Meanwhile, Allen Klein had recently strong-armed Decca Records into rewarding the Rolling Stones with a lucrative signing bonus. Known for his crude mannerisms and tough-guy demeanor, he had similarly approached Brian about restructuring the Beatles’ EMI contract. Epstein had become deathly afraid of the American interloper, particularly after McCartney inquired about Klein’s recent success on the Rolling Stones’ behalf. “What about us?” he asked Brian. For months, the manager had been attempting to convince the Beatles to tour again but to no avail. Even after he successfully negotiated the contract extension with EMI back in January, he felt that his days with the group were numbered—a situation that he did nothing to improve by offering a controlling interest in NEMS to Robert Stigwood, who had recently begun grooming an Australian group known as the Bee Gees for the big time. When Epstein balked at signing the Australians, Stigwood inked them to a contract with Atlantic Records. With his keen eye for talent and the smooth verbal gifts to match, Stigwood set his sights on the Beatles. For a paltry £500,000—considerably undervaluing the company in the process—he bought his way into NEMS, with the option of obtaining a controlling interest in the corporation after six months. In short order, Stigwood had begun handling the daily operations of NEMS, although Epstein had already decided, if only in his mind, to decline Stigwood’s option. As the days wore on, the Beatles’ manager became ever more paranoid about his progressively tenuous relationship with the band.6
For his part, Martin had never been more confident about his place in the Beatles’ universe. What had once been a teacher-pupil relationship had evolved into a genuine creative partnership. But as it happened, George was nowhere to be found during those heady, pre-Pepper release days. He wasn’t even in the city on the night of Brian’s fabled launch party, having opted to make himself scarce for the first time since he had begun working with the bandmates back in 1962. George could feel the winds of change in the air. In fact, by his own reckoning they had already begun to swirl around the Beatles. In just one session, he could sense that the group’s creative heat was dissipating, losing its focus. “Only a Northern Song” had been a mere prelude to the less concerted, often lackadaisical work that they would carry out during that most unusual summer. The May 12 session for “All Together Now,” which occurred outside of George’s control, had been one of the strangest since “Yellow Submarine” the previous May, when George had been absent with food poisoning and Judy had attended the session in his stead. Years later, Geoff Emerick remembered the “All Together Now” session with a shrug, recalling that “the Beatles nonetheless soldiered on without him [Martin], and I was officially listed on the tape box as both producer and engineer.”7
From Emerick’s perspective, Martin’s sudden yen for a holiday didn’t make any sense. “Frankly, George going on vacation in the middle of these sessions did not go down well in anybody’s book. We were all tired, yet he was the only one taking time off.” Worse yet, “things were definitely more relaxed when George Martin wasn’t around. There was always a certain protocol when he was at a session: we in the control room felt that we had to be on our best behavior, and even the Beatles seemed slightly constrained by his presence at times. When he wasn’t there, we’d all let our hair down and have a bit of fun. There was just a different dynamic.” But along with the loose atmosphere that George’s absence created in the studio was a sense of aimlessness and a lack of direction. As Emerick remembered, it was a general feeling that “now that the schoolmaster’s out, we kids finally get a chance to play.” George had sensed the growing unease among the bandmates and his production team—and not merely regarding their preternatural need to let their personalities roam free and buck George’s desire to establish organization and a purposeful drive. There was an even more pressing and larger question related to how the band would move forward after willing the likes of Sgt. Pepper into existence. George could feel the bandmates’ unsettled nature during their first few sessions after putting the finishing touches on the album.8
For Martin it had all begun to spiral out of control back on Tuesday, April 25, although in truth, he should have sensed the coming disarray during the “Getting Better” session back in March, when Lennon might very well have tumbled off of the studio rooftop had it not been for the well-timed intervention of his eminently more sober friends. During the nearly nine-hour session on the twenty-fifth, George and the bandmates had tried their hand at a brand-new McCartney composition titled “Magical Mystery Tour.” The song had found its origins during Paul’s American trip with Mal Evans after the Beatles had recorded the “Sgt. Pepper” reprise. Flying back to the United Kingdom on April 11, Paul hatched the idea for a Beatles television movie about riding about the countryside on a mystery coach tour. As Paul later remembered, “The Mystery show was conceived way back in Los Angeles. On the plane. You know they give you those big menus, and I had a pen and everything and started drawing on this menu and I had this idea. In England, they have these things called mystery tours. And you go on them and you pay so much and you don’t know where you’re going. So the idea was to have this little thing advertised in the shop windows somewhere called Magical Mystery Tours.”9
As it happened, the Beatles had also considered other projects in mid-1967. For several months, they pondered the concept of making a television movie based on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. They had even gone so far as scheduling the principal photography for the would-be production for October and November 1967, with a screenplay by Ian Dallas under the direction of Keith Green. In addition to a mammoth “A Day in the Life” segment, the film was slated to feature 115 extras—including a troupe of motorcycle-riding “rockers” and a dozen “Model Rita Maids.” But with the idea for Magical Mystery Tour now brewing in his synapses, McCartney was working “on heat,” which meant, as it usually did, that he would stop at nothing to bring his vision to life.
After rehearsing “Magical Mystery Tour,” Martin and the Beatles settled down to the creation of a basic rhythm track on April 27, which included Harrison and Lennon’s guitars, McCartney’s piano, and Starr’s drums. By this point, they had already decided that “Magical Mystery Tour” would require a fusillade of trumpets, as well as plenty of ambient sound effects—especially of the highways and byways variety, this being a song about a bus and all. After recording three takes of the rhythm track—with the third being selected as the best—the bandmates sent Emerick to the EMI tape library to ferret out the appropriate sound effects. In this case, Volume 36: Traffic Noise Stereo fit the bill, with the sound of cars and trucks roaring along England’s highways. As it turned out, Martin’s longtime colleague Stuart Eltham had originally recorded the sounds, later recalling, “I did that leaning over a bridge on the M1 motorway. It was a quiet day, a Sunday, because that was the only way one could capture the sound of individual vehicles. On any other day, all I would have had was a mass of traffic noise.”10
Over the next few days, George and the Beatles made quick work of “Magical Mystery Tour.” On Wednesday evening, April 26, George carried out a tape reduction and they overdubbed Paul’s bass guitar, along with a spate of percussion—maracas, cowbell, tambourine, and the like—played by all four Beatles. At this point, the band concocted a series of playful shouts and other attendant frivolity—including John ad-libbing, “Step right this way!” By Thursday, they were overdubbing McCartney’s lead vocal, with Lennon and Harrison providing harmonies. Martin recorded Lennon ad-libbing “Roll up, roll up for the Magical Mystery Tour!” at half speed to quicken the intensity on playback. As Richard Lush later recalled, “They really wanted those voices to sound different.” The session ended with Emerick and Lush cutting acetates, presumably for Martin to use as a reference when scoring the trumpet section. At that point, George booked studio musicians for the following week, including the ubiquitous David Mason, only to learn that Geoff would be unavailable for the upcoming session. Along with Ken Townsend, he was booked for a mobile recording of
the Wurzels, a “Scrumpy and Western” comedy act from Somerset. When the Beatles learned that Emerick would be 130 miles away in Royal Oak, they were aghast. With no other choice, Martin was forced to impress Malcolm Addey into service as Emerick’s stand-in.11
By the time that the Beatles and their producer reconvened on Wednesday, May 3, George apparently hadn’t found his way clear to scoring the trumpet parts. And this unusual lack of preparation on George’s part didn’t escape notice. In addition to Mason, trumpeters Elgar “Gary” Howarth, Roy Copestake, and John Wilbraham were also on hand for the session. Without a score from which to work, Martin and McCartney attempted to improvise. As Addey observed from his place in the control room, “Paul McCartney was humming to the musicians the notes that he wanted, trying for a long time to get his thoughts across to them. In the end, we had to send the trumpet players off for tea while Paul and George [Martin] worked things out on the Studio 3 piano.” In the end, Howarth became understandably irritated by the situation and hastily composed trumpet parts for himself and the other players. By the time that the session concluded some five hours later, the brass overdubs were complete, with Mason leading the way and delivering a volley of high-velocity sixteenth notes. The next evening, with Emerick back in the fold, Martin conducted a mixing session for the new song. Amazingly, the title track for the bandmates’ next project was already nearing a state of completion, and Sgt. Pepper hadn’t even been released yet.12
But any momentum that George and the Beatles enjoyed at this point began to dissipate precipitously the following week. During the Tuesday, May 9, session in Studio 2, for instance, George and the bandmates toiled until six o’clock in the morning while only committing sixteen minutes of a malingering instrumental jam to tape. The music consisted of the Beatles plying their electric guitars, woefully out of tune, along with drums and harmonium. Two days later, they convened in suburban Barnes at Olympic Sound Studios, one of the United Kingdom’s most esteemed independent recording venues and a regular haunt of the Rolling Stones, who had been recording Their Satanic Majesties Request—the follow-up long-player to the strong-selling Between the Buttons—at the studio since February. Martin and the Beatles convened that evening at nine o’clock—once again, without Emerick and Lush, who were not permitted to work in non-EMI facilities. Sitting in their places were Keith Grant, Olympic’s manager, and Eddie Kramer. That night, the Beatles tried out a new composition titled “Baby, You’re a Rich Man,” another number under consideration for the soundtrack for the Yellow Submarine animated film, which would be announced during a June 7 press conference. During the session for “Baby, You’re a Rich Man,” John played the studio’s handy Clavioline, the same space-aged instrument that Joe Meek had used to propel “Telstar” to international fame back in 1962. With the Stones’ Mick Jagger and Brian Jones in attendance, they made fairly short work of the new tune, McCartney overdubbing bass and piano parts, along with Harrison on lead guitar and Starr on drums. At one point, Kramer even pitched in with a turn at the studio’s vibraphone. In the wee hours of the morning, as John and the other Beatles sang the play-out for “Baby, You’re a Rich Man,” John can be heard aiming a satiric barb at the Beatles’ manager, ad-libbing, “Baby, you’re a rich fag Jew.” By this period, Brian had shrewdly made himself scarce in the studio, having been rebuffed on several occasions when he attempted to make suggestions about the band’s musical direction. In addition to overseeing the Sgt. Pepper launch, Brian was growing increasingly paranoid about the band’s drug use—and whether its public disclosure might result in some future PR disaster—while also privately hoping that Harrison would tone down his infatuation with Eastern music. As he confided in Nat Weiss at the time, “I wish George would stop making such a big issue of the sitar and just use it instead of getting it out of context.”13
By the very next evening, the bandmates were back in the studio working on a new composition—this one slated explicitly for Yellow Submarine—titled “All Together Now.” An upbeat children’s song from Lennon and McCartney in the same whimsical vein as “Yellow Submarine,” Lennon played a harmonica part on a Beatles song for the first time in two years. The song concluded with a lighthearted sing-along that slowly gathers up speed before galloping into a sudden climax. But in contrast with their experiences back at Olympic earlier that same morning, Martin was absent from the producer’s chair, with Emerick sitting in for him. For his part, George was already making his way toward the English Channel, bound for a three-week jaunt in France. As George later recalled, “I knew as Pepper was coming to a close that it was the end of a chapter in our lives. Judy, my wife, who had been pregnant all this time, needed a holiday as much as I did. We left Britain on 12 May, despite the fact that the Beatles wanted to, and did, record ‘All Together Now’ with Geoff Emerick looking after them in my absence. We set off in our little Triumph Herald for France and Italy, and had a lovely holiday buzzing about by the sea. We were a day late getting back, coming home to all the furor of the album’s release on 1 June.”14
And what a furor it was. With his heavily pregnant wife by his side, George found himself in the eye of a very different storm than the one he had left only a few weeks earlier. In fact, the long-player had already hit the shops by the time George and Judy had rolled back into London from their holiday abroad. Released early, on May 26, in the United Kingdom after pirate radio had already begun playing it nonstop, and without bothering with the niceties of commercial interruption, Sgt. Pepper had been an instant blockbuster. The long-player debuted at number one on the UK charts, selling 250,000 copies during its first seven days of release and holding down the top spot for twenty-two consecutive weeks. Stateside, Sgt. Pepper quickly ruled the pop-music roost, lording over the Billboard charts for fifteen uninterrupted weeks and selling 2.5 million units during the summer months alone. Like their British counterparts, American radio stations kept the LP in heavy rotation. Writing in 1968, Rolling Stone magazine’s Langdon Winner described the album’s release as a great moment of cultural unification—rivaling, if not exceeding, the night the Beatles made their American debut on The Ed Sullivan Show:
The closest Western Civilization has come to unity since the Congress of Vienna in 1815 was the week the Sgt. Pepper album was released. In every city in Europe and America the stereo systems and the radio played, “What would you think if I sang out of tune . . . Woke up, got out of bed . . . looked much older, and the bag across her shoulder . . . in the sky with diamonds, Lucy in the . . .” and everyone listened. At the time, I happened to be driving across the country on Interstate 80. In each city where I stopped for gas or food—Laramie, Ogallala, Moline, South Bend—the melodies wafted in from some far-off transistor radio or portable hi-fi. It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever heard. For a brief while, the irreparable fragmented consciousness of the West was unified, at least in the minds of the young.
For McCartney, Sgt. Pepper’s resounding impact would become clear much closer to home and only a few days into its release. On June 4, the Jimi Hendrix Experience played London’s Saville Theatre, the old vaudeville house on Shaftesbury Avenue that Epstein had taken over back in April 1965. McCartney and Harrison were in attendance that night as the American guitar hero blew the audience away with a sizzling rendition of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” a song that bore Hendrix’s unmistakable influence and that, amazingly, had only just been released.15
As striking as Sgt. Pepper’s sales figures and critical acclaim were, the impact of the LP’s revolutionary music had been matched for many consumers of the day by the album’s stunning cover art. Peter Blake, Jann Haworth, Michael Cooper, and their team had clearly accomplished their objective, creating an artistic design wholly appropriate for the long-player’s avant-garde aspirations. The center of the unusual cover art featured the Beatles themselves, decked out in psychedelic military regalia as Sgt. Pepper’s mythical troupe. To their right stand the bandmates’ Beatlemania-era selves as wax figures,
along with nearly sixty of their cultural and countercultural “friends” from the annals of history, religion, Hollywood, music, sports, and literature. In addition to the high literary presence of Lewis Carroll, Edgar Allan Poe, and Oscar Wilde, the cover montage ranges from Marlon Brando’s steely visage in On the Waterfront and Bob Dylan in thoughtful repose to the stereotypically one-dimensional portrait of boxer Sonny Liston and the lost, penetrating gaze of Stuart Sutcliffe, the Beatles’ original bassist who had died of a brain hemorrhage in April 1962, two months before they first met Martin at Abbey Road. At one point, Epstein had been so concerned about the potential controversy associated with the mustached Beatles posing in front of a grave adorned with cannabis leaves that he considered releasing the album in a plain brown wrapper. As it was, the cover design had cost nearly £3,000, a considerable sum for that era in the British record industry. But it proved to be a pittance in comparison with the LP’s overall production costs, with the final tally of expenses associated with Sgt. Pepper totaling approximately £25,000. As a point of comparison, their first album, Please Please Me, had cost some £400 to produce. But ultimately, Sgt. Pepper’s cover art, like the long-player itself, would show its mettle. As with Klaus Voormann’s Revolver design the previous year, Blake and Haworth would be rewarded with a Grammy Award for Best Album Cover, Graphic Arts. Indeed, Sgt. Pepper would capture a number of the coveted statuettes at the Tenth Annual Grammy Awards in 1968, including awards for Best Engineered Recording, Non-Classical; Best Contemporary Album; and, perhaps most impressively, Album of the Year, marking the first time that a rock LP had bested that category. EMI may have been known for its penny-pinching ways, but Sgt. Pepper was an investment that, even at that early date, had already paid for itself many times over.
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