Track 5 – Fixing A Hole: While not making too many people’s ‘Favorite Beatles’ Songs’ list, and also not known for getting much radio airplay, it nonetheless stands the test of time as a strong group performance. It stands among an album filled with songs that have all the ‘bells and whistles’ included, such as Indian instruments, audience applause and laughter, a calliope, clarinets, raving orchestra swells and animal sound effects. “Fixing A Hole” has none of those things. What it does have, however, is a straightforward pop/rock arrangement using conventional instrumentation, the only eccentric touch being the inclusion of a harpsichord. The result is nothing less than imaginative and articulate for its time.
The “damned studio” that he found was Regent Sound Studio in
London where many of the early Rolling Stones hits were recorded, as well as other popular artists. “Regent Sound was
a pretty awful little studio, very cramped and boxy,” relates George Martin. Engineer Geoff Emerick, in his book “Here, There And
Everywhere,” recalls his frustration of not being able to attend this session: “Ridiculously,
even though we’d recorded almost every note on the album up to that point,
Richard (Lush) and I couldn’t go there because we were EMI employees. George
Martin, on the other hand, could attend, because he was working as an
independent contractor.” This procedure changed in later years, allowing
recording staff to complete a project no matter what studio was used on a given day. But as it was on this
day, Adrian Ibbetson was used as a replacement for Geoff Emerick. The hours The
Beatles were in Regent Sound on this day is not known but, if recent habits
dictate, the session probably began around 7 pm and lasted until early morning
the next day.
There is one other person known to have been present on this day. Paul
relates: “The funny thing about that was the night when we were going to record
it, at Regent Sound Studios at Tottenham Court Road, I brought a guy who was
Jesus. A guy arrived at my front gate,
and I said, ‘Yes? Hello’ because I always used to answer it to everyone. If
they were boring, I would say, ‘Sorry,
no,’ and they generally went away. This
guy said, ‘I’m Jesus Christ.’ I said, ‘Oop,’ slightly shocked. I said, ‘Well,
you’d better come in then.’ I thought, Well, it probably isn’t. But if he is,
I’m not going to be the one to turn him away. So I gave him a cup of tea, and we just chatted, and I asked, ‘Why do you think you are Jesus?’ There were
a lot of casualties about then. We used to get a lot of people who were maybe
insecure or going through emotional breakdowns or whatever.”
“So I said, ‘I’ve got to go to a session,
but if you promise to be very quiet and just sit in a corner, you can come.’ So
he did, he came to the session, and he
did sit very quietly, and I never saw him
after that. I introduced him to the guys. They said, ‘Who’s this?’ I said,
‘He’s Jesus Christ.’ We had a bit of a giggle over that…But that was it. Last we ever saw of Jesus!”
With Jesus Christ in the corner, The Beatles began their studio
time on this day with extensive rehearsals led by Paul, at least six unofficial
takes being recorded before they had the
arrangement ironed out. “Paul knew exactly
where he was going with 'Fixing A Hole,'" wrote George Martin in the book
“Summer Of Love.” He continues: “As a result, it was one of the fastest
tracks we recorded, in an album of 13 songs that took some five months to
complete…It's a very simply constructed song, built around a harpsichord and a
bass guitar. Even before we got into the studio Paul had decided to use a
harpsichord as the mainstay of his rhythm; even so, the bass line is more important
than the harpsichord line.”
Once everyone’s parts were learned, the group taped three official
‘takes’ of the rhythm track of the song. Unusually, they reverted to the recording technique of the
early Beatles sessions by recording all the instruments,
and lead vocals live, even the lead guitar work. Common practice for the past
year had them overdubbing the lead vocals, bass and lead guitar afterward in order to ‘fine tune’ these performances. Possibly
because of the cramped and unfamiliar setting of Regent Sound Studios, they reverted to basics for “Fixing A Hole.”
Even though Geoff Emerick couldn’t be there, he was impressed by
the performance nonetheless. “We listened to the tapes a few days later, and
while they were a bit disappointing sonically, I was impressed with the vibe: all
four Beatles played together on the backing track, just like in the old days,
and George Harrison played a good guitar solo, too.”
The question, however, is the identity of the players of the
instruments. George is on lead guitar and, of course, Ringo is on drums, but
there is a discrepancy about the other
instruments. Beatles road manager Neil Aspinall, writing in the magazine “The
Beatles Monthly,” claims to have witnessed Paul playing the distinctive
harpsichord part. And, while engineer Richard Lush wasn’t present on this day,
he is quoted in Andy Babiuk’s book “Beatles Gear” as saying: “I do remember
that Lennon played the bass on that track. He used a Fender bass on it. If you
play the album, you can pick it out
because it’s very simple, and a ploppy
sort of sound. It didn’t sound as rich as Paul’s Rickenbacker bass.”
While this seems to settle the issue, there is much more to
consider. We have to remember that, since Richard Lush wasn’t allowed to be
present by EMI on that day, his opinion is based
on listening to the recordings of that day when they reconvened to add overdubs to it nearly two weeks later (February
21st). The bass was recorded live on the rhythm track utilizing an
engineer using standard procedures, the Rickenbacker bass sound on the rest of
the “Sgt. Pepper” album being overdubbed afterward for optimal quality. As
Geoff Emerick related, the recording was “disappointing sonically.”
Someone who was there, however, was producer George Martin. In the
book “Summer Of Love” he states: “Paul had to play bass guitar on it because nobody could (or can) play that
instrument quite like him. That meant someone else was going to have to play
keyboards. This was unusual because Paul always liked to play his own keyboards on his own compositions. The part of honorary stand-in keyboard player to
the greatest group in the world was offered
to me.” Neil Aspinall’s account of witnessing Paul on harpsichord could
very well have been early rehearsals of the song or in instructing George
Martin on how he wanted the keyboard part to be
played.
This would, therefore, leave John
Lennon out of the picture. Upon listening to the released recording, however,
it appears the maracas heard throughout the song were also part of the rhythm
track since it is panned specifically to
the left channel of the stereo mix along with the rhythm track recorded on this
day. This appears to be the best
explanation of the instrumentalists on “Fixing A Hole”: Paul on bass and lead
vocals, George Harrison on lead guitar, Ringo on drums, John on maracas and
George Martin on harpsichord.
Of the official three ‘takes’ of the song recorded on this day,
the first two were complete, and the
third broke down before the song was complete but was viewed as desirable by
the group nonetheless. In any event, as related in Mark Lewisohn’s book “The
Beatles Recording Sessions”: “The first two (takes) were both very good so onto
the tape box was written, rather ambiguously, ‘master’ for take one and ‘final master’ for take two.” Although undecided which ‘take’ was going to be used for overdubs,
they apparently knew they accomplished what they set out to do on this day.
February 21st, 1967, was the second and last day needed to
complete “Fixing A Hole.” They were back in EMI Studio Two this time
around with engineers Geoff Emerick and Richard Lush back on the job, the
session scheduled to begin at 7 pm. The first thought was to salvage the
partial ‘take three’ that was recorded two weeks prior even though it broke
down before the song was completed. There
must have been something they liked on this ‘take’ even though it wasn’t
complete. Therefore, the group recorded another ‘take’ of the song (incorrectly labeling it ‘take one’) with the intention
of mixing it together with the incomplete ‘take three.’
Apparently, this idea didn’t work out as planned and they dropped
it. Instead, a reduction mix was made of
‘take two’ (the one originally labeled ‘final master’) in order to free up some empty tracks for overdubbing. George’s
lead guitar work was isolated to a separate track, however, to single it out in
the stereo mix. Paul’s bass was combined with the rest of the instruments,
leaving a performance flub in the third verse which therefore couldn’t be
corrected later. To confuse things even more, they labeled this reduction mix
‘take three,’ not to be confused with the incomplete ‘take three’ recorded at
Regent Sound. Still with me?
This being
done, they recorded overdubs, which comprised Paul double-tracking his
lead vocals in strategic spots, George double-tracking his lead guitar work,
and John and George performing backing vocals. The mono mix was tackled on this day as well with The
Beatles present. Five attempts at the mono mix were
made (for some reason labeled remixes 2 through 6), an edit of remix 3
and 6 being
used for the final product. Ringo’s drums are quite prominent throughout
the song while George’s lead guitar work is somewhat subdued in the mix. In the
fade out, Paul is heard singing a high pitched but faintly audible “hey” twice,
the second during the lead vocal overdub.
The stereo mix wasn’t created
until April 7th, 1967, in the control room of EMI Studio Two by the same
Martin, Emerick and Lush team. The rhythm track is predominantly in the left
channel while both lead vocal parts from Paul are
centered in the mix. Both tracks of George’s lead guitar are panned to
the right channel as are the background vocals of John and George. The drums are a little more subdued than on the mono
mix, but the lead guitar passages are more prominent. This stereo mix
fades a little sooner so as not to hear the “hey” exclamations as heard on the
mono mix.
Also, on June 12th, 1967, just ten days after “Sgt. Pepper” was
released, Harry Nilsson was nearly finished recording his first RCA album
“Pandemonium Shadow Show” when he found himself impelled to record his own version of “She’s Leaving Home.”
“With his savvy musical sense, he knew a gem when he heard one,” related Derek
Taylor in the CD liner notes to Nilsson’s album.
While the song may be habitually skipped over by
listeners throughout the later years, the overall complexity and versatility of
the “Sgt. Pepper” experience cannot be fully
enjoyed without appreciating its’ dramatic and poignant flair. Author
Chris Ingham puts it perfectly when he describes the instrumentation as “one of
the lushest Beatle orchestral sounds on one of the most mature Beatles songs.”
Before recording began, Paul thought carefully about how the song
should be presented on the album. “Paul
was getting very keen on the possibilities of orchestral settings,” states
Barry Miles in the book “Many Years From Now,” “and felt that ‘She’s Leaving
Home’ would be best suited for this type
of arrangement.” Therefore, on March 10th, 1967 or thereabouts, Paul
contacted George Martin about his idea.
In his book “All You Need Is Ears,” George Martin describes his
take on this discussion with Paul: “During the making of ‘Pepper’ he was also
to give me one of the biggest hurts of my life…At that time I was still having to record all my other artists.
One day Paul rang me to say: ‘I’ve got a song I want you to work with me on. Can you come round tomorrow afternoon? I
want to get it done quickly. We’ll book an orchestra, and you can score it.’ ‘I
can’t tomorrow, Paul. I’m recording Cilla (Black) at two-thirty.’ ‘Come on. You
can come round at two o’clock.’ ‘No, I can’t, I’ve got a session on.’ ‘All
right, then,’ he said, and that ended the conversation.”
“What he did then, as I discovered later, was to get Neil
Aspinall, the road manager, to ring round and find someone else to do the score
for him, simply because I couldn’t do it at that short notice. In the end, he found Mike Leander, who could. The
following day Paul presented me with it and said, ‘Here we are. I’ve got a
score. We can record it now.’”
“I recorded it, with a few alterations to make it work better, but
I was hurt. I thought: Paul, you could have waited, for I really couldn’t have done it that afternoon, unless I had just
devoted everything to The Beatles and never dealt with any other artist. Paul
obviously didn’t think it was important that I should do everything. To me it
was. I wasn’t getting much out of it from a financial point of view, but at
least I was getting satisfaction. The score itself was good enough, and still, holds up today, but it was the only
score that was ever done by anyone else during all my time with The Beatles. However,
it had happened, and there was nothing to be done about it.”
Mike Leander was a freelance producer and arranger who Paul met
while attending the recording session at Decca Studios for Marianne Faithfull’s
version of Paul’s song “Yesterday.” Apparently,
he remembered meeting him at this session on got his number by dispatching Neil
Aspinall to find it for him.
Paul explains his side of the story in “Many Years From Now”: “I
rang George Martin and said, ‘I’m really
on to this song, George. I want to record it next week.’ I’m really hot to
record it, I’ve got one of those ‘I’ve got to go, I’ve got to go!’ feelings and
when you get them, you don’t want anything to stop you, you feel like if you
lose this impetus, you’ll lose something valuable. So I rang him, and I said, ‘I need you to arrange it.’ He
said, ‘I’m sorry, Paul, I’ve got a Cilla session.’ And I thought, F**king
hell! After all this time working together, he ought to put himself out. It
was probably unreasonable to expect him to.”
“Anyway, I said, ‘Well, fine, thanks,
George,’ but I was so hot to trot that I called Mike Leander, another arranger.
I got him to come over to Cavendish Avenue,
and I showed him what I wanted, strings, and he said, ‘Leave it with me.’ It is
one of the first times I actually let
anyone arrange something and then reviewed it later, which I don’t like as a
practice. It’s much easier if I just stay with them. Anyway, he took it away, did it, and George Martin was very hurt,
apparently. Extremely hurt, but of course,
I was hurt that he didn’t have time for me, but he had time for Cilla (Black).”
“It was the song that got away,” George Martin stated later. “It
was the song I wanted to do…It was just one of those silly things. He was so
damned impatient, and I was up to my eyes
with other work, and I just couldn’t cope.
But Paul realizes now, though he was surprised that I was upset.”
At any rate, with all hurt feelings aside, the session for “She’s
Leaving Home” was booked for March 17th, 1967, in EMI Studio Two. It appears
that Paul was the only Beatle in attendance on this day, the intention of this
session being the recording of the strings only. The instrumentalists booked
for this session were Erich Gruenberg (leader), Derek Jacobs, Trevor Williams
and Jose Luis Garcia (violins), John Underwood and Stephen Shingles (violas),
Dennis Vigay and Alan Dalziel (cellos), Gordon Pearce (double-bass) and Sheila
Bromberg (harp). Sheila was the first woman to appear on a Beatles recording
(unless you count Pattie Boyd and Marianne Faithfull’s scant contributions to
“Yellow Submarine”)
The session documents indicate it to have begun at 7 pm, but
harpist Sheila Bromberg, in a 2011 BBC segment, indicates otherwise. “There
were people called fixers. This fixer called me up and said, am I free from 9
o’clock at night until midnight?..and I thought, ‘Do I really want a session from 9 to midnight?’ But it was Alec, and he
gave me a lot of work, so I didn’t want to turn him down…So I was sitting here
(in EMI Studio Two) at half-passed eight tuning the harp.”
George Martin prepared the final sheet music to be presented to
the ten musicians present on this day and gave it to them to rehearse before 9
pm arrived. “I had to change the score a little bit, but not very much,” George
Martin recalls, adding, “Mike Leander did a good job.” Sheila continues: “Suddenly
a piece of music was plunked on my music stand,
and I gave it a brief look…(Alec) didn’t tell me at the time it was for The
Beatles. You never knew who you were going to play with…And then this voice said, ‘Well, whatcha got on the duss?,” meaning ‘What’s written on the music?’ I
recognized the Liverpool accent. I turned around and, of course, it was Paul
McCartney.”
Six takes of the song were recorded on this day and, being that
these were professional session musicians, their performances were nearly
flawless right from the start. However, someone,
in particular, was fussy about what he wanted. “First of all I played exactly what was
written,” Sheila relates. “Then I stopped and (Paul) said, ‘No, I don’t
want that. I want something, ehhhh…’”
After she tried out other ideas, Paul would just repeat, “No, I don’t want that.
I want something, ehhh…” “I think
he had an idea in his head of what he wanted it to sound like, but he couldn’t describe it, he couldn’t
express it, and he was waiting for somebody to bring it out of the air. During
the session, after each time we played it, Paul McCartney, we would hear from
the controls, ‘No, I don’t want that. I want something, ehhh…’ So we’d play it again.”
“Came midnight, and the string section were really fed up. And eventually, the leader of
the orchestra stood up, Erich Gruenberg, tucked his violin under his arm, and
said, ‘Now it is midnight, we have to go home
because we are working in the morning.’ So a voice (Paul) from the control box
said, ‘Well, I suppose that’s that then.’ And we all went home.” With not
much difference between the performance of the takes, both ‘take one’ and ‘take
six’ were marked as ‘best’ and the session was complete for the day by 12:45
am.
Three days later, on March 20th, 1967, the next session for “She’s
Leaving Home” was booked for 7 pm at EMI Studio Two with at least two Beatles
in attendance, Paul, and John. The first
task at hand was to free up space for overdubs of the vocals since all four tracks on the four-track tape will filled with the strings from three days ago. This could easily be accomplished by making a tape reduction onto another four-track
tape to leave open two tracks for the overdubs. However,
they still couldn’t decide whether ‘take one’ or ‘take six’ was really ‘best’
(there being hardly a difference anyway), so they did reduction mixes for
both; ‘take one’ received three reduction mixes (takes 7 through 9) and
‘take six’ received one (take 10). Thereafter, the final decision was made: the third reduction mix of ‘take
one,’ now considered ‘take 9,’ was the winner. So, as it came to be, the very
first performance from the ten-piece string section was the one that was used, Paul making them stick around until
midnight for no reason whatsoever.
The next job was to overlay the vocals. Engineer Geoff Emerick, in
his book “Here, There And Everywhere,” relates the eyewitness details. “There
were still two available tracks on the multitrack tape, but Paul felt strongly that he wanted certain lines
double-tracked, and he also wanted the strings to remain in stereo. The only
solution was to have them sing their vocals at the same time, recording each
pass on a single track.”
“The lights in the studio were turned off to set the mood; the
sole source of illumination was a table lamp next to the wall. The two Beatles,
lifelong friends, and collaborators, sat on high stools, facing each
other, studying each other’s lips intently for phrasing. Watching them, I
remember thinking that John’s and Paul’s voices were so different yet so
perfectly complemented each other’s, just like their personalities and approach
to music-making. It wasn’t an easy vocal to nail down, either – at one point
there was a long discussion about getting the right amount of emotion into the
lyric. Paul was quite the perfectionist by this time, and he was really pissing John off by having him sing the
same line over and over again. Up in the control room, I had to do a bit of
tweaking to get the correct perspective and contrast between the two vocals.”
This being
completed, and after some interviews and recorded speeches were taped by
John and Paul, the mono mix was created to complete the day’s activity. This was done in the control room of EMI Studio
Two by George Martin, Geoff Emerick, and
2nd engineer Ken Scott, undoubtedly with Paul and John still present. They made six attempts at this mono mix, the sixth being deemed the best. Paul still wanted
something to be done with the opening harp segment of the song, so different
experiments were pursued. The first mix
had them treating it with ADT (Artificial Double Tracking) to give it a richer
sound, but they ended up scrapping this idea. The sixth mix had them adding a
doubling effect to the harp, which is what they ended up keeping.
“That’s what he was after,” Sheila Bromberg exclaimed when she
heard the final product. However, Paul is a little sketchy on this detail. “I
don’t like the echo on the harp, but that must be George (Martin) rather than
Mike Leander, or, to give him his due, it might have been one of us saying,
‘Stick some echo on that harp.’ You just can’t tell.” My vote is that
Paul forgot about his insistence and never did get the sound he wanted.
At this stage a decision was made to make two
edits to the song, deleting a small section from the end of both the first and
second chorus (just after the words “for so many years” and just before the
following verse begins in both instances). With these edits accomplished and
a slight bit of reverb added, the mono mix was complete,
and the session was over, it already being 3:30 am the next morning.
The stereo mix wasn’t made until April 17th, 1967, in the control
room of EMI Studio Two by Martin, Emerick and 2nd engineer Richard Lush. The
violins and harp are panned to the right channel while the violas, cellos, and double-bass are
panned to the left, all vocals being centered
in the mix. While current opinion has it that more emphasis was still given to the mono mixes, Paul did get
his wish to have stereo strings in this song, he apparently thinking of the
consumers who preferred to hear Beatles music in stereo.
A curious difference between the mono and stereo mixes is the
speed, the stereo mix slowing the tempo down slightly, making Paul’s vocals
sound a little laborious in the process. It has been suggested by some that
this was unintentional and that the original tape speed was altered as many
other “Sgt. Pepper” songs were and then, forgetting the speed it was recorded
at, made the stereo mix at the standard speed. In any event, a small amount of
reverb was added, the opening harp
segment was doubled, and the two edits were made as they were on the mono mix.
A live recording of “She’s Leaving Home” by Paul, and his band was made in Mexico City in early November of 2002, this version
gracing the international album “Back In The World.”
Be sure to join me tomorrow for a thorough
account in creating ‘Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite,’ and ‘Within You Without You.’
Please feel free to leave any comments or corrections and share these articles plus the blog's website with your friends, especially Beatles’ fans. You and they might also enjoy knowing more about my Love Songs CD and my novel, BEATLEMANIAC. Just click on the My Shop tab near the top of this page for details.
Please feel free to leave any comments or corrections and share these articles plus the blog's website with your friends, especially Beatles’ fans. You and they might also enjoy knowing more about my Love Songs CD and my novel, BEATLEMANIAC. Just click on the My Shop tab near the top of this page for details.
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