18 îêòÿáðÿ 1964. Áèòëç â ñòóäèè. Ìàðàôîíñêàÿ ñåññèÿ "Beatles for Sale"

Çàïèñü ïåñåí Eight Days A Week, Kansas City/Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey!, Mr Moonlight, I Feel Fine, I’ll Follow The Sun, Everybody’s Trying To Be My Baby, Rock And Roll Music, Words Of Love. Âåñüìà ïëîäîòâîðíûé äåíü. Íå óñòóïàþùèé çàïèñè àëüáîìà "Please Please Me".

Èç êíèãè "Maximum Volume The Life of Beatles Producer George Martin, the Early Years, 1926–1966" by Kenneth Womack


Across the Beatles’ incredible recording career, George and the group would enjoy more than their share of landmark sessions at Abbey Road, but few stand out like the nine-hour affair that they conducted on Sunday, October 18, 1964. The marathon session was necessitated by the band’s sporadic availability given the constraints of their current British tour, which had begun back on October 9 in Bradford and would run through a November 10 date in Bristol. On this day alone, they would bring eight tracks to completion, isolate their next stand-alone single, and make history in the recording studio. They may indeed have been war weary, as George had maintained about the Beatles during this period, but their industriousness more than made up for their understandable exhaustion toward the tail end of that life-changing year.

The day’s work began with “Eight Days a Week,” the song that they had left in an unfinished state during their previous meeting. Flush with creative energy, George and the Beatles decided to tackle the catchy composition head on. As Emerick later recalled, the session began when Martin “asked everyone to convene in the control room. The first order of business was to do some repair work” on “Eight Days a Week.” “As the last note died out, we all excitedly agreed that the high-energy performance captured on tape was a definite ‘keeper,’” Geoff wrote. “The only problems were with the ragged beginning and overly abrupt ending, and an intense discussion ensued about how to best fix them.” As it happened, John and Paul had cooked up an idea about beginning the song with their harmonies, sung a cappella, to afford “Eight Days a Week” with an arresting intro. Recognizing that the two Beatles were making precious little progress on this latest brainchild—and with one eye focused, no doubt, on the studio clock—George redirected the band’s energies back to the song’s unsettled conclusion. With Smith and Emerick up in the control room with Martin, Lennon and Harrison chimed out the melody on their guitars—a Gibson “Jumbo” acoustic and twelve-string Rickenbacker, respectively—as McCartney brought the song in for a landing with a series of staccato bursts on his Höfner bass. With the issue of the outro finally resolved, the Beatles’ circle set their sights on the “the problem of what to do about the ragged intro,” Geoff later recalled, “and as they were pondering what to do about it, Norman came up with the brilliant suggestion of simply fading in the song, instead of having everything come crashing in at full volume.” Quite suddenly, “Eight Days a Week” had come into focus, with Smith fashioning the new edit pieces onto the best take from the previous session.

With “Eight Days a Week” in the can, George and the bandmates began knocking off “Kansas City”/“Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey!”—a long-standing Beatles concert staple and the first of several cover versions that they would tackle that day. Written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, “Kansas City” had been released as a single in 1952 by Little Willie Littlefield, while “Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey” had been composed and popularized by Paul’s singing idol, Little Richard. The group knew the song inside and out, and with Martin lending a subtle piano, they knocked off the tune in two high-octane takes. With yet another song in the can, they returned to “Mr. Moonlight,” which had remained unfinished since the August 14 session when they had also tried their hand at “Leave My Kitten Alone.” With Martin in the control booth, the band remade “Mr. Moonlight,” isolating the rhythm section—bass, guitars, and conga—on track one; a Hammond organ riff from McCartney on track two; Lennon’s lead vocals on track three; and backing vocals on the remaining track. “Mr. Moonlight” received a final, key bit of ornamentation when Smith edited Lennon’s opening scream from August 14 into the mix, affording the song with a striking intro.

Which brought George and the Beatles to “I Feel Fine,” the riff that John had been rehearsing between takes during the previous session. Based on Bobby Parker’s “Watch Your Step,” one of Lennon’s favorite songs, the ecstatic guitar sequence clearly had the makings of a hit record, but the Beatles—and especially John—had something even more groundbreaking in mind for “I Feel Fine.” As McCartney later recalled, the song’s innovative intro happened initially by accident during a break in the previous session. “John had a semi-acoustic Gibson guitar. It had a pick-up on it so it could be amplified,” McCartney remarked. “We were just about to walk away to listen to a take when John leaned his guitar against the amp. I can still see him doing it. He really should have turned the electric off. It was only on a tiny bit, and John just leaned it against the amp when it went, ‘Nnnnnnwahhhhh!’ And we went, ‘What’s that? Voodoo!’ ‘No, it’s feedback.’ ‘Wow, it’s a great sound!’ George Martin was there so we said, ‘Can we have that on the record?’ ‘Well, I suppose we could, we could edit it on the front.’ It was a found object, an accident caused by leaning the guitar against the amp.” With this newfangled sound at their fingertips, the Beatles began to experiment with various means of controlling its duration. On October 18, Emerick observed the band from the control room as they toyed with using feedback as the introductory gambit for “I Feel Fine.” “As the band began rehearsing their next song in the studio with George Martin,” Emerick recalled, “I used the opportunity to sit in the control room and relax for a few minutes. I was making small talk with Norman about something or other when all of a sudden I heard this loud, buzzing sound issue forth from the speakers. ‘What the bloody hell was that?’ I asked him, alarmed. My first thought was that a cable had gone bad, or that a piece of equipment had failed. Norman chuckled. ‘Have a look,’ he said to me. I pressed my nose up against the control room glass and was astonished to see John Lennon kneeling before his amplifier, guitar in hand. We knew that if you brought a guitar too close to an amplifier, it would squeal, but John was using it in a controlled way for the first time.”

As the Beatles attempted to get a handle on “I Feel Fine,” Martin suggested that they record the rhythm track first, which they accomplished across eight takes. For the ninth take, John added his lead vocals. The distinctive intro was achieved with Paul plucking a low note on his bass, while John controlled the feedback howling from his guitar. He was understandably proud of having captured the effect on record. Years later, he described it as “the first feedback anywhere. I defy anybody to find a record—unless it’s some old blues record in 1922—that used feedback in that way. I mean, everybody played feedback on stage, and the Jimi Hendrix stuff was going on long before. In fact, the punk stuff now is only what people were doing in the clubs. So I claim for the Beatles—before Hendrix, before the Who, before anybody—the first feedback on any record.”

With their next standalone singles release fully in hand, Martin and the band took a dinner break before shifting to one of McCartney’s oldest compositions, which he had written at age sixteen in his family’s front parlor back in Liverpool. As Paul later recalled, “There were certain songs I had from way back that I didn’t really finish up, but they were in the back of my mind.” Titled “I’ll Follow the Sun,” the song was completed by the group in eight takes, with the final run-through being selected as their best effort. Lennon and McCartney sang the middle eight in an exquisite vocal duet, while Harrison overdubbed a solo in the guitar break. In yet another innovation on the day, Ringo kept time during “I’ll Follow the Sun” by simply slapping his knees with the palms of his hands. Years later, Martin would single out “I’ll Follow the Sun” as his favorite track from the Beatles for Sale album. He later admitted that he was generally tolerant of recording technical imperfections during this era, preferring to capture the best possible vocal performances, as he had done with John and Paul’s memorable work on “I’ll Follow the Sun.” “Looking back,” he later recalled, “some of the plops that we got on the mics were pretty awful, but I was out to get the performance—the excitement of the actual live action—and technical things like that didn’t worry me too much.”

The October 18 session hurtled toward its conclusion with the recording of three more songs that evening—“Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby,” “Rock and Roll Music,” and “Words of Love”—all of which were accomplished in just five takes. For the first two tracks, George sweetened the songs’ lead vocals by heavily treating them with STEED (single tape echo and echo delay) in order to achieve a live-sounding echo effect. The enhancement was accomplished when Smith delayed the recorded signal by directing it into Studio 2’s echo chamber using a tape machine and then picking up the resultant sound using a pair of condenser microphones, which transmitted the signal back to the recording console. For “Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby,” a cover version in the style of Carl Perkins, one of Harrison’s guitar idols, George and the group captured the song in a single take with the STEED effect applied live during the actual recording. As a result, Harrison’s vocal oozes with reverb as if he’s singing in a spacious concert hall. “Not only did he sing it with enthusiasm,” Emerick wrote, “but he played guitar confidently and well. Even his solo, performed live, was flawless.” After adding a tambourine overdub by Ringo, they turned to another cover version, the Chuck Berry classic “Rock and Roll Music.” With Lennon’s vocals sweetened with a heavy dose of STEED and Martin playing a mean piano, the Beatles recorded “Rock and Roll Music” in a single, scintillating take.

For John, George’s deployment of STEED to treat his lead vocals was seemingly the answer to his long-standing issues with the quality of his voice. “I could never understand his attitude, as it was one of the best voices I’ve heard. He was a great admirer of Elvis Presley’s early records, particularly the ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ kind of sound,” George later remarked. In many ways, John was his own worst critic, fretting over the quality of his lead vocals, which he frequently attempted to camouflage and enhance via double-tracking. STEED afforded him with a means for altering his voice even more perceptibly. As George remembered, “He was always saying to me, ‘Do something with my voice. Put something on it. Smother it with tomato ketchup. Make it different.’ He was obsessed with tape delay—a sort of very near-echo. I used to do other things to him, and as long as it wasn’t his natural voice coming through, he was reasonably happy—but he’d always want his vocals to get special treatment. However, I wanted to hear it in its own natural quality.” As it turned out, John’s long-standing difference with George over the natural beauty of his voice was only just getting started.
With the evening growing nigh, the Beatles had time for just one more track, as they had to be in Scotland the very next day to resume their current tour. At this juncture, they turned to Buddy Holly’s “Words of Love,” the only time that the bandmates, who idolized the fallen Texan, would record one of his numbers. Captured in three takes—only two of which were complete—“Words of Love” featured John and Paul in a warm vocal duet. Martin sweetened the track with a series of overdubs, including Lennon and McCartney double-tracking their vocals, as well as double-tracking the distinctive chiming sound emitted by Harrison’s Gretsch Tennessean. To keep time for the song, Ringo can be heard rapping the side of a packing case—not unlike the sound that the Crickets’ Jerry Allison achieved on Holly’s “Everyday” by slapping his hands on his lap. With the second take of “Words of Love” having been selected as the best run-through, the Beatles’ incredibly productive session had come to an end after just over nine hours of work in Studio 2.

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