This post comes from a 1966 interview with John and Paul about creativity in songwriting, and their album recording at the Abbey Road studios in London.
My friend Mr Masato Hisamune-san, over dinner told me that he lived on Abbey Road, when he worked in London some years back.
And as he recalled his encounters with the multitude of tourists posing for selfies, the same way as the Beatles were photographed walking across the famous crosswalk of Abbey Road in London — we talked about how useful innovation and creativity is, for the Concorde business as well.
Of course we all know Abbey Road from the eponymous album cover — one of the most iconic music records, when all four Beatles were the boyband that rocked the World, and they performed their songs, at the Abbey Road Studios.
So, that is how I was reminded of this nuanced inspiration about Creativity & Innovation, through the memories of a new friend and trusted colleague, while in Tokyo Japan, where we shared a classic high quality and delectable sake infused Japanese dinner, at a beautiful restaurant of his choice, at the Artagen building in Ginza, and talked about the Concorde also being built in Japan, amongst other places, like Seattle, Italy and the UK.
Yet, being reminded of the Beatles who used the Abbey Road recording studio for many of their best albums, back in the day of their brilliant and meteoric rise to stardom — we know that both Paul and John, stressed the incredibly unusual fact that since they did not write-down their songs when composing, the finished record is really the song they “write” on the fly, as they perform inside the Abbey Road recording studios.
And because it is inside the Abbey Road studios, where they did most of the arranging, they were aided by George Martin, who was recording everything they had done earlier, and by his inventive interplay with George and Ringo, they were like Duke Ellington, who wrote and arranged his music on the fly, even adjusting his style, when he had particular musicians in mind, that he sought to cooperate, incorporate, and orchestrate with.
John in 1966 went on to say: “George Martin is important because he knows what we want.”
“He acts as a translator between us and Norman Smith, the engineer, who actually runs the recording machines.”
Now they were interested in getting more complicated electronic effects, using more over-dubbing, feedback, and “hyping” their sounds, so they sought inspiration from one of their biggest recent influences from contemporary musicians such as the inspiration that came from what has been the group “Who” who used tremendous amounts of feedback, in their most popular musical albums.
“They started us thinking again,” Paul said.
“We had that feedback idea in “I Feel Fine” but the “Who” went farther and made all kinds of weird new sounds. I suppose Donald Zec [a disparaging music critic on the Daily Mirror] would say “What would they do without amplifiers?” but that’s as silly as saying, “If God wanted us to smoke, he’d have given us chimneys.”
“We haven’t got chimneys, but we smoke – so what?”
”What would the theatre be without a stage and make-up, or movies without a camera?”
The Beatles always say, that other influences are hard to pin down… but the “Who” have been a real helping influence in developing their unique musical sound.
“If we say we are influenced by someone or we like them, that will make them too important. So, our best influences now are ourselves,” says Paul.
“We listen to records every day, a big mixture of stuff,” says John. “You can’t pick out any one person.”
But John did mention Steve Cropper, guitarist / writer with Booker T. and The MG’s, suggesting that they would like to have Cropper produce Beatle recording sessions.
Paul mentioned a wide range of people he likes now: from groups like the Marvelettes and rhythm and blues singer Otis Redding, through Stockhausen and John Cage, and onto Albert Ayler, a pioneer of random jazz. Cage, he felt, is too random.
“I like to get ideas randomly but then develop them within a frame.”
As an afterthought he put forward the “Fugs,” a New York group who sing wildly obscene songs, purposely using verbal shock as a musical technique.
“It’s like a new development in discordancy. Anyway, its new and very funny,” he explained.
Summed up, their musical achievements have been breathtaking.
Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, and Richard Rodgers all had written songs, and good ones, by their early twenties, but none could have matched the sheer output, range, or originality of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, aged 25 and 23 respectively.
Yet they feel they have done nothing extraordinary, rather that they have just begun, and fairly modestly at that.
In interviews they stress over and over again the obvious facts: they have been at the game seriously just over six years; that much of their early work was adolescent and imitative, and that they hope to live and create for another forty years, and that they have total financial freedom to musically “develop” in any way they please.
“All of us have barely started,” Paul says.
“At first we wanted to make money. Now, we’ve got a fantastic platform of money to dive off into anything. People say we’ve had a fantastic success and that is all. We don’t look at it that way. We look at our lives as a whole, think in terms of forty more years of writing. I wouldn’t mind being a white-haired old man writing songs, but I’d hate to be a white-haired old Beatle at the Empress Stadium, playing for people. We might write longer pieces, film scores – I know we want to write the whole score of our next film. We might write specifically for other people, or write for different instruments… You name it, and it’s possible we could do it.”
Their development has already, in fact, brought them full circle: Marshall Chess, head of Chess Records which records Chuck Berry, has asked John and Paul to write songs for Berry, who until now has written all his songs himself. The boys now influence their influencers…
John and Paul like to write songs and so far they have hardly had to work at it.
“I’d never struggle writing a song till it hurt,” John says,
“I’d just forget it and try something else.”
“One thing that modern philosophy, existentialism and things like that, has taught people, is that you have to live now,” says Paul.
“You have to feel now. We live in the present, we don’t have time to figure out whether we are right or wrong, whether we are immoral or not. We have to be honest, be straight, and then live, enjoying and taking what we can.”
And that is why the famed Abbey Road studios are so central to their collaborative creative lives, collective works, and musical genius.
What a team…
Yours,
Dr Churchill
PS:
Paul & John at Abbey Road recording studios…
Clik here to view.
PPS:
Building the Concorde is a lot like that.
Creativity is needed but playing together with many talented engineers of all disciplines and C-level team members like Mr Hisamune-san in Tokyo — makes us all perform like rock stars, and make memorable music, raising up the Concorde all over again.
Clik here to view.
