ABBEY ROAD REUNION

Unsung EMI engineers gather at the legendary studios to celebrate a new book about their accomplishments



By Tim Riley







ABBEY ROAD REUNION



or



All Together Now
THINGS WE DID YESTERDAY



SUBHEAD: Unsung EMI engineers gather at the legendary studios to
celebrate a new book about their accomplishments



By Tim Riley



Everybody knows Neil Armstrong was the first man to step onto the moon.
But who  designed his space capsule? Who sewed up those space suits to
support life while Armstrong golfed on the Sea of Tranquility?



In musical terms, the Beatles were aesthetic astronauts. But the sound
engineers who translated their performances onto tape remain obscure. The richly
detailed and lavishly illustrated RECORDING THE BEATLES, by two young
American engineers, Kevin Ryan and Brian Kehew, maps the audio
breakthroughs that keep the Beatles’ recordings contemporary. Indeed,
there are many producers in this digital age who turn their equalizers
into pretzels trying to copy Abbey Road’s classic analog sound. In pop
terms, everybody moonwalks these days, but few understand how it was
first accomplished. “We really were a law unto ourselves,” said Ken
Townsend, who started as a tape librarian and worked his way up to head
the company.



At a party last week (Nov. 9) celebrating its publication, over thirty of 
the Beatles’ recording crew gathered at Studio 2 in St. John’s Wood. 
These mild-mannered pros met the Beatles
point for point in creative terms, wiring the guts of rock’s classic
catalog. If it weren’t for them, the variable speeds, tape loops and
multi-tracks of “Tomorrow Never Knows” and “A Day in the Life” would
never have been possible. Many of these figures went on to enjoy greater
notoriety in their post-Beatles careers: Chris Thomas, for example,
played some keyboards for the WHITE ALBUM, but has since produced
recordings from Badfinger and Pink Floyd to the Pretenders and Pulp; and
Richard Lush went on from second engineer of SGT PEPPER to produce
Wings’s RED ROSE SPEEDWAY and oversee the MOULIN ROUGE movie soundtrack.



The typical day in the life of these knob-twiddlers might involve an
orchestra in the morning, a pop session in the afternoon, and an mixing
assist at night. “It really did bring out the best in you,”
says Ken Scott, who’s since produced Supertramp and David Bowie.
Despite its old-school reputation, EMI staffers broke many of the rules
they were rigorously trained in. Not did EMI design and build its own
equipment (in Hayes, Middlesex), it mastered its own in-house recordings
right in St. John’s Wood before sending them out for pressing.



As these audio rock stars recognized one another and embraced, the
typical rock fan could only wonder at conversations about White
Elephants hacked into bass microphones, or how ADT compensated for a
lazy John Lennon, who didn’t want to sing a song twice over. But just
like a talk-happy movie crew, there was lots of backstage banter to
counter the music’s brilliance. Thomas remembered an exhausted Sir Paul
McCartney snoring atop a mixing console while finishing the White Album.
And Townsend remembers how John Lennon honored his promotion to producer
in the midst of the Beatles heyday:



“Mr. Townsend,” Lennon said to me, “We have a very serious complaint.
The toilet paper in this place, it’s very hard and shiny, you can’t wipe
your bum on it. And not only that, he said.  It’s got ‘EMI LTD’
stamped on every sheet. Don’t you trust the staff here?” And so Townsend
had all the toilet rolls in the building replaced so to better serve
Beatle bums. You can still find pieces of the old corporate-stamped
toilet sheets getting auctioned off on ebay.



With an elegant layout, helpful diagrams, and patient explanations,
RECORDING THE BEATLES will fascinate even the most Luddite fans. Ryan
and Kehew represent the finest in Beatle scholarship in an area that the
digital revolution has all but swallowed up, and they remind you how
even the most inspired music sweats bullets backstage. They also make
you wonder: what type of toilet paper did Neil Armstrong insist on for
his lunar stroll?



RECORDING THE BEATLES (Curvebender Publications)
http://www.recordingthebeatles.com



EMI’s Abbey Road Studios
http://www.abbeyroad.com