When Lennon Asked for a Mountaintop

On the morning of April 6, 1966, in Studio Three at EMI Recording Studios on Abbey Road, John Lennon walked up to a nineteen-year-old engineer named Geoff Emerick and said he wanted his voice to sound like the Dalai Lama chanting from a mountaintop, surrounded by a thousand singing monks. Emerick had been on the job for six days. His predecessor, Norman Smith, had just been promoted to produce, and the Beatles had quietly asked George Martin to assign the new kid to the next record. Smith was a career EMI man who knew which rules of the house could be bent and which could not. Emerick was too young to know there were rules.

He went off and thought about it. By the time tape rolled on what would become "Tomorrow Never Knows," he had fed Lennon's vocal through the rotating speaker cabinet of a Hammond organ set up across the hall, microphoned the cabinet as it whirled, and bounced the signal back as if the singer were inside a chapel that was also a centrifuge. Lennon listened on playback and asked if he could instead be suspended from the ceiling and sung at as he was slowly rotated around a microphone. Emerick offered the Hammond as the safer second draft. Lennon accepted.

What is easy to miss in the apocrypha is that everything else on that record was also an invention by an engineer who had nothing to lose. Five tape loops, made overnight on home machines by the band, were threaded onto the studio's reel-to-reel decks by every available pair of hands in the building — secretaries, technicians, anyone who could hold tension on tape — and fed simultaneously into a console where Emerick rode their faders the way a pilot rides a storm. The bass drum was close-miked with a sweater stuffed inside, in flagrant violation of a house policy that forbade microphones within two feet of a kick. A guitar line was cut, reversed, and dropped in from tape rolling the wrong direction.

The story that gets told is the story of the band's imagination. The story that does not get told is the story of the engineer who said yes. Norman Smith — who had recorded the first four Beatles albums by knowing exactly which fights to pick with the EMI standards committee — almost certainly could not have done this session, not because he lacked the ability, but because he had the reflexes of a man who had been told no enough times to know how to ask permission first. Emerick did not have those reflexes. He had a nineteen-year-old's willingness to be wrong, and the artist had the imagination to ask for what did not yet exist.

That is the relationship at its best. The artist's part is to ask for the impossible without apology. The engineer's part is to take the impossible request seriously enough to find the route that does not appear on any map. Neither one is the inventor. The inventor is the trust between them. Smith could have engineered that record with one hand behind his back. He would have given Lennon a beautifully recorded vocal in a beautifully recorded room, and the Beatles would have made a different, smaller album.

The lesson is unglamorous. When an artist asks for something absurd, the right answer is almost never to talk them out of it. The right answer is to disappear for an hour and come back having tried it. Whether what you tried works is almost beside the point. What matters is that the room becomes a place where the absurd request is the start of the day's work, not the end of it.

Most of the records that matter were made by someone who had not yet learned the word no.