LONG AND WINDING ROAD

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (12-29-22)- Please remember small business in your town during this coronavirus pandemic

     Sometimes an interviewer will ask a musician what his or her influences are, and they will say, of course, The Beatles. Which makes Paul McCartney the most famous YouTube influencer there ever was. During the height of Beatlemania the fans were so loud that four musicians couldn't hear a note they were playing onstage. Everybody was screaming at the top of their lungs. If I had been there at the time I would have been screaming too: "CAN'T YOU PEOPLE PLEASE SHUT UP FOR TWO MINUTES? I CAN'T HEAR THE MUSIC OVER MY CONSTANT YELLING AT YOU!" Playing inside a DC-10 engine might have been a peaceful respite. To escape the madness they would lock themselves into the friendly womb of EMI Recording Studios, adjacent to and affectionately known as, Abbey Road. 

     We saw a documentary at the Jacob Burns Film Center called, "If These Walls Could Sing," about the hallowed soundstage which included a Q & A with the filmmaker, Mary McCartney. McCartney, who is a photographer, was seduced into directing her first movie when she came across a photo of her Mother leading a Shetland pony into the studio. The '70s were like that. Paul McCartney doesn't remember exactly what it was doing there but does recall that it was fairly well-behaved. I guess it could come in handy if your voice was a little horse.

     The Beatles had unlimited recording time there, it was written into their contract. It grew to be a place where what was commonly referred to as magic was exposed to be hard work, intense collaboration, trial and error, and innovation. There's a lore about the place that started the day Edward Elgar directed an orchestra performing his Pomp and Circumstance March no. 1 over 90 years ago, and was recorded directly onto wax disc. 

     And the mystique has only grown over time. No one can walk to the other side of the street at "Zebra Crossing" without snapping a photo commemorating the event, and it's one of the few photo ops in the world where a selfie will not do. The stories are as legendary as the music. Like the time a young Jimmy Page was hired into the session for Shirley Bassey's Goldfinger recording. She had to sing the song as the credits were rolling, and she got to the last note before the credits did, resulting in high D-sharp held so long that she almost had to finish it from an oxygen tent.

     But it was the people who made Abbey Road a place. The creative inspirations of The Beatles, Pink Floyd and others were matched by the technical wizardry of Ken Townsend, Geoff Emerick and other "balance engineers." The doubling of vocal performances, done digitally now, was pioneered at EMI, by feeding a slightly slower output of Paul or John's voice back into the tape machine and letting the physical distance between the record and the playback do the job. Ideas like slowing down the tape, or running it backwards into the mix made smoke come out of the ears of the studio executives, who only prayed that these techniques were not damaging their equipment. The Beatles were, however, The Beatles, and they were left to their playground.

     Paul affectionately called the technicians and engineers "boffins," and he knew he could come to them with an outlandish brainchild that was possibly an orphan, and they would find it a home. Behind every cool thing in history is a slightly socially awkward person with thick glasses who made it technically possible. And that's why the geek shall inherit the Earth.

     The '70s seemed like the studio's heyday, but hey, those days don't last forever. The music business changed, the recording industry changed, and the cavernous Studio One lay fallow. Until a lucky circumstance that led John Williams there, twirling his baton and leading an orchestra that embarked on a Solo career. The Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises begat a new era for Abbey Road, and it had come full circle back to the philharmonic recordings that it had started with. Producer Giles Martin, son of the late George Martin who presided over all those Beatles sessions, referring to all those ghosts of music past that inhabit Abbey Road likened the atmosphere to a teapot that "wasn't meant to be cleaned." 

     Mary's movie hit all the right notes, and it's a good thing because it must have been hard to shine growing up in all that reflected light. "Daddy, do you like the song I made up??" "Of course, honey, and have you considered strings for the second bridge?"