The Beatles (110 page)

But getting a fair shake in the States came at too high a price. For all Cropper’s attempts to accommodate them, it remained too much of a gamble. “They wanted a fantastic amount of money to use the facilities there,” Paul recalled, and he suspected that it had nothing to do with overhead and everything to do with the Beatles. “They were obviously trying to take us for a ride.” With that, the Beatles immediately booked time to record at Abbey Road.

The first song they recorded, on April 6, 1966, established the pace for everything that was to come. Just after 8
P.M.
the Beatles, along with their trusty acolytes Neil Aspinall and Mal Evans, George Martin, and a new, embarrassingly young engineer named Geoff Emerick who had been promoted to replace Norman Smith (otherwise engaged with his new discovery, Pink Floyd), assembled in Studio Three at Abbey Road to begin work on a song with the mysteriously obscure title of “Mark 1.” The time of the session itself was quite extraordinary. Studio discipline dictated that all evening sessions end at ten o’clock, thanks to a long-standing ordinance by the local council that imposed a midnight curfew on recording in what was primarily a residential area. The rule was strictly observed for twenty-five years—that is, until the Beatles shoved it out the door. According to Vera Samwell, who booked the four studios, “
the Beatles just recorded whenever
they wanted to. They went into the studios and didn’t come out until they’d finished and nobody ever had the nerve to ask them to leave.” So the session that night ran—officially—from seven to ten, but as the clock struck twelve, and then one, the Beatles continued to work.

From the beginning, John’s fertile imagination had conceptualized “Mark 1” in a special way.
Paul recalled that the seed
for it germinated on an afternoon in early March, when he and John visited the newly opened Indica Bookshop, ostensibly to encourage a few sales. John requested a book by an author whose name he pronounced as “Nitz Ga,” and only after a long, ineffectual search did Barry Miles finally turn up
The Portable Nietzsche.
In the interim, John browsed the stalls and pounced on a copy of
The Psychedelic Experience,
by Dr. Timothy Leary. Opening the book, he read: “
Whenever in doubt
, turn off your mind, relax, float downstream.” In fact, Leary had pinched most of that directly from
The Tibetan Book of the Dead,
which, in turn, gave John license to help himself to the lines.
Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream.
It was an irresistible mantra—for so many different reasons. Rushing home, John dropped acid according to Leary’s instructions. “
I did it just like he said
in the book,” John recalled. Almost immediately, the words came: inscrutable strings of
words started threading around ever more gauzy abstractions.
Lay down all thoughts, surrender to the void… That you may see the meaning of within…
It was an acid freak’s bonanza!

He played a verse of it for Paul a few days later during a meeting at Brian Epstein’s flat. Incredibly, it “
was all on the chord of C
,” according to Paul. Somehow, John had stripped the music to its most basic structure, the level at which melody and rhythm contract to an unmodulated drone, in the fashion of Indian music. He had bored into the pores of the song until it vibrated with clarity. Paul was intrigued but wondered how George Martin would deal with it, especially considering their reputation for churning out melodic three- and four-chord hits. To his credit,
Martin “didn’t flinch
at all when John played it to him,” Paul recalled. “He just said, ‘Hmmm, I see, yes. Hmm hmm.’ ” Martin, from Paul’s standpoint, thought it was “
rather interesting
.”

Interesting—but unfinished. The lyric was as stark as the melody: only one verse in length. “
We worked very hard
to stretch it into two verses,” Paul explained. “We wracked our brains but couldn’t come up with any more words because we felt it already said everything we wanted to say in the two verses.” Nor did the structure allow for a middle eight. At that length, the track would come in at just over a minute. They had to find a way to make it longer while still preserving its originality.

It was Paul who came up with a solution: tape loops. From his growing infatuation with Stockhausen, especially
Gesang der Jünglinge,
a composition that fused vocal and electronically produced notes, he’d discovered a process of recording whereby if he removed the erase head from a tape recorder and replaced it with a loop of tape, he could play a short phrase or sound that would ultimately saturate itself. As George Martin described it: “
It went round and round
and overdubbed itself until the point of saturation, and that made a funny sound.” Martin said recording technicians called it musique concrète, or reinforced music. There were infinite combinations of sounds that could be produced by this method, from which Paul made a number of “
little symphonies
.” He demonstrated it for the others in the studio, encouraging George and Ringo to make loops as well. Then,
Martin “listen[ed] to them at various speeds
, backwards and forwards,” in order to integrate them into the recording.

Meanwhile, John discussed several ideas for the vocal with his producer, each one a conceit of his overactive imagination. “
He wanted his voice
to sound like the Dalai Lama chanting from a hilltop,” Martin recalled. Most producers would have dismissed such a cheeky idea out of
hand, but Martin, a wise and patient man, gave the Beatles enormous leeway. Their ideas might sound like gibberish
initially,
but he recognized that because of their lack of formal musical training, they often only needed someone to “translate” what they meant, to express it in terms that made sense to structured technicians, and in that respect Martin viewed his role as “the official interpreter.” In any case, he struggled to create some kind of a Tibetan influence or effect in the studio, realizing that ordinary echo or reverb wouldn’t do the trick. Recording out of doors was also out of the question; there was no way to contain or control the sound. And John’s suggestion—that “
we suspend him from a rope
in the middle of the studio ceiling, put a mike in the middle of the floor, give him a push, and he’d sing as he went around and around,” according to Geoff Emerick—was met with a meaningful, albeit barely tolerant smile. (When pressed by John, they were always said to be “looking into it,” Emerick recalled.)

It was the nineteen-year-old Emerick who eventually came up with an inventive solution. He suggested putting John’s voice through a Leslie speaker and re-recording it as it came back out. To a straitlaced, formalistic EMI technician, this sounded about as nutty as suspending John from a rope, but the more Martin thought about it, the more he saw its possibilities. A Leslie was a speaker with variable rotating baffles that was usually paired with a Hammond console organ. “
By putting his voice through that
and then recording it again, you got a kind of intermittent vibrato effect,” Martin explained. It was a revolutionary idea—but considered taboo at Abbey Road, where engineers were discouraged from “playing about with microphones.”

With Martin’s “support and approval,” Emerick happily rigged the mikes for the Leslie. (“
It meant actually breaking
into the circuitry,” Emerick recalled.) The rest was a matter of simply forcing John’s vocals through the vibrato, much like vegetables through a ricer. “I remember the surprise on our faces when the voice came out of the speaker,” Emerick said. “It was just one of sheer amazement.” The Beatles were beside themselves with glee.
Stoned—which they were
most of the time in the studio—the experiments became part prank, part innovation. In that kind of dreamy, altered—
impractical
—state, the possibilities were limitless. Recording became no longer just another way of putting out songs, but a new way of creating them.

Of course, once the Beatles got their hands on the controls, they found it impossible to leave them alone. “
The group encouraged us
to break the rules,” Geoff Emerick recalled. “It was implanted… that every
instrument should sound unlike itself.” As well as each of the Beatles. John flirted with the idea of having “
thousands of monks chanting
” in the background of “Mark 1,” a prospect about as likely as booking the Dalai Lama as a sideman. A way to simulate it, however, was to double-track John’s voice—that is, to re-record John singing a duplicate vocal and superimpose it over the original as a way of thickening the texture—but the sound was severely limited by the lack of available tracks. Besides, John dreaded redoing a vocal—he absolutely
hated
it.

In a rather magnanimous gesture, Ken Townsend, the studio’s manager of technical operations, decided to tackle the problem himself. He went home that night, amid much grousing and chin-rubbing, and came up with a solution that would forever change the state of recording. Hunched over a cannibalized tape recorder, he concluded that if you took the signals off both the recording and the playback heads and delayed them, it produced two sound images instead of the usual one. Moreover, he discovered that by varying speed and frequencies, you could make adjustments to deliver a desired effect. Artificial double-tracking—or ADT, as it became known—revolutionized not only the recording process but the way in which vocals were subsequently heard. Eventually every artist and producer put it to good use on sessions. What’s more, it opened the frontiers of experimentation to all sorts of electronic recording devices.

John was especially “
knocked out
” by the sound. It shaved hours, maybe days, off the recording process, let alone the annoying inconvenience of having to sing vocal take after vocal take.
Tell me again what it is?
John wondered.
How does it work?
“
Well, John,” Martin replied
earnestly, seizing the opportunity to have some fun at his artist’s expense, “it’s a double-bifurcated sploshing flange.”
A sploshing flange!
According to Martin, John knew he was putting him on, but from that point on, the technique known throughout the recording industry as flanging was practiced.

After sampling the wattage behind the spooky-sounding “Mark 1,” which they eventually retitled “Tomorrow Never Knows,” it was virtually inevitable that the Beatles would want to tinker in some way with every new song. A good case in point was the subsequent session for “Got to Get You into My Life,” which had begun, according to studio notes, as “
a very acoustic number
.” Paul had not composed it in a romantic gist, as the lyric might indicate, but ironically as an ode to drugs. “
It was a song about pot
actually,” he admitted—
not about acid
, as John later suspected (Paul hadn’t taken acid yet)—
written to a great extent
after Bob Dylan turned on the Beatles in New York. At first, the Beatles recorded it as a standard
rhythm track, with George Martin sitting in on the organ. In the initial eight takes done over two days (April 6 and 7), familiar Beatlesque backing vocals—
John and George repeating
“I need your love” behind the refrain—were still discernible beneath the layers of overdubs. But nearly a month and a half later, they were scrapped for an entire brass section—two trumpets and three saxophones—to give the song “
a definite jazz feel
.” Everyone felt they were on the right track. The horns managed to open up and brighten the song in tantalizing ways. It was clear upon playback, however, that the jazz feel was way too precious, too sedate; the song didn’t rock enough. Moreover, the horns didn’t scream like those on American records. Once Geoff Emerick reevaluated the setup, he hit on a method designed to sharpen the arrangement. Instead of recording the brass in the standard way, by placing the horns a polite six feet away from the mikes, he sandwiched the works—bringing “
the mikes… right down
in the bells of the instruments”—which fairly electrified the track, giving it liftoff. Then,
to launch it into orbit
, they overdubbed an additional three trumpets in the coda to match the intensity of Paul’s vocal ad-libs, sealing in a blazing pop R&B feel.

In the sessions that followed, covering “And Your Bird Can Sing” and “Doctor Robert,” the Beatles reverted to fairly straightforward recording techniques. On “Paperback Writer,” which John and Paul composed in an epistolary construction, they relied on a “
heavier,” rock ’n roll
sound utilizing “
a guitar lick on a fuzzy, loud guitar
,” as John recalled, but otherwise kept it fairly straight.
The only special effect
employed was to tweak the bass by using a loudspeaker as a microphone so that the throbbing sound practically jumped off the grooves.

“Rain,” however, was a whole other issue. As far as the writing went, it
was “a co-effort
,” according to Paul’s account, but they ran into problems the minute it was brought into the studio. No matter how the Beatles ran it down, they “
couldn’t get a backing track
” to work. They couldn’t find a groove; there was just no punch to it. At some point in the proceedings, they remembered how full and meaty certain instruments sounded when they were slowed down. Drums especially took on serious weight, providing “a
big, ponderous, thunderous
backing” like “a giant’s footstep.” That gave them another idea. If they played the rhythm track faster than normal and then slowed it down on playback, it thickened the whole texture of the song. They used the same effect for John’s sleepy vocal. But even that didn’t satisfy the Beatles’ thirst for experimentation.

No one is certain exactly whose idea it was to run the tape backward. John claimed it was accidental, following an extremely late night at Abbey Road.
The Beatles were halfway through
work on “Rain,” according to George, who recalled how each of them took home a rough mix of the song on a reference tape
tails out,
which meant that the engineer had not rewound it on the tiny four-inch spools before handing it to them. Apparently, John had forgotten that by the time his smoke-filled car pulled into Kenwood. “
I got home from the studio
and I was stoned out of my mind on marijuana,” he recalled. Just in case he wasn’t wrecked enough, however, he lit up another fat joint before threading the tape onto his recorder, tails out, and played it—
backward.
In the confusion, John must have experienced a whopper of a paranoid flash; the sound was unlike anything he’d ever heard before, a piercing
scronnnch whuppp-whuppp-whuppp
bisected by shreds of keening feedback. By John’s account, it sparked an epiphany. “I ran in the next day and said, ‘I know what to do with it, I know…. Listen to this!’ ”