The first in an occasional series covering (mostly music- or film-related) books that I have recently checked out of my friendly neighborhood public library. Come read with me!
The Beatles have been memorialized, celebrated and dissected in print hundreds–nay, thousands–of times in the last 40 years or so. There are memoirs from former members, members’ wives, associates and hanger ons. There are officially sanctioned coffee table books. There are slab-like tomes devoted to chronicling every last bit of Fab Four minutae. There’s even stupid shit like this. One might assume–logically–that the Beatles well has, at this late date, run dry. But one would be wrong!
For years, Geoff Emerick remained of the few remaining people who actually has a perfectly good reason to write about John, Paul, George and Ringo, but never did until just this year. Here, There and Everywhere chronicles in satisfying detail the years Emerick spent as the Beatles’ recording engineer at EMI’s legendary Abbey Road studios. That’s right, Beatlemaniacs: finally, we can get the nitty gritty on what really matters–Mic placements! Speaker cabinets! Mixing consoles! Compression! All the sonic wizardry that makes Beatles records sound amazing all these years later. Fortunately, Emerick is a fairly decent writer, and doesn’t let technical detail get in the way of telling a good story. His book keeps its narrative firmly planted in the confines of the studio, meaning that the reader doesn’t have to slog through the usual Beatles stories that have been repeated ad nauseam elsewhere. And it’s by no means a rose-tinted nostalgia trip for Emerick; the sessions for “The White Album” are depicted as extremely tedious and tortuous. And George Harrison in particular comes across as a rather unpleasant dude. A dick, really.
The bulk of Here, There and Everywhere is obviously devoted to Beatles recording sessions, but one of the most entertaining chapters covers the disastrous making of Wings‘ Band on the Run, which bizarrely took place in Lagos, Africa. During a break from recording, Paul, Linda and Emerick took in a concert by Afro-Beat king Fela Kuti. McCartney, blown away by the performance, went backstage to meet Kuti. But instead of greeting the former Beatle with open arms, Kuti immediately denounced him, claiming that McCartney was trying to “steal the black man’s music.” One can assume that if and when Kuti heard Band on the Run, he realized that his suspicions had been completely unfounded. I mean, that’s like the whitest record ever made, right?