Category: Beatles

Plastic Soul Lives

On October 17, Amazon.com created a section devoted to vinyl records.

One of D.F. Rogers’ possessions that I envy him having is the complete British catalog (or, should I say, “catalogue”) of Beatles albums put out by Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs in the early 1980’s. The box set now goes for big bucks on eBay. I have a couple of the individual discs. The general consensus is the records sound better than the CDs; which is understandable, considering the digital mastering was done with first-generation equipment over 20 years ago.

Beatless Ringo?

Geoff Emerick - Here, There and EverywhereI’m in the middle of reading the autobiography (written with help) of recording engineer and producer Geoff Emerick — Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of THE BEATLES. This is an excellent, excellent book, a great read, and it’s enormously, vastly better than George Martin’s All You Need Is Ears.

Emerick’s vivid accounts of the Beatles’ recording sessions make a perfect companion to the superb — but highly technical — reference text, RTB Book — Recording the Beatles, by Kevin Ryan and Brian Kehew. He tells many stories that others have told in ways that were either exaggerated, off-the-mark, or incomplete. For example, Emerick has the best account I’ve read of why Ringo was pulled after the first take of “Love Me Do.”

Ringo was having difficulty maintaining a steady beat, and Paul was starting to get annoyed with him. George Martin did his best to prop them up over this talkback mic, but in his private conversations with Norman [Smith], he criticized the unsteady drumming.

Another interesting moment was when Emerick met Brian Epstein for the first time.

Friendly though he was, Brian struck me as a bit odd. He was a quiet man, obviously upper class. He didn’t come to many sessions, but he was always very polite to me when he did; however, I always got the impression that the Beatles didn’t like having him around.

Despite Epstein’s importance to the success of The Beatles, they felt the recording studio was their domain, and Epstein didn’t belong there. Also, Epstein was gay, and from what I’ve read elsewhere, at that time The Beatles weren’t comfortable with his lifestyle.

Emerick loves to describe the various recording tricks that were employed to give The Beatles’ records their distinctive sound. And unlike the RTB book, his explanations aren’t technical. In the spirit of audio experimentation, I recommend checking out a link on the WFMU blog, where the entire Beatles album catalog has been compressed into one hour. You may find yourself getting bored quickly with that, so I suggest listening to the time-compressed songs that have been slowed down. EMI/Capitol may not appreciate these mashed-up recordings, but they’re exactly the sort of playing around that The Beatles loved to do in the studio.

A Long Lost Weekend

Circa 1974, John Lennon went on a year-long bender with Harry Nilsson that Lennon later called his “Lost Weekend,” a reference to the 1945 movie. Most famously the two were thrown out of The Troubadour nightclub, but there was also an altercation outside of Ciro’s, as seen in these photos. Is that David Geffen with them?

[Note: The photo was mislabeled in the source material I used as having been taken outside of Ciro’s. Nicola Brown clarifies: Just wanted to clarify that in the photo of John Lennon and Harry Nilsson outside the Troubadour, the third person in it isn’t David Geffin, it is my ex-husband Louis Maiello aka James Oliver. He just happened to be there and he actually convinced John to go back to his house that night to chill out. Harry had been kicked out of the Troubadour for heckling the Smothers Brothers who where on stage that night.]

Harry Nilsson and John Lennon

Harry Nilsson and John Lennon

Harry wasn’t a nice guy when he was drunk, and he was often drunk. But he had his good side. Here’s an example, taken from an aged and well-worn piece of vinyl.

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/SEP07/WithoutYou.mp3]

Thanks to the blog called AM, Then FM that I just found tonight, I know there’s a documentary called Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him)? that hasn’t yet made it to DVD. Despite the difficulty of being a friend of Harry’s, Harry had a lot of friends, and seeing their famous faces in this trailer for the documentary has me looking forward to seeing it.

It’s interesting seeing the Smothers Brothers among the people interviewed about Harry, because Lennon and Harry were thrown out of the Troubadour for heckling the brothers.

More Help for HELP!

This is the trailer to the Beatles movie HELP! as posted on YouTube™.

Here it is as done by yours truly, taken (of course) from a 20-year-old LaserDisc. Better, yes? This is why I avoid YouTube when I can, although I must say the new, interactive Flash player is slick.

[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/SEP07/HELPtrailer.flv 400 300]

The narrator is Mason Adams. Didn’t have to look him up, I recognize his voice. Remember him on Lou Grant?

HELPed Back

The second Beatles movie, HELP!, first mentioned here nearly a year ago, is being re-re-released on DVD. The Beatles were terrorized by a fanatical eastern religion that was out for blood! I love this movie, it always makes me laugh, and I think it HELPed prime my generation for enjoying Monty Python.

John Lennon knocked HELP!, but it had much more influence on the 60’s as an era than A Hard Day’s Night. And, in fact, I think it had influence on the Beatles themselves, as seen in this video I spliced together.

[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/SEP07/HELP.flv 400 300]

“I can say no more” has been a running joke between me and D. F. Rogers for decades. Did you notice three things seen for the first time that would be seen again later?

  1. John’s wire-rim glasses
  2. Indian instruments
  3. The boys in Sgt. Pepper-ish garb

George Martin is also not particularly fond of HELP! because he didn’t score the incidental music. This is what Martin had to say about it in his book, All You Need Is Ears:

On the Beatle front, the next film was Help!, and that was done without my help! I produced all the Beatles recordings for it, of course, and they certainly thought I was going to do the film music; but since the director was Dick Lester again, it was hardly surprising that, to quote Sam Goldwyn, I was included out. The music was done by Ken Thorne, a buddy of Lester’s.