Cheers!
The Borgias have been renewed for a second season! This makes me a very happy camper indeed. I'm not sure when I feel in love with a historical show so quickly the last time. Not Rome, because Rome took more than half a season to make me go from interested yet left cold to interested and gradually caring about these incarnations of the characters to damn, I like this show. Maybe all the way back to I, Claudius. Not to say that The Borgias is I, Claudius, but five episodes in it has hit many of my fannish buttons, it avoids nearly all the stuff that annoys me, it made me care about the characters from the get go and oh, but the cinematography is drop dead gorgeous. *pretentious Byron quote* "Italy, with thy fatal gift of beauty" *end showing off Byron knowledge* Especially in the Renaissance.
***
Yesterday the BBC broadcast a special on George Martin, aka Coolest Producer/Uncle Figure In Pop History, which you lucky Brits can watch and download at the BBC website, as opposed to us non-Islanders, which I regard as most unfair, just because we don't pay taxes which finance the Beeb. Said special has Paul, Ringo, Cilla Black, Bernard Cribbins and the other suspects in it, and I do hope it gets exported.
Reasons to love George Martin and why he was so ideal for the Beatles:
1) He has a great sense of humour (which of course was crucial). Parlaphone was actually the comedy label of EMI (all the other labels had rejected Brian Epstein's endeavours to get his boys record contract), and GM had produced, among others, the Goon shows. The exchange between him and George Harrison the first time the Beatles came to audition (GM: "Just tell me if there is anything you don't like" /GH: "Well, for a start I don't like your tie") could have led to disaster with another producer, but GM laughed, and that set the tone for his and the group's cooperation.
2) For the most part, he knew exactly where to stand his ground and when to give way and welcome experimentation. He challenged them. He originally wanted them to debut with the song How do you do it?. John and Paul said they prefered playing their own material. GM: "Well, if you write a song as good as this, we'll record it." This was exactly the right thing to say to them. It was a give and take of experimentation, of him daring them and them daring him; famously, when asked to use two different takes on Strawberry Fields which John had sung in a completely different tempo and use it in the same master, he together with engineer Geoff Emerick managed to. And then there was the way he suggested string instruments to Paul, first with Yesterday but more importantly with Eleanor Rigby; the art of instrumentation as practised by George Martin is that the strings on Eleanor Rigby, inspired by Bernard Herrman's score for Psycho, aren't "sweetening" (which is how they were usually used in pop song) at all and on the contrary emphasize the haunting, taut nature of the song.
3) He has consistently refused to play the "who's the one true genius?" game since decades, and his quotes on John Lennon and Paul McCartney are among the best characterisations around. He idealizes neither of them, but his love for them both shines through every time he talks about either or them together. Here are some favourite quotes to illustrate this:
"The truth is, deep down they were very, very similar indeed. Each had a soft underbelly, each was very much hurt by certain things. John had a very soft inside to him. But, you see, each had a bitter turn of phrase and could be quite nasty to the other. It was like a tug of war. Imagine two people pulling on a rope, smiling at each other and pulling all the time with all their might. The tension between the two of them made for the bond."
and:
Q: "Back then, people were very keen on knowing who the leader of the group was..."
GM: "Yes, I was. When I first auditioned them I said, 'Who's going to be the leader, is it John or Paul?' Such an odd couple really, because they were different and yet very similar, both had big egos, both very good songwriters, but they needed each other like mad."
Q: "Did they really like each other? It wasn't just a competitive partnership."
GM: "Oh no, they loved each other! They were brothers, and like brothers they pissed each other off quite a lot. John could be maddening at times. Paul can be very bossy and even more maddening and George would get very fed up with both of them. But they did love each other and adored what the other did and had an incredible bond. Paul always took inspiration from John, especially in his lyric writing. 'Eleanor Rigby,' for example, wouldn't have happened without John's influence. Paul wrote all of it, but John's influence was there and similarly John was knocked out by the freshness Paul brought to melodies and harmonies. He learnt from Paul how to put in the odd chord that choked you up a bit."
And from GM's book on the making of Sgt. Pepper:
"John Lennon and Paul McCartney in particular were extremely good friends; they loved one another, really. They shared a spirit of adventure, a modest little childhood ambition: they were going to go out and conquer the world. They egged each other on, and helped each other if they got stuck."
There was the famous incident when John took LSD by accident while they were recording (Getting Better, if you must know) and GM, simply assuming John felt a bit unwell, took him on the roof of the EMI building and left him there. When this dawned on Paul and George (who of course knew what the matter with John was) as they saw GM return alone, they raced upstairs terrified tripping John would just blithely walk of the roof. I already quoted how this turned out from Paul's pov in other posts, and here is George Martin's description:
“John was having what you might call a bad trip. [He] didn’t go back to Weybridge that night; Paul took him home to his place, in nearby Cavendish Road. They were intensely close, remember, and Paul would do almost anything for John. So, once they were safely inside, Paul took a tablet of LSD…`so I could get with John’, as he put it---be with him in his misery and fear. What about that for friendship?"
Also:
And sometimes, in a thing like She’s Leaving Home when John and Paul both sang on the song, and I had very few tracks to play with, I’d already used up two tracks, I had two tracks left for my vocals but I wanted to double track them, and I didn’t want to go to another slave, I didn’t want to lose another generation, so they had to sing together and I had to put different echo on one voice to get the space, so when they’re doing ‘She’s leaving… what did we do with our lives’ and so on, that was on two mikes but on one track, and they did that perfectly. So then I said ‘Right fellas, now do it again, and we’ll double track it.’ And they did, that was how good they were.
4.) Have you listened to those records?
5.)
6.) Which other record producer warrants his own parody??
***
Unrelated, but also about cool people with a Beatles connection, another reason why Olivia Harrison (George's second wife) is awesome:
Q: “You were a nice girl in California, working as a secretary in a record company, and all of a sudden, you’re here. And, I’m sure on several occasions, Olivia, you might have thought, ‘Wow.’”
Olivia Harrison: “Wow, didn’t he get lucky!”
And a great Times magazine article about Linda McCartneys photography and Paul's favourite pictures of same.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/674589.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
***
Yesterday the BBC broadcast a special on George Martin, aka Coolest Producer/Uncle Figure In Pop History, which you lucky Brits can watch and download at the BBC website, as opposed to us non-Islanders, which I regard as most unfair, just because we don't pay taxes which finance the Beeb. Said special has Paul, Ringo, Cilla Black, Bernard Cribbins and the other suspects in it, and I do hope it gets exported.
Reasons to love George Martin and why he was so ideal for the Beatles:
1) He has a great sense of humour (which of course was crucial). Parlaphone was actually the comedy label of EMI (all the other labels had rejected Brian Epstein's endeavours to get his boys record contract), and GM had produced, among others, the Goon shows. The exchange between him and George Harrison the first time the Beatles came to audition (GM: "Just tell me if there is anything you don't like" /GH: "Well, for a start I don't like your tie") could have led to disaster with another producer, but GM laughed, and that set the tone for his and the group's cooperation.
2) For the most part, he knew exactly where to stand his ground and when to give way and welcome experimentation. He challenged them. He originally wanted them to debut with the song How do you do it?. John and Paul said they prefered playing their own material. GM: "Well, if you write a song as good as this, we'll record it." This was exactly the right thing to say to them. It was a give and take of experimentation, of him daring them and them daring him; famously, when asked to use two different takes on Strawberry Fields which John had sung in a completely different tempo and use it in the same master, he together with engineer Geoff Emerick managed to. And then there was the way he suggested string instruments to Paul, first with Yesterday but more importantly with Eleanor Rigby; the art of instrumentation as practised by George Martin is that the strings on Eleanor Rigby, inspired by Bernard Herrman's score for Psycho, aren't "sweetening" (which is how they were usually used in pop song) at all and on the contrary emphasize the haunting, taut nature of the song.
3) He has consistently refused to play the "who's the one true genius?" game since decades, and his quotes on John Lennon and Paul McCartney are among the best characterisations around. He idealizes neither of them, but his love for them both shines through every time he talks about either or them together. Here are some favourite quotes to illustrate this:
"The truth is, deep down they were very, very similar indeed. Each had a soft underbelly, each was very much hurt by certain things. John had a very soft inside to him. But, you see, each had a bitter turn of phrase and could be quite nasty to the other. It was like a tug of war. Imagine two people pulling on a rope, smiling at each other and pulling all the time with all their might. The tension between the two of them made for the bond."
and:
Q: "Back then, people were very keen on knowing who the leader of the group was..."
GM: "Yes, I was. When I first auditioned them I said, 'Who's going to be the leader, is it John or Paul?' Such an odd couple really, because they were different and yet very similar, both had big egos, both very good songwriters, but they needed each other like mad."
Q: "Did they really like each other? It wasn't just a competitive partnership."
GM: "Oh no, they loved each other! They were brothers, and like brothers they pissed each other off quite a lot. John could be maddening at times. Paul can be very bossy and even more maddening and George would get very fed up with both of them. But they did love each other and adored what the other did and had an incredible bond. Paul always took inspiration from John, especially in his lyric writing. 'Eleanor Rigby,' for example, wouldn't have happened without John's influence. Paul wrote all of it, but John's influence was there and similarly John was knocked out by the freshness Paul brought to melodies and harmonies. He learnt from Paul how to put in the odd chord that choked you up a bit."
And from GM's book on the making of Sgt. Pepper:
"John Lennon and Paul McCartney in particular were extremely good friends; they loved one another, really. They shared a spirit of adventure, a modest little childhood ambition: they were going to go out and conquer the world. They egged each other on, and helped each other if they got stuck."
There was the famous incident when John took LSD by accident while they were recording (Getting Better, if you must know) and GM, simply assuming John felt a bit unwell, took him on the roof of the EMI building and left him there. When this dawned on Paul and George (who of course knew what the matter with John was) as they saw GM return alone, they raced upstairs terrified tripping John would just blithely walk of the roof. I already quoted how this turned out from Paul's pov in other posts, and here is George Martin's description:
“John was having what you might call a bad trip. [He] didn’t go back to Weybridge that night; Paul took him home to his place, in nearby Cavendish Road. They were intensely close, remember, and Paul would do almost anything for John. So, once they were safely inside, Paul took a tablet of LSD…`so I could get with John’, as he put it---be with him in his misery and fear. What about that for friendship?"
Also:
And sometimes, in a thing like She’s Leaving Home when John and Paul both sang on the song, and I had very few tracks to play with, I’d already used up two tracks, I had two tracks left for my vocals but I wanted to double track them, and I didn’t want to go to another slave, I didn’t want to lose another generation, so they had to sing together and I had to put different echo on one voice to get the space, so when they’re doing ‘She’s leaving… what did we do with our lives’ and so on, that was on two mikes but on one track, and they did that perfectly. So then I said ‘Right fellas, now do it again, and we’ll double track it.’ And they did, that was how good they were.
4.) Have you listened to those records?
5.)
6.) Which other record producer warrants his own parody??
***
Unrelated, but also about cool people with a Beatles connection, another reason why Olivia Harrison (George's second wife) is awesome:
Q: “You were a nice girl in California, working as a secretary in a record company, and all of a sudden, you’re here. And, I’m sure on several occasions, Olivia, you might have thought, ‘Wow.’”
Olivia Harrison: “Wow, didn’t he get lucky!”
And a great Times magazine article about Linda McCartneys photography and Paul's favourite pictures of same.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/674589.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.