Recording - May 2014 - 54

Continued from page 53
years old, you might be a recording engineer, and
suddenly it all changed. I had to be very careful,
because there was one engineer who didn't like
what I was doing. They had been using the guy
that used to do Cliff Richard and stuff. He used to
just come in, do this, do that and press a button,
and away he'd go. Everything was always set up
the same.
In [studio] Number Two, once I was doing a session. The rhythm section always used to go up in
the dead end of the studio, and the strings and
the brass were all down in the live end. So I
decided to put all the strings and brass on the
dead end, and bring all the rhythm down on to
the live end. It was a pretty good session, and
someone had gone and snitched on me!
I had changed the process. The other engineers
were like 35, 45 years old and they didn't want
some young guy coming in trying to teach them
their job. They didn't want the hassle of changing
the process of how they recorded. They weren't
prepared to experiment.
I was shocked when you said at dinner the other
night in so many words that EMI/Abbey Road Studios is really not all that it's believed to be. It's kind
of enshrined in our mind as being hallowed
ground - certainly because the Beatles recorded
there. Tell the audience what it was actually like, I
mean physically. You mentioned paint was peeling
off the walls.
It was very regimented. I mean, it was like working in a hospital. There was light green paint half
the way up the wall, and the rest of it was cream.
There were the maintenance people, or the technicians with their white lab coats on, and the
janitorial staff wears the brown coats. I will
always remember the manager when I first
started, Mr. Fowler. The only time you used to see
Mr. Fowler was lunchtime. He was a recording
engineer himself. I guess once you get too old to
be a recording engineer yourself, you're the manager of EMI Studios. Mr. Fowler used to come
around at lunchtime, and he used to turn the

"The artist side is still the most
important side. It's got nothing to do
with technology, you know!"
lights off. Then he'd come around an hour later
and turn the lights back on. That was his job.
Tell us about the period when John met Yoko, and
she was ever present during the sessions.
Obviously, she was a stranger. John brought her
in and she went into the studio. I don't think she
was really introduced; she just sat there.
Obviously, they didn't like it. A feeling developed.
54

In fact, Yoko used to follow John everywhere. If
John went to the bathroom, she'd sit on the corridor floor outside the door. She would never let
him out of her sight.
Then, when we did the Abbey Road album, just
before we were due to start it, they had been in a
road accident together, so we canceled the
sessions for the first two weeks. Then, when we
did start the session, they wheeled a big bed into
the studio from Harrods, which is a store in London. So they roll in this bed, and the premise was
that Yoko was going to lie in bed while we
recorded the Abbey Road album. And she did.
So Yoko actually had a bed in the studio ... and
would take visitors who would come and see her.
That's right. So she laid in bed. But as far as I was
concerned, she was just like part of the furniture,
so I didn't think any more of it. But, of course, it
was bad for the other guys. I mean, you can imagine how they must have felt? Nothing was really
said, but you could tell by their looks.
I can't imagine that nothing was said, and I can't
imagine that George Martin didn't say, "What the
hell is going on here?"
I mean, control had been lost. They were controlling their own session.
Do you have a favorite Beatles song?
There are a lot, really. "A Day in the Life," I guess,
obviously. And "Tomorrow Never Knows,"
because it was the first one. I mean, they've all got
their memories. The night we finished "A Day in
the Life" and put that orchestra on it, it was like a
party-type thing. You've got to remember what
was available at that time to listen to, and what
things sounded like. There were a lot of people-
Mick Jagger was there. There was a huge host of
people; it was like a party going on in Number
One studio.
And they asked them to wear costumes?
While we were doing the orchestra, yeah. So John
said, "Let's dress everyone up." The orchestral
people had to wear tuxedos, and Mal Evans, who
was one of the roadies, went out and bought a lot
of funny noses and glasses and plastic mustaches,
and asked the orchestra, who were mainly classical players-in fact, all classical players-to put
these things on. So, obviously, there was a huge
uproar, but George Martin and Paul sort of
calmed them all down. The other thing was, on
the score for "A Day in the Life," the directive was
that it just go from one note to the next note over
24 bars, I think it was. And what you did, you
went from that note in your own time, not listening to the person next to you. And they said, "We
can't do that." So Paul's out there asking, "What

do you mean you can't?" The players responded,
"We can, but obviously, we've never done that
before. There's a way of reading notes on manuscripts." Anyway, a couple of the players in the
orchestra-like Alan Civil, who played the French
horn on "For No One," and David Mason, who
played the piccolo on "Penny Lane"-they sort of
talked their fellows around. So gradually, what
was happening was the pop people were breaking
down that barrier between the classical people.
That was the beginning of the breakdown of that
barrier. Anyway, to keep a long story short again,

"If you thought about the error, it
was really good and different, so we
used to put overdubs on top of the
error. That's why their songs are the
way they are, with lots of changes in
the songs, and the mistakes becoming part of the arrangement."
we had done that orchestral thing on that ["A Day
in the Life"], and then the piano chord on the end
came a few weeks later. We tried an Om sort of
sound, but that didn't work.
Actually, that was the first time we had run two
four-tracks in lock [synced together]. The basic
record was on four tracks. The rhythm track and
vocals were on three tracks. There was one track,
the fourth track, was for the orchestral overdub.
But what we did for the first time... We thought,
"How could we link two four-track machines?" So
we paused each motor, because they weren't crystal-lock motors with the same 50-cycle pulse, and
put a grease mark on the tape on the second
machine, and went for another take of the
orchestra so they were running together. We did
the same thing on the second and the third part,
because we'd already locked in the first orchestral
track on the proper four-track. So we then went
for the third part of the orchestra on track two of
the second four-track by just lining up the grease
pencil and going into record.
But how often did that actually work?
We were only going to know when we came to
the mix.
And the players had all gone home?
Yeah, that was fine. We had gotten our basic take
on track four with, obviously, some timing errors.
The timing was going with the orchestra, so I was
ducking a track and lifting up another track to
cover it and smooth it out. But the mono mix of
that is almost perfect, whereas, on the stereo mix
on that orchestral part, you can actually hear a
Continued on page 57

Recording - May 2014

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