OH, THAT MAGIC FEELING
auditions Abbey Road at Abbey Road, 50 years after his first time. It’s remixed and augmented, but what else, if anything, has changed?
T’S 2.30AM, MAY 7, 1969 AT OLYMPIC STUDIOS in Barnes, and The Beatles are about to record Take 36 of You Never Give Me Your Money, an unusual mini-medley of four consecutive ideas which leaps from resigned sadness to euphoric nostalgia. It will become part of a much larger medley, the skilful collation of fragments forming most of the second side of the group’s final recording (though not their final release), Abbey Road.
It’s unlikely Paul McCartney knew for certain that the group was coming to a close when he wrote this song (John Lennon wouldn’t declare that he wanted “a divorce” until September 20), but the situation was tense enough that recording engineers at EMI Studios (the complex was renamed ‘Abbey Road Studios’ a year after the album appeared) preferred not to work on Beatles sessions by this time, and his song clearly grew from the band’s bitter internal row about finances, which McCartney, acting as a de facto manager since Brian Epstein’s death, took very personally.
“Come on boys,” says Paul, before they begin to play – on the day of this recording the “boys” are Number 1 in the singles charts with Get Back – but Take 36 is rather ragged and tired, adding another layer of poignancy to the already wistful opening of the song.
This moment is one of many small but welcome revelations on the latest iteration of Abbey Road, reissued on its 50th anniversary in a new, carefully recalibrated stereo mix with a trove of outtakes and bonus material. Once again, the remix has been directed by Giles Martin, son of the album’s original producer George Martin. Giles’s mission for this one was, he says, “to make it sound like you remember it, but better.”
Of all The Beatles albums, this is the one generally considered the most polished. Was it broke? Did it need fixing?
“Good question,” says Martin. “When did you last listen to it?” “This morning,” I say. “Researching for this playback.” “What did you notice?”
I’d noticed that the stereo is almost as extreme as previous Beatles stereo mixes, drums often to one side, band on the other, but more disguised. There are occasional attempts to record things in true stereo but not many. There are curious decisions like the whole track going over to one side at the end of You Never Give Me Your Money, things that wouldn’t happen today.
“Exactly,” says Giles. “Thing is, when we came to change some of those, it just didn’t feel right. Those anomalies are built into our memories of this record and are one of the reasons it works. We had to mix Come Together five times because the original always sounded better. We put the drums in the centre and that didn’t sound so good, it ruined the groove.
“I was a huge fan of Free when I was a kid and there was a remix of All Right Now that came out where the cowbell was much louder and they’d changed the snare sound and even as a 13-year-old it annoyed me. So I wanted to avoid that kind of thing.”
Although, as usual, it took a lot of work and “some huge leaps of confidence” according to Martin, most of the changes are apparently subtle. “We’ve done things like put the three guitar solos on The End in different rooms. Made the drum fills in She Came In Through The Bathroom Window, and John’s ‘shoop’ sound on Come Together [sometimes heard as the more suggestive ‘shoot’] pan across the stereo – things which you think you remember happening, but actually didn’t. With Pepper it was, ‘How do you make it more immersive, psychedelic and colourful?’ With The White Album it was, ‘How do you make it more visceral?’ With this one it’s, ‘How do you make it more hi-fi?’ It’s The Beatles’ most modern record.”
Bafflingly, George Martin’s pivotal strings and loud brass on Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight were allotted only one track and therefore appear in mono on the original. Giles and engineer Sam Okell had to re-amp this important element, feeding it back through the speakers in Studio 1 – where the strings were originally recorded – miking it up to capture the room ambience afresh in a new stereo image. They used this technique several times, sometimes employing ADT (Artificial Double Tracking), an effect invented in the ’60s at Abbey Road, utilising the distance between the playback and record heads of certain tape machines to isolate two separate signals from one performance, giving the illusion that the same part has been played twice. “We create it in exactly the same way as they would have done it, not with plug-ins,” says Martin. This way, backing vocals, drums, and that orchestra, things which had previously languished either left, right or centre can now breathe across the whole stereo picture. Furthermore, they can be repositioned for mixes in 5.1 or Atmos, a recently developed format featuring 46 speakers, including some overhead, providing a complete 3D/360° experience.
bbey RoAd WAS THE FIRST BEATlES AlBuM MIxED only in stereo. It (the original) feels cleaner than their previous albums partly because they were working exclusively on 8-track tape for the first time, and didn’t have to undertake so many bounces – copying multiple tracks onto one to free up space – before the final mix, something that had built quirks into their sound in the past. With the tasteful use of the brand new Moog synthesizer for countermelodies, solos and the solar wind effect at the end of I Want You (She’s So Heavy), Abbey Road contained a glimpse of music’s future, teeing up the gloss of FM rock (Here Comes The Sun), the dark grind of heavy metal (I Want You (She’s So Heavy)), the expansiveness of prog (side two), and several sonic directions of the ’70s. It was a huge seller.
It’s hard to adequately describe, for those who didn’t experience it, the seismic impact of a new Beatles record in the week of its release. How, if you let it, even in that mythical time before social media, it could dominate the conversation, on the radio and TV, in the workplace, the playground. I was 10 when Abbey Road arrived in October 1969, and I can still smell the aroma of damp autumn air rippled with recently varnished parquet flooring that wafted through my first hearing of Here Comes The Sun in a school assembly the week the album came out. The song was so instantly appealing, we were all singing it at playtime. A new Beatles record was inevitably the source of unconditional joy, so imagine my surprise when I got my hands on a copy of Abbey Road – my dad brought
it home one Friday night – and thought, Something’s not right…
Having just about processed the riches and variety of The White Album, a year earlier – its huge success teed up by the sensation of Hey Jude in August ’68, just a month after the Yellow Submarine movie had dropped – I had no idea the group that had curated those abundant pop-art treats was effectively kaput (to be fair, no one did; not even they were sure). What I had worked out was that they had become more serious in the interim, less playful. Paul and John had both married in spring 1969 and the one-two punch of Get Back/ Don’t Let Me Down and The Ballad Of John And Yoko/Old Brown Shoe in early April and late May, had confirmed that loveable moptops and rainbow-coloured Pepper boys were consigned to the past and this new edition contained a bit of politics, a bit of blasphemy, a bit of Chuck Berry and some beards (Ono sideboards?).
Apart from Get Back – and its rooftop video shown on Top Of The Pops – we weren’t yet privy to Let It Be’s attempts to retrench and return to simpler times, so we jumped straight from those pithy singles to the dense sophistication of Abbey Road. Other things gave the young me pause. There was the perfunctory packaging – a single sleeve with no inner bag, no lyrics or gimmicks, barely any information. Then there was side one.
Initially, and for some time after, side one struck me as a procession of odd, even alienating decisions. You can’t unsee the awful picture of a deranged hammer-wielding murderer painted by Maxwell’s Silver Hammer in sing-along primary colours, a nasty taste not quite washed away by Oh! Darling’s shamelessly retro doo wop melodrama. More disturbing still to my 10-year-old brain – though it later became a favourite – was I Want You (She’s So Heavy), a blues-flavoured endurance test: like forever ascending an Escher staircase until you’re cruelly, abruptly left in mid-air. On first exposure, I even found something a little distant, and a little square, about Something. And Octopus’s Garden – hadn’t Ringo been here before?
There seemed something bloodless about side one, as if Maxwell had already given it the once over, so I seldom
listened to it. While it possessed all the variety we’d come to expect from a Beatles record, their usual upbeat attitude was lacking. About six months later, we’d get a clue why when we heard the group had split. After that, I found it almost too sad to enjoy. But, oh side two!
HE SECOND HALF OF ABBEY ROAD IS SURELY THE reason the album is beloved, extolled as highly as any other Beatles creation. Functioning, it turned out, as a spectacular finale to their career, side two pulls together the things that made them great – melody, harmony, humour, humanity, innovation – rustling up a Michelin-starred tasting menu from some leftovers. “Side two is how my dad thought it was going to go after Sgt. Pepper,” says Giles Martin. “Don’t forget he was their A&R man as well as their producer. I think he thought they were going to be doing this body of work where they broke away from standard song form. Prog rock, if you like.”
While The Medley (working title: The Long One) technically begins when Because ends, all of side two always felt to me like one glorious suite in 11 parts. On its first vinyl pressings, this side wasn’t banded, so track demarcation wasn’t obvious. Echoed lyrically in Sun King, Here Comes The Sun feels part of the whole, and the unresolving chord that leads Because into You Never Give Me Your Money blurs any boundary between the two.
“What’s funny about The Medley,” says Giles Martin, “is that the songs you think have been chopped together haven’t and the ones that don’t sound like it, were. Sun King and Mean Mr Mustard were recorded as one thing, as were Polythene Pam and She Came In Through The Bathroom Window.” The conversational moment where Lennon sings “Look out!” and McCartney follows with “She came in through the bathroom window!” was not fortuitous but built into the take.
An earlier version of ‘The Long One’ among the outtakes in the new package (the top-end version has three CDs this time) has Her Majesty in its original position, just after
Mean Mr Mustard. You’re glad you heard it – but the original sequence loses momentum, which underscores the sureness of The Beatles’ decision-making. Ditto a rousing alternative I Want You (She’s So Heavy) with Billy Preston’s long, intense Hammond organ solo restored. Exciting though it sounds in its late-’60s blues-rock way, it demonstrates what a genius move it was to scrub it, leaving just the churn of guitars to weave its strange spell – way more futuristic and timeless.
Some snippets of studio chat prove similarly revealing. One take of I Want You… at Trident Studios is declared the last loud one because someone outside is complaining about the noise. McCartney sings “Day after day…” before a take of Golden Slumbers – acknowledging a similarity to The Fool On The Hill. Someone – perhaps Harrison – shouts “Kick out the jams!” after Maxwell’s Silver Hammer, a reminder, like Lennon’s Albatross-inspired Sun King, that The Beatles were fans and followers as well as leaders. Pop music was being stress-tested in 1969: The Who had essayed the double concept album with ‘rock opera’ Tommy earlier in the year. A week after Abbey Road was released, King Crimson’s In The Court Of The Crimson King hit the shelves; ‘progressive rock’ became the phrase of the day. Abbey Road could hold its own in that company.
Once again, we must also marvel at how George Martin and his team routinely turned base metal into gold. Great as the raw playing could be, it always needed a last assiduous polish to make the material sparkle. It was Martin’s wish before entering the studio for this record that he be given free rein to produce in the way he had before the chaos of The White Album and the dismay of Let It Be. The band agreed, a shrewd call. Abbey Road, especially its second half, exudes a feeling of harmony in the work place, despite whatever was going on around these performances.
“This was The Beatles album I knew growing up,” says Giles. “It was one of my dad’s favourites.” He looks wistful for a moment. “It was like a gift that happened at the end when everything was taken away.”
His new version carefully plumps up his father’s sumptuous work, lets it breathe and subtly enhances its memorable peculiarities. Nothing sounds ‘fixed’, just gently freed from the constraints of the past. Because it’s that past, that brilliance and exaltation in its time that listeners cherish, and will want to experience for the first or the umpteenth time: The Beatles and their mentor and closest collaborator coming together one last time. Abbey Road, for all its advances, captured the sound of the ’60s taking a final bow.
Special anniversary editions of ‘Abbey Road’ due for release on Sept 27th by Apple Corps Ltd/Capitol/Ume.