For their trouble, the musicians—save for Gruenberg, who, as leader, was paid eleven pounds—received a one-time fee of nine pounds for their performances that evening. Using the available track three for “Within You, Without You,” Martin recorded several takes of the orchestral score until Harrison was satisfied with the adornment. As it happened, achieving the right sound was no easy feat. Just as Martin had expected, the Western musicians ran into considerable difficulty in mimicking the Eastern players’ style. As Emerick later wrote, “George Martin was conducting the same top-flight orchestral players that worked on most of the rest of Pepper, but despite their expertise, the musicians took a long time to get it right; I clearly remember the look of deep concentration on their faces as they struggled to master the complex score. It was painstaking, and it certainly was a challenge to the musicians, many of whom seemed to be getting a bit frustrated as the session wore on.” From his vantage point in the control room, Geoff could tell that it “was a really hard session for George Martin—by the end of the night he was absolutely knackered. Thankfully, he had the help of George Harrison, who acted as a bridge between the Indian tonalities and rhythms, which he understood quite well, and the Western sensibilities of George Martin and the classical musicians. I was never more impressed with both Georges than I was on that very special, almost spiritual night.”3
With the orchestral work completed, the Beatles’ producer turned to Harrison’s lead vocal, which the Beatle delivered in impressive style, befitting the song’s deeply philosophical lyrics. After overdubbing sitar and acoustic guitar flourishes from Harrison, Martin was finally ready to put “Within You, Without You” to bed. And in so doing, the recording sessions for Sgt. Pepper—which clocked in at some seven hundred hours in the studio—had reached their end. While the Beatles, especially McCartney, had taken a greater interest in nearly every aspect of their work’s production, they tasked Martin with concocting a draft of the LP’s running order. Meanwhile, the producer and his production team conducted a control room session on Tuesday, April 4, to carry out mono and stereo remixes for “Within You, Without You,” which had been transformed from three discrete parts into a seamless whole. During the mixing session, they had also applied a heavy dose of ADT to the song, and, at Harrison’s request, appended “Within You, Without You” with a few seconds of laughter in order to temper the serious mood established by his Eastern-oriented composition. As usual, the sound effects were ferreted out of the EMI tape library—in this instance, courtesy of Volume 6: Applause and Laughter.
George’s production team continued their work on the evening of Thursday, April 6, when they began carrying out a series of cross-fades in order to blend the contents of Sgt. Pepper into a largely continuous work of art. And in George’s vision, they did so without benefit of the traditional lines of demarcation, or rills, that had characterized the vast majority of albums during that era. But first, they completed the mono and stereo mixes for “Good Morning, Good Morning.” As Emerick later recalled, “During the mix, I enjoyed whacking the faders all the way up for Ringo’s huge tom hit during the stop-time—so much so that the limiters nearly overloaded, but it definitely gets the listener’s attention! Add in the flanged brass, miked in an unorthodox way, and it’s all icing on the cake; take those effects off and the recording doesn’t have the same magic. That song serves as a good example of how simple manipulation can improve a track sonically.” Martin and Emerick took a similar approach to mixing the contents of Sgt. Pepper, painstakingly attempting to bring out the musical color in what was shaping up to be far more than a mere experiment in pop music. As the dazzling contents of Sgt. Pepper took shape during the mixing sessions, they were on the precipice of compiling and banding a groundbreaking work of recording artistry.4
By the time he arrived at the studio that evening, Martin had succeeded in drafting the long-player’s running order. As had been his practice for many years, George worked from a long-standing philosophy about how to best position the product for the marketplace. Martin always felt that the best strategy was to organize a strong first side in order to maximize an album’s commercial potential. Given McCartney’s original concept, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” had “to be the first track, naturally. The reprise of the song, for the same reason, had to go last—except that the final chord of ‘A Day in the Life’ was so final that it was obvious nothing else could follow it. So the reprise of ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ was put back to second to last.” By this point, the bandmates had determined that the title track would segue into “With a Little Help from My Friends,” which meant that Martin had already accounted for four of the album’s thirteen tracks. In his original draft, George rounded out side one as follows: “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” “With a Little Help from My Friends,” “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!,” “Fixing a Hole,” “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” “Getting Better,” and “She’s Leaving Home.”5
For Martin, side two emerged fairly quickly once he decided how to deploy “Within You, Without You,” easily Sgt. Pepper’s most challenging selection—which was saying something, given the long-player’s overt avant-garde ambience. “When it came to ‘Within You, Without You,’” he later recalled, “I could not for the life of me think of anywhere to put it at all. It was so alien, mystical, and long. There was no way it could end a side, nor did it sit comfortably next to anything else on the album. The self-deprecating laugh George had added at the end of his song gave me a bizarre idea: it could start a side, and I could follow it with a jokey track: ‘When I’m Sixty-Four.’” Under this reasoning, side two shaped up very quickly, especially after Martin happened upon one of the most important sonic discoveries in the entirety of his career. As he attempted to figure out the placement of “Good Morning, Good Morning,” he listened to the sounds of animalia during the song’s play-out section. And that’s when it hit him. “I suddenly realized as I was pulling it together,” he later wrote, “that the chicken noise we had dubbed on sounded really like the little bit before the reprise of ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,’ when the boys are tuning their guitars. So when I edited it together I turned the cluck-cluck of the chicken into the sound of a guitar string coming under tension as it is tuned, trying to mimic that twang, as near as I could. The chicken became the guitar.” Sitting in the Studio 2 control room, George found himself thunderstruck by such an incredible moment of creative caprice. “It sounded great,” he wrote. “It really welded the songs together. I couldn’t congratulate myself too much on it, though, because it arrived all by itself—a stroke of luck. It just happened.”6
With the balance of the album’s contents in place, George simply slipped “Lovely Rita” between “When I’m Sixty-Four” and “Good Morning, Good Morning,” and his running order was complete—for the moment, at least. During the April 6 mixing session, Emerick carried out cross-fades between “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and “With a Little Help from My Friends” and, to close out the album, between the reprise and “A Day in the Life.” In order to mask the edit that morphs the title track into “With a Little Help from My Friends,” George reached way back to the Beatles’ August 30, 1965, appearance at the Hollywood Bowl, which he had originally recorded for a potential live album. George had scrapped the project because of the inferior sound quality of the music, overwhelmed as it was by the screaming hordes of Beatlemania. But suddenly the band’s ear-piercing multitudes served a greater purpose, with the sudden upsurge of their screams punctuating McCartney’s boisterous introduction of the fictive Billy Shears in the guise of Ringo. When it came to the album’s master reel, George tasked EMI engineer Malcolm Davies with preparing Sgt. Pepper without rills.
On Friday, April 7, Martin and his production team continued working on mixing the long-player in the Studio 2 control room. In contrast with the heady days of Beatlemania, when the bandmates recorded their tracks and left everything else to George�
�s discretion, the group attended all of the mono mixing sessions for Sgt. Pepper. With stereo having not yet come fully into vogue in the UK marketplace, mono reigned supreme, and stereo recordings were considered an afterthought. As Richard Lush later recalled, “After the album was finished, George Martin, Geoff, and I did the stereo in a few days, just the three of us, without a Beatle in sight.” Hence, with the Beatles present and providing their input, “there are all sorts of things on the mono, little effects here and there, which the stereo doesn’t have.” In those days, they only worked from a single loudspeaker in the booth, given mono’s primacy. As Emerick later observed, “We did have two speakers but everything was put through the right hand one. We weren’t allowed to monitor on both because they were saved for stereo orchestral recordings!”7
For his part, George considered the mixing and editing processes associated with the album to be essential aspects of the band’s recording artistry. And in the case of Sgt. Pepper, he discovered that much of the album’s shape was defined during the postproduction process, as opposed to his early years with the Beatles, when he was able to mix their recordings for release with relative ease—and quickly, at that. But things were markedly different with Sgt. Pepper. “When it came to compiling the album,” he later wrote, “I tried to edit it together in a very tight format, and in a funny kind of way when I was editing it, it almost grew by itself; it took on a life of its own.”8
As with Revolver, the Beatles’ latest album featured a wide range of styles and genres, and both records’ strengths were rooted in their mind-blowing diversity. But with such a vast panoply of sonic experiences at his fingertips, George slowly began to recognize that he needed to celebrate the album’s rapidly shifting musical palette at every possible turn. For this reason, as Pepper evolved during the mixing process, George came to realize that his original running order for side one was problematic—particularly in terms of closing the side with “She’s Leaving Home.” So with the bandmates’ approval, he began to reshuffle the album’s sequencing for side one. As he later wrote, “‘She’s Leaving Home’ was a lovely song, but it was a bit downbeat—it didn’t exactly shout its optimism—so I decided to place it after the more upbeat but less worthy songs” such as, in George’s estimation, “Getting Better” and “Fixing a Hole.” With this new gambit in mind, George was left to ponder the placement of “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” In the latter case, he felt that “Lucy” was “a great song” that “could hardly be more different in atmosphere and mood from ‘With a Little Help from My Friends,’ so why place it after that? Well, it was because it was so different. It was a complete change of musical color, which was welcome.” Having decided that he wanted to end side one “with a bang,” the madcap “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” emerged as the obvious closer.9
With Sgt. Pepper seemingly in a state of completion, George and the bandmates took a much-deserved two-week break. But for the Beatles’ producer, the time off was devoted almost entirely to handling a growing backlog of AIR business. The Beatles’ considerable demands upon his time meant that he had little room in his schedule for his existing stable of acts, several of whom were beginning to find themselves at career crossroads. David and Jonathan had been faltering since the release of their “Lovers of the World Unite” single, and George already had a plan up his sleeve to jump-start their flagging career. Knowing that the Beatles had no intention of releasing Sgt. Pepper’s tracks as singles, George had selected “She’s Leaving Home” as David and Jonathan’s next release. Perhaps lightning would strike yet again for David and Jonathan in the form of a Lennon-McCartney composition as it had done back in 1966 with “Michelle.” Meanwhile, Cilla Black had all but lost the momentum she had gathered in previous years. Her latest release, “I Only Live to Love You” backed with “From Now On,” saw her flailing yet again. Like “What Good Am I?,” her previous single, “I Only Live to Love You” had stalled on the charts, going no higher than the midtwenties.
While George’s acts were faltering, his partner Ron Richards was tearing up the charts with the Hollies, AIR’s most reliable hitmakers—outside of the Beatles, of course. In 1966, the Hollies had hit their stride with a lineup that included Allan Clarke, Tony Hicks, Graham Nash, Bobby Elliott, and Bernie Calvert. Richards had discovered the Manchester band in the Cavern Club in 1963, and over the ensuing years they had honed their style as three-part vocalists, with the voices of Clarke, Hicks, and Nash blending in perfect harmony. By 1966, they had developed into one of AIR’s headlining acts, with a trio of top-five singles in “I Can’t Let Go,” “Bus Stop,” and “Stop Stop Stop.” Richards predicted big things from the Hollies in 1967, and they had already come through with a pair of top-five singles in “On a Carousel” and “Carrie Anne.” Attempting to capitalize on the strength of the band’s flurry of hit singles, Richards had been working sporadically with the Hollies all spring on their latest album. In fact, they had been recording at Abbey Road during the same period in which the Beatles had been toiling away at Sgt. Pepper. But in contrast with the Fab Four, who had spent virtually every possible day attempting to refine their sound, the Hollies had devoted just six days across three months to recording their new long-player, with Richards at the helm. The Hollies planned to call their record Evolution, and EMI had scheduled it for release on June 1, the very same day that the record conglomerate had slated for loosing Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band upon a waiting world.
On Monday, April 17, Martin was back in the Studio 2 control room, where he remixed several Sgt. Pepper tracks, including “Getting Better,” “She’s Leaving Home,” and “When I’m Sixty-Four,” with Emerick and Lush in tow. That Wednesday, George and his production team had to create a new mono remix for “Good Morning, Good Morning” in order to perfect the cross-fade between the animal sounds and the “Sgt. Pepper” reprise. They carried out fourteen remixes until they were able to capture the sound of the hen’s final cluck transforming into the lead guitar at the beginning of the reprise, just as George had envisioned it. But for Emerick, it was no easy feat. While the Beatles’ engineer admitted it was “one of the cleverest bits of matching a sound effect with an instrument ever done,” it wasn’t as simple as George had previously imagined it would be to transform the sound of a chicken into a guitar lick. “It wasn’t a perfect match,” Geoff later recalled, “so we shifted the cluck up in time to match correctly.”10
Knowing that the Beatles would be back in the studio on April 20 in order to resume work on “Only a Northern Song,” which they had left unfinished back on February 14, George had acetates of the song prepared for the bandmates’ review. Having been scuttled from Sgt. Pepper, “Only a Northern Song” held a new purpose for George and the Beatles, who still had a third film to complete in order to fulfill the deal that Brian Epstein had negotiated with United Artists. By this point, they had agreed to prepare music for an animated feature film to be titled Yellow Submarine and produced by Al Brodax, the man behind the Beatles cartoon shorts. Canadian director George Dunning had been tasked with directing the film.
But getting to the point where the Beatles would finally be able fulfill the deal with United Artists had been no easy feat for Epstein, who was still battling the depression that had hobbled him after the Jesus Christ tour. While George and the bandmates had been working on Sgt. Pepper at Abbey Road, Brian plotted their follow-up film to Help! Over the ensuing months, Epstein and the Beatles had turned down one script after another. At one point, Brodax had even tapped Joseph Heller, the celebrated author of Catch-22, to write a screenplay expressly for the Fab Four, although Epstein rejected the author’s efforts out of hand. Meanwhile, in the early months of 1967, Epstein had gone so far as to contract British playwright Joe Orton to come up with a script, which resulted in Up Against It, a screenplay that left the Beatles’ manager aghast. In fact, he was so disgusted by Orton’s depiction of the Fab Four that he wouldn’t even return t
he writer’s calls. For his part, Orton wasn’t surprised about the manager’s nonresponse, writing in his diary at the time that “the boys, in my script, have been caught in-flagrante, become involved in dubious political activity, dressed as women, committed murder, been put in prison, and committed adultery.”11
With Orton’s side effort having failed miserably, Brodax finally succeeded in capturing Brian’s attention with a screenplay titled Yellow Submarine by Erich Segal. The Beatles felt that the project was daft, particularly given that King Features, Brodax’s company, had been responsible for such cartoon fodder as Popeye. In desperation, Epstein had first turned to Brodax, the American television producer behind the successful Beatles cartoons, which were broadcast on ABC for four seasons after debuting in September 1965. In order to facilitate the cartoons, Martin had helped out by providing Brodax and King Features with Beatles masters in order to facilitate each episode’s sing-along.
After Brian inked the deal for Yellow Submarine, the Beatles openly displayed their disdain for the feature-length cartoon, deliberately planning to commit their weakest songs to fulfill the four tracks that they were contractually obligated to deliver for the soundtrack. As George later recalled, “If they had any rubbish, as they considered it, at the end of the session, that would be one of the songs. There used to be a standing joke: ‘Ah, good enough for Yellow Submarine . . . let them have that one.’” But for his part, George was confident that King Features could bring home the goods, later remarking that “the Beatles feared the worst, but in truth the project was in the hands of very good artists. If Brian hadn’t stuck to his guns, that classic would never have happened.”12
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