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