Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles by Emerick Geoff & Massey Howard

Author:Emerick, Geoff & Massey, Howard [Emerick, Geoff & Massey, Howard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography
ISBN: 9781592402694
Amazon: 1592402690
Barnesnoble: 1592402690
Goodreads: 35543
Publisher: Gotham
Published: 2006-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The onus had been on me all throughout the Pepper sessions. I was constantly wracking my brains trying to come up with ways to make things sound different. John and Paul’s attitude, even more than on Revolver, was, “We’re going to play guitar, but we don’t want it to sound like a guitar; we’re going to play piano but we don’t want it to sound like piano.” We got off to a roaring start with “Strawberry Fields Forever,” but I wasn’t trying to match it afterward, or even necessarily better it; I was simply trying to make every track sound different, so that each song would have its own personality. As a result, I tried to take a fresh approach to every new track we recorded for Pepper. Because we knew that the Beatles wouldn’t ever have to play the songs live, there were no creative boundaries. By this time the group had enough clout with EMI that if they wanted something, by and large they got it, and there was virtually no pressure on them to deliver anything; if they didn’t feel like coming in on a particular day, they didn’t come in, simple as that. I don’t know of any other band that ever had that kind of luxury—it probably never happened before, and it probably never will again.

In contrast to Revolver, there are hardly any backwards sounds on Pepper. The whole idea was to push the envelope both musically and sonically, and as far as the Beatles were concerned, those sounds were already old hat. In that sense, they were like kids with a new toy: once they discovered something new, they wanted to do it to death; then they got tired of it and moved on to something else. For the same reason, I never used that speaker-as-a-mic trick for Paul’s bass again after “Paperback Writer” and “Rain”; in any event, it wouldn’t have suited the Pepper and post-Pepper songs because it was too muddy, not defined enough. Technically, the same equipment was used to record both albums—it was all the same outboard gear, and mostly the same mics. Yet the two albums sound so different! Part of that is due to the fact that a lot of Revolver was recorded in the cramped confines of Studio Three, whereas most of Pepper was done in Studio Two, which was more spacious and had better acoustics, yielding a more pristine sound. Although the control room of Studio Three provided a more pleasant working environment because it had windows, the studio area was normally just used for solo pianos and string quartets; it simply wasn’t designed to accommodate rock musicians playing loudly.

Another hallmark of Sgt. Pepper was that the Beatles were starting to get fed up with using the same instrumentation all the time. They wanted to advance themselves and were becoming increasingly frustrated with the same old two-guitars-bass-and-drums lineup. They were keen to introduce new tonalities: Paul’s piano playing became a lot more prominent, and they relied

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