Sound Pictures Page 3

  As he was putting the finishing touches on Cilla Sings a Rainbow, George found himself on the fringes of a lawsuit involving the Who and their estranged producer, American expatriate Shel Talmy. For his part, Martin had long admired Talmy, who had thrown caution to the wind and immigrated to the United Kingdom in 1962, slowly building up a stable of hit acts like the Kinks and the Who as an independent record producer. Martin admired the twenty-eight-year-old Talmy’s pluck, and his own pursuit of the Action as potential hitmakers likely owed its genesis to the younger man’s raucous-sounding records, especially his breakthrough work with the Kinks’ lacerating “You Really Got Me.” Like the other independents of his day, Talmy took considerable risk when he assumed out-of-pocket costs, including studio rental fees, studio musicians, and personnel expenses, but he stood to make big bucks if his records ascended the charts and generated strong sales receipts. Martin came to Talmy’s defense after the young producer and the Who parted ways after a contractual disagreement. Talmy had signed the Who after watching them rehearse, and he recorded their breakout tune “I Can’t Explain” in November 1964 at London’s Pye Studios. But things came to a head after the December 1965 release of the Who’s debut LP, My Generation, which scored a top-five showing in the United Kingdom and was likely denied the number-one spot because of the Rubber Soul juggernaut. The band’s relationship with Talmy soured after they accused him of being in cahoots with Decca Records, the American distributor of their debut album, which was titled The Who Sings My Generation in the US marketplace. The Who blamed Talmy and Decca for the LP’s lackluster showing in North America, and they decided to break their contract with their producer.21

  The Who’s lawsuit with Talmy came about after they released the song “Instant Party” as the B-side of “Substitute” on March 7, 1966. Knowing that the Who had simply rerecorded “Circles,” an earlier Talmy production, and renamed it, Talmy leaped into action, seeking an emergency injunction. As the Who’s Pete Townshend later recalled, “We did two versions of ‘Circles,’ which were both identical because they were both copies of my demo. Shel put in a High Court injunction, saying there was copyright in the recording. In other words, if you’re a record producer and you produce a song with a group, and you make a creative contribution, then you own that sound. He took it to the high-court judge and he said things like ‘And then on bar 36 I suggested to the lead guitarist that he play a diminuendo, forget the adagio, and play 36 bars modulating to the key of E flat,’ which was all total bullshit—he used to fall asleep at the desk.” In his sworn affidavit on Talmy’s behalf, Martin attested to his long-standing and now vaunted place in the British record industry, which by this point spanned nearly sixteen years. With his bona fides established, Martin affirmed that the recordings of “Circles” and “Instant Party” were “substantially the same,” albeit with “one or two minor and insignificant differences.” For Martin, being called upon to provide expert testimony was a far cry from his more desperate, pre-Beatles times in 1960, when he had been accused by Melody Maker of “piracy” for recording a near-perfect copy of American phenom Brian Hyland’s “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” with eighteen-year-old Brit Paul Hanford. As for Talmy and the Who, Martin’s affidavit clearly made a difference, with the warring parties working out an agreement within the month in Talmy’s favor in which the Who would provide the producer with a percentage of their future royalties.22

  But by that juncture, George’s mind had clearly drifted to more pressing matters. He had found himself in limbo with the Beatles across the early months of 1966, which was undoubtedly an issue of great concern for the producer, who was now an independent in his own right. The bandmates were at a crossroads of sorts after completing work on Rubber Soul in November and perhaps even more significantly, wrapping up their final UK concert tour with a pair of shows at the Capitol Cinema in Cardiff. They had privately decided that their touring days were coming to an end. For his part, Epstein doubted their resolve. But the evidence of their shifting intentions was hidden in plain sight.

  During the 1963 and 1964 holiday seasons, Epstein had staged a series of sold-out Beatles Christmas concerts. But in December 1965, the bandmates simply weren’t having it. The UK winter tour was their concession to Epstein’s abiding desire to keep them in the public eye—but it would be one of their last. Like other rock ’n’ roll impresarios, Epstein was concerned that the Beatles’ fame could be fleeting—that they might end up being yet another “flash in the pan.” After all, Beatlemania had been built, brick by brick, on the foundation of standout performances on Val Parnell’s Sunday Night at the London Palladium in October 1963 and The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964. But George understood the Beatles’ frustrations, which went well beyond life on the road. He had long harbored concerns about their safety, as he had personally observed the tumult in such faraway locales as Colorado’s Red Rocks Amphitheatre and California’s Hollywood Bowl. At their last show in Cardiff, a fan had rushed the stage as John introduced “Day Tripper,” reminding the bandmates yet again how vulnerable they were to the selfsame fans who had elevated them to global stardom. For Martin, the writing was clearly on the wall as far as the Beatles were concerned. “By 1966, the Beatles were in a car that was going downhill very fast,” he later recalled. “This is not to say that their career was going downhill; but they were a media juggernaut that was increasingly out of their manager Brian Epstein’s control—and everyone else’s, for that matter. It wasn’t so much that somebody was pressing the accelerator too hard; it was that nobody had their foot on the brake.” And when it came to the Beatles, Martin increasingly recognized that he, too, was complicit in the band’s headlong rush into the unknown, that he, too, had effectively taken his hand off the brake.23

  2

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

  * * *

  BY THE EARLY MONTHS of 1966, it was far more than just concert tours—and the Beatles’ prison-like progress from one faceless city to another—that plagued the bandmates. By this point, their collaboration with George had transformed their musical output from primitive beat numbers into more mature recordings that addressed weightier subject matter, including loneliness, infidelity, and the rage for individuality in such songs as “Yesterday,” “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown),” and “Nowhere Man,” respectively. By expanding their notions of the recording studio—and how technology could propel their visions into ever more vivid representations of sound and language—George had opened up a world of uncharted territory for the Beatles. With 1965’s Help! and Rubber Soul long-players, the Beatles had grown their demographic considerably beyond teeny boppers and young adults. By the dawn of 1966, their fan base was bursting at the seams and now included legions of new fans who had seen themselves reflected in the band’s evolving sound. But for all the adulation that they enjoyed, the Beatles themselves still felt isolated by their creative vision, which they increasingly found nearly impossible to re-create in front of thousands of screaming fans who wanted nothing more than to hear the likes of “She Loves You” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand” blaring from inadequate PA systems in far-flung concert halls across Great Britain and the United States. As Ringo later recalled, “The realization was really kicking in that nobody was listening. And that was okay at the beginning, but even worse than that was we were playing so bad. I just felt we’re playing really bad. Why I joined the Beatles was because they were the best band in Liverpool. I always wanted to play with good players—that’s what it was all about. First and foremost, we were musicians.”1

  By this point, the Beatles simply wanted their music to be heard, to be understood for what they had accomplished in just a few short years. As John had remarked to NME’s Keith Altham, “There are only about a hundred people in the world who really understand what our music is all about.” In an August 24 press conference in Los Angeles at Capitol Records’ famous tower, McCartney deployed humor in an effort to deflect a reporter
’s question about the significance of the band’s music and its attendant meanings:

  Reporter: “I’d like to direct this question to Messrs. Lennon and McCartney. In a recent article, Time magazine put down pop music. And they referred to ‘Day Tripper’ as being about a prostitute . . . and ‘Norwegian Wood’ as being about a lesbian. . . . I just wanted to know what your intent was when you wrote it, and what your feeling is about the Time magazine criticism of the music that is being written today.”

  McCartney: “We were just trying to write songs about prostitutes and lesbians, that’s all.”

  And while they were clearly irritated by the culture’s seeming inability to grasp the meaning behind their work, they were far more rankled by their increasingly slipshod stage work. By the mid-1960s, the Beatles’ shoddy live performances had become a matter of concern for Paul, who worried that their musicianship was suffering under the harsh sonic conditions inherent in contemporary concert technology. “We were getting worse and worse as a band while all those people were screaming,” he remembered. “It was lovely that they liked us, but we couldn’t hear to play. So the only place we could develop was in the studio.” But the Beatles also wanted their recordings to be made with the greatest possible fidelity, an aspect of their sound that they felt had been hampered by Abbey Road’s outdated technology. George understood this perspective implicitly. Along with the bandmates, he had been clamoring for EMI to install newfangled equipment at Abbey Road, although their individual and collective voices inevitably fell on deaf ears given the austere nature of EMI’s studio mind-set. It is a great irony that George and the Beatles, having generated millions of record sales, were unable to throw their weight around and demand technological enhancements at EMI Studios.2

  But in truth, the recalcitrance had more to do with the sterile, paternalistic culture that existed at Abbey Road at the time as opposed to the band’s stature in the recording industry. As George later recalled, “What EMI did for them was to put in special lighting,” which essentially amounted to “three fluorescent tubes—one white, one red, and one blue.” As Norman Smith pointed out, the Beatles “were screaming for more sophisticated equipment, more flexible equipment, that could give better definition.” For his part, Harrison put things in decidedly more blunt terms, realizing the irony in the stark conditions under which the biggest band in the world produced their legendary records: “It was all done very clinically, that’s the joke,” he later remarked. “We were in this big white room that was very dirty and hadn’t been painted in years, and it had all these old sound baffles hanging down that were all dirty and broken. There was this huge big hanging light, there was no window, no daylight. It was a very clinical, not very nice atmosphere. When you think of the songs that were made in that studio, it’s amazing because there was no atmosphere in there, we had to make the atmosphere.” In many ways, EMI’s top-down approach to the recording studio—in elevating management’s position over the needs of the real makers of music—underscored many of the reasons that Martin had cited for leaving the record conglomerate the previous fall.3

  Unbeknownst to George at that time, the bandmates had begun taking concrete steps to do something about their lingering dismay over EMI Studios’ intractable ways. In retrospect, they can be understood as engaging in a pointed effort to transform themselves from a touring band into a studio act. With this notion in mind, the Beatles dispatched Brian Epstein to Memphis, Tennessee, in March in order to scout out recording studios with equipment superior to the existing technology at Abbey Road. The bandmates were especially interested in being able to capture the “Stax sound” associated with such American acts as Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, and Booker T. and the MG’s, among others. Stax Studio was particularly alluring to the Beatles because of the unique sound that the facility produced due to the cinema’s sharply sloping floor. As Paul remarked at the time, “The equipment in most British recording studios is much better than it is in the States. But there’s some extra bit they get to the sound over there that we haven’t quite got. You put a record of ours [on after] an American record and you’ll find the American record is always a fraction louder and it has a lucid something I can’t explain.” The intent behind Paul’s words about “most British recording studios” offered a subtle hint about how the Beatles viewed Abbey Road. But there were plenty of recent examples that the Beatles could recount—most significantly, the Rolling Stones’ international hit “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” which they had recorded at Chicago’s Chess Studios and Hollywood’s RCA Studios.

  Like McCartney, Harrison was interested in capturing the raw and punchy American sound on their records. As he remarked to Beatles Book Monthly, the band’s official fan club magazine, “Some terrific records have been made. They get these great band sounds as well. Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding and lots of them record in Memphis. Even if we didn’t use some local musicians on the actual sessions, there’d be this great atmosphere. They concentrate on rhythm & blues and rock in Memphis.” In a conversation with Beatles publicity officer Tony Barrow, Harrison made special note of American recording engineers, whom he suspected were superior to their British counterparts: “The recording engineers there are specialists. It’s not just a job to them. They love our kind of music. There’d be this great atmosphere.” He later pointed out that recording overseas might even act as a creative catalyst for the group, a means for testing their mettle as musicians in unfamiliar environs. “It’ll shake up everything,” said Harrison. “You don’t grow as a band unless you shake things up, you know.”4

  John took things a step further, even going so far as to suggest that they might try their hand with an American producer to go along with their desire to record on American soil. As he later remarked, “Obviously we’d discussed not using George, even when we’d used him, just for a change. America being the dream place, we were always suspicious that American studios were much better than ours, than EMI. It wasn’t so true, of course, when we got over there. It was just that the early Sun Records were something special, and a few records that [Phil] Spector and some other people had made. It was usually the man, and not the studio. So we often talked about Spector, that we’d like to work with him.”5

  But with Memphis in the offing, the man of the moment for Lennon was none other than Steve Cropper, the legendary guitarist with Booker T. and the MG’s, as well as a member of the Stax house band. At twenty-four years old, Cropper was the hippest American producer in the business, as well as the composer behind such classic tunes as Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour” and Eddie Floyd’s “Knock on Wood,” among others. As for Cropper himself, the rhythm-and-blues guitarist had no idea why the Beatles were interested in working with him beyond the opportunity to record at Stax. As Cropper later remarked, “In those days there was not much mention of George Martin, at least in Memphis. We also didn’t listen to much Beatle or pop music. Only what was played on radio. I just assumed from what I was told by Epstein that they wanted me to produce them. We never got far enough to discuss engineers or other musicians’ involvement. Brian Epstein was around for a couple of days. He only came to the studio to discuss things so I didn’t hang with him or anything. We talked a few times by phone when he returned to England.”6

  Things may have been proceeding casually as far as Cropper was concerned, but Epstein was serious enough to book a starting date of April 9 for the Beatles to begin working at Stax. For his part, Epstein had already been considering security issues and accommodations during the Beatles’ visit. Elvis Presley had even offered to house the group and their entourage at Graceland. While Epstein had demanded that the band’s visit be held in absolute secrecy, word got out on March 31, when the Memphis Press-Scimitar reported that the group would be arriving in two weeks to record at Stax with studio owner Jim Stewart as producer, Cropper serving as arranger, and Atlantic Records’ Tom Dowd supervising the sessions. Upset by this turn of events, Epstein suggested an abrupt change of course in
a telephone call with Cropper, who later recalled that “he contacted me and asked if I would be willing to come to New York and record them at Atlantic’s studio. He felt the Beatles would be safer there. I told him I would be willing if that was what the band wanted.”7

  So why did the Beatles give up on their dream of recording at Stax with a bona fide American producer? And more importantly, where did Martin figure in these decisions regarding the band’s immediate future? In 1964, he and Brian had formulated a rudimentary plan of releasing new Beatles product in the form of a new single every three months, two albums per year, and a feature film. From 1963 through 1965, they had produced six albums together, along with a whole raft of hit singles. But 1966, alas, would be different. It already appeared as though there would be no new Beatles film that year—indeed, only a few months earlier, they had rejected producer Walter Shenson’s pitch for a third United Artists movie titled A Talent for Loving that would have depicted the four Beatles as Old West characters. But at this point, as Brian and the bandmates considered veering away from their planned annual output, George had seemingly been left out of the equation and was possibly even entirely in the dark about the Beatles’ thinking. At the same time, there was little doubt that he agreed with the bandmates’ position vis-à-vis American studios, and he, too, wanted to emulate the sound that they created. As Martin later wrote, American records “were technically streets ahead of us, and they could make these records that didn’t just shout—they roared. I didn’t know how they did it. But I wanted to find out all right.” Like the Fab Four, he had been fascinated by that quintessentially American sound. As he later recalled, “The Beatles used to play me some of these records when we first met: the new, mostly black American rock ’n’ roll records. When I first came across them their favorite artists were Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins, Bo Diddley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino, Little Richard, Smokey Robinson, Roy Orbison, Buddy Holly, and, of course, Elvis Presley. ‘Have a listen to this!’ they would say. ‘Don’t you think that’s great?’ I would not hear what they heard, but I heard something that was interesting and good.”8