Backdated, archival post
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link to original on tumblr]
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Earlier this week, I was looking at
the Rex photos again, and I noticed something. I can't tell precisely what it is, but there's a coat or blanket or something inside Hugh Grundy's bass drum:
It's a bit more visible (but further in the background) in this one:
After I saw that, I remembered something that Geoff Emerick wrote in
Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles:
I decided to do something to dampen the bass drum... As quickly as I could, I removed the bass drum's front skin - the one with the famous "dropped-T" Beatles logo on it - and stuffed the sweater inside so that it was flush against the rear beater skin. Then I replaced the front skin and positioned the bass drum mic directly in front of it, angled down slightly but so close that it was almost touching (pp. 12-13).
In
Revolver: How the Beatles Reimagined Rock 'n' Roll, Robert Rodriguez, who's somewhat critical of Emerick's foggy memories, also writes that
Emerick had noticed Ringo's habit of dampening his snare drum's head with a cigarette pack. The engineer wondered if applying some sort of muffling to the kick would result in a more powerful sound on tape (p. 105).
And then he goes on to describe the same process that Emerick writes about.
It seems that either Emerick himself or Peter Vince (the other Abbey Road engineer who workt on
Odessey and Oracle) did the same thing here. I went looking through Claes Johansen's
The Zombies: Hung up on a Dream, and I found something Chris White says about this: "When we went to Abbey Road people like Geoff Emerick and Peter Vince engineered us. They had been doing all the Beatles stuff and we could get great drum sounds" (p. 166).
I think I'm most excited about having noticed out because it's a demonstrable example of something that the Abbey Road engineers did to improve the sound of
Odessey and Oracle. In interviews, Rod Argent always says that because they were walking into Abbey Road as the Beatles were walking out after
Sgt. Pepper, they had the technical advantages that the engineers came up with for the Beatles. In particular, he mentions that they had eight tracks on which to record, but that's actually not correct. Johansen writes that "all the songs had been recorded on four-track equipment with just mono in mind" (p. 175). As a bonus feature on the 40th anniversary concert DVD, there's an excerpt from a documentary (which I can't seem to find in its entirety), and right after Rod Argent says, "We were a bit like kids in the toy shop in the sense that suddenly there were eight tracks to play with," it cuts to Chris White, who says, "We knew we had the limitation of four tracks, and Rod's wrong; it was four. I've got them." Presumably, he's referring to the master tapes.
After writing all of that, the chronology piqued my interest, so I did some research on that too. I skimmed the entries in Mark Lewisohn's
The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions (which I haven't gotten around to reading yet), and the last date I can find with any
Sgt. Pepper song is 20 April 1967 (mixing the stereo version of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)"). According to the
Zombie Heaven liner notes, "Friends of Mine" and part of "A Rose for Emily" were recorded on 1 June, which Lewisohn lists as the U.K. release date for
Sgt. Pepper. At some point, I'd like to cross reference the
Odessey and Oracle recording dates with the dates in Lewisohn's book, just to see if the Zombies were recording at the same time the Beatles were.
In any case, this was a lot longer than I'd planned. Here's a more trivial thing I noticed while looking through the pictures again. On the right in the picture below, you can see a plaid suit coat on the piano:
That's Hugh's; here he is wearing it outside:
