Producer George Martin was thrust head first into the eye of the hurricane when The Beatles performed a series of now historic concerts held at The Hollywood Bowl in 1964 and 1965.
Surrounded by thousands of unruly screaming Beatlemaniacs, he
witnessed first-hand the mania, excitement and fever pitch generated by
the Fab Four, an unforgettable experience he described in the liner
notes to the Beatles At The Hollywood Bowl album issued in 1977
on Capitol Records: “The chaos, I might almost say panic, that reigned
at these concerts was unbelievable unless you were there. Only
three-track recording was possible; The Beatles had no ‘fold back’
speakers, so they could not hear what they were singing, and the eternal
shriek from 17,000 healthy, young lungs made even a jet plane
inaudible.”
Fast forward almost 40 years since the initial release of The Beatles At The Hollywood Bowl album…In connection with the new Ron Howard-directed film The Beatles: Eight Days A Week – The Touring Years, the late George Martin’s son, Giles Martin,
a talented producer in his own right, has been passed the mantle and
brought the Hollywood Bowl tapes back in life with a double-dose of
sonic steroids thanks to dramatic advances in technology.
The result, The Beatles: Live At The Hollywood Bowl,
serves as a splendid document of The Beatles live onstage knocking it
out of the park delivering powerful renditions of future classics She Loves You, I Want To Hold Your Hand, Help, Ticket To Ride, Can’t Buy Me Love, A Hard Days Night, All My Loving, You Can’t Do That, and more.
RockCellar Magazine:Listening to these historic recordings, what impressed you the most about them on a visceral level?
Giles Martin: Well, I think you have to put into
context the fact that the band are playing without any monitors and
without really much of a P.A. so that’s an incredibly raw recording of a
band. The Beatles, even in their softer songs, never gave less than
110%. I sound like a football manager all of a sudden (laughs).
But the visceral nature and vitality is there. The fascinating thing
about recording is it captures people at a certain age and with the
Hollywood Bowl recordings, you’ve captured these 22, 23 year-old men
right on the zenith or the brink of Beatlemania being recorded live in
concert. It’s before Sgt. Pepper, it’s before the consideration happened and they just launch into every song like it’s the last time they’re gonna play it.
Explain the demix technology employed to improve the Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl recordings.
Giles Martin: A few years ago Capitol Studios called
saying they’d discovered some Hollywood Bowl three-track tapes in their
archive. We transferred them and noticed an improvement over the tapes
we’ve kept in the London archive. Alongside this, I’d been working for
some time with a team headed by technical engineer James Clarke on demix
technology, the ability to remove and separate sounds from a single
track.
With Sam Okell, I started work on remixing the Hollywood Bowl tapes.
Technology has moved on since my father worked on the material all those
years ago. Now there’s improved clarity, and so the immediacy and
visceral excitement can be heard like never before. My father’s words
still ring true, but what we hear now is the raw energy of four lads
playing together to a crowd that loved them.
This is the closest you can get to being at the Hollywood Bowl at the height of Beatlemania.
What were the greatest challenges you faced working with this material?
Giles Martin: The greatest challenge is the tapes
themselves. My father originally worked on the original album in 1977
and it wasn’t a labor of love for him. When we addressed the tapes this
time around–this might be hard to explain—but if you recorded your
answering machine message for your voicemail, you never do it on a busy
street. Now imagine however many thousands of girls screaming into a
microphone.
As John (Lennon) said, “We have microphones but everyone is screaming louder than we are and they’re winning.” So it’s that.
It’s actually getting signal levels from the tapes where you can hear
the band. The band are performing great but that’s the biggest
challenge, actually producing an album that’s worth listening to and I
don’t mean worth listening to in a historical context.
I mean, listening to it as a piece of music than can stand on its own.
Listening to the new Beatles Hollywood Bowl collection, it
sounds like the band finally won and can be heard above the cacophony of
screaming. Was there anything done to tame the sound of the audience
going bonkers this go round?
Giles Martin: Yeah, you know what? It’s funny.
There’s a guy at Abbey Road called James Clarke who was playing around
with demix technology, which means taking a track and trying to remove
artifacts off the track. He was trying various things and he’d been
approaching me and I’m always interested in anyone trying to break
through with new technology.
What demix technology does is it recognizes a sound and tries to
remove it. So I said, “Let’s try it on Hollywood Bowl.” So we did it and
we removed some screams from Hollywood Bowl, which meant we could then
dig into the drums a bit more. The Hollywood Bowl shows are on
three-track so we’re limited in our resources. We have bass and drums on
one track. But if I wanted to put more low end onto the drums and to
create more kick drum or more snare drum around 2 kilohertz, that’s just
gonna decrease the level of screams. So we found new technology in
order to get the band to come out more. And actually, one thing that’s
noticeable on this new version, is how much more dynamic it is and how
much more and how much more you can hear Ringo and the band actually
playing.
And Paul’s bass.
Giles Martin: Oh yeah, the bass, yeah absolutely!
See, before with my dad, what he’d do is if he added more bass he’d get
more rumble. You can add more bass in the room and we managed to clean
that up a bit.
Can this demix technology be employed on early Beatles studio recording to improve the sound?
Giles Martin: I played around with it for The Beatles 1
mixes we did. You have to be careful with it. See, the key thing is if
anything affects the sound. People play me stuff all the time that is
new technology, the answer to everything. If you feel as something is
being affected then don’t use it. If it’s doing more than it should be,
then don’t use it.
It’s a bit like digital effects in the cinema. You get to a certain
stage where you know that someone is not flying through a building and
it becomes like a cartoon. It’s the same with sound; it has to be
organic. And as soon as it gets overwhelming with an effect we tend to
steer away. As the Beatles and my father were, I’m not against using any
new technology. I think it’s all about the listener, though. It’s all
about what the fan wants.
Here’s the thing; immersion in audio isn’t just stereo and isn’t just
surround sound. A mono record can sound very immersive. The original
version of Strawberry Fields in mono is an incredibly
psychedelic and immersive recording and that’s a mono recording. So I,
like my father before me, would always be up for any new technology that
would improve the sound quality for the listener.
Were there any tracks that proved particularly problematic?
Giles Martin: Well, first off, there’s a lot of fans
saying, “Why can’t we have all the performances from the Hollywood Bowl
shows?” One of the reasons is for one of the concerts Paul’s microphone
wasn’t working properly so that’s challenging. You can’t do anything
about that. Before we had the new technology we did a test on the
material and saw what it was like. Without thinking about the original
version of the Hollywood Bowl, I chose the best tracks that I thought
would work best and I ended up using the same tracks my dad chose in
1977. (laughs)
I guess I learned something off him as I was growing up. (laughs) So
the ones that were more difficult we tended to avoid because if there’s a
big glitch in the recording or the microphone’s not working or there’s a
glaring error in a performance we just didn’t use it.
That ties in my next question. The band performed other wonderful songs during these shows like If I Fell, I Feel Fine and I’m Down and they did not make the cut. Why?
Giles Martin: For If I Fell, the vocals were kind of strange on that one to begin with. I was gonna use I’m Down.
If you’ve ever been in a band and you can’t hear each other, it’s the
weirdest thing. Ringo said he used to play drums by watching the band’s
bums move; watching John, Paul and George’s bums move and that’s how he
knew where they were in the song. (laughs) I nearly put I’m Down
on there but in one of the middle sections the whole band goes out by a
beat and then come back in again and that’s because they couldn’t hear
each other.
The funny thing is someone said to me, “Were the Beatles a good live
band?” And you go, “Listen to their first four albums, they’re
basically live recordings of the band playing.” Paperback Writer
was done in one and a half takes and that’s just the band playing. They
overdubbed the bass but the drums, guitars and vocals are live. They
were a great live band and one of my jobs is to make sure they’re
remembered as that. So the fact is there are not any artists around
today that would record a three-track recording of a concert and just
release it.
Every single live concert that gets released now has been fluffed around with in the studio at some point.
Is there a song on this collection that embodies the excitement of a Beatles live show best for you?
Giles Martin: I mean, there are a number of them; She Loves You and Can’t Buy Me Love are great performances. But in a funny way, there is one song that epitomizes the good and bad about Hollywood Bowl.
This may be a bizarre choice but I’d choose Things We Said Today. George introduces it. He’s saying, “You may know this song or you may not know this song.” Things We Said Today
has a strange beginning. The audience are waiting for the shift from
minor to major in the chorus and it’s almost like the crowd are creating
this wave that the band surf on in the choruses. There’s nothing we
could do about the screams; the screams are so loud when they go to the
chorus of that song. So in a funny way that song epitomizes Beatlemania
at that stage, the visceral excitement and the power. It was all new.
They were the first stadium band. Now the Hollywood Bowl isn’t a stadium but it’s the first recording of its kind.
Have you heard a reaction from Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr to the new and improved record?
Giles Martin: If they weren’t happy with it we wouldn’t release it. It’s as simple as that. It’s a very simple world, the Beatles’ world.
Yoko and Olivia (Harrison) are the same. Everyone has to be happy.
It’s actually less complicated than most other record companies.
Paul had a CD and put it on in his kitchen and he told me
he danced around the kitchen; he said it was just great to hear the
band play.
And here’s the thing, it is a snapshot of that time. You’re talking
about a 45 minute slot in someone’s life. We did a lot of work on this.
It certainly took a lot longer than 45 minutes to mix. I think you have
to enthusiasm. You have to have enthusiasm in the work and they still
have enthusiasm for everything.
Listening to the show, Ringo really drives the band live.
Giles Martin: Yeah, that’s why I’m so pleased about
this new version of Hollywood Bowl is you can really hear Ringo hit the
drums. You watch the Washington D.C. concert in the new film and he’s
really whacking the kit. (laughs) The Beatles were polite in interviews
and they are incredibly gracious but however, put them in front of an
audience and they really dig in. I’ve worked with Paul a lot and worked
with Ringo in a live situation and I worked on the George Harrison film,
the Martin Scorsese film, (Living In The Material World) so I knew George very well.
I can’t imagine any of them would ever hold back. It wasn’t a
question of warming up or anything; they gave everything for their
audience and especially at that time. And with the Hollywood Bowl
recordings you can hear that celebration of joy and that celebration of
music and that’s what it’s all about. There’s no consideration of image
when they’re playing; it’s just about music.
Many speculated upon the release of The Beatles’ Eight Days a Week
film, a corollary DVD/CD set with live music sourced from various shows
circa ’63-’66 would be forthcoming, are there any plans?
Giles Martin: No, we thought about this. Here’s the
funny thing: as soon as you’re watching something the quality moves up a
notch, as soon as you have visuals. We all toyed around with this for a
long time, whether we should do a soundtrack of the film. The film
works really well and I’m very proud of it and I think it takes you on a
journey but you need the visuals on some of the live recordings to
justify the quality level.
What I mean by that, I say to people, “Imagine taking an iPhone to a
concert wherever you live and recording that, that’s way better than the
quality we have of Beatles live film stuff.” The Hollywood Bowl was
recorded on three-track and that’s the only Beatles performance that
there is a multi-track recording of. And I think it’s really important
not to release things for the sake of it. Hollywood Bowl is a great
document and a really good live album and it captures the Beatles at
their zenith. The film is a really fun film to watch. The goal was to
make people feel like what it would have been like to be there with them
and I think the film does that. But from our point of view it’s really
important that we don’t just sell stuff for the sake of releasing it.
Do you have a wish list Holy Grail Beatles project you’d still like to tackle?
Giles Martin: You know what, I’ve got loads but I
can’t tell you about them. (laughs) But here’s the thing I’m so proud of
and that’s to be part of new generations discovering the Beatles every
day and in general that makes them feel better. There are very things in
life left that make you feel better and don’t harm you and The Beatles
are definitely one of those things. So to be part of that is great, but
I’m always thinking up new ideas so one day they’ll unleash me again.
THE BEATLES - LIVE AT THE HOLLYWOOD BOWL
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CD.... HERE
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