The Beatles’ first visit to EMI

The Beatles’ first visit to EMI

By Gordon Thompson

Fifty years ago, the Beatles recorded for the first time in a building that would eventually bear the name of their last venture. On Wednesday, 6 June 1962, the most important rock band of the twentieth century auditioned at the EMI Recording Studios in Abbey Road, London.

John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Pete Best arrived via the equivalent of the servants’ entrance where they unloaded their equipment from a nondescript van. The high-ceilinged white room with its tall acoustic panels, the cigarette-burned oriental carpets spread across the floor, and the wood-grained stairs leading up to the recording booth with its glass window would have contributed to their sense of social distance from the production process. They would climb those stairs to the control room at the end of the session and only when invited.

The Beatles set up on the studio floor under the watchful eye of the balance engineer, Norman Smith. Contrary to many descriptions of EMI, the only people dressed in smocks were those involved in moving or cleaning equipment, and even they wore suits underneath. Smith, as well as Ron Richards (the Parlophone artist-and-repertoire manager whom director George Martin had asked to oversee the session), wore a suit, tie, and polished shoes, which spoke to his membership in EMI’s studio hierarchy. In contrast, the Beatles’ skinny ties and floppy hair intimated subversion.
Smith positioned the drums and amps at the back of the room where the acoustic damping was greatest and distance from the control room was the farthest. He examined their equipment to trouble-shoot the inevitable problems. The balance engineer disappointingly assessed the battle-scarred drums, guitars, and amplifiers as they settled onto the studio floor. He recalls having to “tie string around John Lennon’s guitar amplifier to stop the rattling.” McCartney’s relatively new violin-shaped Hofner bass presented few problems, but inside the homemade amplifier and speaker cabinet, the internal electronics and soldered connections needed attention.

For the production crew, an important part of knowing how an artist would sound involved evaluating musical instruments and equipment. For this session, Norman Smith spent time on McCartney’s bass rig, borrowing equipment from EMI’s stash of musical and technological miscellanea as well as improvising solutions. Equipment constituted a significant issue at this point in the Beatles’ career, beginning with Decca’s complaints about their instruments during their ill-fated January audition. When Paul McCartney arrived at EMI’s Studio Two on 6 June, Norman Smith and Ron Richards concluded that his amplifier (probably a Selmer Truvoice) and speaker (one 15” woofer in a handmade box built by fellow bassist Adrian Barber of the Big Three) emitted too much noise for a recording.

American-manufactured bass amps (the gold standard in the early sixties) demanded prohibitive prices in Britain and operated on a different alternating current. Consequently, young British bass players routinely improvised their rigs, jerry-rigging components to create primitive beasts of convenience. And every time a musician loaded an amplifier into the back of a van and unloaded it at a new location, the electronics shook and the internal filaments rattled, wiggling the pins a little bit looser from their sockets.

Technical engineer Ken Townsend (EMI kept a staff able to troubleshoot many different kinds of recording problems) commandeered a speaker and an amplifier from Studio Two’s reverberation chamber to replace the noise and distortion of McCartney’s “custom” Liverpool rig. However, EMI’s speaker-amplifier combination created an unintentional musical problem that may explain a peculiar characteristic of this recording: a warm bass sound that nevertheless lacks presence and attack, leaving the beginnings of many notes indistinct.

Norman Smith had experience recording rock bands as a tape operator and more recently as a balance engineer. Equally as important, he continued to perform (unofficially) as a working musician, which informed how he heard the sounds on the studio floor. Being able to isolate amplified sounds in studios designed for acoustic performances (e.g., string quartets) presented engineers with problems. The better they could isolate instruments, the better the engineer and producer could control how loud each part would be through the mixing board. However in these days before headphones, Smith knew that musicians needed to hear and to see each other clearly and some of the balance in these live sessions came from how they reacted to each other. He kept that variable in mind as he positioned their equipment and the microphones.
In London studios during the early to mid-sixties, recording equipment fell a technological generation behind what many American studios were using. British productions commonly employed four-track decks for important sessions and two-track decks for simpler situations. Americans were gradually replacing four-track machines with eight-tracks. For example, Ray Charles recorded “What’d I Say” at Atlantic’s studios in 1959 on an eight-track machine, while similar facilities would not arrive in London until 1968. In the US, the additional tracks gave a producer and his engineer (they were always males in this era) the ability to separate instruments and to balance the sound after a performance. Ron Richards and Norman Smith would record the Beatles this day with two tracks, indicative of the relative unimportance of this session.

Smith, Richards, and Townsend’s amplifier-speaker substitution and the tone settings chosen by McCartney in response to their demands more closely replicated the sound of an acoustic rather than an electric bass. Consequently, the recording reveals McCartney attempting to will presence from his instrument, the strings buzzing slightly against the fingerboard with the force of his plucking. Nevertheless, determining exactly where he places the beat can be unclear and neither the microphone placement nor Best’s drumming provide a precise record of the bass-drum/bass-guitar pattern. A combination of their playing, their equipment, and the choice of microphones (as well as their physical placement) conspired to muddy the sound. [This recording appears on the first volume of the Beatles’ Anthology.]

Most listeners can hear the rhythmic unsteadiness pervading the studio that day, McCartney and Best struggling to hear one another and to establish the beat. Singing also diverts McCartney’s attention and their sense of ensemble clearly falls short. Pete Best’s musical reactions and adaptations reveal a drummer unsure of himself and his environment. McCartney remembers that in these early days, “We never really had to be steady on tempo. We liked to be but it didn’t matter if we slowed down or went faster, because we all went at the same time.” This would prove an unfortunate arrangement for Pete Best.
For someone who reputedly played with a heavy right foot, Best’s kick drum only sometimes surfaces in this recording, while McCartney’s bass rumbles on the acoustic bottom. Best described his drumming to biographer Hunter Davies as “using my bass drum very loud and laying down a very solid beat. . . . This way of drumming had a great deal to do with the big sound we were producing.” However, little of this style emerges on 6 June. The bass drum remains all but inaudible through most of the recording, surfacing clearly only once or twice. When the bass drum does sound, Best and McCartney arrive out-of-sync with each other, sometimes articulating two distinct attacks for the same beat.

Despite the problems, when the Beatles performed “Love Me Do,” Norman Smith suggested to Ron Richards that they call George Martin (the Director of Parlophone Records) into the session. Smith thought that he heard something in the song and that the performance warranted Martin’s attention.

George Martin (the director of Parlophone Records) asked his associate Ron Richards to serve as the artist-and-repertoire manager, which involved rehearsing the band and running their session. Pop groups represented a normal part of Richards’ portfolio and clearly the Beatles didn’t rank high enough on Martin’s list of responsibilities to warrant his presence. That would eventually change, but on 6 June 1962, the Beatles presented only a blip on his radar.
Martin later admitted that sometimes he would tell his associate Ron Richards, “you take that because I’m up doing such-and-such.” Furthermore, this session was simply an artist test: “just looking at four berks from Liverpool. It didn’t mean anything in our lives at all.” As the Beatles arrived, balance engineer Norman Smith quipped, “What in the bleedin’ hell have we got here?” Still, by the end of the day, when Martin asked for his opinion, Smith would encourage the manager to sign the Northerners. The events that followed would forge one of the most successful and well-known production relationships in popular music. Smith remembers, “George Martin, in fact, was there at the test and why I say that in that way is that most of the … artist tests were done by the assistants of the main producer. Each main producer had an assistant. It would normally be assistants that oversaw the artist tests.”

This first session established Lennon, McCartney, and Martin’s collaborative approach to transforming musical material for years to come. According to McCartney, he and Lennon faced a number of last minute changes that challenged their conception of “Love Me Do.” When Martin heard their arrangement, he immediately began tweaking the performance, beginning by telling them to speed up the tempo. Lennon a year later recalled that, “When we went to London for the first recording, ‘Love Me Do’ was a slower number like [Billy Fury’s] ‘Halfway to Paradise,’ you know, Dum-di-di-di-Dum; but George Martin, the recording manager, suggested we do it faster. I’m glad we did.”
Lennon and McCartney’s original arrangement featured them in duet, with Lennon singing the lower part — notably during the song’s title and the refrain when he sang solo — and McCartney providing an upper co-melody. But a distinctive aspect of the recording’s identity lies in John Lennon’s harmonica part. George Martin broached the precipitating question: “Can anyone play harmonica? It would be rather nice. Couldn’t think of some sort of bluesy thing, could you, John?” McCartney claims that this change in the arrangement left him “very nervous … John was supposed to sing the lead, but they changed their minds and asked me to sing lead [on the hook] at the last minute, because they wanted John to play harmonica. Until then, we hadn’t rehearsed with a harmonica; George Martin started arranging it on the spot. It was very nerve-wracking.”

Part of the inspiration for including the harmonica was Bruce Channel’s “Hey! Baby,” which featured Delbert McClinton’s harmonica. That recording had entered British charts on 22 March 1962 and the Beatles appropriated it into their repertoire. The harmonica line that Lennon creates for “Love Me Do” lies in a lower register and in a much simpler style than McClinton’s performance, but the tone quality is reminiscent of the Channel recording. The “some sort of bluesy” aspect of the line might be heard in the chorus melody, particularly when Lennon solos, alternating major and minor thirds in the repeated descending phrases. (The Beatles would open for the two Americans on 21 June 1962, two weeks after their first session at Abbey Road on 6 June.)
At the conclusion of the session, Martin, Richards, and Smith invited the band to climb the stairs to the control room where they critiqued the group’s playing and equipment. Smith in particular remembers offering a very frank opinion of their amplifiers, informing them that he could only record a sound that they produced and that their noisy and unpredictable speakers didn’t speak of professionalism. At the conclusion of their dressing down, a pause ensued. Martin asked if some aspect of the recording session hadn’t met with the approval of the Beatles. The question was rhetorical. His position as both producer and the director of Parlophone Records placed him in the position of dictating conditions, not embracing the opinions of performers. Still, he politely allowed a brief window for these northern working class lads to murmur their grateful thanks for the opportunity to audition.
Both Smith and Martin remember their shock when George Harrison expressed his dislike for Martin’s tie, which Smith described as leading to a “cabaret” atmosphere in the control room. Indeed, Martin cites this episode as the critical element in his decision to record the Beatles. The story of Harrison’s haberdashery quip plays a prominent role in Beatles hagiography, but fans and scholars usually downplay the exchange as lacking any real long-term significance. After all, the Beatles had built their Hamburg and Liverpool reputations through music, not through throwaway one-liners. Still, that moment of tension and release in many ways neatly describes an aspect of the social dynamics involved in their successful recordings.
British session musicians of the era often mention humor as a crucial part of easing the artistic tension involved in recording. For all of the obvious reasons, the ill-prepared Beatles presented George Martin with little in the way of star material. Like Scottish accordionist Jimmy Shand whom he also had produced, Martin may have imagined the Beatles as a regional phenomenon able to sell records around Liverpool and Manchester and occasionally strike a minor national demi-hit. Moreover, their humor played into popular British notions about Merseyside (the area around the Mersey River), exemplified by working-class singing comedians like George Formby and Ken Dodd. If we recognize 6 June as a test, then Harrison’s humor outweighed Lennon and McCartney’s ability to write songs. Their sense of humor may have been their strongest suit, while their songwriting had provided only “Love Me Do” as evidence of their potential.

Martin would need to make his decision about a contract soon. Manager Brian Epstein optimistically had told Decca that the Beatles had already signed with another company and had sought to release the band from a contract with German artist-and-repertoire manager Bert Kaempfert. The heads of EMI’s labels convened regularly to announce their upcoming projects, with the next meeting coming soon. Would the Beatles be on Martin’s agenda?