The Beatles song that made their producer quit: “I want to leave”
Every track that The Beatles ever made seemed to be coming from a place of pure fun. Even when they couldn’t stand each other going into the recording of Abbey Road, their ability to work off each other and still deliver tunes like ‘Come Together’ and ‘Here Comes the Sun’ at least showed their ability to have a good time whenever they walked into the studio. While The White Album marked the one moment where all of those good times were gone, ‘Cry Baby Cry’ was the tune that cost them one of their producers.
That’s because when talking about the Fab Four’s ascent, special attention must be paid to the people behind the board. George Martin was the one who helped them realise their more fantastical ideas, but Geoff Emerick really should be considered the genius who helped turn them into a reality on the technical side.
Looking back on his time with the group, Emerick managed to get away with many impossible techniques. He was on hand throughout most of the Sgt Pepper sessions, and when working on singles like ‘Paperback Writer’, he was the one tasked with putting microphones up closer to the drums to give the tune a fatter sound whenever the tune came on the radio.
Even though Emerick had done a lot for the group, it couldn’t have been fun trying to juggle different studios working on their double LP. It was one thing to see everyone’s separate ideas for what the project should sound like, but going from Paul McCartney playing a tune like ‘Martha My Dear’ to going across the hall and hearing John Lennon’s wild noise experiments on ‘Revolution 9’ was never going to be easy for anyone to fully grasp.
Given how disparate the sessions were, though, ‘Cry Baby Cry’ doesn’t feel like it should be all that bad. There was still a lot more work to be done to make it sound completely finished, but Lennon’s whimsical tune, which is almost nursery-rhyme-level simple, at least gave Emerick enough to work with.
By the time Lennon started belittling him in the studio, all the tension suddenly snapped for him right after the session, saying, “I lost interest in The White Album because they were really arguing among themselves and swearing at each other. I said to George [Martin], ‘Look, I’ve had enough. I want to leave. I don’t want to know any more.’ George said, ‘Well, leave at the end of the week’ – I think it was a Monday or Tuesday – but I said, ‘No, I want to leave now, this very minute.’ And that was it.”
Even when the group were on their best behaviour, it wasn’t exactly a pleasant experience. When talking about his time working with them, engineer Ken Scott remembered working on George Harrison’s ‘Savoy Truffle’ and the entire room growing cold when McCartney walked in to see how things were going.
But Emerick’s walk-out didn’t seem to reflect how the group were playing by any stretch. They had just grown apart creatively, and forcing them into the same room to play the same songs had to be just as much torture for them creatively as it was for Emerick.
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