So What

The October 28 release of the Beatles special edition of Revolver comes after the seemingly inconsequential reworking of the Get Back sessions in January, 1969. The material felt thin and the marriage of the group teetering. Peter Jackson’s restoration technology perfected in his World War II documentary was primarily video-focused, and dovetailed nicely with the source material for what was released as the Let It Be documentary in the immediate aftermath of the Beatles breakup in 1970.

But the audio side turned out to be the real breakthrough, as Peter Jackson’s team used AI and machine learning techniques to unpack hundreds of hours of Nagra recordings from the early days of the shoot at Twickenham Studios. The cold, austere surroundings of the empty sound stage fought against the limitations of the project’s stated purpose of creating a full record from scratch without the complex overdubbing of the Sgt.Pepper era. The strategy enhanced the struggle between the various group members and particularly the dynamic of Harrison’s inability to break into the top tier of Beatle hierarchy.

The director of the original documentary, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, conspired to spy on Lennon and McCartney’s tea break huddle by hiding a microphone in the flower pot centerpiece of the table they were sharing. Harrison used the tension to create the subplot of him quitting the sessions and the band, spurring the four to ultimately hide from the cameras to broker a deal to return Harrison to the fold. In return, Harrison used some of his leverage to insist on moving the sessions to the basement of the Apple headquarters. Harrison had spent the holidays before Twickenham with Bob Dylan and his Band in Woodstock’s Big Pink basement, where Garth Hudson used a prosumer 4 track tape recorder to document what became known as the Basement Tapes. Now Beatles producer George Martin jumped in to get access to EMI equipment to set up a makeshift studio at Saville Row, and Harrison brought his keyboardist friend Billy Preston in to flesh out the live no-overdub feel.

In unpacking the tapes from Twickenham, Peter Jackson’s team discovered how Lennon and Harrison — who used rehearsals and apparently aimless jamming to conceal their chatting from the cameras and the film crew’s mono Nagra sound recording tapes — were fleshing out their irritation with McCartney’s self-appointed managing of the group after Brian Epstein’s overdose death. McCartney used the atomization of the White Album recording sessions to dominate all elements of his songs; the others followed suit by breaking their material into 2 or 3 simultaneous recording sessions. Harrison even brought Eric Clapton into the session for his While My Guitar Gently Weeps. The effect was to overwhelm EMI Studios to the point that some sessions moved to Olympic where the Stones and Hendrix recorded. By the time of the move to Saville Row, the Beatles had been individually exposed to the leap from 4 tracks to 8, which contributed to the more modern sound the group employed on their last studio record Abbey Road.

But years later, the Twickenham tapes, recorded in mono, were massaged by Jackson’s AI techniques to extract Lennon and Harrison’s back channel conversations from the mono mix. The same technology was used to recover the rehearsal performances to the point that Ringo’s drums could be isolated from the guitars and mono sound picture, and vice versa. It was here that George Martin’s son Giles and Abbey Road engineers took advantage of another set of techniques to reassemble and remix the Beatles records starting with Sgt. Pepper and continuing with the White Album, Abbey Road, and now the Get Back/Let It Be film soundtrack. The technique originally grew out of Giles’ work with his father on a reinvention of elements of the Beatles catalogue as the soundtrack for the Las Vegas Cirque De Soleil Love installation.

As the Beatles had never really worked with more than 4 tracks at a time, the strategy used on the complex Sgt.Pepper was to record four tracks, bounce them down to another machine as one mixed track, add 3 more tracks, and so on. In the wake of the transition to digital recorders, Giles Martin could go back to the original unmixed 4 tracks and hybrid mixdown/additional 4 tracks, and reassemble them on a digital master where they could be remixed in stereo and beyond. But it wasn’t until Jackson’s Get Back mixes where the AI tools made possible cracking open the original mono tracks. And as a consequence the first two albums to become possible Special Editions were Revolver and likely Rubber Soul, both recorded on 4 track with more and more use of mixdown elements to add strings and complex studio effects like reversed tapes, feedback, and sound effects elements. What crescendoed with Sgt. Pepper started with Revolver’s last track but recorded first, Tomorrow Never Knows.

In the middle 80’s I met an amazing artist who did many of the covers for Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine. Richard Bernstein used a hybrid process painting atop black and white photographs with airbrushed colors. The result echoed something about Warhol’s silkscreen portraits of Marilyn and tomato soup cans. One night at the Limelight, a night club built on top of a lapsed church, I met Richard and his friend, Grace Jones. I knew little of the Warhol crowd, and only a little more about Grace. I’d seen her leaping off the Eiffel Tower in a James Bond film, but much less about her recording career. Over the course of the next several months, I learned a lot more. For starters, Grace’s music was a revelation.

It was really dumb luck that I knew so little. Richard and I were formulating a strategy of mixing the airbrush techniques with the incipient era of digital graphics, specifically the Quantel Paintbox I used extensively in post production of television commercials I produced as creative director of a small New York ad agency. The plan: produce a record cover for Grace’s new record, a collaboration with producer Nile Rodgers. I had been working with a new computer from Commodore called the Amiga, but felt that it wasn’t ready for prime time. My goal was to stay out of the way, but take advantage of my experience both in electronic video editing, and countless hangouts with another airbrush genius, Robert Grossman, who had created one of the most brilliant covers for the Firesign Theatre.

I think it was dumb luck for Grace as well, since I was a blank canvas who knew of her celebrity but not of her art. Richard and I would go over to her loft in early evening, and she would start at the beginning and play through her archives. The music was stunning, the evolution of production and interactions with a series of prescient producers fascinating. She gave me carte blanche access to her creative world, and later with Nile’s OK, the recording studio. The intersection with Richard’s command of a similar stature in the Interview cover process gave me a window into the Warhol esthetic that mirrored the hybrid structure of this wave of modern art. I knew little about Grace’s world, and even less about Richard’s.

Years later, I stumbled on a live audio session on either Clubhouse or Twitter Spaces, I forget which. Richard’s nephew and some veterans of Warhol’s scene were talking about Richard and the intersection of digital media. In fact, there will be an event at the Warhol museum in Pittsburgh on the 24th of September. To me, Clubhouse, Spaces, Substack, and so on are in the grain of this experiment that goes beyond accident into the realm of breakthrough. I was surprised recently to see Miles Davis quoted as describing his Kind of Blue recordings as a failed experiment. I believe both what he said and in what many think is the greatest jazz record in history. Grace’s experiments with the orchestral landscapes of Slave to the Rhythm remain a work in process. The Compass Point sessions¹ are a window into the creative center of her collaborations with the Jamaican rhythm section of Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare. And when you walk through a museum, remember that Richard estimated that a large percentage of Warhols were just as likely to be signed by him. Both facts are true, I guess. Like the record says: So What.