Alan Parsons Project leader on working with the Beatles
Alan Parsons was an 18-year-old dropout who’d landed a job in the tape duplication department at EMI Records when he heard the master tape of the Beatles’ just-completed 1967 album, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”
It was a formative experience that made him realize how badly he needed to talk his way into a job at EMI Recording Studios on Abbey Road.
“I think it made millions of light bulbs go off around the world, frankly,” he says. “It was clearly a masterpiece of a record. And what was encouraging to me.”
The thing that made his light bulb going off so different than those others is that not quite two years later he was running tape on the Beatles for an album with the working title “Get Back.”
You can see him in the documentary of the same name by director Peter Jackson.
Parsons appeared in the Beatles documentary, ‘Get Back’
“It’s interesting that every shot of me, I seem to be wearing the same shirt,” he says, with a laugh. “I assume I would have worn a different shirt every day. So I think possibly all those shots just happened to be taken on the same day.”
Speaking by phone in advance of a recent concert in Phoenix, Parsons says he quite enjoyed the Jackson documentary, calling it “a huge improvement” over “Let It Be,” the first film documenting those recording sessions by director Michael Lindsay-Hogg.
“I think they come across as being generally very good-humored,” he says, “which didn’t happen in ‘Let It Be.’”
He’s also pretty happy that he actually appears in this one.
“I’m of course delighted to be in it,” Parsons says.
“Delighted to be on screen for probably only 10 seconds in the whole nine hours but at least I was there. I consider it to be famous at last. All I could do before was tell people ‘Yes I was there.’ Now I can prove I was there.”
Parsons was a tape operator for the Beatles
His job at the time, as “a very green tape operator,” was to capture everything the Beatles did on tape.
“So when a tape ran out, you had to try to get a new reel on as soon as you could,” he says.
“And they were playing the songs that we all know and love, but they were also playing all kinds of Chuck Berry and Elvis songs in between, so I had to log all that on the tape boxes and it was very difficult because the tape machine back then didn’t have a tape counter. You had no way of telling where you were on the tape.”
Still, he recalls it as a great experience.
“It was the Beatles,” he says. “It was life-changing.”
Parsons had already worked his way up to assistant engineer by the time the Beatles started work on “Abbey Road.”
On the “Get Back” sessions, he says, “I was there to change tapes and keep everything working.”
“Abbey Road” was a much more fulfilling experience, watching producer George Martin at work with engineer Geoff Emerick.
“I got to understand how the Beatles worked,” Parsons says.
A year later, he briefly worked on an iconic Beatles solo album, George Harrison’s “All Things Pass” with producer Phil Spector.
Asked what it was like to work with Spector, he says, “Crazy. It was crazy. Very loud. He liked to listen very loud.”
Alan Parsons and Pink Floyd
It wasn’t long after he’d earned a Grammy nomination as the engineer on Pink Floyd’s sonic masterpiece, “The Dark Side of the Moon,” that Parsons decided to step through the studio glass and start producing his own music.
Turning down an invitation from Pink Floyd to work on their next album, “Wish You Were Here,” he launched the Alan Parsons Project with Eric Woolfson, a fellow producer and songwriter.
“Eric had long been considering making a concept album based on Edgar Allan Poe works,” Parsons says.
“And he and I discussed that overall idea. He said, ‘You can make this record, you can bring everybody together and you can put your name on it. And that’s exactly what happened.”
Parsons hadn’t done much songwriting at that point, but he quickly got the hang of it as he and Woolfson co-wrote the material for their first concept album, 1976’s “Tales of Mystery and Imagination (Edgar Allan Poe).”
“I got a lot of ideas off my chest,” Parson says. “It was clearly a good team.”
That’s still his favorite thing he’s ever done.
“It’s like a firstborn child, a new way of working,” he says.
“It was effectively the first producer as artist album. That hadn’t really happened before. I mean, you could argue that Phil Spector was an artist but he sort of had to rely on his on his groups and his singers.