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(c) Ian Hammond 1999
All rights reserved

We'll call it The Beatles
I've been reading a book which is imaginatively titled: The Beatles.

Even the subtitle doesn't get much better: Inside The One And Only
Lonely Heart's Club Band. It's the sort of title a publicist comes up
with because he doesn't think the original title will sell.

Sure enough on the copyright page is something more realistic: The
Beatles: An Oral History. What would Lennon have gobbledegooked
there.

It's one of those books that consists of quotes from actual witnesses,
ranging from a couple of lines to a few pages.The authors' credentials
look quite good which makes the material I haven't seen before even
more interesting. And they've selected it rather well. 

I don't know about you, but having read the Beatles True Story about
TWO HUNDRED TIMES, I am starting to tire of rereading certain bits.
I don't really want hear about the injury inflicted on Mr Wooler
again. I don't give a flying futz anymore who played drums on Love Me
Do anymore. What I do want is more data, more data, more data on the
songs. And In The End, I'm willing to wade through every new books
even if I only end up with a few scraps. This book's been better than
most recently.

In particular, it has quotes from those usually neglected or
unavailable for comment, such as Klaus Voorman, Chris Thomas and
Victor Spinetti. The George Martin material is better than his usual
repetition of the accepted mythology.

It's been my habit to retype all the interesting passages I find for
my own on-line study notes. So, here's some of the new extracts. I've
avoided the earlier period and tried to be relevant to some of the
recent interesting RMB threads.

From the backwards discussion:

  On the song Yellow Submarine we were embarking on the sound-
  picture thing. I mean, Yellow Submarine almost a Goon record, 
  with John actually in the studio using a PA mike and an amplifier.
  He used them for the captain's commands and the boat sounds.
    Martin DPB210

Peter Halling was one of the regular session musicians:

  The Beatles were always very kind to the musicians...
  Sometimes they wanted to boost up the bottom line, so they would
  have six to eight cellos doing a certain thing. Sometimes there
  would be four or five bass flutes to get this very weird sound.
  They'd try everything.
    Peter Halling DPB234

  Once some Indian musicians came to the studio to record the song
  Within You, Without You, and I was told, Look there's no music.
  Just play whatever you like! I would just muck about and they 
  would say, Marvelous, marvelous!. The Beatles were lovely people
  and great fun to work with. 
    They would make cuts and changes all the time, sort of cutting
  and pasting as they went along, much like a painting, which was
  totally different from all the other sessions that I did. That was
  how these sessions ran...
   We were called up constantly, especially when they were doing a
  long player. They would get stuck and they would be doing one 
  track for two or three days. One title! It was unheard of. But they
  were experimenting with al sorts of sound ideas.
    Anything they would say to you would be intelligent. They would
  say they wanted to have this certain type of sound. They were most
  obliging, and when they wanted to know something, you didn't mind
  showing them what you could do on your instrument. They would say,
  That's right, great, we want that. 
    I would put a mute on or take a mute off or play ponticello or
  something from the catalog of sounds. If somebody said, No, that's
  not right. That's not what I want, they would disappear into the
  booth. Then George Martin would say, we'll take a break now" He
  would scribble some stuff out. You'd come back afterward and they 
  would give you a scrap of paper with five or six bars on it saying,
  Insert goes in here.
    Peter Halling DPB239

Here's one for the vinyl delights of the monogamists amongst us:

  The best copy of Sgt. Pepper is the mono version, because we
  spent three weeks mixing that and the stereo we mixed in only
  two and half days. Nobody realizes that all the actual effort 
  went into the mono mix because we never monitored in stereo. It
  was all from one speaker. That's how we all heard it.
    Emerick DPB242

Does George Martin finally clear up a mystery?

  The boys had to come up with a song, and I think Paul was working
  on Hello Goodbye which wasn't accepted, and John had written
  All You Need Is Love, which seemed to fit with the overall 
  concept of the program...
    Martin DPB251

  The idea of taking a word and playing with it is very much a 
  Liverpool tradition, and I think it comes from the Irish and Welsh
  oral culture. You use words in creative ways. There was a lot of
  that in Liverpool and a lot of Liverpool comedians used it. In John
  Lennon's I Am The Walrus there are Liverpool folk rhymes imbedded
  throughout it...
    Iain Taylor DPB258 [more]

A slightly different take on an old chestnut:

  I think George Martin had found an advertisement in a magazine that
  said Happiness is a warm gun, because we were talking about it at
  the time. When the White Album was started, it was just when
  Robert Kennedy was shot. George Martin mentioned the ad to John, 
  and shortly after the song came along.
    Chris Thomas DPB265

The Cliff Bennet and the Rebel Rousers view of Revolution 9:

  With Revolution 9, the Beatles said, We're about to do a sort of
  collage or montage of a few things. They went up into the library
  at EMI and found loads of old tapes. They just nicked anything, like
  Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers, Oxford and Cambridge music
  tests for A levels. Loads of things. They took everything down there
  and made copies of the bits they wanted.
    Sometimes they played them backward. Sometimes they chopped a
  little bit out. They literally did anything they liked with the bits
  of tape. Then they assembled some really good sounding loops. 
    One of the ones they bunged on was this Oxford music exam. A guy
  was playing piano and said, Number 9, then he played another bit.
  Obviously you had to identify the bits that you knew. That's where
  Number 9 came from, and there's no significance in it.
    Chris Thomas DPB266

Chris does like to bung things! But, where's the Rebel Rouser bit in
#9? And is the B minor waltz at the start one of the piano extracts
from the Number 9 tape? It's entirely irrelevant, but ironic [sic]
that Number 9 started life as a guessing game. Lennon had this to
say about it:

  There are many symbolic messages going on in it, but it just
  happened. You know, cosmic meandering.
    Lennon DPB267.

And finally something for the young at heart:

  I was staying at John Lennon's house one weekend when the police
  broke in and started searching for drugs. They tore the rooms 
  apart, woke Julian up, ripped his mattress apart, tore everything
  up in the house, then asked for John's autograph and left.
    Victor Spinetti DPB277

  I was in a hotel in Salzburg while we were filming Help and I had
  the flu. We were all staying in the same hotel and I was lying in
  bed. Each of the Beatles visited me separately, and the way they
  visited me when I had the flu is what they are really like.
    There was a knock on the door. Paul McCartney opened it, looked
  around and asked, Is it catching? I said, Yeah, and he closed 
  the door.
    George Harrison walked in and said, I've come to plump your 
  pillows because whenever you're ill people come to plump your
  pillows. And he came in and plumped my pillow and tidied the 
  sheets and did what he could to make me feel comfortable.
    John Lennon walked in and said [in a very German accent] "You
  are in zee state of Austria. You are going to be experimented on
  by zee doctors and your skin will be made into lampshades..."
  Then he walked out.
    Ringo walked in, didn't say anything, sat on the side of the bed,
  picked up the room service menu, looked at it, and said, Once 
  upon a time there were three bears, Mommy bear, Daddy bear and
  Baby bear...
    And that was the essential difference between the four of them.
  John the surrealist. Paul, the one who thinks if it's catching he
  might not be able to do the shot tomorrow. George, the caring one.
  Ringo, the fantastist.
    Victor Spinetti DPB317

Spinetti has the comedians' touch. But he did work on all three films
I believe. Plus Lennon's solo film effort and he collaborated on a
stage version of Lennon's books. Here's his insight:

  What they had onstage was the gift of truth. When you listen to any
  of their songs, they don't sound as if they're lying. They sound as
  if they're telling the truth. If you remember the time in which they
  appeared, pop stars were never seen taking a drink or smoking a 
  cigarette. The Beatles were real, and when they appeared onstage it
  was as if they were actually singing about the truth.
    Victor Spinetti DPB188

I've since checked Amazon, where the book is called The Beatles: an
oral history. It must have been the Australian publicist. Nope, it
won't sell with oral in the title. The book's by David Pritchard
and Alan Lysaght. I double- checked the copyright page, and found a
lovely typo:

            This edition published in 1999 by ...

Something to look forward to.

ian hammond
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"does that me we don't have to do 'How Do You Do It'?"