick thought he was “an odd choice, since I knew that George Martin didn’t like working with him.”9

  When the Beatles and their makeshift production team finally settled down to business in the wee hours of March 10, McCartney presented a brand-new composition titled “Getting Better” for Martin and the bandmates’ consideration. The song originated during one of Paul’s frequent strolls around St. John’s Wood. With his sheepdog, Martha, in tow, along with Sunday Times reporter Hunter Davies, Paul took note of the springlike weather in the air, remarking to Davies that “it’s getting better!” Shortly thereafter, he remembered the words of Jimmie Nicol, Ringo’s June 1964 stand-in during his bout with tonsillitis, who often answered “oh, it’s getting better all the time” when people asked how he was doing. With the new song in hand, the Beatles fashioned a basic rhythm track, which Martin captured in seven takes. The first track featured McCartney’s rhythm guitar and Starr’s drums, with McCartney’s guide vocal on track two. Meanwhile, Martin played a pianette on track three, with Starr rounding out track four with additional percussion. George worked the pianette by striking its strings in order to provide an innovative sound effect on the mini–electric keyboard. Before he concluded the long session that morning, George carried out a tape reduction after deleting the guide vocal, which would be replaced during the evening session. By the time they closed up shop, that evening session was set to begin in just under sixteen hours.10

  And when the March 10 session ensued in Studio 2 that night, George and the Beatles were understandably dead tired. The nine-hour session began at seven in the evening, and Martin led the Beatles through a series of overdubs for “Getting Better,” including Harrison’s tamboura drone, McCartney’s bass, and Starr’s drums. After taking a breather over the weekend, they were back at it on Monday, March 13, when they resumed work on “Good Morning, Good Morning,” which had been on the back burner for the past three weeks. At Lennon’s request, Martin had booked Sounds Incorporated for the session. They had played on sessions for a number of top-flight artists over the years, and they had even shared the bill with the Beatles on several occasions—most famously serving as one of the opening acts for the Fab Four’s Shea Stadium concert in August 1965. As George later recalled, “It so happened that Brian Epstein managed a group called Sounds Incorporated, who were good pals, if a bit crazy, so we brought them in to give us our horn sound. They worked with us all day on it—and they had a very hard time. John’s rhythms, so natural to his ear, were the very devil for the six players to deliver in perfect time. They had to count like mad to know exactly when to do the ‘stabs.’ It was very easy for them to miss cues, and very hard indeed to hit them as one, bang on.” George saw the song as a particular challenge for the Beatles’ drummer. “Think of poor Ringo,” he later wrote. “His drumming had to be super-accurate, with all the walloping accents spot on. Lucky he was so good, really.” As for Sounds Incorporated, sax player Alan Holmes later recalled that the session men were “there for about six hours. The first three hours we had refreshments and the Beatles played us the completed songs for the new LP.” Richard Lush’s memories cohere with Holmes’s. “They spent a long time doing the overdub, about three hours or maybe longer,” the Beatles’ tape operator recalled, “but John Lennon thought it sounded too straight.” As with the swirly sound on “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” and other recent tracks, “he just wanted it to sound weird.” As usual, Emerick was on hand to make that sense of weirdness possible. “To satisfy Lennon’s demand that I take a different sonic approach,” Emerick later wrote, “I shoved the mics right down the bells of the saxes and screwed the sound up with limiters and a healthy dose of effects like flanging and ADT; we pretty much used every piece of equipment at hand.”11

  On We
dnesday, March 15, Harrison heeded Martin’s earlier advice and presented “Within You, Without You,” untitled at this juncture, as a new composition in place of “Only a Northern Song.” While his original contribution to Sgt. Pepper may have been out of place on the Beatles’ latest long-player, the angst that Harrison revealed in “Only a Northern Song” was very genuine indeed. The quiet Beatle was all too conscious of his place in the band’s pecking order and what that placement meant in terms of recording his compositions. “Sometimes I had songs that were better than some of their songs,” he later remarked, “and we’d have to record maybe eight of theirs before they’d listen to one of mine.” But on March 15, Harrison had come through with a veritable triumph. Written earlier in the year at the home of longtime Beatles compadre Klaus Voormann, “Within You, Without You” proved to be Harrison’s Indian tour de force. To make sense of the complex composition, Martin arranged the song into three distinctive parts. As he listened to Harrison debut the piece, he sat mesmerized on his usual high stool in the studio. To Martin’s eyes and ears, Harrison was “like a carpet weaver—meticulous with a needle and thread.” He later observed that “George understood that in any song written according to the Vedic tradition the voice and the dilruba should accompany one another in unison. This was true even of what was basically a Western pop tune. It was the instrumentation, not the melody, that made it sound Indian.”12

  As with his earlier Indian effusions, Harrison had recruited top players from the Asian Music Circle to perform on “Within You, Without You.” Emerick took special care to ensure that the recording environment was welcoming for the Indian musicians. “Studio Two had a hardwood floor,” he later wrote, “so in order to dampen the sound, I normally put down carpeting underneath Ringo’s drums and in the area where Beatles vocals were recorded. But this time Richard and I got out a bunch of throw rugs and spread them all around the floor for the musicians to sit on, all in an effort to make them more comfortable and make the studio a bit more homey. Mind you, the Abbey Road rugs were completely moth-eaten and dilapidated—but it was the thought that counted.” With Harrison working the tamboura, Martin and his production team captured a range of different sounds emanating from the studio musicians’ tabla, swarmandal, and sitar-like dilruba. Even Beatles roadie Neil Aspinall chipped in for the occasion. As Emerick later remarked, “The tabla had never been recorded the way we did it. Everyone was amazed when they first heard a tabla recorded that closely, with the texture and the lovely low resonances.” Martin was especially pleased with Harrison’s penchant for atmospherics, later writing that “George, as usual, set joss sticks smoldering in the corners. He looked a bit like the Lone Ranger with his Indian friends. Although the other Beatles were there, they stuck around for the fun of it. None of them played or sang a note. In order to get them to play what he wanted, George would simply sing to the Indian musicians, or occasionally pick a few notes on the sitar.” The evening was also noteworthy for the appearance of pop artist Peter Blake, who had recently been commissioned, along with his wife Jann Haworth, to design the cover art for Sgt. Pepper. “George [Harrison] was very sweet,” Blake later recalled, “and he got up and welcomed us in and offered us tea.” Martin later recalled the artist’s sense of fascination, writing that “Peter had never seen a Beatles session, and he was amazed. He thought it was a very gentle, very easy way of working. But it was all the music, really: it was George’s hypnotic music that induced that strange air of peace.”13

  As it happened, Martin’s own sense of peace was interrupted during this same week when McCartney, working “on heat” with a new composition titled “She’s Leaving Home,” sought out the assistance of another arranger when the Beatles’ producer had been unavailable. As Paul later recalled, “I rang him and I said, ‘I need you to arrange it.’ He said, ‘I’m sorry, Paul, I’ve got a Cilla session.’ And I thought, ‘Fucking hell! After all this time working together, he ought to put himself out.’ It was probably unreasonable to expect him to. Anyway, I said, ‘Well, fine, thanks George,’ but I was so hot to trot that I called Mike Leander, another arranger. I got him to come over to Cavendish Avenue, and I showed him what I wanted, strings, and he said, ‘Leave it with me.’” Meanwhile, George had been working vigilantly on Cilla’s behalf and, in the process, attempting to placate her over what she believed to be Brian Epstein’s ongoing neglect—even after he had begged her to remain in his stable the previous autumn. Her latest single, “A Fool Am I” backed with a cover version of the Beatles’ “For No One,” had failed to crack the top ten, and she was determined to make her way back to the top of the pops. To this end, George recorded Cilla’s new single “What Good Am I?” backed with “Over My Head,” which ultimately fared even worse than its predecessor, clocking in at number twenty-four on the UK charts later that year.14

  For his part, George later described the episode involving “She’s Leaving Home” as “one of the biggest hurts of my life,” noting that Paul should have understood that “at that time I was still having to record all my other artists.” To George’s mind, Paul simply should have waited. “I couldn’t understand why he was so impatient all of a sudden. It obviously hadn’t occurred to him that I would be upset.” When it had become clear that George would be unavailable, Paul had dispatched Neil Aspinall to ferret out an arranger, which led him to Mike Leander. Later describing “She’s Leaving Home” as “the song that got away,” George recalled that on the day after the Cilla Black session, “Paul presented me with it and said, ‘Here we are. I’ve got a score. We can record it now.’” And that’s exactly what George, ever the professional, did: “I recorded it, with a few alterations to make it work better, but I was hurt.” The Friday, March 17, session for “She’s Leaving Home” began at seven in the evening, with Martin having rounded up four violinists, two violas, two cellists, a double bassist, and a harpist to accommodate Leander’s score. There were a number of familiar faces on hand, including John Underwood and Steve Shingles, who had previously shared their talents on “Eleanor Rigby,” as well as lead violinist Erich Gruenberg from the orchestral overdub for “A Day in the Life.”15

  As the first woman to play on a Beatles recording, harpist Sheila Bromberg had already played on a number of pop sessions. As she later recalled, recording “She’s Leaving Home” proved to be a challenge for Martin’s hastily arranged ensemble: “I got to the studio early to tune the instrument. I walked in and there was Paul McCartney, but I didn’t recognize him at first. I was concentrating on what was written on the manuscript, then I turned around, heard the Liverpool accent and realized it was him. I hadn’t got a clue, I had just talked to the other musicians and waited. In actual fact, he was quite difficult to work with because he wasn’t too sure what he actually wanted. He said, ‘no, I don’t want that, I want something . . . ,’ but he couldn’t describe what he wanted, and I tried it all every which way.” In the end, George acted as conductor and managed to capture six takes of the song’s instrumental backing track, with the harp arranged on track one, the double bass on track two, the violins on track three, and the violas and cellos on track four. Before the evening session concluded, the first and sixth takes had been selected as being the best of the lot.

  On Monday, March 20, Martin and the bandmates resumed work on “She’s Leaving Home,” ultimately selecting take one and subsequently carrying out a tape reduction in order to create space for McCartney and Lennon’s vocals. Ultimately, George recorded their voices twice over in order to establish a vivid layer of sound. In so doing, he captured one of their finest vocal duets on record. At one point, George and his production team experimented with the song’s introductory harp passage by applying a dose of ADT in order to distort the sound ever so slightly, although the idea was quickly scrapped. While Martin had edited out some of Leander’s cello ornamentation, he kept the arranger’s score largely intact. When he supervised the mixing session, George applied varispeed to raise the pitch of the singers’ voices from E
to F major. The song’s mono mix reflected the sonic shift, although strangely the alteration was neglected during the preparation of the stereo version of “She’s Leaving Home.” Despite having felt the sting of McCartney’s impatience, Martin was thrilled with the results: “It’s almost like a little opera,” he later wrote, “and it’s one of the best constructed songs they ever did. The lyrics are particularly telling. I am amazed that they could do this at their age because they could see the conflict between the young and the old.” During that same session, George created a spoken-word recording titled “Beatle Talk.” He took the tape box home with him during the wee hours of the morning, and, rather mysteriously, it was never returned to Abbey Road.16

  But the whereabouts of “Beatle Talk” seem a rather minor issue in retrospect—and certainly in comparison with what transpired in Studio 2 on the very next evening. As it happened, George and the Beatles’ Tuesday, March 21, session was one for the books. The nearly eight-hour affair began at seven that evening, and the studio was chock-full of visitors, including Ivan Vaughan, Paul’s childhood friend who had first introduced him to John back in July 1957; Hunter Davies, who had begun working on the band’s authorized biography; and Dick James, George and the Beatles’ maverick music publisher. James had been a central member of the Beatles’ brain trust since their earliest days with Martin at the helm—in fact, it was due to his longtime relationship with the band’s producer that he had been invited into the fold in the first place. Under his direction, James had watched Northern Songs quickly transform into an industry juggernaut during the heady days of Beatlemania. Back in January, when EMI announced the Beatles’ contract extension, James remarked, “We have some of the greatest assets of any business in the word today—copyrights. You can keep your factories, plant and production lines—give me copyrights.” James also boasted about Lennon and McCartney’s staying power as composers: “This is no nine-day wonder,” said James. “I expect a third of their songs still to be played in A.D. 2000.”17