News The song that made an engineer walk out on The Beatles: “A bit of a nightmare”
When looking back at The Beatles’ recording session, it seems like the band had the greatest time in the world in the studio. There may have been some rough patches towards the end, but nine times out of ten, looking at the band putting pieces of music together, it felt like they were just having fun while they were breaking down the barriers of what rock was supposed to be. Things could get testy, though, and engineer Geoff Emerick had had enough by the time he got to work on the song ‘Revolution’.
Then again, there was a good chance that all of The Beatles needed a little bit of a break. Since they were on the verge of going to India for transcendental meditation, they had been working endlessly since Sgt Pepper and would spend most of their time working on themselves half a world away before returning to the studio to make The White Album.
They needed a single to ensure they weren’t forgotten, though, and the one-two punch of ‘Hey Jude’ and ‘Revolution’ were the kinds of songs that anyone familiar with pop music could enjoy. While Paul McCartney made the delightful single as the lead-off track, Lennon grabbed people by the throat when he came in with his screeching guitar.
Because up until that point, it was practically against the recording rules for a song to sound that abrasive. It may have been the sound that Lennon wanted, but the source of the sound actually came out of spite from Emerick.
When talking about putting the track together, Emerick recalled getting a snide comment from Lennon while he working on finetuning his guitar sound, saying, “It was a bit of a nightmare as far as I was concerned… John had been pretty nasty to me. Something had happened in his life at the time, and he took the anger out on me. He said, ‘I want a nasty guitar sound, and you’re going to bloody well do it, so out of anger, I overloaded one mic amp, and that’s the sound everyone loves.”
Emerick may have given the band what they wanted on that one session, but he wouldn’t be the whipping boy every time they got testy with each other. After only a few more days working on what would become The White Album, Emerick would leave the session and not return for a few years, only coming back on when they were working on Abbey Road with George Martin.
Even though Emerick was considered the right-hand man on many of The Beatles’ soundscapes, it’s easy to tell when he left. Listening to every other track on The White Album, it sounds like all of them could have been on a completely different album, a practice which only got worse when the band decided to let Phil Spector vomit all over Let It Be after the fact.
Despite Emerick leaving, he did seem to have a better opinion of the group later, eventually working with Paul McCartney on Band on the Run under some of the most hellish conditions any engineer could have asked for. Anyone in The Beatles’ circle may have been put through their paces during the late 1960s, but losing Emerick for a while meant saying goodbye to one of the more important fifth Beatles.
