Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles - Softcover

Emerick, Geoff; Massey, Howard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1592402690 ISBN 13: 9781592402694

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

An all-access, firsthand account of the life and music of the Beatles through their legendary recording sessions, from their creative process to the infighting that ultimately brought them down--by an original mastering engineer at Abbey Road Studios

"[Here, There and Everywhere] provides the kind of day-to-day experience of what it was like working with the world's most famous rock group."--The Washington Post

Geoff Emerick became an assistant engineer at the legendary Abbey Road Studios in 1962 at age fifteen, and was present as a new band called the Beatles recorded their first songs. He later worked with the Beatles as they recorded their singles "She Loves You" and "I Want to Hold Your Hand," the songs that would propel them to international superstardom. In 1964 he would witness the transformation of this young and playful group from Liverpool into professional, polished musicians as they put to tape classic songs such as "Eight Days A Week" and "I Feel Fine."

Then, in 1966, at age nineteen, Geoff Emerick became the Beatles' chief engineer, the man responsible for their distinctive sound as they recorded the classic album Revolver, in which they pioneered innovative recording techniques that changed the course of rock history. Emerick would also engineer the monumental Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Abbey Road albums, considered by many the greatest rock recordings of all time.

In Here, There and Everywhere he reveals the creative process of the band in the studio, and describes how he achieved the sounds on their most famous songs. Emerick also brings to light the personal dynamics of the band, from the relentless (and increasingly mean-spirited) competition between Lennon and McCartney to the infighting and frustration that eventually brought a bitter end to the greatest rock band the world has ever known.

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Geoff Emerick joined Abbey Road Studios as an assistant engineer in 1962 and was promoted to full engineer in 1966, leaving to build the Beatles' Apple Recording Studios in 1969. After the dissolution of the Beatles, he continued to engineer for Paul McCartney, as well as artists such as Elvis Costello, America, Jeff Beck, and Art Garfunkel. He has won four Grammy Awards, including a Technical Grammy Award in 2003.

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Here, There and Everywhere

My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles

By Geoff Emerick, Howard Massey

Penguin Publishing Group

Copyright © 2007 Geoff Emerick
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-59240-269-4

Here, There and Everywhere

Here, There and Everywhere

My Life Recording the Music of THE BEATLES

Geoff Emerick and Howard Massey

GOTHAM BOOKS

Foreword by Elvis Costello

PROLOGUE

1966

CHAPTER 1

Hidden Treasure

CHAPTER 2

Number Three Abbey Road

CHAPTER 3

Meeting the Beatles

CHAPTER 4

Early Sessions

CHAPTER 5

Beatlemania

CHAPTER 6

A Hard Day’s Night

CHAPTER 7

Innovation and Invention: The Making of Revolver

CHAPTER 8

It’s Wonderful to Be Here, It’s Certainly a Thrill: Sgt. Pepper Begins

CHAPTER 9

A Masterpiece Takes Shape: The Pepper Concept

CHAPTER 10

All You Need Is Love…and a Long Vacation: Magical Mystery Tour and Yellow Submarine

CHAPTER 11

The Day I Quit: The Making of the White Album

CHAPTER 12

The Calm After the Storm: Life After the White Album

CHAPTER 13

An Anvil, a Bed, and Three Gunslingers: The Making of Abbey Road

CHAPTER 14

And in the End: The Final Stroll Across Abbey Road

CHAPTER 15

Fixing a Hole: The Apple Years

CHAPTER 16

Drainage, Lizards, and Monsoons: The Making of Band On The Run

CHAPTER 17

Life After the Beatles: From Elvis to the Anthologies

EPILOGUE

I Read the News Today, Oh Boy

Acknowledgments

Index

• Foreword •

by Elvis Costello

It has been ten years since Geoff Emerick and I last worked together. One of my favorite memories of that last occasion is Geoff politely cursing the recording desk when it proved impossible to make it distort in an attractive and interesting fashion.

So many of the sounds in today’s recording studios come out of little boxes that merely imitate the sonic innovations of the past. The range of choices is vast but, in unimaginative hands, it seems to create fewer surprises.

Despite all the endless theorizing about pop music of the 1960s, the contribution of a small handful of engineers is still not fully appreciated. Inspired by particular musicians, these innovations brought about a change in the very nature of the recording studio, from a place where musical performances were simply captured in the best available fidelity to an experimental workshop in which the transformation and even the distortion of the very sound of an instrument or voice became an element in the composition. Not that you would ever hear any of this grand talk from Geoff Emerick. You could not meet a more modest and self-effacing man.

When we first worked together in 1981, I had decided to take a very different approach to the recording of what would become the album Imperial Bedroom. My first album had been recorded in a total of twenty-four hours of studio time; the second took eleven days. Now the Attractions and I had booked AIR Studios for twelve weeks and granted ourselves the license to work on the sound of the record until it reflected the mood of the songs. We would hire anything that seemed to help: a harpsichord, a trio of French horns, or even a small orchestra. If we were not to be railroaded to that deadly place called “Geniusville,” where every passing notion in the mind of the musical submariner is mistaken for sunken treasure (believe me, the recording studio can have more than a passing resemblance to the depths of the ocean), we would need someone to retain perspective, to bring some kind of order, and to occasionally act as a referee.

This is how I met Geoff Emerick, a tall, gentle man with a resonant voice and, at that time, an occasionally jittery pattern of speech that I put down to his almost constant intake of vending-machine coffee that blended nicely with the taste and aroma of melted plastic. Over our weeks in the studio, an instrumental tone or sonic effect that seemed fleetingly familiar would suddenly appear, but we never got the impression that Geoff was shaping the sound from a clichéd “box of tricks.” The songs and the moods of the performance always took precedence over the way they might be filtered, altered, or changed on their way to tape. By the end of our time together, we found that Geoff had helped us produce the richest and most varied-sounding record of our career to date.

I had made the band promise that they would not pester Geoff for Beatles stories, but as we got deeper into the process of recording and mixing, the occasional anecdote would emerge. These tales never sounded worn out or rehearsed. There was never a hint of self-aggrandizement or boastfulness about them. They were usually used as examples of how a problem might be solved. The fact that the “problem” might have generated the sound of “Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite” seemed merely incidental.

Well, now we can all enjoy Geoff’s reminiscences about his most famous work. Without meaning any disrespect to George Martin, I think I could find many contemporary musicians and record makers who might agree with me that Geoff Emerick would be regarded as the coproducer of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by modern definitions. What makes this memoir so entertaining to read is that these fabulous inventions and innovations always seemed to be made out of elastic bands, sticky tape, and empty cotton reels. It was the stuff of the hobby shop or do-it-yourself enthusiast rather than the computer-assisted boffin, and always in service of a brilliant musical idea rather than in place of it. None of this is told with any sense of pomp or portentousness, although there is certainly plenty of youthful enthusiasm, described in the accounts of Geoff’s work as a teenage assistant engineer on the very first Beatles’ sessions.

The fact that four young musicians from Liverpool were assigned to the EMI comedy imprint, Parlophone, and staff producer responsible for the comedy output, gives us a glimpse of a number of casual regional assumptions and the hierarchies of early ’60s England. American readers may only be able to equate the class-bound stiffness of Abbey Road to something out of Monty Python. I remember Geoff telling me about the staff engineer’s Rebellion of the White Coats, in which they donned ludicrously mismatched sizes in response to a management directive that they once again wear these garments—last seen in the days when they had to handle the more volatile wax medium of recording—just as hair started to creep over collars that were now sporting floral ties.

The book captures the mood of claustrophobic England that was suddenly illuminated by such imaginative music. It was still postwar England, in which the buses stopped running very shortly after the pubs shut. If I had to give a précis of the contents, it would be in the sentence, “We recorded ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and then I went home and had some nice biscuits.”

Geoff would be the first to say that none of the sonic flights of fancy that he helped shape in the music of the Beatles would have been possible without the incredible apprenticeship and experience offered by...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1592402690
• ISBN 13: 9781592402694
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 400
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: ankabu; service@ankabu.de; ; Erdweg 17; Pöttmes; Bayern; Deutschland