Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles by
Geoff Emerick
My rating:
5 of 5 stars
This October we lost anther icon of the 1960’s. Geoff Emerick first participated in the Beatles’ sessions as a fresh-faced 16-year-old kid assisting at EMI Studios. EMI in those days lent itself to parody; the engineers still wore mad scientist lab coats, the janitors went about in standard-issue brown coveralls. Starting with the Revolver sessions when he took over, at the tender age of 18 as the Fab Four’s chief studio engineer, he was frequently asked to do the impossible, which he did, generally by bending the rules at EMI beyond all excess.
The story of how he and George Martin sewed together two disparate parts to make ‘Strawberry Fields Forever” reminds me of how Walt Disney sold his animators on Snow White in 1937, how he got them so excited about making the film that they didn’t realize he was asking the impossible. Its surprising how many times George Harrison had a hard time nailing a solo, leading Paul to step up, which must have been especially egregious when Paul nailed a blistering solo on ‘Taxman”, one of George’s own songs.
As Emerick relates in his book, the Beatles tended toward self-absorption while they were recording, often giving little regard for other people’s feelings. Often they would also demonstrate a singular lack of appreciation for the technical wizardry that Emerick and other people would pull off with the limited resources then at hand. I took great delight in the frequent Britishisms that popped up in the narrative— “taking the piss”, “sod it” and so on, as well as Emerick’s rapport with his assistant Richard Lush.
Everything would come to a head during The White Album sessions, wherein the Four would show up late, jam for hours—or days-before a proper track was laid. If John Lennon felt Let It Be was the shittiest shit ever laid down on record, apparently he forgot the tensions of recording The White Album. The rancor between Beatles and the constant rehearsals of songs, over and over, pushed Emerick to quit right n the middle of the sessions. This book captures the mood of the making of their classic discs; the chapter on The White Album was as painful to read as it must have been for the author to work through.
Alternately the Abbey Road sessions yielded moments of joy punctuated by those odd moments that could’ve only happened in the ‘60’s—i.e., when Yoko arrived at the sessions, in bed [thought o be truthful, there really was a good reason for that] Too bad she snuck into George’s bag of crisps. The recording of that triple guitar solo for “The End” was a thing of magic. Don’t miss the true story of how Abbey Road got its name, it’s not to be missed [hint: it’s another Ringo-ism]. Emerick would work his magic on many albums to come, including Paul’s Band On the Run. This was an enjoyable roller-coaster ride by an insider on the hidden tricks behind the greatest music of the rock era. God bless, Mr. Emerick. We salute you.
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