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It’s at this point that Geoff Emerick returns as a character in the Beatles saga. In fact, he had been at the “Get Back” mixing session on April 7, though I was unaware of that at the time. His return to the fold had been in process for a while; according to his book Here, There and Everywhere,
I was relaxing at home one Saturday morning in mid-February when the phone rang – it was Paul. After we exchanged pleasantries, he got down to business.
“I’ve got a proposition for you if you’re interested. How would you like to come work for us at Apple? We’ve had a few problems with the studio Alex built for us, so we’d like you to take a look at it, let us know what you think and sort it all out for us.”
“A few problems” was, of course, a vast understatement; Emerick had heard from George Martin that the studio was “a complete and utter disaster.” But he was intrigued by the offer, despite the bad vibes that had led him to quit the White Album sessions. The Beatles were, after all, the biggest band in the universe; no ambitious young man (Emerick was still just 23 at the time) takes such an opportunity lightly.
Frustrated with the difficulty of advancing in the staid EMI organization, Emerick had also been mulling an offer to work at a new studio George Martin was building. But the opening of Martin’s studio kept getting delayed, and in the end Emerick was unable to resist the siren song of Beatledom. He accepted Paul’s offer to sit in on the “Get Back” session, and then:
Just a few days later I received a phone call from Peter Brown, telling me in breathless tones that John had just written a new song and would be coming into Abbey Road the following Monday. Would I be willing to do the session? I asked Peter rather tentatively if John was “okay” these days. He understood exactly what I was getting at; as the Beatles’ designated minder, he had seen plenty of Lennon at his worst.
“Yes, he’s fine,” Peter assured me. “He’s in really good spirits at the moment, and he’s really up about the new song. And he specifically asked me if I could get you to engineer it.”
How could I possibly say no to that?