Recording - April 2014 - 58

Continued from page 57
the guy has got talent there that he is a little bit
scared of. One of the things was his voice being
loud. Because when we did Imperial Bedroom, for
the first three weeks I kept the voice up really loud,
louder than he had ever been used to, and it really
threw him a curve ball. He couldn't handle that,
but eventually he came around to it.
And it was such a great record. It was a ground-breaking record for him, a departure. Were you guys
butting heads in order for you to create that departure and get that performance out of him? Or did he
finally get it?
I mean, he was full of energy, and you've got to
capture his energy. You might be in the middle of
one thing on a project, and you say, "I think I'll just
change that line on that other song," so there's no

"When you're doing a mix live and
there's no automation, you've got
this adrenalin rush."
time for getting a vocal sound. You have to just
reach for it and capture that moment. So there was
a lot of energy and it was captured on that record.
You can sort of feel it and hear it.
Getting back to "She Loves You": The day we did
"She Loves You" there was a photo shoot at the
back of [EMI/Abbey Road] Number Two studio
for the Beatles. I was assistant engineer on that
session. The girls and the fans used to line up outside Abbey Road Studios, and that particular day
someone had leaked out that the Beatles were
going to be there. There were about 300 prams
outside in the road, and they broke through the
gates and broke into the building. They got into
mastering rooms and cupboards and God knows
what else. There were two policemen and the janitorial staff of the studio chasing them with
brooms and all sorts of stuff. I'm serious, they
really were. A couple of them did break into the
studio where we were working. The energy that
was created from that incident that day is captured
in that recording of "She Loves You," because it's
basically a two-track take-it's not multitrack-
and then I think we overdubbed some chorus
vocals. But there's a certain energy on that
record-and it's basically a live recording-and
the energy came from all the girls breaking in!
Talk about the recording of "Tomorrow Never Knows,"
some of the ground-breaking stuff that happened on
that one session.
After we'd done John's voice with the [Hammond
B3] Leslie speaker on, and Ringo's drum sound
had changed. On the Anthology there are two versions of that and you can actually hear the change
in the drum sound. There were sort of gaps in that
track, so George Harrison put the Tambura on it.
58

We all used to have little Brenell tape recorders.
They were like the best domestic-type tape
recorder you could have, and Paul had one. So
what Paul used to do for that loop thing in the
middle of "Tomorrow Never Knows" is... If you
disconnected the erase head and made a [physical]
loop of tape, as the tape went through the second
time, by putting different sounds on the loop, I
think the first recording diminishes by like 3dBs or
something, so you get this buildup of different
sounds. Every time it goes over it diminishes the
recording. So Paul said, "You can just cut the erase
head off." So two days later, Paul had been up all
night and came in with this plastic bag and he had
all these loops on that he'd made at home. But we
only had [studio] Number Three control room
with two stereo machines, so we could only put
through the loops on those machines, which
meant holding it with pencils or drumsticks [as
tape guides]. But Paul had about eight loops, and
the idea was to put eight different sounds on
faders on the desk. So we commandeered all the
control rooms that weren't in use at Abbey Road
that day and patched through to other control
rooms...
How far away were they?
Right down the corridor. I mean, you couldn't see
them. So they commandeered the maintenance
staff to get various people to be able to hold these
loops on these other tape machines from different
control rooms, and we communicated by
telephone. They were constantly on the telephone.
We'd start up and sometimes they'd be holding
loops, not realizing... I mean, these were like maintenance people-very technical people, and they
were not into the pop side-so they had no idea
really what they were doing standing there with
drumsticks holding loops of tape.
With their white lab coats on?
That's right! So we commandeered the other
rooms, and then fed all the sounds of the loops up
through our mixing console in [Number] Three,
and then played the loop section of "Tomorrow
Never Knows." It was random, really, because it
wasn't multitrack, so every time... It was sort of
random. So anyway, it is what it is, you know, and
what it became. It was like the first synthesizer,
wasn't it?
Did it strike you in the moment that it was groundbreaking and really unique?
It was new and unique. But again, we did not
know how it was going to change things. We didn't realize what we were doing.
Were there times that you tried stuff and it didn't
work out, or were there times that you tried things
that the Beatles thought was ground-breaking and

you wished it hadn't made it to the record?
Well, in desperation, when we were trying one of
John's vocals for "Yellow Submarine," I think,
when he was singing into the bottle of water, and I
had a microphone inside a condom suspended in
the bottle of water. It was only frustration, because
John was driving us nuts. I mean, John was not
technical at all and he could never understand
things. Going back to the Leslie speaker thing, at
one stage he knew it was a revolving speaker, and
in his own mind he thought that he could like suspend himself from a rope and we could swing him

"You realize where their talent lies
and you are trying to draw out more
talent than they probably realize
they have."
around from the ceiling around the microphone.
So this was the thought process that was going
through John's mind. And I think he even said to
George Martin, "Why can't I directly inject my
voice?" He did not understand. George told him
he'd have to have an operation and a jack socket
put in his neck. But that's what we were up
against.
Anyway, this particular night on "Yellow Submarine," John said, "Why do you always have to mic
my vocal from the front? Why can't you mic it
from the back of my head?" So we did, and of
course, we played it for him, and of course it was
useless. And that led to singing to the bottle of
water, which sort of had a character to it. You had
to convince them that you couldn't do something.
The word no wasn't in their vocabulary. It really
wasn't, it never was.
Do you remember the first moment when you heard
something that you worked on, played on the radio
and how that felt?
"Pretty Flamingo." It wasn't a Beatle record. A lot
of stuff then, because, again, there weren't many
outlets for music. I think there were only like three
record companies in England, one radio station
that played pop music, and one television program
that played pop music. You know, you could
record Cliff Richard or the Beatles one day, and
like seven days later it's on the radio, and a few
days later it's #1.
So how did you feel when you heard "Pretty
Flamingo" on the radio?
Over the moon. I think the other great track was a
thing called "Theme from a Teenage Opera,"
which was the longest single in those days from
EMI. It was like seven and a half minutes.
Did your parents understand what you did for
Continued on page 61

Recording - April 2014

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - April 2014