John’s vocals on Day in the Life have a 90-millisecond delay on it. Geoff fed John’s vocal to a mono tape machine which then had separate record and playback heads and then fed it back. John said when the tape echo was right, it helped him to keep time. Lyrics drove the composition of John’s songs. Did you know the first verse of “Good Morning” has only 10 bars? Notice the horns begin a new phrase “under the last beat of the second verse.” The horn players had to “count like mad” to play their horn stabs “bang on” together. George cleverly turns a chicken sound into a guitar tuning up at the beginning of the Reprise of SPLHCB (few “rockers” have French horns). Also on the Reprise, Paul’s used a D.I. on his bass for the first time. In the beginning, the Beatles sang about fantasy relationships. But when John sang “I once had a girl, or should I say she once had me” that was about finding Cynthia pregnant. When George Martin met Paul, he said Paul could not play the piano at all! Wow, I play Martha My Dear, Lady Madonna, and Live and Let Die on piano and (maybe) I’m amazed at how Paul came up fast with ANY of those progressions on piano. Paul played every instrument better than the others and so he was relegated to the instrument hardest to sound original on, the bass. When it came to what they wanted musically, Paul was more articulate, and John was more vague. Paul heard that in the US were “meter maids”, and at first he thought we shouldn’t like her, but then realized it would be better for the song if we do like Rita. George Martin told the Beatles to speed up Please Please Me, and to start Can’t Buy me Love with a line from the middle. John wrote the Day Tripper riff and the harmonica Love Me Do line. John’s Weybridge was “a ghetto for rich people.” Look how Paul makes the verse hit the chorus in Fool on the Hill; who else wrote like that? John couldn’t understand Ravel’s insanely beautiful Daphnis and Chloe Suite 2 and said to George, “where’s the tune?” Said George, “If you didn’t hook John’s attention within a few seconds, you lost him.”
George said they could not have done Lucy in the Sky with a Hammond organ, they used the elusive Lowrey (the DSO-1, one of which I bought for $600 from a guy in Kansas – they are super hard to find). The Lowry gave the them needed decay and the slight “quavering” for Lucy’s intro (and in mandolin repeat mode, on the Lowrey you also can get the intro to Baba O’Reilly). Few listeners notice the time signature jump on Lucy from 3/4 to 4/4. Imagine Lucy was your song – how would you have made a smooth transition to the middle section? Paul came up with the “cellophane flowers” and “newspaper taxis”. The vocals on Lucy’s vocals were raised a half-step which thinned and brightened them. In the end, without needing extra instruments, Lucy was one of the quickest songs to record on St. Pepper.
On Within You Without You, the tabla changes from 4/4 to 5/4. Several tambouras were going at the same time for better depth on the drone. That song also has ADT on the strings too! What an idea. And the celli play one octave below the dilruba which kept it from sounding too Indian. George Harrison explained why Hippie Era Beatles was so fertile: “We’ve had four years doing what everybody else wanted us to do, now we were doing what we wanted to do.” The Beatles wanted to experiment and push the envelope. Think of the vocal call and response of Help, Eleanor Rigby, and She’s Leaving Home. St. Pepper cost 25,000 pounds – a fortune at the time. George also mentions the important RAF Burtonwood influence, other books discuss new records arriving only by boat to Liverpool, but Burtonwood Airbase was called “Little America”and that is where since the war all things American really came in. The cutest girls were still flocking to Burtonwood in the 60’s and Liverpool boys got two messages 1. You’d better to every bit of that amazing new music the Yanks are bring in and 2. you’d better find something better for local girls to do than choosing those GI’s over you. Needless to say, the Beatles became experts at one and two. I adore George Martin. It was great fun to finally read this.