Sound Pictures Read online

  Copyright © 2018 by Kenneth Womack

  All rights reserved

  First edition

  Published by Chicago Review Press Incorporated

  814 North Franklin Street

  Chicago, Illinois 60610

  ISBN 978-0-912777-77-1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Womack, Kenneth, author.

  Title: Sound pictures: the life of Beatles producer George Martin: the late

  years, 1966-2016 / by Kenneth Womack.

  Description: First edition. | Chicago, Illinois: Chicago Review Press, [2018

  | Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018009547 (print) | LCCN 2018011496 (ebook) | ISBN 9780912777757 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9780912777764 (kindle) | ISBN 9780912777771 (epub) | ISBN 9780912777740 (cloth)

  Subjects: LCSH: Martin, George, 1926-2016. | Sound recording executives an

  producers—England—Biography. | Beatles. | LCGFT: Biographies.

  Classification: LCC ML429.M34 (ebook) | LCC ML429.M34 W67 2018 (print)

  | DDC 781.66/149092 [B] —dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018009547

  Typesetting: Nord Compo

  Printed in the United States of America

  5 4 3 2 1

  This digital document has been produced by Nord Compo.

  For Becca and PMo:

  All You Need Is Love!

  We should always remember that sensitiveness and emotion

  constitute the real content of a work of art.

  —Maurice Ravel

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication Page

  Prologue: Get Back to Where You Once Belonged

  1 You Say It's Your Birthday!

  2 “Why Can't We Cut a Record Like That?”

  3 Every Sound There Is

  4 A Rube Goldberg Approach to Recording

  5 Collective Madness

  6 Abracadabra

  7 The Jesus Christ Tour

  8 Floating on AIR

  9 A Wistful Little Tune

  10 Carnivals of Light

  11 Home and Dry

  12 The Song That Got Away

  13 The Chicken Became the Guitar

  14 Good Night, Sweet Prince

  15 “We've Fuckin' Had It”

  16 All That and a Bar of Chocolate

  17 The Great Tape Recorder Robbery

  18 Up on the Roof

  19 Come Together

  20 Sentimental Journeys

  21 The Emerald Isle of the Caribbean

  22 “A Series of One-Night Stands”

  23 Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

  24 Grow Old with Me

  Epilogue: Swan Songs

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Photos Insert

  Prologue

  Get Back to Where

  You Once Belonged

  * * *

  FOR GEORGE MARTIN, it came in the form of a most unexpected telephone call. And from no less than Paul McCartney.

  It was a late spring day in 1969, and England’s most esteemed record producer was sitting in his office on London’s Park Street, toiling away at AIR (Associated Independent Recording), the company he founded four years earlier after experiencing one rebuff too many at the hands of the vaunted EMI Group.

  And what a rebuff it had been. After leading EMI’s Parlophone Records label with a steady hand for more than a decade, the normally staid George simply couldn’t take it anymore. Within the space of a scant eighteen months—from the autumn of 1962 through the spring of 1964—he had transformed Parlophone from a modest comedy imprint into EMI’s most valuable, blue-chip musical property. His production had earned EMI a king’s ransom many times over—tens of millions of pounds, quite literally—and what did he have to show for it? In 1963, his salary amounted to a paltry £3,000 during a year in which the records he produced held the number-one position on the British charts for a phenomenal thirty-seven weeks.1

  But by the spring of 1969, the high tide of Beatlemania was just a memory. As the days and weeks passed since he had last seen the bandmates, the man whom the Beatles lovingly referred to as “Big George” had begun to assume that he would never work with the group again. Indeed, it was the longest he’d gone without seeing them since their February 1968 sojourn to Rishikesh in the company of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Only this time, it was different. This time it had seemed eminently more final.

  On the one hand, George was relieved by the respite, having grown tired of the emotional roller coaster. The heartbreak had simply become too much to bear. Yet on the other hand, he was terribly sad to see them go out with a whimper after such masterworks as Rubber Soul, Revolver, and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Surely, their last gasp wouldn’t be in the form of the failed Get Back LP, with all of the attendant infighting and the would-be album’s crude and haphazard production efforts?

  “What a shame to end like this,” George thought to himself at the time. But then, to his great surprise, Paul had phoned him out of the blue. So unexpected, yet at the same time, so very welcome to George’s ears. Paul wasted little time in getting down to business: “We’re going to make another record,” he announced. “Would you like to produce it?” For his part, George’s reply was immediate and firm. “Only if you let me produce it the way we used to,” he answered. “We do want to do that,” said Paul. “John included?” asked George, overbrimming with caution. “Yes,” Paul replied. And then, as an afterthought: “Honestly.”2

  For all of his understandable hesitation in that call, George was undeniably intrigued. Only a short time later, he was back in the familiar environs of Studio 2, assisting Paul in nailing down a lead vocal in the service of a new and as of yet untitled Beatles album. But as Paul’s fellow band members assembled in the studio in the coming days for one more stab at greatness, George worried, justifiably, whether or not they could recapture the magic of days gone by.

  Was it even possible, at this late date, to take the Beatles’ sad song and make it better?

  1

  You Say

  It’s Your Birthday!

  * * *

  ON JANUARY 3, 1966, George Martin celebrated his fortieth birthday with his fiancée Judy Lockhart Smith by his side. With marriage in the offing, George’s future shone brightly. On the professional front, he had just completed production work on Rubber Soul, the Beatles’ latest studio album and their sixth straight UK chart-topper. The long-player had proven to be pioneering in every sense of the word. As George later observed, “I think Rubber Soul was the first of the albums that presented a new Beatles to the world. Up to this point, we had been making albums that were rather like a collection of their singles and now we really were beginning to think about albums as a bit of art in their own right. We were thinking about the album as an entity of its own, and Rubber Soul was the first one to emerge in this way.” Like Paul McCartney, George perceived the album as a result of a growing collaboration between himself and the Beatles, as opposed to the more authoritative position that he had assumed with earlier projects. Previously, George “had a lot of control—we used to record the stuff, and leave him to mix it, pick a single, everything,” Paul later remarked. “After a while though, we got so into recording we’d stay behind while he mixed it, watching what he was doing.” But for his part, John Lennon had already begun to see the bandmates’ working relationship with George evolving even further still. “We were getting better technically and musically, that’s all. We finally took over the studio,” John observed. “With Rubber Soul, we were more precise abou
t making the album—that’s all. We took over the cover and everything.”1

  Forced to produce the long-player between the Beatles’ stints on the road, George had delivered Rubber Soul in breakneck fashion. Recorded between October 12 and November 15, 1965, the album was mastered for release and in the shops by December 3, along with the band’s latest single, “Day Tripper” backed with “We Can Work It Out.” In the space of slightly more than fifty days, George and the Beatles had brought sixteen new tracks to fruition and into the hands of Beatles fans across the globe. Such was the pace in those heady days of midperiod Beatlemania. As it happened, there was no rest for the bandmates, who performed eighteen concerts that same month on their UK winter tour. Not surprisingly, by the time the new year rolled around, the Beatles were drained. But the same could hardly be said for their producer, who had just concluded another banner year in which his acts had reigned atop the charts, and who also ended his long-standing employment with the EMI Group to establish a consortium of producers known as Associated Independent Recording—or AIR for short. But rather than giving in to exhaustion, George had been buoyed by the exhilarating experience of going into business for himself. As George later observed, “My workload was enormous so that I was spending more time in the studio than I was anywhere else. And I found myself completely and utterly wrapped up in my work.”2

  By Thursday, January 6, 1966, George was back in the studio with the Beatles. Only this time, George and the bandmates weren’t in the studio to tackle new material for their waiting world of hungry consumers. And the studio, for that matter, wasn’t the friendly environs of good old Number 2 at Abbey Road that they knew so well. Instead, George and the Beatles had gathered a few miles further south at Cine-Tele Sound Studios (CTS). Located in Kensington Gardens Square in London’s tony Bayswater district, CTS opened for business in 1956, having been constructed in a converted banquet hall that formerly served Whiteley’s Gentleman’s Dining Club. With its ornate, crown-molded ceilings reaching a height of twenty-six feet, the banquet hall was rather large, measuring forty feet across and eighty-five feet deep. During its heyday, the hall had also functioned as a runway for parading the latest European fashions. But by the time that George and the Beatles alighted there in January 1966, the cavernous space enjoyed renown as the go-to place for cinema and television soundtrack recording. George himself had recorded there many times as the bandleader behind the George Martin Orchestra. In the mid-1960s, George lauded CTS as “the best film-recording studio in London.” Indeed, as a converted recording studio space, it didn’t disappoint. CTS could accommodate some sixty-five musicians and—most importantly for George’s purposes—the room produced a natural reverberation of 0.8 seconds.3

  When George and the bandmates assembled at CTS on that frigid Thursday morning, they had come expressly for the reverb. With only a matter of hours to spare, they had been tasked with touching up—if not rerecording entirely—the ragged audio from the group’s August 15, 1965, performance at New York City’s Shea Stadium, where they had delivered a record-setting concert for more than fifty-five thousand screaming fans. With its natural reverb, CTS seemed like the perfect venue for carrying out the necessary touch-up work for the audio portion of their thirty-four-minute gig. According to chief maintenance engineer Peter Harris, the building had one major drawback: “Underneath the studio were the storage cellars of the furniture company next door (Frederick Lawrence & Co.), so at crucial times you’d hear these steel-wheeled trolleys being trundled around downstairs. One had to rush round and beg the gentleman who controlled the loading bay to get these guys to lay off for a little while.”4

  As it happened, George and the Beatles’ mission at CTS was time sensitive. BBC One was slated to broadcast a documentary devoted to the Shea Stadium concert on March 1, and the existing audio simply wasn’t up to par. This issue was of paramount concern to the bandmates, given that manager Brian Epstein’s NEMS Enterprises, along with the Beatles’ Subafilms and American television personality Ed Sullivan, were acting as coproducers for the project. George and the Beatles had pointedly refused to release their 1964 and 1965 Hollywood Bowl performances given the atrocious state of the original recordings. But with NEMS’s own money on the line, things were very different this time around. George and the Beatles needed to clean up the Shea recordings—and fast.

  The Shea Stadium concert had originally been filmed under the direction of M. Clay Adams and cinematographer Andrew Laszlo, who deployed fourteen cameras to capture footage of the group and the unbridled euphoria of their multitudinous fans. The Shea audio had been recorded by Fred Bosch, a Cinerama engineer who had to resort to recording the vocals directly from the stadium’s column speakers arrayed around the playing field. According to Bill Hanley, the engineer who mixed the Beatles’ 1966 Shea concert, “The delay, combining those field speakers and the screaming house speakers, would have been atrocious; it would have been a horror show.” During the 1965 concert, Bosch and Bob Fine, who served as the original sound mixer, were stationed below the elevated stage platform. As Fine’s son Tom later observed, the mixers had been built “for P.A. and broadcast use. They weren’t designed for a guy screaming rock and roll into a microphone. The overloading could have started at the input transformer.”5

  With the Beatles’ raucous sound blaring through the stadium speakers blending with fifty-five thousand boisterous fans into an unholy cacophony, Bosch and Fine never really had a chance. As Tom Fine later observed, “Everything was really primitive then. You can’t look at this from a modern perspective. These guys had small space and limited time. They just set up whatever worked. This was the beginning of stadium rock P.A.—it had never been done before.” The Beatles performed a dozen songs during the thirty-four-minute show. Most of the band’s lead vocals were heavily distorted given the brutal conditions inside the stadium. In truth, there was very little Fine could do to capture a passable recording. As Abbey Road engineer Sam Okell remarked, Fine was standing “in the middle of a baseball field, with headphones on and he can’t hear anything. It’s absolutely crazy they got anything.”6

  On the Wednesday afternoon before the CTS session, Martin and Adams assembled at Abbey Road to cobble together a game plan for salvaging the Shea recordings. Adams had flown in from New York City earlier in the week in order to work with George at CTS to bring the audio up to snuff—or, failing that, to a much less embarrassing sound than existed in the original recording. Working from Fine’s mix, which Fine had prepared back on December 2, Martin and Adams had their work cut out for them. John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s vocal recordings were particularly dreadful on “Twist and Shout” and “She’s a Woman,” while Ringo Starr’s lead vocal was inexplicably dropped from “Act Naturally.” A number of the songs suffered from recording hiccups and instrumental drops, especially “I’m Down,” which featured Lennon playing a lively Vox Continental organ. In a January 10, 1966, letter to his son Michael, Adams described Martin as being “a fine person—very thoughtful, cooperative, and very ‘giving’ of himself. He has been recording the Beatles as their A&R (artists and repertoire) man ever since the beginning.” Observing the CTS recording sessions the next day, Adams remarked that the bandmates “really look up to George Martin. Whenever they are recording, they do exactly what he tells them and they take his criticisms to the letter.” Adams later joined Martin at AIR’s Park Street offices, where he met Ron Richards, John Burgess, and Peter Sullivan, Martin’s business partners in his post-EMI career.7 For dubbing purposes, Adams had brought a rough cut of the documentary to serve as a guide for overdubbing the Beatles’ new vocals and instrumentation onto Fine’s December 2 mix. In Adams’s recollections, Martin quickly diagnosed the problem with the original recordings as being weak on the “low end”—namely, McCartney’s bass and Starr’s drums. Living in Central London, McCartney arrived at CTS first. In short order, roadie Mal Evans set up an amplifier and McCartney began recording new bass lines to accompany Fine’s mix. Ad
ams recalled that McCartney was “playing bass notes so loud they felt like they were loosening the fillings in your teeth.”8

  An hour later, the other three Beatles arrived. Only they couldn’t get started, as their guitars hadn’t been delivered to the studio. Eventually, Evans and Alf Bicknell, the Beatles’ driver, managed to retrieve the bandmates’ guitars, and by early afternoon they were finally ready to go. Adams had described their mission as needing to “fortify” Fine’s mix, and the bandmates took to aping Adams at nearly every turn. “How are we doing, Clay, did we fortify that one okay?” McCartney asked. As the session proceeded, Martin led the Beatles through complete remakes of “Ticket to Ride,” “I Feel Fine,” and “Help!” With the bandmates unable to simply “fortify” “Twist and Shout” into shape, Martin helpfully provided Adams with unreleased audio for the song from the band’s August 30, 1965, concert at the Hollywood Bowl, their last appearance in that august West Coast venue. Unable to salvage “Act Naturally,” Martin provided Adams with the original master recording from the Help! long-player, which the Beatles’ producer had “sweetened” with crowd noise. While Martin and the bandmates had to contend with less-than-stellar audio recordings, Adams was impressed with their ability to match their studio performances with the images on the documentary. As Adams’s son Michael later recalled, “My dad said he was amazed by the Beatles’ ability to sync precisely to picture, particularly when they were patching their vocals. They could match completely what they did onstage.” By January 25, Adams had returned to New York City, where he prepared a mono mix of Martin’s CTS recording. Broadcast on the BBC on March 1, The Beatles at Shea Stadium documentary wouldn’t debut in the United States until January 10, 1967, when it was finally broadcast on ABC television.9

  For George, recording in a pinch had long been the norm—whether he was working with the Beatles or carrying out his new freelance professional lifestyle with his partners at AIR. As it happened, life at AIR had started out rather slowly as far as hit making went. The Beatles were AIR’s mainstay, “fireproof” act as far as their producer was concerned, and by this juncture their track record in the United Kingdom had resulted in six straight number-one long-players and eight chart-topping singles—nine if you count “Please Please Me,” which landed the top spot on New Musical Express (NME) and Melody Maker, respectively, but came in second on Record Retailer, the official UK charts for much of the 1960s. But even with the Beatles’ staggering sales returns, George needed to supplement AIR’s balance sheet with a few hitmakers of their own if they were going to prosper, since the percentage he received for new acts was considerably higher. George was ever mindful of AIR’s motto—“Built by producers, for producers”—and he knew that if his partnership was going to succeed in the long run, it would do so on the backs of a new stable of artists.10