Quodlibets: More Music--sort of

Back to one of my pet topics--The Beatles. (It occurs to me now that I should have just had a Beatles category from the very beginning. Oh well.) I just finished an incredibly interesting Beatle book, probably one of the most interesting one I've read in years. It's not a history, and since all the books about them I've read in the last few years have been histories of one sort or another--except for that one about the Beatles and pop culture--it was a new sort of thing. I learned new things about the Beatles, and I'll be honest, as much as I love reading the histories, I kind of thought I was done learning new things about them. Anyway, the book was "Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Beatles" and the author, Geoff Emerick, engineered SOME of the boys' albums. So he doesn't talk about all the albums, he delves almost not at all at what is happening in the boys' lives when they are recording, and doesn't talk about lyrics at all. There's very little reading into anything.

What Emerick is interested in (and was interested in then, as a 19 year-old engineer) is HOW the Beatles sound, and how he can make them sound better. There was a LOT of mumbo jumbo in this book, because I just don't know enough about recording to understand what he means by so many of the terms. I don't really know what he's talking about at all, in essence. But that didn't matter. Because what I did understand was fascinating. I don't know that I've ever read a book that mentioned Emerick, and if a book did, I'm sure it was in passing. And I don't know if this is deliberate on his part, but it sort of seems that he was important in the scheme of things. The guitars sound the way they do because Emerick figured out new ways to mic them. John's voice (apparently he hated his voice, and wanted it to sound distorted a lot of the time) is, from Revolver on, the brainchild of Emerick. He figured out new ways to distort it, with weird pieces of equipment. And really, so much of the finished sound has to do with the person that is overdubbing, cutting and splicing the tape together, to make a finished product. In "Strawberry Fields", he points out when a key splice comes into the song, and if you look for it, you can totally hear it. It's something I could have NEVER picked up without a heads up. And of course he knows where the splice is--he did it.

I think the sections on "Sgt. Pepper's" and "Abbey Road" were the most interesting, simply because I know those albums like the back of my hand already. He devotes a good number of pages to "A Day in the Life", probably because a) it's still one of the most interesting rock and roll songs recorded and b) it took a long time. Some tidbits: you can hear Mal Evans counting during the orchestra crescendos in the middle 24 and at the end. Personally, I can still only hear that during the end crescendo, but I honestly had never heard it before yesterday, and that's interesting. Mal Evans was counting off the middle 24 because there was nothing to go there when John first wrote the song, and when the Beatles were recording it, they needed someone to count out the beats so they could move on to the next section correctly. Also, that alarm clock? Not originally intended to be part of the song. Mal Evans set it off after the 24th beat, and Emerick couldn't get it off the tape, so it stayed. It only ended up being coincidence that the next line happened to be "Woke up, got out of bed..." That line (and this is something I've always known) came as a part of the snippet Paul McCartney contributed to the song, after they had recorded the initial part of John's song. (Maybe you don't find this fascinating, in which case you should stop reading this right now.)

Also during "A Day in the Life", there is apparently a shoe squeak on tape. During that last monster long piano note (4 or 5 people hitting the same keys on 4 different pianos simultaneously, can't remember the exact number, although Ringo apparently wasn't strong enough to hit hard, so he and Paul teamed up--see! new information.), Ringo moved his foot a little bit and that squeak made it onto tape. Paul wasn't very happy. From "Abbey Road"--during "The End", that's all three boys (not Ringo, clearly) playing little guitar solos. I didn't know that, and it's also really interesting that John left Yoko in the control room with the engineers during that last bit of recording. Emerick does guess a little, but he's clear to note that he has no clue what John's motives were--did he know it was the last time the three would play together? Anyway, interesting.

I feel like I'm going on and on here, so I'll stop regurgitating all the things I found new and interesting, and move on to one small thing that sort of nagged at the back of my brain while reading this. It's clear, from the very first, that Emerick LOVES Paul. He loves Paul so much that Paul was his best man in 1988 (although you don't find that out until the end of the book) at his own wedding. Emerick also loves Linda, and hates Yoko--you can see where this is going, right? There's no way to know if he is short-changing the other guys, or what. He's pretty clear to point out the genius of certain John songs--"A Day in the Life" "Strawberry Fields"--and he didn't really talk that much about three of Paul's monsters--"Yesterday" "Let it Be" "Hey Jude"--because he didn't record them, but even so, he's very clear in his opinion that Paul was the most important Beatle. I don't know if it's because Paul sought him out for "Band on the Run", or what. He's also VERY down on George. I sort of like some of George's later songs--"While My Guitar..." "Something"--and of course, Emerick left the White Album sessions before the first song, and is very complimentary about "Something", but still, you can feel his derision. He's quick to point out how much trouble George had with guitar solos (apparently, everyone was nervous that George would fail during the live guitar solo for "All you need is love"), and very quick to insert Paul's genius into those situations. Something like, "Paul took over, and his guitar solo was so exciting and full of energy compared to George's tries." Then again, he's very nice about the Indian music bent that George takes later on. I don't know.

I mean, I like Paul. I love Paul. He's my favorite Beatle. But Emerick's really biased, so I guess if you hate Paul, you might find the bias annoying. Either way, if you are interested in Beatle books, try this one. If you're only a dabbler, I don't think it's for you--keep reading the histories until you're bored of them, and then move on to something like this. Oh, and if you do read it, load your iPod with Beatle music, because I can tell you, you're going to want to listen to these songs he's talking about. I think I listened to "A Day in the Life" ten times in a row yesterday, while I was reading about it. I guess it's THAT compelling.