Sound Pictures

by Kenneth Womack

  Also on hand that evening were members of Norman Smith’s new signing, Pink Floyd, who were still toiling away on their debut album in nearby Studio 3. As Hunter Davies later recalled, “Very politely, [Smith] asked George Martin if his boys could possibly pop in to see the Beatles at work. George smiled, unhelpfully. Norman said perhaps he should ask John personally, as a favor. George Martin said no, that wouldn’t work. But if by chance he and his boys popped in about 11 o’clock, he might just be able to see what he could do.” At the appointed hour, the younger bandmates strolled into Studio 2. “They [the Beatles] were God-like figures to us,” drummer Nick Mason later recalled. “They all seemed extremely nice, but they were in a strata so far beyond us that they were out of our league.” After exchanging their “half-hearted hellos” with the Beatles, the rapt members of Pink Floyd observed the session from the control room. “The music sounded wonderful, and incredibly professional,” Mason later recalled. “There was little if any banter with the Beatles. We sat humbly and humbled, at the back of the control room while they worked on the mix, and after a suitable (and embarrassing) period of time had elapsed, we were ushered out again.”18

  Years later, Martin would remember the March 21 session for a very different reason altogether. As Davies and Vaughan looked on, Martin pressed forward with the session, which featured Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison working out the vocals for “Getting Better.” Not long afterward, the bandmates took a break. As George later recalled, “I was standing next to John, discussing some finer point of the arrangement to ‘Getting Better’ when he suddenly looked up at me. ‘George,’ he said slowly, ‘I’m not feeling too good. I’m not focusing on me.’” And that’s when the strangeness of the moment hit the Beatles’ producer:

  This was a pretty odd thing to say, even for John. I studied him. I’d been oblivious to it until then, but he did look pretty awful—not sick, but twitchy and strange. “Do you want someone to take you home?” I asked.

  “No,” he replied.

  “Come on, John,” I said. “What you need is a breath of fresh air. I know the way up on to the roof.” When we had clambered out on to the flat roof of Studio No. 2, we found it was a beautiful clear night. John took a deep breath, and, with a bit of a lurch, took a couple of steps towards the edge of the building. I grabbed hold of his arm: it was a good 50 feet to the ground. We stood there for a minute or two, with John swaying gently against my arm. “I’m feeling better,” he announced. Then he looked up at the stars. “Wow,” he intoned. “Look at that! Isn’t that amazing?”

  I followed his gaze. The stars did look good, and there seemed to be a good many of them—but they didn’t look that good. It was very unlike John to be over the top in that way. I stared at him. He was wired—pin-sharp and quivering, resonating away like a human tuning-fork.

  At this point, George didn’t feel terribly alarmed by the situation, bizarre as it may have been, and returned to the control room to prepare for another stab at “Getting Better.” And that’s when Paul called up to the booth, “How’s John?” he asked. “He’s on the roof, looking at the stars,” George answered. “You mean Vince Hill?” Paul joked, in reference to the British singer who was currently riding atop the hit parade. Not missing a beat, Harrison began singing “Edelweiss,” Hill’s latest single. Suddenly realizing why John had felt so sick in the first place, McCartney and Harrison raced to the roof to rescue their friend before it was too late. “They knew why John was feeling unwell,” Martin later surmised. “Maybe everyone else did, too—everyone except for father-figure George Martin here! It was very simple. John was tripping on LSD. He had taken it by mistake, they said—he had meant to take an amphetamine tablet.”19

  During that same evening, Martin resolved the prolonged issue of the empty solo section in the middle of “Lovely Rita.” With McCartney’s grudging assent, he recorded a barrelhouse piano solo to give the song a honky-tonk ambience. Using his windup piano technique, George recorded his solo at half speed so that it could be played back at full speed in order to imbue the sound with greater impact, not to mention a staccato feel. Emerick further manipulated the sound by wrapping a piece of adhesive tape around the capstan, the motor-driven spindle on the studio’s tape recorder. In so doing, the capstan would vacillate ever so slightly, affording the solo with even greater sonic textures and nuance. As Martin later remarked, “I used to try out funny things in odd moments and I discovered that by putting sticky tape over the capstan of a tape machine you could wobble the tape on the echo machine, because we used to delay the feed into the echo chamber by tape. So I suggested we do this using a piano sound. The Beatles themselves couldn’t think what should go into the song’s middle-eight, and they didn’t really like my idea at first, but it turned out fine in the end because of the effect.” With the windup piano solo complete, Martin “dropped in” the overdub into the existing mix for “Lovely Rita.”

  While the March 21 session had been a hive of activity, the Beatles didn’t miss a beat. On the very next evening, they were back in Studio 2 for another seven-hour affair. In their own way, Martin and the other bandmates were very much like McCartney—also having grown used to working “on heat” with an inexorable drive to bring their latest work to fruition. In this case, that work was Sgt. Pepper, and they were working at breakneck speed to bring it home—“home and dry,” in Martin’s words. The Wednesday, March 22, session witnessed additional overdubs associated with “Within You, Without You.” That evening, George and his production team superimposed two more dilruba performances, courtesy of personnel booked, as always, through the good offices of the Asian Music Circle. George recorded the parts at fifty-two and a half cycles per second in order to afford the overdub with the sound of being slowed down on playback. After completing the dilruba overdub, George conducted a reduction mix in order to free up real estate for additional work. He also prepared a demo mono remix in order to compose a score to accompany Harrison’s exotic effusion. Before the day’s work concluded, tape operator Graham Kirkby, who had previously shared his expertise in the compilation of A Collection of Beatles Oldies, held a listening session at George’s request in the Studio 1 control room. During the ninety-minute playback, Kirkby cued up the completed recordings for “A Day in the Life,” “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” “Fixing a Hole,” “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!,” “Lovely Rita,” “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” and “Getting Better.” With “Good Morning, Good Morning,” “Within You, Without You,” and “She’s Leaving Home” nearing fruition, George and the bandmates had the makings of an unusual long-player on their hands, with space for two more compositions that had yet to be debuted in the friendly confines of Abbey Road.

  Work continued on “Getting Better” on March 23—fortunately, with Martin and Lennon avoiding any further rooftop excursions. On this occasion, Emerick and Lush were scheduled to work another session at EMI Studios, leaving Peter Vince in the engineer’s seat and Ken Scott sitting in as tape operator. Given John’s uncertain state during the previous session, George rerecorded the vocal track, with Ringo also providing an overdub on the bongos. With “Getting Better” in a state of completion, George and the band returned to “Good Morning, Good Morning” on Tuesday, March 28. John finally recorded his lead vocal, which was given additional texture during the remixing session with a heavy dose of ADT. After George and his production team carried out a tape reduction, the bandmates began piling on overdubs during the nearly ten-hour session. Paul turned in a sizzling lead guitar solo on his Fender Esquire, and after John and Paul superimposed their backing vocals, John hit upon an idea. As Geoff recalled, “John said to me during one of the breaks that he wanted to have the sound of animals escaping and that each successive animal should be capable of frightening or devouring its predecessor.” As it turned out, John’s idea wasn’t entirely original. Not surprisingly, Pet Sounds had struck again, with the animal sounds apparently having been inspired by the Beach Boys’ coda fo
r “Caroline, No.” The sound effects in “Good Morning, Good Morning” were courtesy of the EMI tape library’s Volume 35: Animals and Bees and Volume 57: Fox-Hunt. Before the long night concluded, the Beatles returned to “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” With Harrison, Starr, Mal Evans, and Neil Aspinall pitching in as a harmonica quartet, Lennon added an organ overdub, while McCartney superimposed a lead guitar part.20

  By this point, a self-imposed deadline for delivering the master tape for Sgt. Pepper to EMI had emerged. Paul had made it be known that he intended to travel to the United States on April 3 for the purposes of surprising Jane Asher on the occasion of her twenty-first birthday. At the time, Asher was touring the United States with the Old Vic’s traveling company for Romeo and Juliet. With the date of April 12 slated for the Beatle’s return, Martin had promised his former employers that the album would be in EMI’s hands before McCartney was back on British soil. So when George and the group gathered in Studio 2 on Wednesday, March 29, they had less than a week to take advantage of McCartney’s presence in the studio. First up was “Good Morning, Good Morning,” for which Martin and Emerick overdubbed the animal sounds in order to finish off the track. With “Good Morning, Good Morning” in the can, they turned their attentions to “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” Martin’s team superimposed the elaborate sound effects recorded on February 20 onto the track, while George himself provided the “swirly” organ sounds to bring the song to fruition at long last. The March 29 session also witnessed the debut of a new song that went under the working title of “Bad Finger Boogie,” a Lennon-McCartney composition written expressly for Ringo to sing. As George later observed, “The tradition that Ringo always had a song to sing on an album was nothing to do with the others being kind to him. Perched up behind his drums at the back of the stage, Ringo occupied a special place in the hearts of many Beatles fans. The most common adjectives you heard about him were ‘cute’ and ‘cuddly.’ Having him sing something on every album, then, was extremely good marketing—simple as that.”21

  By the time that John and Paul arrived in Studio 2 on that evening of March 29, they had decided to segue “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” directly into this new song, which would shortly come to be known as “With a Little Help from My Friends.” As George later wrote, “With this song, Paul and John had really come up with the goods. Ringo’s voice is extremely distinctive, warm and memorable—but he would be the last person to claim that it has much range. So Paul wrote a beautiful simple melody for him, again based around no more than five notes. All Ringo’s voice had to carry was one little phrase. Terribly simple, terribly effective. Economy is the mark of genius.” Lennon and McCartney had also imagined a fictive character, Billy Shears, for Ringo to play, believing that building a sense of character and setting would help them in bringing the Sgt. Pepper concept off—if only for a couple of songs on the long-player. On that first evening, George and the Beatles devoted ten takes to laying down a basic rhythm track that featured McCartney’s piano, Harrison’s rhythm guitar, Starr’s drums, and Lennon’s cowbell. The introduction for “With a Little Help from My Friends”—designed to accommodate the musical transition from the title track—was undergirded by Martin hammering away at the Hammond organ.22

  Before finishing up that evening’s work, George turned to Ringo, who was preparing to perform his lead vocal. After carrying out a tape reduction of take ten, Ringo stood in front of the Studio 2 microphone, ready to capture his vocal, albeit very nervous. As George later recalled, “John could be insecure about his voice; but Ringo made John look brazenly confident.” Worse yet, Ringo saw “With a Little Help from My Friends” as a major piece of work, which made him even more nervous still. To George’s mind, Ringo’s sense of uncertainty was rooted in his personal anxiety about his vocal abilities, as well as in his perceived place in the band’s interpersonal calculus. “If George [Harrison] had a slight burden to carry in being the Third Man within the group,” Martin observed, “Ringo had the burden, initially at least, of being the ‘replacement’ man.” But by the time he stepped up to the mic in the wee hours of March 30, Pete Best was long gone, having faded into history. Recognizing their bandmate’s reticence, Lennon and McCartney joined the Beatles’ drummer on the studio floor. “Paul and John coaxed him and cajoled him,” George later wrote, “and in the end, they sang along with him when he did his stuff. It was a brilliant three-way live performance, that recording. In the last seconds of ‘With a Little Help from My Friends,’ when he had to hit the last, dangerously high note, Ringo did it wonderfully well. It is one of the best performances he ever turned in, perhaps the best track he has ever sung.” For Ringo, “With a Little Help from My Friends” was a great triumph indeed. As George later concluded, Ringo “came up trumps. He really was Billy Shears.”23

  The very next evening, Thursday, March 30, the Beatles were late in arriving at Abbey Road, having spent the day at Chelsea Manor Studios with Michael Cooper posing for the photographs that would eventually adorn the Sgt. Pepper album cover. When they finally turned up at eleven that evening, George and the group went right back to work on “With a Little Help from My Friends,” determined to put another Sgt. Pepper track to bed. And after overdubbing Harrison’s lead guitar, McCartney’s splendid bass part, Starr’s tambourine, and the call-and-response backing vocals from Lennon and McCartney, the group did just that. A six-hour session in Studio 2 was conducted on Friday, March 31, in order to carry out additional cleanup on “With a Little Help from My Friends,” which was doused with ADT. And then, ever the perfectionists, George and the bandmates turned their attentions back to “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” Before carrying out a remix, organ and glockenspiel parts were added to the song’s mix. The next day, April 1, George and the Beatles were in residence at Abbey Road for a rare Saturday session, an eleven-hour affair that wouldn’t conclude until six o’clock on Sunday morning. With Paul jetting out to America with Mal Evans on Monday, their backs were against the wall to record the long-player’s thirteenth track. In the end, it was one of the Beatles’ roadies who came up with the idea of recording a reprise for “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” According to George, “The reprise of ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ was another Neil Aspinall brainwave. ‘You’ve given a concert,’ he commented. ‘Why don’t you wrap up the concert with another version of ‘Sgt. Pepper’?’”24

  And that’s exactly what they did.

  13

  The Chicken

  Became the Guitar

  * * *

  FOR THE “SGT. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” reprise, the Beatles intentionally designed the song to be punchier and more straightforward than its namesake—with no frills and no overdubs diluting its rock ’n’ roll mien. “We were in the big studio at Abbey Road, No. 1, for this one,” George later recalled, “and the natural acoustics of this vast, cavernous room lent something to the live, bright quality of that recording. Geoff Emerick had a problem sorting out the balance between the various vocal and instrumental inputs, but he fixed it, and the electrifying, football stadium atmosphere comes through.” Even still, George added, “We had to use an isolation booth for the heavy stuff—that is, we had to shut away the drums in a sort of portable, sound-absorbing cabinet. Had we not done that, the recording would have been a cacophony, the instruments spilling into one another as though being played in a cathedral.” With the acoustics sorted out, the reprise was captured in nine takes, with Harrison and Lennon on electric guitar, McCartney playing bass, and Ringo on the drums. During each take of the rhythm track, Paul had provided a guide vocal. After selecting take nine as the best, the bandmates shared spirited lead vocals on the reprise. “This time, we really went hammer and tongs for a live performance,” Martin later wrote. “This version of the song is much better—up-tempo, faster, pulsating with energy, much livelier. The Beatles knew the song inside out by now, and there was a sort of end-of-term feeling in the studio. We nev
er made a second recording of a song on an album before, and that was exciting in itself. We finished the whole recording—vocals, solos, the lot—in one overnight session of 11 hours’ straight work.”1

  Amazingly, George and the Beatles had captured the song on a single four-track tape without the necessity of any overdubs—just a single, magical, inordinately live recording. And when they were done, George knew that Sgt. Pepper had arrived at last. With a full complement of material in hand for the long-player, he later wrote, “We had an album.” By Monday evening, April 3, they were back at work yet again—sans McCartney, of course. Working in Studio 1, they put the finishing touches on “Within You, Without You,” the last track to be completed for Sgt. Pepper—or so they thought at the time. George had booked eleven musicians for the occasion—eight violinists and three cellists. Led once again by the redoubtable Erich Gruenberg, the session musicians were on hand to record George’s orchestral score. As with his earlier work on “A Day in the Life,” Martin had composed his string arrangement based upon Harrison’s existing melody for “Within You, Without You.” Composing the score had proven to be difficult. “What was difficult,” Martin later recalled, “was writing a score for the cellos and violins that the English players would be able to play like the Indians. The dilruba player, for example, was doing all kinds of swoops and so I actually had to score that for strings and instruct the players to follow.” One challenge, in particular, involved the “sliding techniques” inherent in the Eastern instruments that had been recorded earlier. For Martin, “This meant that in scoring for that track, I had to make the string players play very much like Indian musicians, bending the notes, and with slurs between one note and the next.”2