Sound Pictures
Page 34
On Thursday, April 20, George and the Beatles reunited in Studio 2 to pick up where they had left off with “Only a Northern Song,” the first of the four new songs that they were obligated to provide for the Yellow Submarine soundtrack. As they worked the session, Brodax and Dunning visited the studio—at one point, even pausing to observe as the Beatles refined the rhythm track for “Only a Northern Song.” The production team’s visit was hardly routine at this point. With Yellow Submarine slated for a summer 1968 release, they had their work cut out for them in order to prepare the requisite cartoon cels, on the one hand, and organize the Beatles songs and incidental film music, which George had been tapped to compose, on the other.
After McCartney provided a new bass part for “Only a Northern Song” that evening, the bandmates decided to overdub a bizarre arrangement of intentionally discordant sounds, with Lennon playing the glockenspiel while McCartney tried his hand at the trumpet. As it happened, the trumpet had been Paul’s first instrument, having received a nickel-plated version of the brass instrument for his fourteenth birthday. But McCartney’s attempt at picking up the trumpet for the first time in eleven years fared badly. As he later recalled, “The film producers were wandering around the studio and they had to sort of go along with this—I saw some very sad faces while I’m playing this trumpet.” At this juncture, Martin needed to make room for additional vocal overdubs from Harrison. Over the years, his typical maneuver had been to carry out a tape reduction in order to create more recording space. But taking a page out of his own book, Martin decided to synchronize a second tape machine in order to simulate eight-track recording, just as he had done a few months back, with Ken Townsend’s able assistance, on behalf of “A Day in the Life.” In so doing, Martin could add yet more overdubs to take eleven, an unused reduction from February 14, to which Harrison superimposed two lead vocals, with more instrumental shenanigans from Lennon and McCartney, who added piano and Mellotron, along with the sound of the Beatles clearing their throats, to the mix. At one point, Harrison can be heard jeering at McCartney’s trumpet antics, saying “Take it, Eddie!” in reference to the Blue Flames’ Eddie Thornton, who had played trumpet on Revolver’s “Got to Get You into My Life.”13
During the April 21 session, Martin and his production team synchronized the machines in Studio 2 and successfully merged the two four-track tapes associated with “Only a Northern Song.” But for his part, George resented having had to go to so much trouble to simulate eight-track recording—namely, because the technology had been available on a wide scale since the previous year; however, EMI’s technical staff hadn’t even been authorized to purchase one of the newfangled machines as of yet. But as it happened, the April 21 session was dominated by conversation among George and the bandmates about how to conclude the Sgt. Pepper album. Apparently, their latest long-player wasn’t quite as complete as they had first believed. The issue, it seemed, was how to punctuate the profound silence following the fifty-four-second piano chord that brought “A Day in the Life” to its thunderous close. “It was just a silly in-joke,” Martin later recalled, the idea of “having a little noise just for fun.” It was Paul, in particular, who was taken with the concept of undercutting the seeming finality of the deafening piano sound. And at the same time, Paul reasoned, why not play a little prank on the Beatles’ listeners by placing a kind of sonic Easter egg in the concentric run-out grooves of their phonographs? Back in those days, music fans with automatic players would be treated to a sudden torrent of sound before the pickup arms on their phonographs returned to their bases. While the owners of expensive phonographic equipment might be startled by such an unexpected burst of sound in the wake of the crashing piano chord at the end of “A Day in the Life,” consumers with cheaper equipment were more apt to be irritated by the run-out groove’s discordant noise—a seemingly endless influx of sound that could only be terminated by manually returning the pickup arm to its base. “We always said,” Martin later wrote, “that when the needle gets to the end and starts swithering around and lifts off, well those people who don’t have automatic players should be able to hear something.”14
For George and the bandmates, the idea of manipulating the long-player’s run-out groove—and playing a harmless joke on their listeners—seemed too good to pass up. But it wouldn’t necessarily be an easy process, as EMI’s ace disc-cutter Harry Moss pointed out to George. “I was told by chaps who’d been in the business a long time that cutting things into the run-out grooves was an old idea that they used to do on 78s,” Moss later reported. Even still, Moss would have to wait for the masters themselves to be pressed in order to see if his work in the run-out grooves had been successful. But Moss was never one to shy away from a technological challenge. “It’s gonna be bloody awkward, George, but I’ll give it a go!” he told the Beatles’ producer. Now all the bandmates had to do was record the requisite nonsense to bring their sonic prank to fruition. As Emerick recalled, “They were all there discussing how to end the LP, but the decision to throw in a bit of nonsense gibberish came together in about 10 minutes. They ran down to the studio floor and we recorded them twice—on each track of a two-track tape. They made funny noises, said random things; just nonsense. We chopped up the tape, put it back together, played it backwards and threw it in.” In Barry Miles’s memory, the work that went into recording approximately two seconds’ worth of sound that evening was considerably more involved than Emerick’s remarks might suggest. “It was a triple session—three three-hour sessions—which ended around 4 AM. The Beatles stood around two microphones muttering, singing snatches of songs, and yelling for what seemed like hours, with the rest of us standing round them, joining in. Mal [Evans] carried in cases of Coke and bottles of Scotch. Ringo was out of it. ‘I’m so stoned,’ he said, ‘I think I’m going to fall over!’ As he slowly toppled, Mal caught him and popped him neatly in a chair without a murmur. In the control room, no one seemed to notice. A loop was made from the tape of the muttering and was mixed.”15
With the assorted nonsense having been captured on tape, Lennon suggested to Martin that the Beatles’ gibberish should be preceded by one more in-joke. In this case, the prank wasn’t aimed at the bandmates’ legions of listeners but rather at their pets. At Lennon’s instigation, Martin later recalled, “we added a special dog whistle which is an 18 kilocycle note that you won’t be able to hear. We thought it would be nice to include something especially for dogs.” At this point, the producer turned the whole shebang over to Moss, who prepared the mono and stereo masters for Sgt. Pepper. As it turned out, adding the dog whistle was remarkably simple for the experienced disc-cutter, who recorded the high-pitched tone at the same frequency as a standard police dog whistle. And sure enough, dogs all over the world would soon be perking up as the Beatles’ new long-player came to its rapturous conclusion. But they wouldn’t be the only ones able to register the high-pitched tone. Not long after the April 21 session, George presented a prerelease copy of Sgt. Pepper to his ten-year-old son Gregory, who told his father that he could hear the dog whistle that graced the end of the album. “Nonsense,” his father replied. “No human can hear a note that high-pitched.” Perhaps George, like most people, didn’t realize that the frequency of a dog whistle often falls within the hearing range of children, whose auditory senses haven’t begun deteriorating with age.16
But no matter. With “Sgt. Pepper’s Inner Groove” nestled into its final resting place at the end of the master reel, the long-player was once and truly finished. But even still, George couldn’t help wondering what would happen come June 1, when Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was simultaneously released on British and American shores. Would George and the Beatles really be “home and dry,” to borrow Alan Livingston’s turn of phrase, in the wake of such a bizarrely experimental, unprecedented work of aural art?
14
Good Night, Sweet Prince
* * *
IN MANY WAYS, May 1967 served as the calm before
the storm for George and the bandmates—which, in the Beatles’ ever-shifting universe, was saying something. Pausing to reflect on what they had just accomplished, George chalked up Sgt. Pepper as the express result of the Beatles no longer having “the millstone of madcap live performance tours around their necks. Now that they had some time and space, they were spreading their musical wings. They were showing us what they could really do.” Commenting at the time, John saw the soon-to-be-released long-player as “one of the most important steps in this group’s career. It had to be just right. We tried and I think succeeded in achieving what we set out to do.” Harrison was equally thoughtful, remarking, “You just have to keep striving for perfection. This LP, I think, is the best we’ve done, but only the best we could do at that time. The next one ought to be better. That’s always got to be the goal.” But perhaps the most peculiar observation in advance of the album’s release belonged to Brian Epstein, who had been waiting in the wings since falling into a depression during the previous fall. During an American radio interview, Brian proclaimed that Sgt. Pepper would “prove more than a thing or two,” adding, “I don’t like to be particularly swanky about it, but it is going to be great.”1
For Brian, Sgt. Pepper’s imminent release represented an opportunity to return to the world stage, not to mention a strategic moment to get the Beatles’ business affairs in order before what promised to be a media onslaught. After all, the group had been whiling away the hours at Abbey Road, save for the brief interregnum back in February with the release of the “Strawberry Fields Forever” backed with “Penny Lane” single and its attendant promotional video images of the mustached, Carnaby-dressed Beatles looking very different from the figures that they cut during the heady days of Beatlemania. In recent years, Brian had assembled the finest minds in London economic circles to address the bandmates’ labyrinthine business interests. Recognizing that the Beatles were about to suffer the financial penalties associated with falling within the United Kingdom’s highest income bracket, Brian’s advisers warned of an imminent tax bill that they estimated to be in the vicinity of £3 million. In order to offset their exorbitant income tax, Brian’s team of advisers recommended that the Beatles invest in businesses that were most closely aligned with their ongoing work. To this end, Brian launched Apple Music, Limited, on the bandmates’ behalf in May 1967. Although Apple was founded initially as a holding company, the Beatles already saw their new venture as a means for seeking out and supporting new songwriting talent, just as Dick James had hoped to do by expanding the reach of Northern Songs. While Epstein helped make the bandmates’ nascent Apple dream a reality, the group members—particularly John and Paul—were enamored with the idea of going into business for themselves, of taking the reins of their financial future. For his part, Paul McCartney had already begun developing an idea for the new company’s logo. As with so many of his aesthetic impulses during this period, McCartney had been influenced by Robert Fraser. “One day he brought this painting to my house,” Paul later recalled. “It just had written across it ‘Au revoir,’ on this beautiful green apple.” The painting in question—Belgian artist René Magritte’s Le Jeu de Mourre, a slick pop-art depiction of a Granny Smith apple—was precisely the image that McCartney had been seeking: simple and mysterious but at the same time sophisticated and surreal. Just like the Beatles themselves.2
For Brian, the bandmates’ “swanky” new release also signaled the opportunity for a bravura press launch—the likes of which the record industry had never seen. And on Friday, May 19, Brian did just that, inviting the Beatles to turn up at his home at 24 Chapel Street for one of the most incredible coming-out parties of all time. With the June 1 release date for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band looming, the Beatles’ manager pulled out all of the stops for the occasion, serving a sumptuous spread of champagne, poached salmon, and caviar to his guests. As the launch party progressed, the bandmates posed for photographs in Epstein’s drawing room, as well as on the front stoop of their manager’s regal townhouse, which was just a stone’s throw away from Buckingham Palace.
Not surprisingly, the event made for a who’s who among the glitterati of music journalism, including Norrie Drummond of the NME, who implicitly understood the auspicious nature of the occasion. The Beatles had ceased touring back in August 1966, and, save for the release of the “Strawberry Fields Forever” backed with “Penny Lane” single, they had largely been out of the spotlight in the ensuing months. And yet here they were, unveiling their groundbreaking new album under an air of mystery as if they were Willy Wonka finally opening up his magical dream factory for the eyes of a waiting world. Even the Beatles’ entrance took on a sense of grandeur and great expectation on that illustrious evening. As Drummond wrote, “John Lennon walked into the room first. Then came George Harrison and Paul McCartney, followed closely by Ringo Starr and road managers Neil Aspinall and Mal Evans. The Beatles had arrived at a small dinner party in Brian Epstein’s Belgravia home, to talk to journalists and disc jockeys for the first time in many months.” And there they were: mustached (save for a clean-shaven Paul) and decked out in their hippie finery. Their carefree Bohemian image was a far cry indeed from the suited bandmates of days gone by. One of the guests that night was none other than American rock photographer Linda Eastman, who had first met Paul four nights earlier at the trendy Bag O’Nails club, where Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames were topping the bill. Linda later remembered that they “flirted a bit” before heading out to yet another club and then concluding the evening at Paul’s home at Cavendish Avenue, where Linda recalled being “impressed” to see her future husband’s prized trio of Magritte paintings.3
If Epstein’s other guests were awestruck by the pioneering soundscapes that they heard during the initial May 19 Sgt. Pepper listening session, their impressions would be drowned out soon enough by a plenitude of other voices. The first one, as it turned out, proved to be more than a bit unsettling, as BBC director of sound broadcasting Frank Gillard informed Sir Joseph Lockwood in a May 23 letter that the media corporation would be banning “A Day in the Life” because of the refrain “I’d love to turn you on,” which Gillard interpreted as having a “sinister meaning.” He allowed that the “recording may have been made in innocence and good faith, but we must take account of the interpretation that many young people would inevitably put upon it. ‘Turned on’ is a phrase which can be used in many different circumstances, but it is currently much in vogue in the jargon of the drug-addicts. We do not feel that we can take the responsibility of appearing to favor or encourage those unfortunate habits, and that is why we shall not be playing the recording in any of our programs, Radio or Television.” For his part, Martin was disgusted by the shortsightedness of the ban, especially in terms of “A Day in the Life,” which he already perceived as being on an artistic plane at a significant remove from the Beatles’ previous achievements. While Gillard’s decision proved to be not only unfortunate but an embarrassment for the BBC, which came off looking very stodgy in the face of contemporary mores, his would be one of the very few dissenting voices. Within a matter of days of the album’s release, the revolutionary long-player’s reviews came in swiftly and were overwhelmingly positive. Writing in the London Times, William Mann proclaimed Sgt. Pepper to be “a pop music master-class,” while his colleague Kenneth Tynan went even further, calling the LP “a decisive moment in the history of Western civilization.” In the United States, the cultural elite at the New York Times Book Review proclaimed Sgt. Pepper as beckoning the commencement of a “golden Renaissance of Song.” And while he wasn’t entirely sure about the album’s overall aesthetic impression, which he faulted for its “obsession with production,” the New York Times’s Richard Goldstein singled out “A Day in the Life,” which he described in moving terms as a “deadly earnest excursion in emotive music with a chilling lyric. Its orchestration is dissonant but sparse, and its mood is not whimsical nostalgia but irony. With it, the Beatles have produced a
glimpse of modern city life that is terrifying. It stands as one of the most important Lennon-McCartney compositions, and it is a historic Pop event.”4
While Brian’s launch party had proven to be a spectacular success, it was merely subterfuge. For Brian, the past several months had gone from bad to worse. After rousing himself out of his post-touring depression, he had succumbed to his inner demons yet again. With his psyche in disarray, Brian increasingly turned to drugs and alcohol to salve his aching heart. On May 17, his psychiatrist, John Flood, encouraged Brian to admit himself to the Priory Hospital in Roehampton. On May 19, he left the sanitarium for the Sgt. Pepper launch party, only to return to the mental health facility immediately afterward. As if his psychiatric problems weren’t enough, Brian had spent much of the past several months in turmoil over his business relationship with the band. For Brian, the creation of Apple Music was nothing short of a death knell. “He’d decided this was the Beatles’ first real step toward ending their relationship with him,” Peter Brown remarked. But nothing was further from the truth. The group had established Apple Music expressly as a tax dodge—as Brian well knew—and they had done so at his urging, no less.5