Sound Pictures

by Kenneth Womack

  Years earlier, when he was still slugging it out with the other EMI A&R men as Parlophone’s label head, George would almost certainly have been galled by such a turn of events. But by the time that Paramor settled down to record “Lily the Pink,” Martin would be embroiled in far more pressing matters involving the most important act in his stable. On Saturday, February 3, 1968, George reconvened with the Beatles for a quick spate of sessions before their long-planned visit to India to study Transcendental Meditation under the tutelage of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. With Lennon and Harrison scheduled to depart on February 15—and the Transcendental Meditation retreat to keep the Beatles at bay until April—time was of the essence. As always, EMI was hungry for new Beatles product to ring in the new year, and as luck would have it, McCartney had been working “on heat” and was eager to get back to Abbey Road. As with so many of the Beatles’ singles releases in the past, Paul was ready to vie with John for the A-side.

  During the February 3 afternoon session in Studio 3, George supervised the bandmates’ rehearsal for a new number from Paul called “Lady Madonna.” McCartney’s piano-boogie introduction owed a clear debt to Humphrey Lyttelton’s British trad-jazz hit, “Bad Penny Blues,” which had been produced by the late Joe Meek for Parlophone back in 1956. With Martin working up in the booth with Ken Scott and Richard Lush, the group refined a basic track in three takes, featuring McCartney’s piano and Starr’s drums. As Ringo later recalled, “We said to George Martin, ‘How did they do it on ‘Bad Penny Blues’? And he said, ‘They used brushes.’ So, we put an off-beat” on “Lady Madonna.” As the band pressed forward with the session, McCartney added a bass overdub, along with Lennon and Harrison’s fuzzed guitars. For the vocal tracks, McCartney sang lead using his “Elvis voice,” accompanied by Lennon and Harrison’s scat harmonies.6

  The next day, John presented his entry in the single sweepstakes, a haunting acoustic number titled “Across the Universe.” During that rare Beatles Sunday session, Martin and the bandmates spent nearly ten hours working on the song. For John, “Across the Universe” arrived as another found object in his songwriterly life, emerging after a late-evening tiff with his wife Cynthia. After she fell asleep, he “kept hearing these words over and over, flowing like an endless stream. I went downstairs and it turned into sort of a cosmic song.” But for John, capturing the song in the studio proved to be difficult, even as the Beatles attempted to refine a basic rhythm track over six takes. In the song’s first iteration, the instrumentation included Lennon’s acoustic guitar, Star’s tom-toms, and Harrison’s tamboura, with Emerick filtering the signal through a Leslie speaker to give it more texture. For take two, Martin recorded Lennon’s lead vocal with his own acoustic guitar accompaniment and Harrison’s sitar. By the time they reached fruition with the rhythm track, Lennon recorded a new version of his lead vocal, with Martin running the tape machine slow to afford the Beatle’s voice with a brighter sound on playback.7

  Yet Lennon and McCartney were still shaking their heads, feeling as if the song was missing some essential element. And that’s when they hit upon the idea of falsetto harmonies. Needing to round up female background singers on a Sunday night in St. John’s Wood was a relatively minor matter for the Beatles, whose fans regularly congregated outside the studio gates. In short order, McCartney dispatched Martin Benge, who was subbing for an ill Ken Scott, to the streetscape. Scanning the dozens of girls waiting outside for their heroes to emerge, Benge selected sixteen-year-old Lizzie Bravo, visiting the United Kingdom from Brazil, and seventeen-year-old Gayleen Pease, a Londoner, to join him back in Studio 3. As Benge later recalled, “They were so excited. They couldn’t believe they’d actually been invited by Paul not just inside the building but into the studio itself, to sing with the Beatles.” After they recorded their harmony vocals, singing “nothing gonna change our world,” they were escorted back outside so that George and the bandmates could superimpose a backward bass and drum track. But to John’s mind, the song still wasn’t quite right.8

  With time running out in advance of the group’s Indian jaunt, Martin and the bandmates turned to Harrison’s “The Inner Light,” which the Beatles’ lead guitarist had begun recording back in mid-January at EMI’s Bombay studio. Harrison had been working in India on his recently commissioned soundtrack for Wonderwall, a psychedelic film by first-time director Joe Massot. With Harrison sitting in the producer’s seat, the Beatle refined an instrumental track for “The Inner Light” while working with a host of Indian musicians. During a Tuesday, February 6, session in Studio 1, Martin and the Beatles—sans Starr, who was doing a guest spot on Cilla—focused their attentions on “The Inner Light,” with Harrison superimposing his lead vocals onto the existing instrumental track. As tape operator Jerry Boys later recalled, “George [Harrison] had this big thing about not wanting to sing it because he didn’t feel confident that he could do the song justice. I remember Paul saying ‘You must have a go, don’t worry about it, it’s good.’”

  With Harrison’s composition nearing fruition, Martin turned to “Lady Madonna,” for which he supervised yet another McCartney lead vocal, as well as backing vocals from Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison, singing, “See how they run.” While the three Beatles had attempted an imitation brass solo by cupping their hands around their mouths, McCartney wanted the real thing. Without missing a beat, Martin rang up Laurie Gold, EMI’s session organizer, to arrange for a quartet of saxophonists. Up first was Harry Klein, a baritone sax player whom Gold roused from his bath for the session at Abbey Road that evening. Klein suggested that Gold hire Ronnie Scott, the London jazz club owner, to play tenor sax.9

  When Klein arrived at the studio, Martin’s sax quartet was set with Scott and Klein, along with baritone and tenor sax players Bill Jackman and Bill Povey, respectively. With George and the Beatles working “on heat,” the sax men were treated to the sight of empty music stands. As Klein recalled, “There was no written music but we played around with a few riffs until Paul liked what he heard. And then we recorded it—101 times! I remember there was a big pile of meditation books in the corner of the studio, like the back room of a publisher’s office, and I also recall that they asked if we wanted a bite to eat. We were expecting a terrific meal but a few minutes later someone returned with pie and chips!” As Martin looked on, McCartney took the lead. “There was not only no prepared music for us to follow,” Povey later reported, “but when Paul called out some chords at us our first reaction was to look at each other and say, ‘Well, who plays what?’” The days when session players could expect to arrive to the sight of a carefully crafted score by Martin were no longer in vogue. And on this day, as had become an increasingly regular practice, the musicians were left to their own devices. As Jackman recalled, “Paul went through the song on the piano and we were each given a scrap of manuscript paper and a pencil to write out some notes. Had there been music we would have been in and out in about ten minutes. As it was, it took most of the evening, recording it in A-major pitch with the rhythm track playing in our headphones.”10

  With his eye on the calendar, Martin and his production team carried out a mono remixing session for Harrison’s “The Inner Light” during the February 8 session before turning back to Lennon’s “Across the Universe.” As for John, he was still at sea about the song’s instrumentation. For their next attempt, Martin chipped in with an organ part and Lennon played the Mellotron. But when Lennon proved dissatisfied with the new instrumentation for “Across the Universe,” the Beatle started anew with a tone pedal guitar part, Harrison’s maracas, and McCartney’s piano. With the next instrumentation worked out, Martin erased the backward bass and drum track, which he replaced with harmony vocals from Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison. But the real highlight for Martin and Emerick was Lennon’s remarkable vocal performance, one of the finest that he had ever committed to tape. As Emerick later recalled, “‘Across the Universe’ was such a superb performance from John. He put so much feeling into the so
ng, and his vocal was just incredible.” But to John’s mind, “Across the Universe” remained unfinished, so he dropped out of the single sweepstakes. As it happened, George’s old friend Spike Milligan was visiting the studio that night, and he made a pitch to John that the Beatles offer “Across the Universe” for an upcoming charity album for the World Wildlife Fund that the former Goon was spearheading. John accepted Spike’s entreaty with a simple “yeah, whatever.” Meanwhile, with no other credible choice in the offing, Martin went with McCartney’s “Lady Madonna” backed with Harrison’s “The Inner Light” for the upcoming single.11 Incredibly, this marked the first occasion in which a Harrison composition had appeared on a Beatles single, albeit as a B-side.

  On Sunday, February 11, Martin and the Beatles rode their latest burst of creativity to the hilt, recording a brand-new composition, Lennon’s “Hey Bulldog,” from start to finish in a single session in Studio 3. In so doing, they completed their quota of original material for the Yellow Submarine soundtrack. Led by Tony Bramwell, a camera crew was on hand in the studio that day—a rarity in George and the bandmates’ professional universe—to capture images of the Fab Four at work. The resulting footage was slated to serve as a promotional video for the “Lady Madonna” single. With Emerick and Phil McDonald joining him up in the booth, Martin recorded “Hey Bulldog” on four tracks without the necessity of a tape reduction. As the session began, John issued a single instruction to George, “Just tell us when we get a good one,” before launching into ten takes of the basic rhythm track. With Lennon’s piano, McCartney’s tambourine, Harrison’s rhythm guitar, and Starr’s drums, the basic track for “Hey Bulldog” found the bandmates at their searing, electric best. Clearly, they had turned a corner from the psychedelic impulses that had consumed their artistry in the months following the Jesus Christ tour. During the subsequent overdubs, Martin supervised the recording of McCartney’s fuzz bass line, along with guitar doubling from Harrison and Starr adding a snare drum part to the beat. Up next were John and Paul singing the vocal track, with John belting out his lead vocals with a powerful, unflinching rasp. The track ended with John and Paul clowning around, barking and howling into the fade-out. The final overdub found Lennon borrowing Harrison’s Gibson SG Standard and breaking off a scorching guitar solo. During the remixing session later that evening, George afforded “Hey Bulldog” with a healthy dose of ADT, and the Beatles’ contribution was all but complete.12

  Martin carried out a mono mixing session for “Lady Madonna” on February 15, the day on which Lennon and Harrison, anxious to begin their sojourn, embarked for India, and the Beatles’ latest UK single was ready for the marketplace. Released on March 15, “Lady Madonna” backed with “The Inner Light” topped the charts, extending the bandmates’ post–“Strawberry Fields Forever” backed with “Penny Lane” roll yet again. The reviews for “Lady Madonna” were oddly mixed, with Melody Maker’s Chris Welch reporting that the “best bit is the piano intro, then you can have fun wondering why Paul sounds like Ringo.” Ultimately, Welch wrote, “I can’t really see this being a hit.” Stateside, where the single topped out at number four, Billboard proclaimed “Lady Madonna” as a “powerful blues rocker.” Clearly, Welch had underestimated the Beatles’ lingering appeal. For his part, George knew that the Beatles had plenty upside left in terms of creativity—the recent setback with the Magical Mystery Tour television movie notwithstanding. George, like Brian, recognized the potential that the Yellow Submarine feature film portended in terms of widening the Beatles’ demographic even further.13

  With the Beatles out of the picture for the next few months, George settled into scoring the Yellow Submarine orchestral soundtrack. The bandmates continued to be indifferent to the animated film, only acknowledging that they were contractually bound to participate in its soundtrack. And while they may have seemed dismayed by the whole business, they good-naturedly filmed a live-action, one-minute cameo back on January 25 at Twickenham Studios. In the footage, the Beatles can be seen cheerfully leading a movie-ending sing-along to “All Together Now.” But in the recording studio, they had been anything but delighted. As producer Al Brodax later reported, “Apparently, they would say, ‘this is a lousy song, let’s give it to Brodax.’” For Brodax, the saving grace of the project was Martin, particularly after Epstein’s untimely death. “George is a prince of a man,” Brodax later wrote, “unflappable, charming, the ultimate in English gentlemanliness.” Brodax saw their kinship as being rooted in “a fraternity of humble beginnings. George is a carpenter’s son from one of London’s less affluent boroughs. I’m the son of an immigrant tailor, out of a rough Brooklyn neighborhood. Beyond these similarities, our life experiences have shaped us differently. George matures undeniably upper-class in manner and speech; I remain a product of Brooklyn’s mean streets.”14

  In this way, Brodax and Martin became natural allies. For his part, George was painfully honest with the film’s producer about the band’s musical contributions, which, in Martin’s words, amounted to “the dregs of their inventory. Pieces they would in any case jettison: junk, file-and-forget pieces. John in particular damns the TV series, thinks Submarine will just be an embarrassing extension of that.” Martin could see the writing on the wall in terms of the precariousness of their situation. “So you broke your ass to get them their third picture solution,” he told Brodax, “and they throw a bunch of junk your way in gratitude. A good deed never goes unpunished, especially in our world.” Fortunately for Brodax, Martin was determined to be part of the solution. With director George Dunning working at a breakneck pace to complete the animation and voice overlays—the Scaffold’s Roger McGough was hired to provide Scouse-like dialogue and assorted in-jokes for the screenplay—Martin threw himself into the score. But it was not as though he had any other choice. As he later wrote, “It was done so quickly that George Dunning, the director, actually said to me, ‘We haven’t got time for you to write the music after the film is finished. You’ve got to write it as we make it.’ He gave me a movieola (an editing device through which you can view professional film) which I set up in the drawing room of my house in London, and from that I would make my own timings.”15

  George had scored soundtracks before, but Yellow Submarine was clearly going to be different. Animated films typically required years to make. By contrast, Yellow Submarine was completed, from start to finish, in the space of a single year. And the film was produced on a shoestring budget, courtesy of United Artists, of £250,000, a paltry sum for a film that featured the biggest act on the planet. But George didn’t have time to consider such details. “Once again, I was on a sharp learning curve,” he later wrote. “Not only did I have to decide (along with George Dunning) where the songs that the Beatles had supplied would go into the film, I also had to write something like an hour’s worth of original music for the background score. And for that he said, ‘I can’t really direct you on this because I am so damn busy. What I suggest is you write as much as you think is appropriate, if you don’t mind losing some of it when we come to the dub.’” As each reel of the film came off the production line, most often out of sequence, it was shipped to Martin. As he pondered each new reel, George wrote, “My job was to look through it and say, ‘Well, this scene needs some music here,’ and I would just write what I thought was appropriate. Poor George Dunning didn’t know what I was writing until the editing stage.”16

  For Martin, concocting the score for Yellow Submarine forced him to grow as a film composer in innumerable ways—not merely in terms of working under pressure but also regarding the manifold opportunities to be groundbreaking and inventive, just as he had done in his finest moments with the Beatles. As Martin later recalled, “Everything had to be tailor-made for the picture. If a door opened or a funny face appeared at a window, and those moments needed to be pointed-up, it was the musical score that had to do the job.” During the composition process, he added, “you plan whatever tempo your rhythm is going to be, and then you la
y down what is called a ‘click track.’ That is, a separate track which simply contains a click sound which appears every so many frames of film. You know that 35mm film runs at 24 frames per second, so knowing what tempo you want, you simply ask the film editor to put on a click at whatever interval you want. Then while conducting the orchestra, you wear headphones through which you can hear the clicks, and by keeping to that particular beat you ‘lock in’ the orchestra to the film. In that way you can write your score knowing that, even if something happens a third of the way or halfway through a bar, you can safely put in whatever musical effect you want, with absolute certainty that it will match the picture—that is how I did it with Yellow Submarine.”17

  In spite of the fact that scoring the animated feature was a work for hire as far as George was concerned, he pointedly drew his inspiration from Maurice Ravel, “the musician I admire most,” he later wrote. While his youth had been characterized by his early love for Claude Debussy, Martin had cleaved ever closer to Ravel throughout his Guildhall days and beyond. For Martin, Ravel “was one of the greatest orchestrators of all time.” In many ways, Martin’s score for Yellow Submarine acted as a long-playing form of homage to Ravel, whose influence can be heard in the nooks and crannies of the film’s incidental music. To George’s mind, “the astonishing man was Ravel, of whom we always think in terms of lush orchestrations. He was a very fine pianist, and—with the exception, I think, of his Piano Concerto—he always wrote his compositions as piano pieces first of all. Then he orchestrated them. I find this very curious. If I’m writing an orchestral piece, I write straight for orchestra.” As Martin discovered during the composition process for Yellow Submarine, fashioning his orchestration after Ravel provided him with a sense of liberation in the face of his looming deadline, the opportunity to take chances that he might normally have avoided.18