Tags
Details of some of the events of this week are a little squirrelly. For instance, Magic Alex’s wedding — pictured above, with John Lennon and Donovan as best men, not too shabby — is said to have been today, but who gets married on a Thursday? (Remember: thanks to the leap day, 1968 is now one day behind.)
Also, the technical breakthrough that gave birth to the unique guitar sound of the single version of “Revolution” took place somewhere in here. Geoff Emerick places it on a Friday, which would have to be tomorrow:
All that week, while we labored over the remake of “Revolution,” John had been exceptionally moody. “No, no, I want the guitar to sound dirtier!” he kept demanding of me, often without giving me a moment’s space to try something out. By the end of the week, it was really starting to get to me. Fridays were usually a little more tolerable than the other nights, because I at least had the weekend to look forward to – two days away from the nastiness in the studio. But on this evening, Lennon arrived in the studio looking ready to chew someone’s head off, and I was the nearest target.
“Haven’t you sorted out that bloody guitar sound yet, Geoff?” he asked me almost as soon as he walked in the door.
Actually, I had an idea I wanted to try – one that I thought might satisfy John, even though it was equipment abuse of the most severe kind. Because no amount of mic preamp overload had been enough for him, I decided to try to overload two of them patched together, one into the other. As I knelt down beside the console, turning knobs that I was expressly forbidden from touching because they could literally cause the console to overheat and blow up, I couldn’t help but think: If I was the studio manager and saw this going on, I’d fire myself. The ironic thing was that, years later, this ended up being precisely the guitar sound every grunge band in the world aspired to.
But the studio log says that the “Revolution” sessions took place on Wednesday and Thursday, so it would have to have happened then.
Well, never mind. What matters is that it sounded like this:
Fuck yeah.