George & Geoff & Yoko

Look at this great photo of John and Paul.
It's only tangentially related to this
blog post, but I stumbled on it last night
and I just really like it and wanted to use it.
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Geoff Emerick had a lot to say about working with the Beatles in his book Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles. Emerick was responsible for many of the cool sounds the Beatles used in their most celebrated albums, and also worked with Paul McCartney, who he adored, after the Beatles broke up.

But in the book he is unsparing about people who were rude or cold to him, especially George Harrison.

Emerick:

George Harrison was always kind of a mystery to me. Although he was kind and generous with many of my EMI colleagues throughout the years, he and I just didn't have good chemistry together. He struck me as a dour, humorless man who complained a lot, and he always seemed suspicious of everyone outside of the Beatles' inner circle. He didn't interact or converse with me very much, even when we were working on one of his songs. He didn't know anything about technicalities, either—he'd just focus on the musical aspects, and discuss them with the others, or with George Martin. He might say to me, "Can you change the guitar sound a bit, Geoff?" but it wouldn't go much further than that.

I've noted what a buzzkill Harrison was. 

So George and Geoff did not have a good rapport, but on top of that, Emerick was supremely unimpressed by Harrison's musicianship, writing:

Paul sometimes actually seemed a bit embarrassed by Harrison's musical limitations; certainly there were many instances of eye-rolling when poor George was wrestling unsuccessfully with a solo or lead part. I imagine in those circumstances that Paul was frustrated, probably thinking that he could have mastered the part faster and played it better. 

 

To be fair, Harrison faced an uphill battle against the massive talents of Lennon and McCartney. For one thing, he was the youngest band member and was therefore frequently treated like a kid brother, not to be taken seriously. For another, he didn't have a songwriting partner to bounce ideas off of. I always felt that at a relatively early point, Harrison simply realized that he was never going to be a Lennon or a McCartney, which might explain why he turned to Indian music—it was his own outlet, something completely separate from the others. On occasion, Lennon would lend him a hand with a lyric or chord change, but then John would quickly become distracted or bored. I never saw Paul extend himself to George that way. His attitude toward his younger bandmate seemed to be, "You shouldn't be asking me for help; you should be doing it yourself." Perhaps it was the creative and personal tension between the two that led Harrison to keep me at arm's length, because it was obvious that I had a close relationship with Paul.

And according to Emerick, it wasn't only himself and Paul who were unimpressed:

I noticed a definite maturing in George Harrison during the course of the Revolver sessions. Up until that point, he had played a largely subordinate role in the band—after all, it was Lennon and McCartney's songs that had been the hits. But he ended up recording three original songs on this album—Im not sure why he was given so much space, but it's possible that he had put pressure on Brian Epstein to put pressure on George Martin.

All those discussions would have been held privately, outside of the studio, but there were definite economic considerations involved, because royalty income was directly tied to how many songs a writer got on each album. Paul and John weren't especially derisive of George's abilities as a songwriter or his explorations into Eastern music—at least, not in my presence—but George Martin always seemed a bit concerned about both the quality of Harrison's compositions and the amount of time being spent on them, which tended to make Harrison a bit self-conscious. With the benefit of hindsight, George Martin has expressed regret in some of his interviews about the short shrift that Harrison sometimes received, though it is somewhat understandable in light of Lennon and McCartney's phenomenal songwriting abilities. It's little wonder that George was often overshadowed. I thought that George's strongest song on Revolver was "Taxman," and George Martin must have agreed, since he decided to put it first on the album-the all-important spot generally reserved for the best song, since the idea is to try to capture the listener immediately. Harrison didn't like paying tax, and the Inland Revenue had been after him once or twice, so he wrote a song about it, with a really clever lyric ("My advice to those who die / Declare the pennies on your eyes"). There was a bit of tension on that session, though, because George had a great deal of trouble playing the solo—in fact, he couldn't even do a proper job of it when we slowed the tape down to half speed. 

I was recently listening to Revolver and was wondering myself why there were three Harrison songs on it, none of which are any good, in my opinion, including "Taxman." The only good song Harrison wrote before the magnificent "It's All To Much" was "I Need You" from the Help album. You can hear during the end credits of Help, Harrison's yelling out "I Need You by George Harrison" when his credit comes up on screen, and he was right to be proud about that song. Although to be fair, part of what I love about it is the reverb on the guitar especially towards the end, and the backing vocals. I wrote about the Help album and my love of "I Need You" way back in 2012. I almost forgot I wrote about Help, but I guess that's what happens when you have a blog for almost twenty years.

"Taxman" is considered great by many, but I can't stand it. First because the lyrics sound like they were written by a libertarian. I mean, boo-hoo, obscenely rich musician has to pay high taxes. And second, because the melody is no good. The guitar solos are very good but guess what - George, the band's lead guitarist, doesn't even play them! 

Emerick again:

After a couple of hours of watching him struggle, both Paul and George Martin started becoming quite frustrated—this was, after all, a Harrison song and therefore not something anyone was prepared to spend a whole lot of time on. So George Martin went into the studio and, as diplomatically as possible, announced that he wanted Paul to have a go at the solo instead. I could see from the look on Harrison's face that he didn't like the idea one bit, but he reluctantly agreed and then proceeded to disappear for a couple of hours. He sometimes did that-had a bit of a sulk on his own, then eventually came back. Whatever private conversations he would have with John or Paul upon his return occurred in the corridor, where none of us could hear. 

Sometimes Ringo would be part of the conference, but more often he would stay in the studio with Neil and Mal until the storm had blown over. Paul's solo was stunning in its ferocity-his guitar playing had a fire and energy that his younger bandmate's rarely matched —and was accomplished in just a take or two. It was so good, in fact, that George Martin had me fly it in again during the song's fadeout.

Emerick also confirmed what I came to think of Yoko Ono while watching Get Back a few years ago - she basically approached the world as if she was royalty. I wrote:

Amanda Hess compares Ono's behavior to a performance piece, but there's a more likely, if prosaic explanation: Ono was from a family of wealthy Japanese aristocrats. The Beatles were working-class musicians. In the world that Yoko came from, you didn't worry about the feelings of the people you outranked. Why should she care if she was irritating the fuck out of everybody?

And the next year I mentioned I had read what a classmate had to say about her:

A classmate offered a different perspective: “She never felt happy unless she was treated like a queen.”

And in Emerick's description, she's even wearing a tiara. Lennon and Ono had been in a car crash and while Ono was recuperating, Lennon had a bed brought into the recording studio during the making of Abbey Road. If only this had been caught on video and seen by all those Ono partisans like Amanda Hess.

Also, Lennon's habit of referring to Ono as "Mother" is extremely creepy.

"I'm afraid that Mother is still not too well, though," he said, suitably chastened. Even during the White Album sessions John had started referring to Yoko that way, which I always found a bit creepy.

Yoko started to say something, but before she could get a word out, the door burst open again and four men in brown coats began wheeling in a large, heavy object. For a moment, I thought it was a piano coming in from one of the other studios, but it soon dawned on me that these were proper deliverymen: the brown coats they were wearing had the word "Harrods" inscribed on the back. The object being delivered was, in fact, a bed.

Jaws dropping, we all watched as it was brought into the studio and carefully positioned by the stairs, across from the tea-and-toast setup. More brown coats appeared with sheets and pillows and somberly made the bed up. Then, without saying a word, Yoko climbed in, carefully arranging the covers around her.

I'd spent nearly seven years of my life in recording studios, and I thought l'd seen it all...but this took the cake. George Martin, John Kurlander, Phil, and I exchanged wary looks; out of the corner of my eye I could see that Paul, Ringo, and George Harrison were as gobsmacked as we were. Lennon walked over to the bed.

"Are you okay?" he asked solicitously.

Yoko mumbled an affirmative. Lennon turned to us.

"Can you put a microphone up over here so we can hear her on the headphones?" he asked. Dumbfounded, I nodded to John Kurlander and he began setting up a boom stand, suspending the microphone above the supine Mrs. Lennon's face.

For the next several weeks, Yoko lived in that bed. Her wardrobe consisted of a series of flimsy nightgowns, accessorized with a regal tiara, carefully positioned to hide the scar on her forehead from the accident. As she gained her strength, so too did she gain her confidence, slowly but surely starting to annoy the other Beatles and George Martin with her comments. She spoke in a really tiny voice, and she always referred to the Beatles in a peculiar, impersonal third-party way: "Beatles will do this, Beatles will do that," never failing to leave off the "The." That used to really irritate Paul. On occasion, he'd even try correcting her: "Actually, it's the Beatles, luv," but she persistently ignored him.

I stand by what I said in response to Get Back - Yoko Ono didn't break up the Beatles, but Lennon used her as one of his methods to break up the Beatles.

Emerick again:

We were working on the backing track to "The End"-the song designed to conclude the album's long medley-when the four Beatles trooped upstairs to listen to some playbacks. Yoko stayed behind, stretched out languorously in the bed, wearing the usual flimsy nightgown and tiara.

As we were listening, I noticed that something down in the studio had caught George Harrison's attention. After a moment or two he began staring bug-eyed out the control room window. Curious, I looked over his shoulder. Yoko had gotten out of bed and was slowly padding across the studio floor, finally coming to a stop at Harrison's Leslie cabinet, which had a packet of McVitie's Digestive Biscuits on top. Idly, she began opening the packet and delicately removed a single biscuit. Just as the morsel reached her mouth, Harrison could contain himself no longer.

"THAT BITCH!!!"

Everyone looked aghast, but we all knew exactly who he was talking about.

"She's just taken one of my biscuits!" Harrison explained. He wasn't the least bit sheepish, either. As far as he was concerned, those biscuits were his property, and no one was allowed to go near them. Lennon began shouting back at him, but there was little he could say to defend his wife (who, oblivious, was happily munching away in the studio), because he shared exactly the same attitude toward food.

Actually, I think the argument was not so much about the biscuits, but about the bed, which they had all come to deeply resent. What Harrison was really saying was "if Yoko is well enough to get out of bed and steal one of my biscuits, she doesn't need to be in the bloody bed in the first place." It almost didn't matter what the argument was about. By this stage, whenever the four of them were together it was like a tinderbox, and anything could set them off...even something as dumb as a digestive biscuit.

August orchid

I was going to repot this orchid once the blossoms faded - at this rate the blooms are going to last until autumn.

So what did the critics think of Eleanor Rigby?

The author of the New York Times' mixed review of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Richard Goldstein, loved the Beatles' previous album Revolver. In his review in the Village Voice, he wrote:

Revolver is a revolutionary record, as important to the expansion of pop territory as was Rubber Soul. It was apparent last year that the 12 songs in Rubber Soul represented an important advance. Revolver is the great leap forward. Hear it once and you know it’s important. Hear it twice, it makes sense. Third time around it’s fun. Fourth time, it’s subtle. On the fifth hearing, Revolver becomes profound.

As far as Eleanor Rigby though, he didn't write about the musical aspect of the song directly, instead focusing on the lyrics:

“Eleanor Rigby” is an orchestrated ballad about the agony of loneliness. Its characters, Eleanor herself and Father MacKenzie, represent sterility. Eleanor “died in the church and was buried along with her name.” The good father writes “words to the sermon that no one will hear/No one comes near.” As a commentary on the state of modern religion, this song will hardly be appreciated by those who see John Lennon as an anti-Christ. But “Eleanor Rigby” is really about the unloved and un-cared-­for. When Eleanor makes up, the narrator asks: “Who is it for?”‘ While the father darns his socks, the question is: “What does he care?”

Edward Greenfield, writing for the British newspaper the Guardian, adored Revolver and had the same kind of response to Eleanor Rigby that I did fifty years later:

"Eleanor Rigby" (with "square" string octet accompaniment) is a ballad about a lonely spinster who "wears the face that she keeps in a jar by the door" and about Father McKenzie "writing the words of sermon that no one will hear," the verses punctuated by wailing cries of "Look at all the lonely people: where do they all come from?"

There you have a quality rare in pop music, compassion, born of an artist's ability to project himself into other situations. Specific understanding of emotion comes out even in the love songs - at least the two new ones with the best tunes, both incidentally sung by Paul McCartney, the Beatle with the strongest musical staying power.

 Ray Davies of the Kinks did not like much of Revolver and as far as Eleanor Rigby:

Eleanor Rigby - I bought a Haydn LP the other day and this sounds just like it. It's all sort of quartet stuff and it sounds like they're out to please music teachers in primary schools. I can imagine John saying: 'I'm going to write this for my old schoolmistress'.

Of course John didn't actually have much to do with the song, it was Paul's baby. 

While Googling to learn more about contemporary reviews of Eleanor Rigby, I was flabbergasted to find that Paul McCartney published an article in The New Yorker about writing Eleanor Rigby in 2021 (Archived version here) and I somehow missed it until now.

I wrote about Eleanor Rigby in December 2016 - almost nine years now - called The loneliness of Paul McCartney, in which I marveled that it had been written by a 24-year-old social butterfly pop star. 

In the New Yorker article, McCartney explains how this miracle came to pass:

Growing up, I knew a lot of old ladies—partly through what was called Bob-a-Job Week, when Scouts did chores for a shilling. You’d get a shilling for cleaning out a shed or mowing a lawn. I wanted to write a song that would sum them up. Eleanor Rigby is based on an old lady that I got on with very well. I don’t even know how I first met “Eleanor Rigby,” but I would go around to her house, and not just once or twice. I found out that she lived on her own, so I would go around there and just chat, which is sort of crazy if you think about me being some young Liverpool guy. Later, I would offer to go and get her shopping. She’d give me a list and I’d bring the stuff back, and we’d sit in her kitchen. I still vividly remember the kitchen, because she had a little crystal-radio set. That’s not a brand name; it actually had a crystal inside it. Crystal radios were quite popular in the nineteen-twenties and thirties. So I would visit, and just hearing her stories enriched my soul and influenced the songs I would later write.

The contemporary reviews of Eleanor Rigby mention that the song uses classical music instruments, but don't comment on how powerful they sound in the recording. That is what is so striking about the song, in addition to its compassion. The Beatles' sound engineer Geoff Emerick had a lot to say about the recording in his book Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of The Beatles, 

There was also a bit of stress during the recording of “Eleanor Rigby,” though for an entirely different reason. After hearing Paul play this beautiful song on acoustic guitar, George Martin felt that the only accompaniment that was necessary was that of a double string quartet: four violins, two violas, and two cellos. Paul wasn’t immediately enamored of the concept—he was afraid of it sounding too cloying, too “Mancini”—but George eventually talked him into it, assuring him he would write a string arrangement that would be suitable.

“Okay, but I want the strings to sound really biting,” Paul warned as he signed off on the idea. I took note of what he said and began thinking of how to best accomplish that. 

 

String quartets were traditionally recorded with just one or two microphones, placed high, several feet up in the air so that the sound of the bows scraping couldn’t be heard. But with Paul’s directive in mind, I decided to close-mic the instruments, which was a new concept. The musicians were horrified! One of them gave me a look of disdain, rolled his eyes to the ceiling, and said under his breath, “You can’t do that, you know.”

His words shook my confidence and made me start to second-guess myself. But I carried on regardless, determined to at least hear what it sounded like.

We did one take with the mics fairly close, then on the next take I decided to get extreme and move the mics in really close—perhaps just an inch or so away from each instrument. It was a fine line; I didn’t want to make the musicians so uncomfortable that they couldn’t give their best performance, but my job was to achieve what Paul wanted. That was the sound he liked, and so that was the miking we used, despite the string players’ unhappiness. To some degree, I could understand why they were so upset: they were scared of playing a bum note, and being under a microscope like that meant that any discrepancy in their playing was going to be magnified. Also, the technical limitations at the time were such that we couldn’t easily drop in, so they had to play the whole song correctly from beginning to end every time.

Even without peering through the control room glass, I could hear the sound of the eight musicians sliding their chairs back before every take, so I had to keep going down there and moving the mics back in closer after every take; it was comic, really. Finally, George Martin told them pointedly to stop moving off mic. In the end, the players did a good job, though they clearly were annoyed, so much so that they declined an invitation to listen to the playback. We didn’t really care what they thought, anyway—we were pleased that we had come up with another new sound, which was really a combination of Paul’s vision and mine.

It was during the Revolver sessions that I realized I simply couldn’t rely on textbook recording techniques in terms of mic positioning and placement. The Beatles were demanding more, so much more, of both me and of the technology. We didn’t know it at the time, but we were making tremendous advancements in the recording process.

Emerick was an important, if usually overlooked aspect of the Beatles' sound and he participated in most of their recordings except "Let It Be" and most of the White Album. And wow, does he have opinions about the Beatles, which made his book controversial. He likely would have agreed with the Guardian critic's assessment of McCartney as "Beatle with the strongest musical staying power." George Harrison, on the other hand... but I will write about that in another post.

The Eleanor Rigby section of the movie "Yellow Submarine":

The New York Times did not like Sgt. Pepper

Making Pepper 

Recently I was listening to "Eleanor Rigby" by the Beatles, which appeared on their Revolver album in 1966 and I thought: "what must the critics have made of this? It must have seemed so alien to anything they'd ever heard under the label "rock and roll." 

I've written about Eleanor Rigby on this blog before, about what an amazing accomplishment the song is, especially considering it was written by Paul McCartney when he was 24 years old.

So I decided to do some Googling and in a minute I discovered that the New York Times was none too impressed by the Beatles' next album, "Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" when it was first released:

Like an over-attended child “Sergeant Pepper” is spoiled. It reeks of horns and harps, harmonica quartets, assorted animal noises and a 91-piece orchestra. On at least one cut, the Beatles are not heard at all instrumentally. Sometimes this elaborate musical propwork succeeds in projecting mood. The “Sergeant Pepper” theme is brassy and vaudevillian. “She’s Leaving Home,” a melodramatic domestic saga, flows on a cloud of heavenly strings. And, in what is becoming a Beatle tradition, George Harrison unveils his latest excursion into curry and karma, to the saucy accompaniment of three tambouras, a dilruba, a tabla, a sitar, a table harp, three cellos and eight violins.

Actually the author thought "Within You Without You" was "among the strongest cuts" which I have to disagree with. It is the first song on side two, on the olde thyme vinyl album and after I heard it a few times - I listened to Sgt. Pepper a lot after I first bought it - I used to put the record's needle down at the end of the track and start side two right off with "When I'm Sixty-Four."

I do like a few George songs, but this is not one of them.

I have recently been listening to the audio book "Revolver - how the Beatles Re-Imagined Rock and Roll" and the author pointed out that a common theme in George songs is disapproval. And after quickly making a mental inventory of George songs, I concluded: "so true!" 

His negativity was a running theme in the Let it Be sessions, which is why I called him a buzzkill.

And sure enough Within You Without You expresses disapproval. The lyrics include:

We were talking about the love that's gone so cold

And the people who gain the world and lose their soul

They don't know, they can't see, are you one of them?

Because if you are "one of them" then George disapproves.

Even my favorite George song, the under-appreciated "It's All Too Much" (this guy gets it) has a title that is basically a complaint. Although fortunately the rest of the lyrics are more hippie-trippy than disapproving and then there are the immortal lines:

Set me on a silver sun, for I know that I'm free

Show me that I'm everywhere, and get me home for tea

I will have more to say about the Revolver book soon.

The New York Times review doesn't even mention some of the songs on Pepper: Lovely Rita, Good Morning, With a Little Help, Getting Better and Fixing a Hole are ignored. And "She's Leaving Home" is compared, unfavorably, to Eleanor Rigby. 

But the reviewer loves "A Day in the Life":

With one important exception, “Sergeant Pepper” is precious but devoid of gems. “A Day in the Life” is such a radical departure from the spirit of the album that it almost deserves its peninsular position (following the reprise of the “Sergeant Pepper” theme, it comes almost as an afterthought). It has nothing to do with posturing or put-on. It is a deadly earnest excursion in emotive music with a chilling lyric. Its orchestration is dissonant but sparse, and its mood is not whimsical nostalgia but irony.

With it, the Beatles have produced a glimpse of modern city life that is terrifying. It stands as one of the most important Lennon-McCartney compositions, and it is a historic Pop event.

“A Day in the Life” starts in a description of suicide. With the same conciseness displayed in “Eleanor Rigby,” the protagonist begins: “I read the news today, oh boy.”

There's Eleanor Rigby again. I'll be talking about the critics' response to that song next.

In the meantime - it's all too much!