Sound Pictures Read online

  With the benefit of hindsight, I can equally understand George Martin’s adamant refusal to allow Norman to receive the promotion and remain as the Beatles’ engineer. There was no way George wanted another producer in the room with him when he was working with “the boys”—that would undermine his authority and place him, and everyone else, for that matter, in an extremely awkward position. George always wanted the limelight to shine on him alone. Having a peer in the control room was completely unacceptable from his point of view. Having a wet-behind-the-ears 19-year-old rookie engineer, on the other hand, was fine. Simply put, I presented no threat to him.

  If Martin had been concerned that Emerick secretly coveted his job, he had nothing about which to be even remotely concerned. “Having control over the sounds was my goal all along,” Emerick later remarked, “and I was much happier tinkering with the controls of the mixing board and coming up with new sonic innovations than I would have been going through string arrangements and organizing session bookings.”17

  For his part, Emerick directed most of his anxiety on that first night in the producer’s chair to the Beatles themselves. He had tossed and turned the night before, worried that the bandmates might not be receptive to the idea of having him in such a vaunted role. Events would shortly demonstrate that his worries had been entirely unfounded. Emerick’s value to the bandmates at this crucial juncture in their careers lay in his technical know-how. While Martin was a master of orchestration and had a natural gift for shaping the work of his artists, he lacked the vast storehouse of knowledge in terms of engineering and the nuts and bolts of record production that his younger colleague had in spades. To his credit, Emerick made it his business to possess a working understanding of the latest studio trickery and sonic innovations. By this point, he had worked with Meek on several occasions at Abbey Road. “I was enthralled with the low end on his records and with their unique coloration, which I later learned was due to his home-built compressors,” Emerick later wrote. “Joe’s tapes were distinguished by their offbeat echoes and reverbs, also the result of his self-designed equipment. The only tool we had that was roughly equivalent was EMI’s acoustic echo chamber, which sounded quite good—so good, in fact, that it was rarely available for mastering, because it was almost always in use by a recording session.” For Emerick, talented producers like Meek challenged him to learn as much as he possibly could so that when his own opportunity to shine arrived, he would be prepared to act.18

  It seems plausible in retrospect that George didn’t want to record in the United States—or at least, not at that juncture when he was trying to make a go of it with AIR—and that the Beatles knew it. Emerick would later claim to have known about the April 6 Abbey Road session with the Beatles for a solid fortnight, suggesting that Stax was old news by mid- to late March. But the band’s presence in the United Kingdom that evening also came down to something entirely different, something essential to the Beatles’ DNA as artists—namely, Lennon and McCartney’s impulsiveness as composers. The duo’s creative caprice had always been characterized by a fervent desire to bring their vision to fruition as soon as reasonably possible after first having discovered the germ of an artistic idea—whether as a result of a collaborative writing session or, as was becoming the norm, their individual efforts. Paul would later describe this rage for creation as something akin to working “on heat”—the notion that he and John would become so overwhelmed by their creative impulses that they had to get into the studio as soon as possible in order to purge the latest composition from their synapses and get on to the next thing.19

  For John and Paul, the past few months had seen their compositions beginning to accumulate at a precipitous rate. Having achieved new artistic heights with Rubber Soul, they were clearly ready to take their latest wares into the studio and bring them off—so that they could write new and better songs, of course! For Paul, the composition for which he was “on heat” may very well have been a little number that had come to him during a recent visit to Bristol, where he was in town to see Jane Asher performing on stage with the local Old Vic Company. Written from a detached perspective about an aging spinster and a lonely parish priest, Paul’s latest song was a clear departure for him, eschewing the warmth and familiarity of personal pronouns for the cold eye of a novelist. The spinster, at least at this juncture, was called Miss Daisy Hawkins, although he felt that the name seemed too contrived. As he later recalled,

  I was sitting at the piano when I thought of it. Just like Jimmy Durante. The first few bars just came to me. And I got this name in my head—“Daisy Hawkins picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been.” I don’t know why. I can hear a whole song in one chord. In fact, I think you can hear a whole song in one note, if you listen hard enough. I couldn’t think of much more, so I put it away for a day. Then the name “Father McCartney” came to me—and “all the lonely people.” But I thought people would think it was supposed to be my dad, sitting knitting his socks. Dad’s a happy lad. So I went through the telephone book and I got the name McKenzie. I was in Bristol when I decided Daisy Hawkins wasn’t a good name. I walked round looking at the shops and I saw the name Rigby. You got that? Quick pan to Bristol. I can just see this all as a Hollywood musical.

  With a surname in hand, Paul christened his spinster as Eleanor after actress Eleanor Bron, whom the Beatles had starred with in Help! during the previous year. As it happened, the name Eleanor Rigby may have been in Paul’s subconscious for much longer still. Scant yards away from the field behind St. Peter’s Church in Woolton, where Lennon and McCartney first met on July 6, 1957, lies a gravestone for one Eleanor Rigby, who had died in October 1939 at age forty-four and been buried along with her name.20

  As for John, writerly inspiration for his latest composition had been brewing since the previous year. But he wouldn’t be writing “on heat” until barely a week before George and the Beatles reconvened at Abbey Road on April 6. John had been expressly interested in capturing the essence of his recent psychedelic wanderings on record. In April 1965, his world had been transformed by the events that transpired at a dinner party with George Harrison and Pattie Boyd’s dentist, John Riley, at the home of Riley’s fiancée, Cyndy Bury. To Lennon’s surprise and initial dismay, Riley slipped LSD—lysergic acid diethylamide, also known as “acid”—into his guests’ coffee. As Cynthia Lennon later recalled, “It was done without our knowledge so we didn’t know how to handle it. We didn’t know the effect it was going to have on us. It was like sitting in this room and it suddenly became like the Albert Hall. Pattie and George were opposite, John was beside me, and they started disappearing in the distance. I wondered what on earth was happening. We just had to get out. I didn’t know what was happening to me. It was more frightening than anything I’d ever experienced. I thought I would be like this for the rest of my life. John Riley said that we shouldn’t leave the house because he’d given us LSD but we thought ‘So? What’s that?’ It was a totally irresponsible thing to have done.” Against Riley’s advice, the Beatles and their wives soon fled the premises. That evening, Lennon later became frightened during an elevator ride to the Ad Lib nightclub, having been convinced by the experience of his acid trip that the building had caught on fire.21

  In August 1965, John gave LSD another try during a stopover during the Beatles’ summer American tour. At a rented house in Benedict Canyon outside of Los Angeles, Lennon dropped acid with Harrison, Starr, the Byrds’ David Crosby, and actor Peter Fonda. Lennon and Harrison were eager to have a more positive experience than at the April dinner party with Riley and their wives, but things didn’t go so well for Harrison, who began to fear that he was dying. Having once died on the operating table, Fonda’s measured reassurances for the Beatles’ guitarist would later serve as a source of inspiration for Lennon, who by early 1966 had begun to experiment regularly with LSD in the privacy of his Kenwood home. Having increasingly embraced the personal in his lyrics, his growing penchant for LSD soon emerged
as prime subject matter for his next composition. It was during the week before George and the Beatles’ April 6 session that John would finally discover the found object that would bring his idea into much greater clarity and focus. With Paul in tow, John had visited the Indica Bookshop, where he happened upon The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, coauthored by a trio of academics—Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and Ralph Metzner.

  Formerly a Harvard professor of clinical psychology, Leary had been an early advocate of LSD as a source of personal transcendence that could be deployed as a treatment for psychological disorders. With The Psychedelic Experience, Leary had advanced this notion further still to compare his acid trips to the euphoria purportedly experienced by Buddhists and Hindus during various religious rites such as meditation and fasting. In the book, Leary drew his inspiration from The Tibetan Book of the Dead. But it would be Leary’s reading of the ancient work that caught Lennon’s fancy. In The Psychedelic Experience, Leary refashions the precursory text, which had been envisioned as a means for preparing Buddhists to experience the various states of dying and eventual rebirth, into a guidebook for dropping acid. In its central tenet, The Tibetan Book of the Dead challenges its readers’ sense of reality, urging them to release the ego in order to fully experience a sense of rebirth. Metzner, one of Leary’s coauthors, described The Psychedelic Experience as “a paradigm for a spiritually-oriented psychedelic experience.” To Leary’s mind, The Tibetan Book of the Dead’s imperative to sublimate the ego seemed like a valuable means for preparing the acid dropper to experience the life-altering throes of an LSD trip, which for many users, Harrison included, took on death-like proportions, much like those Tibetan monks who were understandably petrified as they encountered the seeming “void” of nonexistence prior to entering the afterlife. For Leary, assisting his devotees in having fulfilling acid trips was a key objective, prompting him to deploy pacific, welcoming language in his writings. “Trust your divinity, trust your brain, trust your companions,” he recommended in The Psychedelic Experience. “Whenever in doubt, turn off your mind, relax, float downstream.”22

  Borrowing the first line of his latest composition without benefit of elision from The Psychedelic Experience, Lennon was raring to go. A few days before the April 6 session, he premiered his new song for Martin and McCartney at Brian Epstein’s Belgravia home during a planning session for their upcoming long-player. George and Paul would later register surprise at how simple the song’s musical structure seemed to be. And its esoteric, philosophical nature was in stark contrast to “Run for Your Life,” the Lennon composition that had set Rubber Soul into motion during the previous autumn. As Paul looked on, he gauged George’s reaction as John shared this most unusual song for their consideration. To Paul’s surprise, George nodded his head, and said, in measured tones, “Very interesting, John. Very interesting.” For his part, Paul could have envisioned things unfolding very differently. As he later remarked,

  This is one thing I always gave George Martin great credit for. He was a slightly older man and we were pretty far out, but he didn’t flinch at all when John played it to him, he just said, “Hmmm, I see, yes. Hmm hmm.” He could have said, “Bloody hell, it’s terrible!” I think George was always intrigued to see what direction we’d gone in, probably in his mind thinking, “How can I make this into a record?” But by that point he was starting to trust that we must know vaguely what we were doing, but the material was really outside of his realm.

  When it came time for Harrison to preview the song, he chalked its mono-chord structure up to the bandmates’ growing interest in Indian culture and thought. It was a deft innovation, to be certain, and one that Martin would be sure to exploit back at Abbey Road: after spending so many years in the service of discovering and combining so many different sounds, why not simplify instead, reducing the multifariousness of their sound into a single chord? “Indian music doesn’t modulate; it just stays,” Harrison later observed. “You pick what key you’re in, and it stays in that key. . . . The whole song was on one chord. But there is a chord that is superimposed on top that does change: if it was in C, it changes down to B flat. That was like an overdub, but the basic sound all hangs on the one drone.”23

  In this instance, the “drone” was the sound of Harrison’s tamboura, hearkening back to the Indian influences that he had first introduced with Rubber Soul. When he arrived at Abbey Road for the sessions associated with their new long-player, Harrison lugged the instrument’s massive case on his back, which carried the long-necked, double-steel-stringed instrument safely inside its cocoon. As Emerick later recalled, Harrison “staggered into the studio under its weight—it’s a huge instrument, and the case was the size of a small coffin—and brought it out with a grand gesture, displaying it proudly as we gathered around.” Clearly, “Norwegian Wood” hadn’t marked the end of Harrison’s Indian fascination. With Lennon’s strange new composition in the offing, Harrison was only just getting started. And with Lennon and Harrison ready to make their return to Abbey Road—and in spite of damned near everything they had said over the past few months—McCartney carried out a few finishing touches of his own. Pulling off his own strategic coup d’état, he had finally moved out of the Ashers’ home on Wimpole Street for good. Since the previous April, he had been overseeing renovations on a three-story Regency townhouse that he had purchased for £40,000 on St. John’s Wood’s Cavendish Avenue, just mere steps away from EMI Studios’ front stoop at 3 Abbey Road. In the past few months, he had installed a music room on the top floor where he could compose new material and create demos courtesy of his well-used Brenell recorders. And perhaps most importantly, he would be closer than ever to Abbey Road—and certainly closer than the other bandmates. Now the pieces were all in place, the songs were coming fast and furious, and Martin and the band were cued up and ready to go. With the meeting to organize their new album in their rearview mirror, the Beatles were finally ready to record the follow-up long-player to the groundbreaking Rubber Soul.24

  3

  Every Sound There Is

  * * *

  FROM THE MOMENT that George and the Beatles began work on their as-of-yet untitled new album, things were very different indeed. For George, the planning session back at Brian Epstein’s Belgravia home had offered only a mere glimpse at the new ideas and potential sounds that would be coming his way. As Martin later recalled, “Their ideas were beginning to become much more potent in the studio. They started telling me what they wanted, and pressing me for more ideas and for more ways of translating those ideas into reality.” The Beatles’ producer could tell that the American records that the bandmates consumed so voraciously were exerting a clear influence upon their sound, as well as their own interest in pushing the boundaries of recording artistry. “You can hear that the boys were listening to lots of American records and saying, ‘Can we get this effect?’ and so on. So they would want us to do radical things.” As he worked ever more diligently to assist them in capturing the sounds and visions in their minds, the Beatles’ relationship began to shift perceptibly in terms of Martin’s role in their creative lives. As Paul observed, “Originally, George Martin was the Supreme Producer in the Sky and we wouldn’t even dare ask to go into the control room. But, as things loosened up, we got invited in and George gave us a bit of the control of the tools; he let us have a go.” As Harrison later recalled, “George Martin had a strong role in our lives in the studio, but as we got more confidence he and the others in EMI became more relaxed with us. I suppose as time went on they believed more in our ability because it was obvious that we’d had success. They eased off on the schoolteacher approach.” Besides, Harrison added, “George Martin had become more our friend as well; we socialized with him. We gained more control each time that we got a Number One, and then when we’d go back in the studio we’d claw our way up until we took over the store.”1

  As Martin and the bandmates sat down to work on that very firs
t evening back in the studio, a recurring issue of John’s began to make its presence known. The very same man who had cut his teeth learning how to belt out rock ’n’ roll tunes with the best of them back in the dank, raucous clubs of Hamburg was growing less confident in his vocals in the sterile sonic spaces of the recording studio. As Martin later recalled, Lennon “had an inborn dislike of his own voice which I could never understand. He was always saying to me, ‘Do something with my voice! You know, put something on it. Smother it with tomato ketchup or something. Make it different.’” According to Geoff Emerick, “That was typical John Lennon. Despite the fact that he was one of the greatest rock ’n’ roll singers of all time, he hated the sound of his own voice and was constantly imploring us to make him sound different. ‘Can you squeeze that up there?’ he would say, or ‘Can you make it sound nasally?’” To remedy his issues with his own voice, John would provide George and Geoff with metaphors for altering his voice in very specific ways. In an earlier instance, John had asked George to imbue his voice with “the feel of James Dean gunning his motorcycle down a highway.” But this time, he wanted something designed especially for the mood of his latest composition—the one that was inspired by The Tibetan Book of the Dead by way of Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience. “Make me sound like the Dalai Lama chanting from a mountaintop,” said John. He even asked Martin if it were possible to suspend him from the ceiling by a rope so that his voice would swell in volume and intensity as his body swung above the microphone. But Martin understandably demurred at the very thought of hanging the Beatle by a rope under any circumstances. At the same time, Martin intuitively knew what the Beatle wanted—namely, to minimize the sound quality of his own voice and to maximize his lyrics. “He said he wanted to hear the words, but he didn’t want to hear him,” George sagely remarked.2