Morning Constitutional

At the beginning of this episode of the Gillmor Gang, Brent Leary tells a story about listening to a Rick James track while walking in a suburban Atlanta park. Hijinks ensue when he realizes his singing along with earphones sends a potentially inappropriate message to younger passersby. At the end of the recording session, Brent has to jump off to another show he does on his and Paul Greenberg’s PPN network, a conversation with his good friend John Colderice aka The Cold One, The Bold One. And there he tells the same story, funnier. Thanks, Brent.

In April, 1970 Paul McCartney said out loud that the Beatles were done. He had been recording a solo album in the style of many of his contributions to the White Album, initially at home with a 4-track Studer and then at Abbey Road for a Beatlesque Maybe I’m Amazed. John Lennon had been the first to call for a group divorce behind the scenes, but now McCartney was going public to compete directly with the band’s last record Let It Be, which Lennon had called badly recorded shit. Ringo Starr was sent to ask Paul to delay his solo release until after the Phil Spector-mangled version of the mostly live recordings, but he was summarily thrown out of the house.

At the time, this did not seem as momentous a moment as it seems in retrospect. But this was four years before Nixon was thrown out of office, before an actor became President, before the invention of the iPhone, before television was TickTocked. Technology rose to replace these hard transitions with slick sidesteps. Stars died off as technicians tweaked drum sounds. Theft became a career path. Maybe I’m Amazed morphed into Not Really. The Beatles themselves showed just how magical they were in collaboration by scraping the husk clean of humor. Step by step, inch by inch. Slowly they turned into Elvis-tamed lions on drugs. Heroin 1 Beatles 0. All they were saying: Nothin’.

Three years earlier, the overture to Sgt. Pepper. A blend of audience at a comedy show, the Fab Four, and Hendrix-level Studio One funk, the perfect record is launched. The backbiters complain about the weak material (She’s Leaving Home, etc.) but the shot heard round the world is impossible to ignore. Overwhelming the loss of the road, virtualizing the vision of the future, all you need to know is the reaction to the discovery as embodied by the competition. A precursor of Steve Jobs’ rollouts of the iPhone and iPad, the group invited David Crosby into the room to hear the playback. Crosby was a time traveler, moving from the Byrds’ capture of McGuinn’s 12-string chimes by Harrison on If I Needed Someone to CSNY’s Carry On harmonies. Crosby was an unstable force, but a shapeshifter who rode the invention of this paradigm at the Beatles’ invitation. The group’s innate advantage was that they knew what they were creating. Their state of group mind had conquered the clubs, television, and now the economics of the film business.

It’s not that the band was so advanced as individuals, at least not at the beginning. As a younger boy, I recall the slow build of the early albums as a growing awareness of the power of shared experiences. The healthy competition between the principal songwriters fostered a precision of just enough burnishing of the track. The 4-track bounce-downs created a dynamic where each overdub was essentially one live mix on top of the others. Vocals melded the elements together even as a separate session mixed handclaps with other percussion. The limited skillset of the songwriters’ keyboard work worked to the advantage of the group’s producer, George Martin. He masked his own limitations with half-speed recordings of piano overdubs that doubled the pitch to simulate a harpsichord. Harrison’s interest in Eastern scales and drone-like instruments mirrored Martin’s classical-lite arrangements to finance the transition from live feel through Rubber Soul’s acoustic guitars to the studio breakthroughs of Revolver.

Years later, the technology revolution built on the Beatles process by using the shared software experience to establish a representation of a group mind. The competitive dynamic between Dylan and the group drove a woodshedding in the Band’s Big Pink recordings that sparked the seeds of the Get Back experiments that almost sunk the band a year before its Abbey Road recovery. Harrison literally journeyed to Woodstock and absorbed the work process of the Basement Tapes over the holidays. Returning to McCartney’s second failure in a row in instigating a film project — Magical Mystery Tour and then the chilly film studio rehearsals that led to Harrison quitting the group — the guitarist dragged a Moog Synthesizer¹ into the final record’s sessions with Martin and Revolver/Sgt. Pepper engineer Geoff Emerick back on board and dragooned keyboardist Billy Preston in to save the live sessions. It was in effect a palace coup that allowed the group to emulate Nixon’s Peace with Honor gambit to end the War. Or as John and Yoko plastered on billboards in many cities: War is over If you want it.

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