The Beatles’ single “Now and Then,” released on November 2nd, took the world by storm, with its combination of a “new” John Lennon vocal (that was actually recorded in 1977), backed by a powerful new string arrangement, solid drumming by Ringo Starr, and a stunning slide guitar solo by Paul McCartney in the style of the late George Harrison.
To understand the elements at play and how we listen to them as a whole, it helps to explore the time and space elements of recorded sound. In his epochal 1979 speech, turned into a 1983 two-part Downbeat magazine article, “The Studio As Compositional Tool,” U2 and Talking Heads producer Brian Eno noted:
The first thing about recording is that it makes repeatable what was otherwise transient and ephemeral. Music, until about 1900, was an event that was perceived in a particular situation, and that disappeared when it was finished. There was no way of actually hearing that piece again, identically, and there was no way of knowing whether your perception was telling you it was different or whether it was different the second time you heard it. The piece disappeared when it was finished, so it was something that only existed in time.
The effect of recording is that it takes music out of the time dimension and puts it in the space dimension.
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As soon as you record something, you make it available for any situation that has a record player. You take it out of the ambience and locale in which it was made, and it can be transposed into any situation. This morning I was listening to a Thai lady singing; I can hear the sound of the St. Sophia Church in Belgrade or Max's Kansas City in my own apartment, and I can listen with a fair degree of conviction about what these sounds mean. As Marshall McLuhan said, it makes all music all present.
Ever since Les Paul commissioned the first 8-track reel-to-reel multitrack recorder from Ampex in 1954, multitrack recording has always had a time illusion. On a complex multitrack recording, let’s say Pink Floyd’s 1979 masterpiece “Comfortably Numb,” a song could take a week – possibly a lot more – to record in the studio. The drums might be recorded on one day, the bass guitar on another, the rhythm guitar on another day, followed possibly weeks later for the lead guitar, and then another day or two spent on the lead vocals, and a day spent recording the orchestra. Finally, some additional percussion might be tacked on for good measure. And yet when we listen to the song, our brain processes it as a band and orchestra all playing together in real time. It’s an illusion that works perfectly with virtually every song we hear on the radio, with the main exceptions being jazz stations playing lots of improvised material featuring a band in the room jamming away together simultaneously.
The Beatles’ “Now and Then” song takes this illusion to its breaking point. The song began life as a demo John Lennon recorded in 1977 on a pair of what, in less enlightened times, would have been called “ghetto blaster” tape decks. Lennon frequently used two cassette recorders because of his love of hearing his vocal double-tracked. (For a man gifted with one of the best rock & roll voices in the history of the medium, Lennon notoriously hated the sound of his own voice, unless it had some kind of audio effect on it.) To record his demos, Lennon would play piano and sing into one tape deck, then play the recording he had just made back, and after hitting record on his second cassette deck, finally would record himself singing along to the playback of his original song, so as to capture a double-tracked lead vocal, albeit one recorded in rather low-fi conditions. Particularly so on “Now and Then,” which in the background contained plenty of hum, ambient noise, and even the noise of a television set.
In 1994, when Paul McCartney was in New York to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Yoko Ono met him to give McCartney three songs on cassettes that Lennon had demoed in this rough and ready fashion in the late 1970s. Despite the inability, due to limitations in that era’s audio restoration technology, to fully separate Lennon’s voice from his piano, two of Lennon’s demos ended up being massively reworked by the then-three surviving Beatles and producer Jeff Lynne, to appear on their "Anthology" recordings in 1994 and ‘95.
Those songs were of course “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love,” each featuring a tiny ghost-in-the-machine 1970s vocal by Lennon alongside newly recorded vocals and guitars by Paul McCartney and George Harrison, and drums by Ringo Starr. (The three surviving Beatles told themselves that John had slipped out for a “cuppa tea” while they completed the tracks.)
Because the piano and background noise were so prominent in the recording of “Now and Then,” and could not be removed or significantly lowered, Harrison balked at rebuilding this song from scratch in 1995, after only spending a day recording some acoustic and electric guitar parts.
In the interim years, despite Harrison’s death, McCartney told interviewers that the song was worth completing, and vowed to eventually do just that. In 2012, McCartney told the BBC that there’s one song “still lingering around, so I'm going to nick in with Jeff and do it. Finish it, one of these days.”
To Boldly Go Where No MAL Had Gone Before
For the 2021 three-part miniseries "Get Back," which massively expanded upon footage shot for the Beatles’ last film, 1970’s "Let It Be," director Peter Jackson’s technical crew developed highly sophisticated audio restoration software, which they dubbed “M.A.L.” It’s a name that simultaneously stands for “Machine Audio Learning,” and as homages to Stanley Kubrick’s legendary Hal 9000 supercomputer in "2001: A Space Odyssey," and the Beatles’ beloved road manager, the late Mal Evans (who frequently stole the show in "Get Back").
MAL allowed Jackson’s boffins to separate Lennon and McCartney’s voices from loud background noises when they hid out in the Twickenham Film Studios’ cantina to dodge the prying microphones of original "Let It Be" director Michael Lindsey-Hogg, as they discussed how to proceed during the time when Harrison had briefly quit the Beatles. It also allowed the group’s vocals and instruments recorded in mono to be separated, to allow for much greater control when mixing down songs. MAL would subsequently be deployed in 2022 to allow Giles Martin to remix the Beatles’ seminal 1966 album "Revolver" which was originally recorded on a four-track reel-to-reel tape recorder, and with numerous instruments bounced together onto one track, making individual mixes of these combined elements impossible. These instruments could now be cleanly separated, each onto its own track, to allow for a mixdown that would not have been possible prior to MAL’s invention.
For “Now and Then,” MAL was used to isolate Lennon’s vocal, removing both background noises, and Lennon’s piano playing. This allowed Paul McCartney to re-record the piano in a professional studio. Ringo replaced his original overdubs from 1995, and Harrison’s rhythm guitar parts from that year were “flown in” to the new multitrack files. Finally, it was possible to say that all four Beatles contributed to the recording. Additionally, Giles Martin, working from arranging concepts taught to him by his legendary father George, wrote a string score, which was recorded by session musicians at Capitol Studios in Los Angles. The outside musicians were told they were working on a McCartney solo project, to avoid word leaking that another Beatles song was coming. Giles Martin also sampled and flew in “oohs and ahhs” style backing vocals by Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison from several 1960s-era Beatles songs. Finally, McCartney played an electric slide guitar solo, as a tribute to Harrison.
Because of the incredibly clean and clear sound of Lennon’s vocal, “Now and Then” works much more effectively than the two Lennon demos the “Threetles” adapted in the mid-1990s for "Anthology." It’s a safe bet that MAL will once again be deployed to isolate Lennon’s vocals to redo “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love” for a future update to the "Anthology" recordings, or some other Beatles greatest hits or "Rarities" compilation a few Christmases from now.
Kind of Red and Blue
In 1973, in one of his last acts as Apple Records manager, Allen Klein commissioned the Beatles’ 1962-1966 and 1967-1970 greatest hits compilations. Like “The White Album” in 1968, the two double-album sets became known not by their actual album titles, but by the color of the sleeves, “The Red Album” for the first package, and “The Blue Album” for the latter set. Long before the World Wide Web caused memes to go "viral,” these informal names evidently caught on quite quickly. The 1988 documentary "Imagine: John Lennon " has footage of John and Yoko walking through Central Park in the late 1970s, when an ecstatic fan shouts to Lennon, “I love your albums – I love your ‘Blue Album!!’”
In addition to “Now and Then,” to bring the “Red Album” in particular up to acceptable 2023 sonic standards, Giles Martin and his engineers called upon MAL throughout the album as a way to create enough multitrack elements to create stereo and Dolby Atmos surround sound mixdowns.
Bringing Jurassic Beatles Recordings into the 21st Century
This was particularly important on the band’s first songs. The Beatles’ first two albums "Please Please Me" and "With the Beatles" weren’t even recorded onto four-track reel-to-reel recorders. No, these two albums were recorded onto a “Twin-Track” reel-to-reel recorder, which used quarter-inch wide tape, which allowed for the band’s instruments to go on one track, and their vocals on another. This format worked (sort of) because prior to the rise of FM radio and an increased use of stereo LP players in the late ‘60s, mono was by far the way fans heard virtually all pop music.
Once stereo became popular by the early 1970s, reissuing these two-track recordings could cause problems. As George Martin wrote in his 1979 autobiography, "All You Need is Ears," in 1976, Capitol Records proposed a compilation of Beatles recordings they titled "Rock and Roll Music." As Martin writes, EMI and Capitol were “terrified of the Beatles, who issued an edict that the tapes must not be touched in any way. No one was to ‘mutilate’ them, and if they were reissued it had to be exactly as they were recorded. EMI had taken this absolutely literally. They put the tapes on a transfer machine and were going to issue them just as they were—but in stereo! The effect was disastrous.” Martin immediately noticed all the voices were on one side, and all of the backing was on the other, and immediately told Capitol:
‘You can’t let that go out!’ I said.
‘We didn’t touch it,’ they said, ‘because the Beatles wouldn’t like it.’
My response was ‘stuff that for a lark. Let’s do something about it.’
Martin used the technology of the 1970s to salvage these early Beatles recordings, but he would have salivated at the prospect of having MAL to rebuild the recordings. And fortunately, MAL eliminates these issues, and songs like “Love Me Do” and “Please Please Me” can now be heard with stunning modern-sounding stereo mixes.
Beginning With A Hard Day’s Night, and continuing through "Revolver," the Beatles recorded onto a four-track recorder which used one-inch wide reel-to-reel tape, frequently bouncing together previously recorded tracks together to free up new tracks on the recorder. It was only before recording began on the "Sgt. Pepper" sessions in late 1966 that EMI issued an edict to the Beatles’ engineers ordering them to make “safety copies” of each element the Beatles recorded before tracks were bounced down. Having these safety copies allowed Peter Jackson and Abbey Road senior engineer Sam Okell to create quite large multitrack files when remixing "Sgt. Pepper" for its 50th anniversary in 1967, even before MAL was a gleam in Peter Jackson’s eye. Which is why, with the exception of “Now and Then,” MAL played much less of a role in creating mixes for the “Blue” 1967-1970 greatest hits collection.
And on the “Red” album, Giles Martin benefits from having already used MAL to create new multitracks last year for "Revolver."
While George Harrison compositions were entirely missing on the entire original “Red” album, the new version makes up for this loss by adding two tracks written by George (“I Want to Tell You” and “If I Needed Someone) and “Roll Over Beethoven, a cover of a Chuck Berry mid-1950s classic, with George on lead vocals.
On the new “Blue,” there are several Harrison compositions added, as well as the Ringo Starr-written “Octopus’s Garden.” (Though arguably, Starr’s “Don’t Pass Me By,” the first composition that Ringo placed on a Beatles album – specifically, the “White Album” – is the cooler recording, but it’s missing from “Blue.” But of course, Beatles fans will quibble endlessly over what songs are missing from these compilations.)
One of the most dramatically reworked songs on the “Blue” album is “I Am the Walrus.” Because the BBC broadcast of Shakespeare’s "King Lear" was flown in as an act of random creativity when the song was originally recorded in 1967, for decades, the stereo version of “Walrus” descends into what is called in the trade “fake stereo” when the "King Lear" excerpts begin. The BBC gave the Beatles’ camp an isolated excerpt of "Lear" in the late 1990s, allowing a fully stereo version of “Walrus” for the remixed "Yellow Submarine" soundtrack. The version of “Walrus” that Giles Martin supervised for the new “Blue” album has a strange fusillade of sound effects simulating the twisting of a radio-dial as King Lear begins. It’s not something that was present on the original recording, but if any song calls out for some experimental effects, it’s certainly “Walrus.”
One song that’s a disappointment is the remixed version of “Let It Be” from the album’s 2021 “Super-Deluxe” box set reissue. Like many songs featured in the Beatles’ final movie, “Let It Be” went through several iterations. George Harrison’s first attempt at a guitar solo was a subdued affair played through a rotating Leslie speaker. However, as Phil Spector reworked the material for the Beatles’ final album released as a group, Harrison replaced his first attempt with a solo likely played on his 1958 Les Paul, where he really cuts loose, complete with a biting tone from his amp. It’s a brilliant solo, but for whatever reason, Giles Martin went with Harrison’s first, much more laidback attempt for inclusion on the “Blue” album.
Of course, Beatles obsessives will quibble endlessly about what should and shouldn’t have been included in the reissues of the Beatles’ greatest hits albums. But in any case, there is a treasure trove of new and recently remixed songs, and “Now and Then,” which Paul has touted as “probably, like, the last Beatles song.” Considering that it’s likely the last song which features contributions from all four Beatles, that in and of itself make the albums must-haves for die-hard Beatles fans.
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