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CHAPTER 1

YOU SAY IT'S YOUR BIRTHDAY!

ON JANUARY 3, 1966, George Martin celebrated his fortieth birthday with his fiancée Judy Lockhart Smith by his side. With marriage in the offing, George's future shone brightly. On the professional front, he had just completed production work on Rubber Soul, the Beatles' latest studio album and their sixth straight UK chart-topper. The long-player had proven to be pioneering in every sense of the word. As George later observed, "I think Rubber Soul was the first of the albums that presented a new Beatles to the world. Up to this point, we had been making albums that were rather like a collection of their singles and now we really were beginning to think about albums as a bit of art in their own right. We were thinking about the album as an entity of its own, and Rubber Soul was the first one to emerge in this way." Like Paul McCartney, George perceived the album as a result of a growing collaboration between himself and the Beatles, as opposed to the more authoritative position that he had assumed with earlier projects. Previously, George "had a lot of control — we used to record the stuff, and leave him to mix it, pick a single, everything," Paul later remarked. "After a while though, we got so into recording we'd stay behind while he mixed it, watching what he was doing." But for his part, John Lennon had already begun to see the bandmates' working relationship with George evolving even further still. "We were getting better technically and musically, that's all. We finally took over the studio," John observed. "With Rubber Soul, we were more precise about making the album — that's all. We took over the cover and everything."

Forced to produce the long-player between the Beatles' stints on the road, George had delivered Rubber Soul in breakneck fashion. Recorded between October 12 and November 15, 1965, the album was mastered for release and in the shops by December 3, along with the band's latest single, "Day Tripper" backed with "We Can Work It Out." In the space of slightly more than fifty days, George and the Beatles had brought sixteen new tracks to fruition and into the hands of Beatles fans across the globe. Such was the pace in those heady days of midperiod Beatlemania. As it happened, there was no rest for the bandmates, who performed eighteen concerts that same month on their UK winter tour. Not surprisingly, by the time the new year rolled around, the Beatles were drained. But the same could hardly be said for their producer, who had just concluded another banner year in which his acts had reigned atop the charts, and who also ended his long-standing employment with the EMI Group to establish a consortium of producers known as Associated Independent Recording — or AIR for short. But rather than giving in to exhaustion, George had been buoyed by the exhilarating experience of going into business for himself. As George later observed, "My workload was enormous so that I was spending more time in the studio than I was anywhere else. And I found myself completely and utterly wrapped up in my work."

By Thursday, January 6, 1966, George was back in the studio with the Beatles. Only this time, George and the bandmates weren't in the studio to tackle new material for their waiting world of hungry consumers. And the studio, for that matter, wasn't the friendly environs of good old Number 2 at Abbey Road that they knew so well. Instead, George and the Beatles had gathered a few miles further south at Cine-Tele Sound Studios (CTS). Located in Kensington Gardens Square in London's tony Bayswater district, CTS opened for business in 1956, having been constructed in a converted banquet hall that formerly served Whiteley's Gentleman's Dining Club. With its ornate, crown-molded ceilings reaching a height of twenty-six feet, the banquet hall was rather large, measuring forty feet across and eighty-five feet deep. During its heyday, the hall had also functioned as a runway for parading the latest European fashions. But by the time that George and the Beatles alighted there in January 1966, the cavernous space enjoyed renown as the go-to place for cinema and television soundtrack recording. George himself had recorded there many times as the bandleader behind the George Martin Orchestra. In the mid-1960s, George lauded CTS as "the best film-recording studio in London." Indeed, as a converted recording studio space, it didn't disappoint. CTS could accommodate some sixty-five musicians and — most importantly for George's purposes — the room produced a natural reverberation of 0.8 seconds.

When George and the bandmates assembled at CTS on that frigid Thursday morning, they had come expressly for the reverb. With only a matter of hours to spare, they had been tasked with touching up — if not rerecording entirely — the ragged audio from the group's August 15, 1965, performance at New York City's Shea Stadium, where they had delivered a record-setting concert for more than fifty-five thousand screaming fans. With its natural reverb, CTS seemed like the perfect venue for carrying out the necessary touch-up work for the audio portion of their thirty-four-minute gig. According to chief maintenance engineer Peter Harris, the building had one major drawback: "Underneath the studio were the storage cellars of the furniture company next door (Frederick Lawrence & Co.), so at crucial times you'd hear these steel-wheeled trolleys being trundled around downstairs. One had to rush round and beg the gentleman who controlled the loading bay to get these guys to lay off for a little while."

As it happened, George and the Beatles' mission at CTS was time sensitive. BBC One was slated to broadcast a documentary devoted to the Shea Stadium concert on March 1, and the existing audio simply wasn't up to par. This issue was of paramount concern to the bandmates, given that manager Brian Epstein's NEMS Enterprises, along with the Beatles' Subafilms and American television personality Ed Sullivan, were acting as coproducers for the project. George and the Beatles had pointedly refused to release their 1964 and 1965 Hollywood Bowl performances given the atrocious state of the original recordings. But with NEMS's own money on the line, things were very different this time around. George and the Beatles needed to clean up the Shea recordings — and fast.

The Shea Stadium concert had originally been filmed under the direction of M. Clay Adams and cinematographer Andrew Laszlo, who deployed fourteen cameras to capture footage of the group and the unbridled euphoria of their multitudinous fans. The Shea audio had been recorded by Fred Bosch, a Cinerama engineer who had to resort to recording the vocals directly from the stadium's column speakers arrayed around the playing field. According to Bill Hanley, the engineer who mixed the Beatles' 1966 Shea concert, "The delay, combining those field speakers and the screaming house speakers, would have been atrocious; it would have been a horror show." During the 1965 concert, Bosch and Bob Fine, who served as the original sound mixer, were stationed below the elevated stage platform. As Fine's son Tom later observed, the mixers had been built "for P.A. and broadcast use. They weren't designed for a guy screaming rock and roll into a microphone. The overloading could have started at the input transformer."

With the Beatles' raucous sound blaring through the stadium speakers blending with fifty-five thousand boisterous fans into an unholy cacophony, Bosch and Fine never really had a chance. As Tom Fine later observed, "Everything was really primitive then. You can't look at this from a modern perspective. These guys had small space and limited time. They just set up whatever worked. This was the beginning of stadium rock P.A. — it had never been done before." The Beatles performed a dozen songs during the thirty-four-minute show. Most of the band's lead vocals were heavily distorted given the brutal conditions inside the stadium. In truth, there was very little Fine could do to capture a passable recording. As Abbey Road engineer Sam Okell remarked, Fine was standing "in the middle of a baseball field, with headphones on and he can't hear anything. It's absolutely crazy they got anything."

On the Wednesday afternoon before the CTS session, Martin and Adams assembled at Abbey Road to cobble together a game plan for salvaging the Shea recordings. Adams had flown in from New York City earlier in the week in order to work with George at CTS to bring the audio up to snuff — or, failing that, to a much less embarrassing sound than existed in the original recording. Working from Fine's mix, which Fine had prepared back on December 2, Martin and Adams had their work cut out for them. John Lennon and Paul McCartney's vocal recordings were particularly dreadful on "Twist and Shout" and "She's a Woman," while Ringo Starr's lead vocal was inexplicably dropped from "Act Naturally." A number of the songs suffered from recording hiccups and instrumental drops, especially "I'm Down," which featured Lennon playing a lively Vox Continental organ. In a January 10, 1966, letter to his son Michael, Adams described Martin as being "a fine person — very thoughtful, cooperative, and very 'giving' of himself. He has been recording the Beatles as their A&R (artists and repertoire) man ever since the beginning." Observing the CTS recording sessions the next day, Adams remarked that the bandmates "really look up to George Martin. Whenever they are recording, they do exactly what he tells them and they take his criticisms to the letter." Adams later joined Martin at AIR's Park Street offices, where he met Ron Richards, John Burgess, and Peter Sullivan, Martin's business partners in his post-EMI career. For dubbing purposes, Adams had brought a rough cut of the documentary to serve as a guide for overdubbing the Beatles' new vocals and instrumentation onto Fine's December 2 mix. In Adams's recollections, Martin quickly diagnosed the problem with the original recordings as being weak on the "low end" — namely, McCartney's bass and Starr's drums. Living in Central London, McCartney arrived at CTS first. In short order, roadie Mal Evans set up an amplifier and McCartney began recording new bass lines to accompany Fine's mix. Adams recalled that McCartney was "playing bass notes so loud they felt like they were loosening the fillings in your teeth."

An hour later, the other three Beatles arrived. Only they couldn't get started, as their guitars hadn't been delivered to the studio. Eventually, Evans and Alf Bicknell, the Beatles' driver, managed to retrieve the bandmates' guitars, and by early afternoon they were finally ready to go. Adams had described their mission as needing to "fortify" Fine's mix, and the bandmates took to aping Adams at nearly every turn. "How are we doing, Clay, did we fortify that one okay?" McCartney asked. As the session proceeded, Martin led the Beatles through complete remakes of "Ticket to Ride," "I Feel Fine," and "Help!" With the bandmates unable to simply "fortify" "Twist and Shout" into shape, Martin helpfully provided Adams with unreleased audio for the song from the band's August 30, 1965, concert at the Hollywood Bowl, their last appearance in that august West Coast venue. Unable to salvage "Act Naturally," Martin provided Adams with the original master recording from the Help! long-player, which the Beatles' producer had "sweetened" with crowd noise. While Martin and the bandmates had to contend with less-than-stellar audio recordings, Adams was impressed with their ability to match their studio performances with the images on the documentary. As Adams's son Michael later recalled, "My dad said he was amazed by the Beatles' ability to sync precisely to picture, particularly when they were patching their vocals. They could match completely what they did onstage." By January 25, Adams had returned to New York City, where he prepared a mono mix of Martin's CTS recording. Broadcast on the BBC on March 1, The Beatles at Shea Stadium documentary wouldn't debut in the United States until January 10, 1967, when it was finally broadcast on ABC television.

For George, recording in a pinch had long been the norm — whether he was working with the Beatles or carrying out his new freelance professional lifestyle with his partners at AIR. As it happened, life at AIR had started out rather slowly as far as hit making went. The Beatles were AIR's mainstay, "fireproof" act as far as their producer was concerned, and by this juncture their track record in the United Kingdom had resulted in six straight number-one long-players and eight chart-topping singles — nine if you count "Please Please Me," which landed the top spot on New Musical Express (NME) and Melody Maker, respectively, but came in second on Record Retailer, the official UK charts for much of the 1960s. But even with the Beatles' staggering sales returns, George needed to supplement AIR's balance sheet with a few hitmakers of their own if they were going to prosper, since the percentage he received for new acts was considerably higher. George was ever mindful of AIR's motto — "Built by producers, for producers" — and he knew that if his partnership was going to succeed in the long run, it would do so on the backs of a new stable of artists.

As it happened, the new year had not been entirely kind to George. For the past several months, he had been devoting long hours between Beatles sessions to Twang!!, a new musical from the redoubtable Lionel Bart, the West End composer behind Oliver! Bart's latest work promised a burlesque musical revue of the Robin Hood legend. Given his work with the British comedy masters of the day, Martin seemed like a perfect complement for Bart's zany vision. Martin had subsequently been inked to prepare the soundtrack album for release with United Artists, the American record and film conglomerate who had signed him to a multirecord deal back in September 1964. He was no stranger to the theatrical world, having recorded live performances of Beyond the Fringe and Flanders and Swan during his Parlophone days. But Twang!! was less dependent upon Martin's expertise as producer and musical director. Working with Bart wasn't that different from collaborating with the Beatles, who had no formal training and couldn't compose in notation. As Martin later wrote, "There have been many great musicians who couldn't write a pop tune to save their lives. Equally, the pop world in particular has seen many who have known nothing of music but could write great tunes. Lionel Bart, for example, can't play an instrument." Instead, "he just whistles his tunes as he thinks of them." Musicals like Twang!! tended to take on lives of their own, and Bart's show was no different.

Things had seemed promising on October 9, 1965, when George and the bandmates celebrated John's twenty-fifth birthday with the cast at Lionel's home to commemorate the musical's opening. But a preview performance in Manchester's Palace Theatre offered a glimpse of the horrid events to come. Indeed, the preview performance had gone so badly that the director, Joan Littlewood, promptly jumped ship. By the time that Twang!! opened in the West End's Shaftesbury Theatre in December 1965, disaster was clearly imminent. Collapsing under the weight of a poorly written script and — worse yet — a weak rendering of Robin Hood's typically charismatic personage, Twang!! closed in January 1966 after just forty-three performances. For his part, Bart lost his entire fortune in the fiasco. In an incredible irony, by the time that Martin's United Artists original cast soundtrack was released that same January, the musical had already been mothballed. When the show closed, London critics were already condemning Twang!! as "the worst musical for years." Bart's theatrical disaster would not soon be forgotten. In 2015 — sixteen years after the one-time musical impresario's death — the Telegraph ranked Twang!! as seventh on its roster of the ten worst musicals of all time.

January also saw the release of Cilla Black's new single "Alfie" backed with "Night Time Is Here." Like "Anyone Who Had a Heart," which notched a number-one hit for Black and Martin in 1964, "Alfie" had been penned by the legendary American songwriting team of Burt Bacharach and Hal David, who had been inspired to write the song by the upcoming British film of the same name. Since 1957, Bacharach and David had landed thirty-three top-forty hits in the United States and United Kingdom alone, many of them with Dionne Warwick, the American chanteuse who was the principal interpreter of their music. Given the film's London setting, the film's producers recommended that Bacharach and David seek out a British singer for "Alfie." Black seemed like a natural choice, since Bacharach had personally selected Black to sing the Bacharach-David confection "Anyone Who Had a Heart."

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Excerpted from "Sound Pictures"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Kenneth Womack.
Excerpted by permission of Chicago Review Press Incorporated.
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