YEARS LATER, MARTIN WOULD CAST the November 24, 1966, session as a turning point for his work with the Beatles, as a moment in which they took full advantage of the considerable goodwill that they had earned from EMI and transformed the studio into the magical workshop of which George had long dreamed. As Martin later observed, “The time had come for experiment. The Beatles knew it, and I knew it. By November 1966, we had had an enormous string of hits, and we had the confidence, even arrogance, to know that we could try anything we wanted. The sales we had achieved would have justified our recording rubbish, if we had wanted to. But then, we wouldn’t have got away with foisting rubbish on the public for long.” With their latest single and album having been issued in August, George felt that the time was nigh. “It was several months since we had been in the studio, and time for us to think about a new album. ‘New’ was certainly how it was to turn out,” said George. In retrospect, he later recalled, “I suppose the indications were already there. ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and ‘Tomorrow Never Knows,’ from Revolver, had been strong hints for those with ears to hear what was to come. They were forerunners of a complete change of style.” And of course, there was the looming matter of the Beach Boys’ evolving arms race with the Beatles. It was, in George’s words, “a curious transatlantic slugging match, a rivalry conducted by means of songwriting and recording genius.” As he later recalled, “The Beatles thought Pet Sounds, its vocal harmonies in particular, was a fantastic album. I thought it was great, too. ‘Could we do as well as that?’ they asked me, in the run-up to their own new long-player. ‘No,’ I replied. ‘We can do better.’”1
But George and the Beatles’ stylistic paradigm shift didn’t simply commence with one session. As with their work since their earliest days together, it began with a single composition—in this instance, the dreamlike tune that John had begun composing back in Almería. Now going by the title of “Strawberry Fields Forever,” the fragment had grown from John’s crude structure back in Spain into a series of progressively more structured demo recordings. The November 24 session began at seven that evening with the Beatles, Martin, Geoff Emerick, and Phil McDonald huddled around the Studio 2 console. Years later, Emerick recalled the sight of the Beatles, having changed utterly, as they sauntered into the control room. “It had been five months since I’d last seen the group, but it might as well have been five years. For one thing, they all looked so different. Garbed in colorful clothes and sporting trendy mustaches—George Harrison even had a beard—they were utterly hip, the epitome of swinging London.” But it was John who really caught Geoff’s eye: “John was the one who had changed the most: having shed the excess weight he’d put on during the Revolver sessions, he was trim, almost gaunt, and he was wearing granny glasses instead of the thick horn-rimmed National Health spectacles I was used to seeing. He also had very short, distinctly non-Beatlish hair.”2
But before Martin could go about the business of “routining” any new compositions that the bandmates had ready that evening, Lennon interrupted the proceedings. It was not only clear that John had something to say but that the Beatles had had a number of private conversations about the band’s future—and if there was going to be one, what kind of band they wanted to be. In Geoff’s memory, John seemed “agitated” as he took the floor. Even after all these years, when push came to shove, it was John who took the lead. “Look,” he said to the Beatles’ producer, “it’s really quite simple. We’re fed up with making soft music for soft people, and we’re fed up with playing for them, too. But it’s given us a fresh start, don’t you see?” As George looked on, Geoff could tell that he was surprised by John’s unexpected torrent of passion. “We can’t hear ourselves onstage anymore for all the screaming,” Paul added, “so what’s the point? We did try performing some songs off the last album, but there are so many complicated overdubs we can’t do them justice. Now we can record anything we want, and it won’t matter. And what we want is to raise the bar a notch, to make our best album ever.” Now George was beginning to understand. “What we’re saying is, if we don’t have to tour, then we can record music that we won’t ever have to play live, and that means we can create something that’s never been heard before: a new kind of record with new kinds of sounds.”3
From George’s perspective, the November 24 session was already a veritable dream come true. He had long feared that touring would, quite literally, be the death of the band, realizing how vulnerable they were on a tiny stage amid a sea of people. He knew that they suffered from “hotel fatigue” on the road, that their celebrity had become nothing more than a “prison of fame.” And the notion that they wanted to continue pushing the boundaries, fearless about the consequences and willing to go wherever their music might take them—well, that was music to George’s ears. “When I first started in the music business the ultimate aim for everybody was to try and re-create, on record, a live performance as accurately as possible,” Martin later recalled. “But then, we realized that we could do something other than that. In other words, the film doesn’t just re-create the stage play. So, without being too pompous, we decided to go into another kind of art form, where we are devising something that couldn’t be done any other way. We were putting something down on tape that could only be done on tape.” With Lennon’s words still ringing in his ears, Martin was ready and willing to take this newfangled and refreshingly arrogant Beatles out for a spin.4
And with that, the producer delivered his usual call to action with the Beatles in the studio: “Right, then, let’s get to work. What have you got for me?” As Emerick later recalled, McCartney seemed to be on the verge of piping up, when Lennon shouted, “I’ve got a good one, for a starter!” As Emerick and McDonald readied themselves up in the control booth, the others took their place below in Studio 2. Martin took his customary perch on a tall stool in front of Lennon, who began singing “Strawberry Fields Forever” for the very first time at Abbey Road. “John was standing in front of me, his acoustic guitar at the ready,” George later wrote. “This was his usual way of showing me a new song—another of my extremely privileged private performances. ‘It goes something like this, George,’ he said, with a nonchalance that concealed his ingrained diffidence about his voice. Then he began strumming gently. That wonderfully distinctive voice had a slight tremor, a unique nasal quality that gave his song poignancy, almost a feeling of luminescence.” Martin was thunderstruck. “It was a very gentle song when I first heard it,” he later recalled. “It was spellbinding. His lyrics painted a hazy, impressionistic world. I was in love with what I heard. All I had to do was record it.” If only it would be so simple. Any notion of producing the song with John singing solo along with his guitar, à la Paul’s “Yesterday,” was out the window almost immediately. For his part, McCartney was just as smitten as Martin, breathlessly telling his songwriting partner, “That is absolutely brilliant.” As Emerick later recalled, Lennon was keen to share his demo recording, although his efforts fell on deaf ears: “‘I’ve brought a demo tape of the song with me, too,’ John said, offering to play it, but everyone agreed there was no need—they wanted to get straight into recording. The energy in the room was staggering: it was almost as if the band’s creative energies had been bottled up for too long.”5
Drawing its name from an aging Salvation Army home near Lennon’s boyhood haunts back in Liverpool, “Strawberry Fields Forever” began shaping up very quickly, with Martin and the bandmates already devising an arrangement for the song as Emerick and McDonald waited in the control room upstairs. As was their practice, they began compiling a basic rhythm track, which featured Paul playing the Mellotron Mark II with the flute stop deployed. Mal Evans had helpfully brought the keyboard instrument to Abbey Road from John’s Weybridge estate. The Mellotron had already figured prominently in the composition of two Lennon-McCartney songs, “In My Life” and “Tomorrow Never Knows.”
The Beatles rounded out the basic track for “Strawberry Fields Forever” with Harrison and Lennon on their guitars. With Lennon playing rhythm guitar on his Gibson Jumbo, Harrison provided lead guitar accents on his Sonic Blue Fender Stratocaster. Meanwhile, Starr got into the act of experimenting with new sounds by arranging tea towels over the drum heads on his snare and tom-toms. With the towels in place, his drumming took on a distinctive muffled tonality. After recording the first take of the basic track with this arrangement, Martin captured Lennon’s first pass at the lead vocals, which was later treated with ADT, along with Harrison and McCartney providing harmonies. For John’s vocal, George instructed Geoff to roll the tape fast at fifty-three cycles per second in order to create the illusion of a faster tempo on replay. By the time the session ended at 2:30 AM, Martin and the bandmates had created an exquisite first attempt at the song. Indeed, George felt they already captured the best possible recording in a single, magical take. “That first take is brilliant, especially John’s vocal: clear, pure, and riveting,” Martin later wrote. “As he sang it that night, the song became hypnotic, gentle and wistful, but very strong too, his sparse vocal standing in sharp contrast to the full sound of George’s electric guitar, Paul’s imaginative Mellotron, and Ringo’s magnificent drums.”6
But Lennon felt differently, believing that more work had to be done, that “Strawberry Fields Forever” wasn’t quite there yet. Even years later, George struggled to understand how the bandmates’ very first recording of “Strawberry Fields Forever” had succeeded so powerfully in capturing his own imagination yet at the same time failing to seize John’s in even remotely the same way. As George later wrote, the mystery at the heart of any work of art exists at an elemental level for each of us: “I am not sure how much cold-blooded analysis has to do with one’s passion for a work of art. It is a bit like falling in love. Do we really care if there is the odd wrinkle here or there? The power to move people, to tears or laughter, to violence or sympathy, is the strongest attribute that any art can have. In this respect, music is the prime mover: its call on the emotions is the most direct of all the arts.”7
Martin recognized that “Strawberry Fields Forever” was not merely situating the Beatles on the precipice of new soundscapes but on whole new vistas of composition. “It was the beginning of the imaginative, some say psychedelic, way of writing,” he later remarked. “I prefer to think of it as being complete tone poem imagery, and it’s more like a modern Debussy.” By invoking Claude Debussy—the “heavenly” composer who had left a powerful imprint on fifteen-year-old George’s schoolboy mind—the producer had granted “Strawberry Fields Forever” the highest possible compliment that he could muster. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine finer praise coming from George.8
But as it turned out, additional work on the exciting new song would have to wait until the following week. The next day, Friday, November 25, the Beatles had been booked to record their annual Christmas message. With George in tow, the bandmates traveled across town to Dick James’s office on New Oxford Street. Working in the music publisher’s basement studio, they hammed things up, recording a series of skits. As Ringo later recalled, they concocted their 1966 Christmas narrative on the spot: “We worked it out between us. Paul did most of the work on it. He thought up the Pantomime title and the two song things.” Prepared for later distribution to members of the UK Beatles fan club, the disc would be adorned with cover art by McCartney and titled as Pantomime: Everywhere It’s Christmas. With Martin and Epstein in the control room, the Beatles performed a series of skits, including “Podgy the Bear and Jasper” and “Felpin Mansions.” With McCartney on piano accompaniment and Mal Evans and Neil Aspinall providing additional voices, the group sings such hastily improvised compositions as “Everywhere It’s Christmas,” “Orowainya,” and “Please Don’t Bring Your Banjo Back.” On December 2, Pantomime: Everywhere It’s Christmas was mixed for released in EMI Studios’ Room 53, with Tony Barrow sitting in for Martin and Emerick serving as balance engineer. The recording was distributed to UK fans on December 16.9
With their annual holiday chore out of the way for another year, George and the bandmates returned to Studio 2 on Monday, November 28, for another overnight session. Realizing that they were badly in need of a new Beatles release, EMI was happy to grant the Beatles all the time and space the band felt they needed. As Ringo observed at the time, “We’re big with EMI at the moment. They don’t argue if we take the time we want.” For his part, George was all too familiar with the breakneck pace of their past projects. If they really were abandoning the road—if he no longer had to book sessions in the nooks and crannies that Brian Epstein allotted him between concert dates and public appearances—then he intended to take full advantage of the bandmates’ availability. When George and the Beatles got to work that evening, they remade “Strawberry Fields Forever” with a slightly different arrangement, notable for a telling shift into the lower key of A major. The shift in key signature would prove to have significant implications for the ultimate direction of the song. With Paul again working the Mellotron with the flute stop toggled, take two saw the Beatles beginning to establish a proper rhythm track. With the same instrumentation in play—save for the addition of maracas—take two collapsed under the weight of several guitar misfires on Harrison’s part. Take three stalled after John complained that Paul’s Mellotron introduction was too loud. For the moment at least, take four was selected as the best. Including Harrison’s guitar work, the basic rhythm track featured a newly recorded slowed-down vocal from Lennon and McCartney’s overdubbed bass part. As Martin later recalled, “Typically, John asked me for a speed change on his vocal recording. I thought his voice was one of the all-time greats, but he was always asking me to distort or bend it in some way, to ‘improve’ it as he thought. So when we overdubbed his vocal, we pumped up the tape frequency to 53 hertz instead of the normal 50 hertz. On playback at normal speed, the adjustment lowered his voice by a semitone, making it sound warmer and huskier.” At the session’s conclusion, Martin and Emerick prepared three mono mixes for the purpose of creating acetates so that the Beatles could reflect on their progress at home. But by this point, George and the bandmates knew that “Strawberry Fields Forever” was not quite there. And to John’s mind, it wasn’t even close.10
On Tuesday, November 29, Martin and the group worked an afternoon session in Studio 2 that sprawled until eight that evening during which the band remade the rhythm track yet again. By this point, they were satisfied with the arrangement and the instrumentation; they simply hadn’t captured the best performance yet. “I thought our baby was perfect,” George later recalled, but “over that weekend, however, fertile imaginations went to work, and by the time we arrived for that session on Monday, it was obvious that John and Paul had come up with plenty of ideas on how to improve ‘Strawberry Fields Forever.’” In the same vein as the producer’s suggestion in earlier years that they begin songs like “She Loves You” and “Can’t Buy Me Love” with the chorus, Lennon and McCartney had reconfigured the beginning of “Strawberry Fields Forever.” “It was a good move,” Martin later wrote, “because the lyric now immediately grabbed you by the throat. The song made you share an intriguing journey.” After several hours of rehearsal, take six seemed to be the answer, including a lengthy coda, to which Lennon appended an ADT-treated vocal and McCartney adorned a bass line on his Rickenbacker. After enacting vocal and Mellotron overdubs, Martin and Emerick created three mono mixes—again, for acetate purposes. But as things began to wind down that evening, Geoff could tell that John was still far from happy with their results, that the song still wasn’t quite where he wanted it to be. As he later wrote, “John seemed to be having a lot of trouble making up his mind about how he wanted the song recorded.”11
As it happened, Lennon would have nearly ten days to mull things over and reconsider the direction of “Strawberry Fields Forever.” When Martin and the group reconvened for what turned out to be an overnight session on Tuesday, December 6, they tackled yet another new composition—although in this case, it was a song that McCartney had begun back in 1958. With his father, Jim, having turned sixty-four on July 2, 1966, Paul may have revisited the composition titled “When I’m Sixty-Four” in his honor. The tune had occasionally featured in the Beatles’ prefame days playing lunchtime concerts in Liverpool’s Cavern Club—and often when they suffered from amplifier breakdowns or other equipment failures. As George later wrote, “The song had been lurking around in Paul’s mind for a long, long time, ever since I first knew him.” He was especially fond of the lyrics: “When I heard ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ for the first time, I chuckled at the cleverness of the lyrics,” Martin wrote. “It was an affectionate satire regarding old age from a young man’s point of view.”12
Before they tried their hand at recording “When I’m Sixty-Four,” George led the bandmates through the production of Christmas greetings recorded expressly for the United Kingdom’s pirate radio set. As an alternative to the BBC’s broadcast monopoly—not to mention the network’s demure programming—pirate radio stations like Radio Caroline and Radio London broadcast across Great Britain from their moorings beyond the coastline. With Martin and his production team in the Studio 2 control room supervising the recording of dozens of messages for the listeners and staffs of Radio Caroline and Radio London, the group—McCartney, in particular—began experimenting with various instruments and sound effects. Eventually, McCartney asked the Beatles’ producer to overlay their messages with tape echo, to which Martin sarcastically replied, “Do you want to make a production out of it?” Harrison continued the joke, saying “Yeah, let’s double-track everything!” As if mocking Martin and the bandmates’ increasing penchant for treating their vocals and instrumentation with studio effects, Lennon piped up next, remarking that Martin “can double-splange them. That’d be great!”13
For “When I’m Sixty-Four,” George led the bandmates—namely, Paul—through their standard rehearsal with the tape running. As they attempted to capture the basic rhythm track, Paul worked on piano and bass parts, with Ringo playing brushes on his snare. Two takes were completed, with take two being selected as the best. Two days later, during an afternoon session on Thursday, December 8, work continued on “When I’m Sixty-Four” without the other Beatles present. With Martin and Emerick up in the booth, McCartney continued working on take two as he tried his hand at recording a lead vocal for the snappy vaudeville number. As the dinner hour approached, Martin and Emerick took their leave. Hence, when Paul and the other Beatles arrived at seven that evening for another one of their famous overnight sessions, George and Geoff were no longer in evidence. As technical engineer Dave Harries later recalled, Martin and Emerick “had tickets for the premiere of Cliff Richard’s film Finders Keepers and didn’t arrive back until about 11 o’clock.” After having ensured that the group’s microphones and instruments were lined up properly, Harries was surprised when “the Beatles arrived, hot to record.” With no other choice—and a quartet of EMI’s most valuable clients at the ready—Harries supervised the bandmates as they took another go at establishing the rhythm track for “Strawberry Fields Forever.” “There was nobody else there but me so I became producer/engineer,” Harries remembered. “We recorded Ringo’s cymbals, played them backwards, Paul and George were on timps [timpani] and bongos, Mal Evans played tambourine, we overdubbed the guitars, everything. It sounded great. When George and Geoff came back, I scuttled upstairs because I shouldn’t really have been recording them.” But of course, he never really had any other viable option. By this point in their career, the Beatles weren’t waiting for anyone. Not even Martin.14
For his part, Emerick had been bothered that Martin wanted to attend the premiere in the first place. “George was quite adamant that we go, which really annoyed me,” he later wrote. “I felt our place was with the Beatles, and I felt certain that they were going to be unhappy about us taking time off so early into an album project. In retrospect, I think it may have been a psychological ploy on George’s part to show them who was in charge.” If it had indeed been a psychological ploy—rather than Martin simply wanting to be seen at a major industry event, especially given the new startup he was spearheading—it failed miserably. If Martin had wanted to attend simply to enjoy the film, he was likely severely disappointed. Directed by Sidney Hayers, Finders Keepers was roundly panned. Like Gerry and the Pacemakers’ big-screen bomb, Ferry Cross the Mersey, back in 1965, Finders Keepers proved that rock musicals in the wake of the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night feature film almost inevitably seemed like pale imitations of the Fab Four’s natural wit and incomparable sound. Still, A Hard Day’s Night—which had premiered some eighteen months earlier—seemed like a distant memory in comparison with the Beatles of December 1966, who scarcely resembled their former selves both outwardly and artistically.
After the movie, the producer and his engineer returned to Studio 2, “only to find the four Beatles still hard at work with maintenance engineer Dave Harries,” Emerick wrote, “who had been recruited to start the session in our absence. In the end, only part of what he recorded ever made its way onto the final release version; George and I stayed on until nearly dawn and ended up redoing most of it.” For his part, Martin had been stunned by the scene that greeted him that night:
When Geoff and I strolled in, Studio 2 was in the grip of a controlled riot. The boys had decided it would be fun to lay down an “unusual” rhythm track for “Strawberry Fields Forever” on their own, with anyone and everyone available simply banging away on whatever came to hand. The racket as we walked in was like something from a very bad Tarzan movie. John and Paul were bashing bongo drums, George was on huge kettledrums, joined sporadically by Paul; Neil Aspinall was playing a gourd scraper, Mal Evans a tambourine, and George’s friend Terry Doran was shaking maracas. Somebody else was tinkling away on finger cymbals. Above it all, Ringo was struggling manfully to keep the cacophony together with his regular drum-kit.15
In fact, during the producer’s absence, the bandmates had worked out a number of issues with the structure associated with “Strawberry Fields Forever.” It was John who piped up first, eager to share what they had learned—and seemingly oblivious to George and Geoff’s absence. While the heart of the band’s production team had been away in Central London, Harries led the Beatles through fifteen additional takes—takes nine through twenty-four—as they continued to refine the rhythm track. At this point, Lennon and his mates selected fifteen and twenty-four—two different, incomplete versions of the song—as the best.
As he and Emerick cleaned up shop in the wee hours of Friday, December 9, Martin replayed the recordings from that evening’s “controlled riot.” He discovered that he was particularly keen on a section “towards the end of this rogue track,” he later wrote, where “everyone was whooping or yelling, and John can clearly be heard chanting very slowly, and in time to the rough-and-ready beat: ‘Cranberry sauce, cranberry sauce . . .’ Why cranberry sauce? Why not? It was coming up to Christmas!” Perhaps this aspect of that “wild and wacky recording” would be of use at some later juncture.16
By 2:30 that same afternoon, Martin and the Beatles were already back at work in Studio 2. With “Strawberry Fields Forever” continuing to chew up plenty of real estate, Martin and Emerick dealt with the inherent limitations of four-track recording by mixing down the edit of takes fifteen and twenty-four and reducing them to a single track, which was dubbed as take twenty-five. With three empty tracks at their disposal, Martin and the bandmates provided a series of overdubs. Track two was composed of Starr playing various percussion, along with Harrison playing a swarmandal. After preparing a mono mix to facilitate new acetates, additional overdubs were carried out, including the recording of backward cymbals. Not unlike the backward guitar solos on Revolver’s “I’m Only Sleeping,” capturing the cymbals on tape was fraught with difficulty. Breaking out pencil and paper, Martin and Emerick worked out the song’s structural pattern so as to ensure that the backward cymbals were synchronized in the appropriate instances.
In the intervening days before the next session for “Strawberry Fields Forever” commenced, Lennon sought out Martin to express his disappointment over the song’s progress at this juncture. For his part, George was astounded, having felt that the song had already been exquisite back on November 24. With Emerick waiting in the wings, Lennon told the Beatles’ producer that “he still wasn’t entirely happy with what we had done,” Martin later wrote. “The song kept eluding him: he could hear what he wanted, in his head, but he couldn’t make it real.” As the others attempted to reassure him, John “kept mumbling, ‘I don’t know; I just think it should somehow be heavier,’” according to Geoff. As Martin questioned the Beatle about his concept of heaviness, Lennon replied, “I dunno, just kind of, y’know . . . heavier.” At this point, McCartney interceded. Observing how pleased John had been with the Mellotron flute stops, Paul suggested that orchestral ornamentation might be an option for beefing up the sound of “Strawberry Fields Forever.” Quite suddenly, John’s enthusiasm had returned. He was particularly taken with the idea of cello and trumpet accompaniment for the song. All the producer had to do was come up with the appropriate score. “Do a good job, George,” John instructed as he left the control room. “Just make sure it’s heavy.”17
With only a few days to spare, Martin went about the business of organizing the instrumental accompaniment for “Strawberry Fields Forever.” As usual, George booked a powerhouse of session aces when it came to securing studio musicians for the Beatles. For the purposes of his trumpet quartet, George selected Greg Bowen, Tony Fisher, and Stanley Roderick, the players who had made their name as the “007” trumpet section for the early James Bond films. Rounding out the brass was Derek Watkins, late of Billy Ternent’s London Palladium orchestra. Martin’s trio of cellists was composed of John Hall, Norman Jones, and Derek Simpson, a long-standing member of the renowned Aeolian Quartet. Knowing that he needed to concoct something “heavy,” Martin set straight to work. “I believe in economy in music,” he later wrote, “to get a clarity that using too many instruments will sometimes cloud. I had less than a week to write the score that John was looking for. I knew he wanted the brass to be bright and punchy, but I felt the chords needed a bit of reinforcement on some of the changes.” As he worked at the piano at the home he shared with Judy on Manchester Square, George consulted the latest “Strawberry Fields Forever” acetates. As he later recalled, “Having a basic recorded track to write to was a great advantage. It meant I could see where to put the flesh on the bones. I decided the cellos should speak with one voice, in unison, forming a bass counterpoint to the melody. The trumpets I wrote either in simple triad (i.e., three-finger) chords, or with a unison staccato emphasis, blasting away on one note.”18
For the purposes of inspiration, George drew from the quintessentially American sound that had stirred the Beatles so vividly prior to beginning work on Revolver. In addition to concocting a punchy brass score, he found himself confounded by the backward cymbals that he and the bandmates had appended to the latest version of the song. With his own penchant for experimentation on full display, George decided to score the cellos in contrast with Ringo’s percussion: “I confess I had heard a lot of American records with very groovy horn sections by this time, and lifted one or two ideas from them,” he later wrote. “As the song developed further it seemed natural to use the trumpets as a harmony behind the voice, sounding the same phrase as in our lovely intro. Then came the only section I had qualms about. At this particular point, the tempo is held together by a fast rhythm from a cymbal that Ringo recorded backwards—never an easy sound to latch on to. The cellos worked against this urgent beat with a slower, triplet tie motif, and I was not at all sure that it was going to work.” As he completed work on his orchestration for “Strawberry Fields Forever,” George was forced to contend with a long-standing issue that he had observed throughout the song’s labyrinthine production: the Mellotron’s tape-replay system had proven to be idiosyncratic in terms of maintaining a steady pace, so much so, in fact, that with “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “our rhythm track would vary even from one bar to another!” This presented a problem, of course, when it came to studio musicians, who understandably “take it for granted that if they are overdubbing, their basic track never varies its tempo.” For this reason, George “felt that Ringo’s drumming on this song is some of his best. His quirky figures accented it in exactly the right way from the outset, complementing John’s phrases beautifully throughout all the changes the song underwent.”19
When George and the bandmates reconvened on December 15, they were joined by the trumpeters and cellists for an afternoon session in Studio 2. Scored in the key of C major, Martin’s orchestration was captured in short order and superimposed on the available third and fourth tracks. At this point, Emerick conducted another tape reduction mix, with take twenty-five becoming take twenty-six. For the remainder of the session, which finally broke up around midnight, additional overdubs were undertaken, including Lennon’s double-tracked lead vocal and Harrison performing descending arpeggios on the swarmandal. The remnant of Lennon muttering “cranberry sauce” from the madcap December 8 session was in evidence, having been earlier spliced onto the end of take twenty-four. The latest remake of “Strawberry Fields Forever,” with the “heavy” orchestration, Ringo’s powerful, rhythmic drums, and Lennon’s newly minted lead vocals, offered a dramatic contrast to the original, gentler November 24 version of the song. For the time being at least, “Strawberry Fields Forever” seemed to be on the verge of completion.
For the next few days, the studio went dark for George and the Beatles. Martin and McCartney were attending to business involving The Family Way, which premiered on the evening of Sunday, December 18, at London’s Warner Theatre. The film enjoyed generally strong notices for being “sincere” and “sympathetic”—especially in comparison with the Boulting brothers’ earlier movies, including the satirical I’m All Right, Jack starring Peter Sellers, which were known for their irreverence. McCartney and Martin’s soundtrack received praise for contributing to the film’s “understated” tone. On December 23, United Artists released the single “Love in the Open Air” backed with “Theme from The Family Way.” Credited to the George Martin Orchestra, the record didn’t chart. Earlier that day, Lennon and McCartney had been shocked to learn that their friend Tara Browne, the twenty-one-year-old heir to the Guinness fortune, had succumbed to injuries that he had suffered the previous evening in an Earl’s Court automobile accident. With his girlfriend, Suki Potier, by his side, Browne had been speeding in his Lotus Elan through the narrow streets of the city when he swerved to avoid an oncoming car and collided with a parked truck. The next day, December 19, saw a swathe of posters being affixed around the city advertising the upcoming Million Volt Light and Sound Rave. Scheduled for January 28, 1967, the festival’s centerpiece would be a psychedelic light show by Ray Anderson and music by Unit Delta Plus, a freelance outfit associated with the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop, the same folks who had worked with George (using the pseudonym Ray Cathode) to produce his 1962 electronic concoction “Time Beat.” The poster for the Million Volt Light and Sound Rave made note of a special musical piece composed by none other than Paul McCartney.
On Tuesday, December 20, George and the Beatles returned to the friendly confines of Studio 2, where they resumed working on “When I’m Sixty-Four,” which had been abandoned since December 6. With the Beach Boys’ avant-garde hit “Good Vibrations” nearing the end of its thirteen-week assault on the British charts, the Beatles began putting the finishing touches on the vaudeville-throwback number. During the overnight session, McCartney, Harrison, and Lennon superimposed harmony vocals onto “When I’m Sixty-Four,” with Starr providing bell sounds to accent the verses. Afterward, Martin and his regular production team of Emerick and McDonald carried out two reduction mixes from take two, with the second being selected as the best. The next day, Wednesday, December 21, George made great strides toward the completion of “When I’m Sixty-Four” with a woodwind overdub courtesy of a trio of studio musicians. Working a two-hour session in Studio 1 that evening, Martin had prepared a score for two clarinets and one bass clarinet. The idea for the clarinet arrangement had apparently been McCartney’s brainchild as an effort to mitigate the possibility that “When I’m Sixty-Four” would be taken as an unwelcome departure into corniness. As George later observed, “Paul got some way round the lurking schmaltz factor by suggesting we use clarinets on the recording ‘in a classical way.’” With Paul’s recommendation in hand, George set about the business of composing the score. He took McCartney’s dictum seriously, appropriating his orchestration as a means for shaping the composition’s larger thematic impetus. As Martin later observed, “The classical treatment gave added bite to the song, a formality that pushed it firmly towards satire. Without that, the song could have been misinterpreted—it was very tongue-in-cheek.”20
Drawing upon his many years of experience as an arranger—not to mention his formal training at the Guildhall School—“When I’m Sixty-Four” offers a primer for understanding the manner in which Martin approached the art of crafting a score: “The arrangement of this song is deceptively simple, but in a way it underlines my constant belief in simplicity in orchestration,” George later wrote. “By restricting ourselves to three instruments only,” he pointed out, “we could hardly be lush. Every note played had to be there for a purpose.” With his score complete, George once again recruited London’s finest to perform on a Beatles record. As with his work throughout Revolver, George never slacked when it came to providing the Beatles with the best available talent. As he later wrote, “We overdubbed two clarinets and a bass clarinet on to track 2, played by the best clarinet players you could get in the business then: Robert Burns, Henry MacKenzie, and Frank Reidy.” Years later, Martin recalled recording the woodwind overdub in the “cavernous Number One studio at Abbey Road and thinking how the three clarinet players looked as lost as a referee and two linesmen alone in the middle of Wembley Stadium.” After the studio players departed, George supervised three mono mixes of “When I’m Sixty-Four.” At this point, the third attempt was considered the best, although merely for acetate purposes. But in terms of George and the Beatles’ standards, the song wasn’t quite there yet.21
They could easily have said the same about “Strawberry Fields Forever,” which had dominated the Beatles’ return to the studio since November. During the December 21 session, Lennon recorded his lead vocal yet again while also superimposing another piano track. It was sometime during this period—with only a few days before Martin and the bandmates briefly closed up shop for the holidays—that Lennon dropped a veritable bomb on the producer and his production team. Apparently, he had been listening to the acetates in heavy rotation, and a eureka moment had occurred. As George later wrote, “John could not make up his mind which of our performances he preferred. He had long since dismissed the original statement of the song on take 7, and was now torn between the slow, contemplative version and the frantic, percussive powerhouse cello and brass arrangement of take 20.” From his position at the mixing desk, Emerick watched the conversation as it unfolded. As he looked on, John announced, “I’ve decided that I still prefer the beginning of the original version.” The Beatles’ engineer could hardly believe what he was hearing: “My jaw dropped. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see George Martin blinking slowly. I could almost detect his blood pressure rising.” And that’s when John said it, turning to George and remarking, “I like them both. Why don’t we join them together? You could start with take 7 and move to take 20 halfway through to get the grandstand finish.” Years later, Martin would remember his response with an unusual clarity, not to mention the mocking tone with which he delivered it. “Brilliant!” he retorted. “There are only two things wrong with that: the takes are in completely different keys, a whole tone apart, and they have wildly different tempos. Other than that, there should be no problem!” For his part, Lennon was hardly put off in the slightest. As George later recalled, “John smiled at my sarcasm like a grownup placating a child.” And then he stared up at the Beatles’ producer with a twinkle in his eye: “Well, George, I’m sure you can fix it, can’t you?”22
And so it was that on the evening of Thursday, December 22, Martin, Emerick, and McDonald conducted an editing session in Studio 2 in an effort, impossible as it may have seemed at the time, to meet the extraordinary challenge inherent in Lennon’s demands. “Every time I go on about the primitive state of recording technology in the mid-sixties,” George later wrote, “I feel like Baron von Richthofen describing the Fokker Triplane to a group of Concorde pilots. But it must be said that nothing on the technology front existed, at EMI’s Abbey Road studios anyways, that could help us out of this fix.” Martin and his team definitely had their work cut out for them: “There was no way those two performances could be matched,” Martin lamented. But then he realized “that because take 20, the frenetic take, was faster—much faster—I could try slowing the tape right down. This would not only bring down the tempo, it would lower the pitch. Would it work? A whole tone was one hell of a drop—almost 12 percent—but it had to be worth trying.” With little genuine hope of actually making Lennon’s dream a reality, Martin turned to Ken Townsend, the ingenious father of ADT, to see what might be possible:
We called up our magnificent band of backroom boys, who wheeled in a Diplodocus-sized washing machine lookalike: the “frequency changer.” This valve-powered monster—a lash-up devised by Ken Townsend, our Chief Engineer, and his merry men—took the main electricity supply, and bent the alternating current up and down on either side of the normal 50 cycles per second. Don’t ask me how they did it, I haven’t a clue. What I can tell you is that it used to get very hot, and would explode in a shower of sparks if you stretched it too far. But it was all we had. We hooked it up. We were looking for a point in the song where there was a sound change, which would help us disguise the edit of the century.
To their great relief, Martin and his team managed to expose the one moment in “Strawberry Fields Forever” that might just do it.23
And there it was. “We found it precisely one minute in,” George later observed, the surprise and relief still evident in his voice even decades later. But when it came to effecting the actual edit itself, Geoff realized that “there was still one last hurdle to overcome. I found that I couldn’t cut the tape at a normal 45-degree angle because the sound just kind of jumped—I was, after all, joining together two totally different performances. As a result, I had to make the cut at a very shallow angle so that it was more like a crossfade than a splice.” With the edit having been completed, the team turned their attention to the coda, including the “cranberry sauce” bit that the Beatles had recorded outside of Martin and Emerick’s earshot back on December 8. Not wanting to lose the magnificent cacophony that the bandmates had created during that zany evening, George instructed Geoff to fade out “Strawberry Fields Forever” before it all went berserk, the moment when the structure collapses in on itself and falls to pieces. The producer was equally intent on preserving the waning instances of orchestration that they had captured back on December 15. “The obvious answer,” Martin later wrote, “would have been to fade out the take before the beat goes haywire. But that would have meant discarding one of my favorite bits, which included some great trumpet and guitar playing, as well as the magical random Mellotronic note-waterfall John had come up with. It was a section brimming with energy, and I was determined to keep it.” But in the end, George did just that: he asked Geoff to begin the fade-out at the last possible moment, and in so doing, he managed to preserve the unique moments of orchestration, sizzling musicianship, and impromptu zaniness. But just as suddenly, George instructed Geoff to abruptly reverse the fade-out and usher “Strawberry Fields Forever” back from the dead. It was George’s sonic head-fake: just when listeners believe that the song is over, it comes roaring back to life again, “bringing back our glorious finale,” “one final exotic touch of color” before the whole thing fades into oblivion once more. With the edit complete and the coda alive and well in all its madcap splendor, “Strawberry Fields Forever” was, for the first time, relatively complete. With the edited piece now in place, George had seen to it that John’s seemingly impossible wish had been granted. And as for that miraculous edit itself, Golden Ears had done it again.24
In production circles, of course, the proof is in the playback. And for John, “Strawberry Fields Forever” was an unqualified success. Indeed, he was ecstatic with the result, having finally heard his vision captured on tape, for the most part, as it had evolved over the past month. George had performed precisely as the Beatle had expected, so John wasn’t really all that surprised at how it had materialized so effectively. “With the grace of God, and a bit of luck, we did it,” Martin later observed. They were able to effect the join between the two versions by gradually increasing the speed of take seven in order to create the illusion of a seamless transition. In fact, most listeners find themselves unable to distinguish the moment where the join occurs. For Martin, this bit of studio trickery never ceased to amaze him in terms of capturing the illusion. “That’s funny,” he later remarked. “I can hear it every time. It sticks out like a sore thumb to me.” The most curious students of the Beatles will find themselves wanting to listen carefully to this moment in the song—some sixty seconds in, right after John sings “let me take you down”—to hear the magic moment that forever joined the two sections. “But seek it out at your peril,” Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn cautions, “if you hear it once you might never hear the song the same way again.”25
For George, John’s satisfaction made the glaring edit piece worth it. And while the producer had felt that the magic inherent in “Strawberry Fields Forever” had been fully realized on November 24, the final product was something to behold. “We were all very proud of our new baby,” he later wrote. “For my money, it was the most original and inventive track to date in pop music.” To date, that is. In any event, it was becoming increasingly clear to Martin and his team that the Revolver-era Beatles were already morphing into something new and different in these rapidly unfolding post-touring days. The freedom to do what they liked in the studio—and for as long as they wanted—was liberating their collective creative instincts. And not merely for the bandmates, who were relieved to no longer be contending with the often unchecked, unexpected rigors of life on the road. That very same sense of freedom had transformed George and Geoff’s approach to their sessions: at this point, they could allow an idea to unfold and flower at its pace, as opposed to rushing from one session to another to satisfy the demands of EMI or, worse yet, to cram in as many recording dates as possible in the face of a looming tour schedule. As he was wont to do, George compared their latest studio practices to the act of painting—particularly in terms of the ways in which artists very deliberately bring their work alive through layers of time, effort, and creative fusion. As George later observed:
The way we worked, the creative process we always went through, reminds me of a film I once saw of Picasso at work, painting on a ground-glass screen. A camera photographed his brushwork from behind the screen, so that the paint appeared as if by magic. Using time-lapse photography you could see first his original construction, then complete change as he applied the next layer of paint, then the whole thing revitalized again as he added here, took away there. It reached a point where you thought, “That’s wonderful, for heaven’s sake stop!” But he didn’t, he went on, and on. Eventually, he laid down his brush, satisfied. Or was he? I wondered how many of his paintings he would have wanted to do again. It was a fascinating film of a great artist, of a brilliant creative mind at work. And I have often thought how similar his method of painting was to our way of recording. We, too, would add and subtract, overlaying and underscoring within the limitations of our primitive four-track tape.26
For George, the comparison between sound recording and making fine art had been festering for nearly as long as he had been in the record business. Way back in 1952, when he was still Oscar Preuss’s assistant A&R man, he had recorded “Mock Mozart,” a three-minute mini-opera, with actor Peter Ustinov overdubbing a four-part vocal ensemble. George had felt like it was “pretty adventurous” at the time, recognizing that the music marketplace may not have been ready for his brand of sound journeys. But if nothing else, “Strawberry Fields Forever” had confirmed George’s long-held belief that the recording studio was capable of being a wondrous magic workshop and that producers such as himself were only just beginning to scratch the surface of its capabilities.27
As it happened, George wouldn’t have to wait very long to see if this evolving method of painting “sound pictures” would be the Beatles’ prevailing creative methodology. With “Strawberry Fields Forever” mostly in a state of completion—and “When I’m Sixty-Four” not lagging very far behind—the bandmates were ready to try out new compositions. Up next was a relatively new confection from McCartney titled “Penny Lane,” an ebullient tune about “blue suburban skies” and a pretty nurse “selling poppies from a tray.” George and the Beatles reconvened after the holidays on Thursday, December 29. With Emerick and McDonald in tow, Martin created mono and stereo remixes of “Strawberry Fields Forever,” as well as mono mixes for “When I’m Sixty-Four.” Meanwhile, an overnight session would be devoted to working out the signature piano foundation for “Penny Lane,” which remained untitled at this juncture in spite of the fact that a year earlier McCartney had informed a journalist that he wanted to compose a song called “Penny Lane” because he liked the poetic cadence of the title. A bus roundabout located a few miles to the west of the Strawberry Field Salvation Army home of John’s childhood haunts, Penny Lane and its attendant memories had clearly inspired Paul to compose a rejoinder to John’s song about the place where “nothing is real.”
For the past few years, Lennon and McCartney had discussed the concept of writing a quasi-musical about their salad days in Liverpool. As John told Rave magazine in February 1964, “Paul and I want to write a stage musical. That’s a must. Maybe about Liverpool.” In December 1965, Paul commented to Flip magazine, “I like some of the things the Animals try to do, like the song Eric Burdon wrote about places in Newcastle on the flip of one of their hits. I still want to write a song about the places in Liverpool where I was brought up. Places like the Docker’s Umbrella which is a long tunnel through which the dockers go to work on Merseyside, and Penny Lane near my old home.” In another light, McCartney’s composition of “Penny Lane” on the heels of Lennon’s “Strawberry Fields Forever” typified a new phase in their collaboration, which had been brewing since Lennon moved out to Weybridge. For his part, George was acutely aware of the ways in which the songwriters’ partnership had evolved. But to his mind, the intensity of their collaboration had slowly but surely become integral to the bandmates’—and his own—collective success:
John Lennon and Paul McCartney in particular were extremely good friends; they loved one another, really. They shared a spirit of adventure, and a modest little childhood ambition: they were going to go out and conquer the world. You could, though, almost touch the rivalry between them, it was so intense and so real, despite the overriding warmth. No sooner would John come up with an outstanding song evoking, say, his own early childhood, like “Strawberry Fields Forever,” than Paul answered him straight back with a winner in the same vein: “Penny Lane.” It was typical of the way they worked as a songwriting duo. Creative rivalry kept them climbing their individual ladders—and kept the Beatles on top.
Indeed, as their songwriting practices developed during this period, the Lennon-McCartney partnership might more accurately be understood as a competition. Many of their songs were now written separately, rather than together in the same physical space, before their debut to George and the bandmates. And as time passed, the rites of competition would become increasingly fierce.28
From that very first evening, “Penny Lane” was accorded the same patience and care that “Strawberry Fields Forever” had enjoyed across the past month. For his latest composition, Paul had a very strong sense of what he wanted to hear on the finished recording, telling George, “I want a very clean recording.” He would later recall that during that period “I was into clean sounds—maybe a Beach Boys influence at that point.” With the tape rolling, Paul began working out the basic rhythm track for “Penny Lane,” which was dominated by an assortment of keyboard parts. After selecting take six as the best, Martin and the Beatles—McCartney, for the most part—began superimposing additional instrumentation. For track one, Paul performed the basic piano rhythm that characterizes the song, with track two featuring a second piano part that Paul appended to the conclusion of each of the song’s verses. Track three offered yet another piano part, along with Starr on tambourine. To afford the piano with a different feel, Emerick fed the signal through a Vox guitar amp and then sweetened the result with added reverb. Track four was composed of a host of sound effects—with many of them treated to varispeed—including additional percussion, two-tone harmonium whistles, and elongated cymbal stylings. As Emerick later recalled, the slow evolution of “Penny Lane” proved to be trying at times for the other Beatles. “For days, the others sat at the back of the studio watching Paul layer keyboard after keyboard, working completely on his own,” the engineer later wrote. “As always, his sense of timing was absolutely superb: the main piano part that everything was built on was rock solid despite the fact that there were no electronic metronomes to lay down click tracks in those days.” But the real issue at this point—in addition to the others’ sense of boredom settling in—involved the problematics of four-track recording. With McCartney creating one layer of piano and sound effects after another, Martin and Emerick were forced to carry out numerous tape reductions, which meant that the vagaries of generational tape loss were not only a risk but an increasing reality.29
On the evening of December 30, George and the Beatles—one Beatle, for the most part—returned to “Penny Lane,” for which Geoff promptly conducted a tape reduction in order to provide much-needed recording space for the additional overdubs that Paul had in mind. But first, McCartney suggested that they return to “When I’m Sixty-Four.” During the eight-hour session in Studio 2, Paul began the workday by suggesting that George and his production team scuttle the December 29 remix and start over. In particular, Paul wanted George to raise his vocal by a semitone to afford it with a more youthful feel. After Emerick’s tape reduction, the current version of “When I’m Sixty-Four” was deemed as take seven. Wiping out the existing track four, Martin recorded a new vocal performance from McCartney, with backing vocals from Lennon: “We originally recorded him in the key of C major; but when it came to mixing, Paul wanted to sound younger,” George later wrote. “Could he be a teenager again? So we racked up his vocal to D flat by speeding the tape up. His vocal sounded thinner and higher: not quite a seven-stone weakling, but nearly.” By the time that work concluded in the wee hours of New Year’s Eve, additional overdubs to track three included Starr on chimes, as well as vocal harmonies from McCartney, Harrison, and Lennon. The only thing left to do was to ring in the new year, but not without acknowledging how magnificent 1966 had been for George and the Beatles, the Jesus Christ tour notwithstanding. They hadn’t merely grown artistically—they had progressed at a paradigm-shifting rate. After Revolver, Rubber Soul seemed like a distant memory. And “Strawberry Fields Forever” promised to render its memory dimmer still.30