♪
♪ 1, 2, 3, 1
[ The Beatles's "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" plays ]
-We were driving to a gig in an old Zephyr 4,
when "Sgt. Pepper" was played for the first time on the radio.
And I remember, we pulled off into a lay-by
and sat there and listened.
-♪ Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band ♪
♪ We hope you will enjoy the show ♪
-And I remember we just looked at each other, "...me!"
-The way George Martin had musically put that together,
I thought, "Where do we go from here?"
-All right here we go. -Okay, Richard?
-Yeah... [ Speaks indistinctly ]
-It's the birth of a new art form.
They were starting to make music that you couldn't actually play.
It couldn't exist outside of a recording studio.
-They did it first.
It revolutionized the way that people worked in studios.
You could say that from then on, it's like the rule book's
out the window because you're no longer trying to represent
something as it was.
-♪ I
♪ I love the colorful clothes she wears ♪
♪ And the way the sunlight plays upon her hair ♪
♪ I hear the sound of a...
-In the '60s, multitrack recording began to redefine
what music could be
and turned the studio into a sonic laboratory.
-♪ I'm picking up good vibrations ♪
♪ She's giving me excitations
-It was like a strange place,
full of like, crazy scientists,
electricians, madmen.
-Just having the time to experiment in the studio
was a radical change.
90 hours working on one song.
Everyone thought that was insanity.
-As recording technology evolved,
a sense of limitless possibility led some bands astray.
-It reached the point where,
the ability to stay in the studio as long as you want
and spend as much money as you want,
may not necessarily have been an entirely good thing.
[ Radiohead's "Bodysnatchers" playing ]
-You know, you can produce a band
that will play their songs perfectly in a room,
and your job as a producer will be to recreate that.
-♪ It is the 21st century
♪ It is the 21st century ♪
♪ You can fight like a dog
-Or you can use the studio as a musical instrument.
That's an art form.
♪
♪ I've seen it coming
-You know, anything is possible, anything is right.
And that's what's exciting.
♪
-Okay, then. Okay.
-It'll be an F for you.
-Here we go.
Just one more time.
-Right after I say, "Are you sure?"
Da da da -- yeah.
-Oh.
-Hal, here's how I want to do it. Takes like this.
-All right, it's fun time. Fun time.
-Here we go.
-Oh, really? -17, take one.
-This will be the keeper. -[Laughs]
♪
[ Boston's "More Than A Feeling" playing ]
-♪ I looked out this morning, and the sun was gone ♪
♪ Turned on some music to start my day ♪
-In 1976, a band named Boston
had a hit single called "More Than a Feeling."
What no one knew was that Boston really wasn't a band at all.
♪
-Boston was a result of me tinkering in a basement
with my multitrack recording studio.
-♪ It's more than a feeling
-♪ More than a feeling
-♪ When I hear that old song they used to play ♪
-♪ More than a feeling
-It was a really personal endeavor.
I worked in my own space, my own time,
put a rhythm guitar part on, and then another one,
and then a bass track, keyboards.
And then I called Brad Delp to see if he wanted
to sing the vocals, which, thankfully, he did.
-♪ Ah
♪ ah
♪
-So I basically threw a band together
to be able to play the songs live.
Not only didn't the record company --
not only were they not aware
that I was making a record in my basement,
but they never became aware that the record
that they were selling millions of copies of
was made in a basement.
♪
Multitracking allowed you
to put music together and change it.
And the reason it was cool is because this gave you basically
a whole new medium.
At one point, someone explained to me,
older than I was, that this whole process
of recording on multitrack recorders
was invented by this guy Les Paul
and I said, "Wow, what a coincidence,
there's a guitar that's named a Les Paul."
And he says, "Yeah, there's a good reason for that."
♪
-Les Paul not only designed some guitars that made
new and incredible sounds,
but had this vision for recording studios.
He invented multitrack recording.
I mean that -- that changed everything.
[ playing "How High the Moon" ]
-♪ Somewhere there's music
♪ How faint the tune
♪ Somewhere there's heaven
♪ How high the moon
-The records I heard by Les Paul and Mary Ford, in the '50s,
I was even aware then that -- without any knowledge of, um,
of recording techniques,
that they were doing something revolutionary.
-Uh, you turn the tape machines on.
They're just a standard, regular, uh, Ampex tape machine.
-Mm-hmm.
As I recall, there are, uh, about a dozen
or 20 voices come in there.
Now, where -- whose are the voices?
-That's Mary.
-You mean they're all Mary's voices?
-♪ Somewhere there's music, how faint the tune ♪
♪ Somewhere there's heaven, how high the moon ♪
Now, I'll add a tenor part to that.
-All right. -Wait a minute.
-[ voices doubled, harmonizing ] ♪ Somewhere there's music
♪ How faint the tune
♪ Somewhere there's heaven, how high the moon ♪
-Well, how long can this go on without getting awfully confused
in your head?
-[ Laughs ] It's pretty confusing.
-Or being cued by your husband?
-Well, uh, would you like to hear the third part?
-Yes.
-♪ Somewhere there's music, how faint the tune ♪
♪ Oh, oh, oh, oh
♪ Somewhere there's heaven, how high the moon ♪
♪
♪ Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah ♪
-Les Paul, I mean,
he made sounds no one had ever heard before.
I remember my mom saying that
you shouldn't listen to this music. It's fake.
She said, "It's one guy tricking us."
So I said, "That's it! That's the music for me."
Because it enabled me to be rebellious, you know, as well.
And I enjoyed the sound.
I don't think you can beat that.
I mean the way that those records sound,
is it's still exciting.
-♪ How high the moon
[ Song ends ]
[ Applause ]
[ Beeping ] -Now come on. Give it to me,
Let me hear that, the whistle and the sax, once more, ready?
That's right.
♪
-Before magnetic tape, an artist would come into the studio
and they would be recorded live.
What they would do is literally etch the grooves
into the disc as the session was being recorded.
You had to start from the beginning and go to the end.
If you made any mistakes,
too bad, or you had to start over.
♪
Magnetic tape -- it just changed music completely.
It gave you the possibility to record in fidelity that was
better than anyone had ever even come close to,
so you can make a more accurate document.
At the same time, it lets you manipulate sounds,
so it didn't sound lifelike at all
because now you can edit.
You can overdub, you could cut and splice.
Once the technology came out,
it very quickly became the standard format.
♪
[ Music changes ]
-When I walked into Abbey Road Studios
for the first time in 1950,
I was astonished at how primitive it was.
They were still recording on discs that were cut by a lathe.
From 1950 on, I just worked away and I had various ideas.
I was experimenting with the newfangled tape,
and I was able to learn what you could do to manipulate sound.
You can cut, you can edit.
Obviously, you can slow down or speed up your tape.
You can put in backwards stuff.
And this is the kind of thing you can do on recording that you
obviously couldn't possibly do live,
because it is, in fact, making up music as you go along.
[ Click ]
-Fleet 1, uh, take 6.
-How could I dance? She'll really dance.
I'll never dance.
♪
-When I first met The Beatles,
I had so little time with them in the studio because
they were incredibly busy all the time.
I would have maybe a day and a half here,
and a couple of days there.
As a result of that, the songs that they produced,
which were marvelous, were still fairly basic.
-2, 3, 4...
[ The Beatles's "I Saw Her Standing There" playing ]
-♪ Well, she was just 17
-The first album only took us 12 hours.
I mean, we all knew those songs so well
because that was our live show.
We were just in there doing the gig, really.
-♪ So how could I dance with another? ♪
♪ Oh
♪ When I saw her standing there ♪
♪
-The old approach was that the band rehearsed,
went into the studio,
stood in front of some microphones and played them.
And the job of the producer was maybe to mix them well
or put a bit of reverb or echo on them.
But essentially the music wasn't transformed.
-♪ Whoo, and I saw her...
-The Beatles were over that phase by about 1966.
With the help of George Martin, they were starting to
make music that you couldn't actually play.
It couldn't exist outside of a recording studio.
It's very difficult to imagine what The Beatles would have
sounded like without George Martin.
[ The Beatles's "Rain" playing ]
What's wonderful about this moment in time
is that 4-track recording opened up the possibilities
to use the studio in the creative palette.
So The Beatles's transition from a garage band group
that's standing around the mic,
playing and singing "Please Please Me"
and "I Saw Her Standing There," into a decisive recording group.
-♪ Rain
♪
♪ I don't mind
♪
♪ Shine
♪ The weather's fine
-They start to use technology to create sounds and sonic textures
that had never been heard in rock music.
-The Beatles revolutionized
the way that people worked in studios.
You know, on "Rain,"
it's the first time there's anything backwards on a record.
And you can say that, like, from that moment on,
it's like, oh, the rule book's out the window
because you're no longer trying
to represent something as it was.
You're...you're trying to break it,
break your perception of this band, you know,
there's this band playing in a room.
♪
[ "Rain" plays backwards ]
It's more fun in the record if there's a few sounds that you
don't really know what they are,
and really they're just instruments,
only something happens on here.
You know, I couldn't tell you what,
'cause we have a special man
who sits here and goes like this.
And the guitar turns into a piano or something, you know.
And then you may say, "Why don't you use a piano?"
Because the piano sounds like a guitar.
[ The Spencer Davis Group's "Gimme Some Lovin'" plays]
-♪ Well, my temperature's rising ♪
♪ Got my feet on the floor
♪ Crazy people rocking 'cause they want some more ♪
-We were all on this ship in the '60s, our generation,
and we were part of it and we went somewhere.
-♪ So glad you made it
♪ So glad you...
-There was a great upsurge of energy and consciousness.
And so there was a lot of excitement on the street.
There was a lot of people who were all trying to go on
the same trip together.
♪
-On "Revolver," The Beatles wanted to make the music that
was going on in their heads.
The first song they worked on was a song of John's.
It had the mysterious title "Mark I,"
which of course becomes "Tomorrow Never Knows."
-That's me in my Tibetan Book of the Dead period.
I gave it a throwaway title because I was a bit
self-conscious about the lyrics of "Tomorrow Never Knows,"
so I took one of Ringo's malapropisms,
which was like "Hard Day's Night."
-"Tomorrow Never Knows," that's a song
that pretty vividly depicts what you're hearing in your head
when you consume some psychedelics.
The Beatles laid that out for everybody to hear.
-"Tomorrow Never Knows" was a very weird song.
The tune had virtually no harmonies,
it was based on a continuous drone of sound.
[ "Tomorrow Never Knows" playing ]
-"Tomorrow Never Knows" started with a backing track,
recorded here at Abbey Road studios.
That's Paul on bass and Ringo on drums,
creating a sort of loopy, mesmeric effect.
♪
To this, John added his vocal, with George playing tambura.
-♪ Turn off your mind
♪ Relax and float downstream
♪ It is not dying
-Late in the song, John's voice gets very unusual-sounding,
especially at the time it was.
-John wanted to sound like the Dalai Lama chanting
from the top of a mountain.
And he suggested that the way that they record that would be
to put him in a harness,
to hoist him high above the studio,
give him a shove, and he'd --
he'd sing every time he came around,
the mic would capture a few beats of it.
-Which wasn't the most practical idea.
But the engineer, Geoff Emerick, had the great idea of
plugging it into a revolving speaker, called a Leslie.
So when it goes fast, it creates one sound,
and when it slows down, it creates another.
-♪ That you may see the meaning of within ♪
-In the early part of the song,
John's voice is pretty straightforward.
Then, after about 1 1/2 minutes,
the Leslie speaker effect kicks in.
-[ Hollow sound ] ♪ That love is all and love is everyone ♪
♪ It is knowing
-The Beatles always looked for other sounds in their records,
and they all had tape machines,
which they used for recording demos.
And they found that by making tape loops,
they could create sounds that people had never heard before.
One of the most recognizable loops on "Tomorrow Never Knows"
is the sound of -- well, it sounds like seagulls squawking.
It's actually the sound of, I think, Paul laughing.
Um, and speeding himself up, which is this.
[ Squeaking sounds ]
-Another loop is just made up of guitars being recorded
over and over again, again, sped up and slowed down,
turned backwards and they sound like trumpets.
[ High-pitched trumpeting ]
And then, early days of sampling,
Paul actually recorded an orchestra off a vinyl record
and created a chord here.
[ Orchestral music playing ]
[ Rock plays ]
-I had a bit of a problem.
How were we going to use the collection of sounds?
I devised a way of playing five loops at the same time,
and if you brought up the faders,
it was like bringing up an organ stop.
Each one had a different tape loop playing all the time,
so you could make your sound as you wished.
-And these tape loops were running and running and running,
and The Beatles and my dad
and Geoff Emerick performed on the desk.
♪
Pushing up faders at the right time
in order to create the instrument sounds
they wanted for the mix.
[ Trumpeting ]
So, the actual mix of "Tomorrow Never Knows"
is a performance; it can't be recreated.
-♪ It is being
♪ It is being
♪
-If you look at everything that's happening
in that recording,
it's like a prophecy of pop music in one song.
With the sampling and the loops, there's so much happening there
that will be active for the next four or five decades.
-♪ It is knowing
-You can look at hip-hop and using samples
or scratching in music,
The Beatles were doing that on "Tomorrow Never Knows."
That song makes you rethink what music is.
It's that profound.
-♪ Or play the game
♪ Existence to the end
♪ Of the beginning
-This was the dawn of creating a new kind of magic.
This was really fantasy stuff.
♪
-Okay, "Wouldn't It Be Nice," take 5.
[ Drumsticks clacking ]
[ The Beach Boys's "Wouldn't It Be Nice" playing ]
♪
-I think that kind of friendly competition
between The Beatles and the Beach Boys
really advanced the cause of popular music.
Brian Wilson heard "Rubber Soul" and understood that there was
a whole other place where you could take rock and roll,
that that was an elevated musical consciousness at play.
-Brian was listening to what The Beatles were doing
in the studio, and he was completely knocked out.
Hearing that made him realize that he had to up the ante
on his next album, which was "Pet Sounds."
-♪ You know it's gonna make it that much better ♪
♪ When we can say goodnight and stay together ♪
-He told me that he and Carl used to pray before each session
that they would make a record that would be warmer
and more inspirational than "Rubber Soul."
-None of those big pickups -- ♪ Ba, ba
Just uh, just like uh...
♪ Doo-do, doo-do
-Brian pre-imagined everything that he did.
He heard all of the vocal parts, all of the instrumental parts,
even before anyone set foot in the studio.
Brian was the mastermind.
-I'd like to start it out now this time with the, uh,
organ and the Fender bass, and then the bongos will come in
at the second half like everything else.
All right, here we go.
-1, rolling...
-1, 2. 1, 2, 3...
-Ironically, the only song from the "Pet Sounds" sessions
that reached number one was recorded
after the album was released and it was the result
of an unprecedented number of hours in the studio.
-Time was nothing to Brian Wilson.
I remember we all got to sit there for about 3 1/2 hours
when he was running his finger up that thing going...
[ Imitates distorted instrument playing ]
-♪ I'm picking up good vibrations ♪
♪ She's giving me excitations
♪ Ooh, bop, bop
♪ Good vibrations, bop, bop
♪ Excitation
♪ Good, good, good, good vibrations ♪
♪ Excitation
♪ Good, good, good, good vibrations ♪
♪ She's bop bop, excitation ♪
♪ Close my eyes
-Just having the time to experiment in the studio
was a radical change.
When he made "Good Vibrations,"
Brian reportedly spent 90 hours recording it.
Everyone thought that was insanity, you know, like,
he's gone mad; he spent 90 hours working on one song.
You know, to me, that's nothing.
-The session that we did on "Good Vibrations"
is not one session.
It was many, many, many sessions.
-Take after take after take.
My fingers were almost bleeding, you know.
It's like "Come on, Brian, fade us out; fade us out."
-♪ I don't know where, but she sends me there ♪
♪ Oh, my, my, what a sensation ♪
♪ Oh, my my, what elation
♪ Oh, my my, what
[ Organ plays ]
♪ Gotta keep those loving good vibrations ♪
♪ Happening with her
♪ Gotta keep those loving good vibrations ♪
♪ Happening with her
-Brian's, you know, a very deep guy.
You know, so he wanted to move beyond songs
about summer and -- and surfing.
♪
Just saying something like, "God only knows
what I'd be without you" in a rock 'n' roll song
and then create this wonderful music that enables the listener,
50 years later, to put it on and to feel what they were feeling.
That's great art.
-♪ I may not always love you
-The way he layered and added different vocal parts
created that wonderful celestial resonance.
Overdub over overdub over overdub until
on "God Only Knows," he ended up with 7 tracks of vocal overdubs.
And that's how come you hear this heavenly choir.
-♪ God only knows what I'd be without you ♪
♪ God only knows what I'd be without you ♪
♪ God only knows what I'd be -We loved the Beach Boys.
And it was a bit of a competition across the pond.
When they did "Pet Sounds,"
I played it to everyone and said... "[ Gasps ]
Listen -- listen to what they're doing here," you know.
So we did "Sgt. Pepper."
[ The Beatles's "Within Without You" playing ]
♪
[ Crowd screaming ]
-What happened to us was that while we were touring,
we were regressing as musicians because the noise
of the audience was louder than the band.
I'm watching the feet, I'm watching their arses,
I'm watching the bobbing heads -- Whoo!
Oh, it's that part --
to stay in some sort of time.
-The last gig was Candlestick Park,
and by then we were just so fed up.
And we got loaded into a meat wagon.
♪
It was like a surrealist film.
It's gone downhill, performance.
'Cause we can't develop when no one can hear us.
You know what I mean? So for us to perform, it's difficult.
It gets difficult each time.
-We can't do a tour like we've been doing all these years
because -- because our music's progressed,
we've used more instruments.
It'd be soft, us going onstage, the four of us, and trying to do
the records we've made with orchestras and, you know,
bands and things.
♪
-♪ Try to realize it's all within yourself ♪
♪ No one else can make you change ♪
-The Beatles achieved a quantum leap when they stopped touring.
That gave us an opportunity which we hadn't had before.
We were no longer were under pressure to complete a song
within a day or two days.
We could spend as much time as we liked on it.
-The boundaries were being moved so far forward
from the early mono days.
Now, we were asking for things like a symphony orchestra
for "A Day in the Life."
You know, lunatics had taken over the asylum.
[ The Beatles's "A Day in the Life" playing ]
-♪ I read the news today, oh, boy ♪
♪ About a lucky man who made the grade ♪
♪ And though the news was rather sad ♪
♪ Well, I just had to laugh
♪ I saw the photograph
-Like many of John's songs,
"A Day In The Life" began quite simply,
based on the odd newspaper cutting.
Paul had written a scrap of a song,
"Woke up, fell out of bed." You know the one.
-♪ Dragged a comb across my head ♪
-But when we laid down the track,
Paul came up with the idea of giant crescendo,
a kind of immense musical orgasm.
♪ Ah
-"Don't listen to the man next to you,"
I said to the orchestra.
"Make your own way up the sliding passage.
If you're playing the same note as your companion,
you're playing the wrong one."
Well, the orchestra hooted with laughter.
All their lives they'd tried to play as one man.
And it only took a few minutes for The Beatles
to change all that.
-We were taking so long making "Sgt. Pepper."
I remember in one of the music papers, they said,
"Oh, The Beatles have dried up."
And we were like... "[Snickers] No, we haven't."
[ Crescendo plays ]
[ Final chord plays ]
-We were on the road driving to a gig in an old Zephyr 4
when "Sgt. Pepper" was played for the first time on the radio.
And I remember, we pulled off into a lay-by and sat there
and listened to the whole thing from start to finish.
And I remember we just looked at each other and went, "...me!"
That's just...
You know, I couldn't wait to hear the songs again.
Suddenly, here was an album
that was like a theatrical construction,
but it was also rooted in songs that were about
all our hopes and fears, and so, in -- in that sense,
that album opened Pandora's box for everybody.
[ Playing Pink Floyd's "Breathe" ]
-"Dark Side of the Moon" started in a rehearsal room
in Bermondsey, I think,
that belonged to the Rolling Stones,
where we did some, um, sort of jamming, writing.
♪
-With "Dark Side," I had a strong and compelling notion
that we could make an album that was about life
and about feelings
and the human condition and things that impinge upon us.
Can I put this down?
-Just a second -- we're just...
I still have to find... -It's on the other track.
-Okay.
-How do we make, you know, with a recording desk
and a couple of little old synthesizers and stuff,
how do you make that sound?
And you have to throw yourself
and your imagination into creating.
I just plugged this up
and started playing one sequence on it,
and, uh, Roger immediately pricked up his ears
and thought that sounded good,
and came out and we started mucking with it together.
-A series of notes played in slowly...
[ Playing notes slowly ]
...triggering a noise generator and oscillators,
and then just speed it up, you know.
[ Speed of music increases, playing rapidly ]
-Now you've got it, basically.
♪
[ Frequency rises ]
-Well, recording changed with the technology.
When 16-track came in,
we could overdub almost to our heart's content.
♪
-I think the analogy of painting is very relevant in terms
of making records, because you can paint over a whole bit,
or erase a whole section, and say, "Well, I like that bit
of the painting, but let's start again here."
♪
-I actually like being able to sit back and listen to it,
and then go and say well maybe if we just add something here.
-♪ All that you touch
♪ And all that you see
♪ All that you taste
♪ All you feel
-That was very freeing.
But you could say maybe it was destructive
in some ways as well, 'cause it meant you didn't have to
make that simple brush stroke that meant something.
You know, you could go blah, blah, blah!
We'll sort it out later.
-♪ Beg, borrow, or steal
♪ And all you create
♪ And all you destroy
-That record to me is... it's mind-blowing.
The way that that still sounds, like, I mean, the tape loops,
the mixing, the depth --
no one has come close to that, probably to this day.
I can clearly remember that moment of sitting and listening
to the whole mix all the way through. I'm thinking,
"My God, we've really done something fantastic here."
♪
-There was an explosion of creativity in the '60s
to the mid '70s of music that will never, I don't think,
be matched in pop music again.
[ Aerosmith's "Sweet Emotion" playing ]
-Technology was certainly enabling people
to experiment more as musicians.
-Multitracking came in and then we had three tracks.
And then we got four tracks.
And then I remember all the studios got eight tracks.
And then all of a sudden we got 16 tracks,
and we were all looking at one another, saying,
"What the hell are we gonna do with 16 tracks?"
Before anybody really learned how to use one of those,
here comes a 24-track.
And the next thing you know, it's multi-forever. [ Chuckles ]
-♪ Sweet...
♪ Emotion
-In the '70s, people were spending
more and more and more money on these gigantic studios.
-Technology has helped us enormously but it has had also
a damaging effect, because it's allowed too much freedom.
I've known groups who will concentrate on
getting a bassline on one song, and spending five days doing it.
Music suffers from overproduction.
You don't gain. You think you're gaining
'cause everybody wants to play with toys.
And when another 16 tracks arrive that you can play with,
you have to play with them, because they're there,
like a kid with a new toybox.
But I thought once you got past 16, it was a waste of time.
It became a bit self-indulgent.
And it allowed records to go on forever in the studio.
♪
-And the album of the year is... Fleetwood Mac!
-The success of "Rumors" was such a disproportionate thing.
You have so much pressure from the outside,
wanting you to repeat the formula that is embodied
in an album like "Rumors."
But there was no formula to "Rumors."
We were just responding to what was going on
in our personal lives, so, no matter what we did,
we couldn't have repeated the authenticity of that.
♪ Loving you
♪ Isn't the right thing to do
Every song on that album is a cross-dialogue
between one member and another.
♪
-♪ You can go your own way
-You can't hear "Go Your Own Way" in any way
other than, you know, me talking to Stevie.
-♪ Another lonely day
-Making the left turn that we made on "Tusk,"
it was all about how do we not paint ourselves into a corner?
And so I said to the band,
"Look, let's try something a little different."
And they were sort of like, "Well...okay."
-♪ Why don't you tell me what's goin' on? ♪
-I had a small studio in the back of my house,
and I just wheeled a 24-track in,
and I just started putting stuff down.
Basically what I'm trying to do is take a track that we cut
in the studio, mic the bathroom,
which is right across the hall, which has an amazing sound.
I mean, 1927 bathrooms are rock 'n' roll all the way.
And, uh, record it back onto some empty tracks.
[ Drum beating ]
Working at home alone allows you to sort of go into the void
and to find all sorts of mysterious things.
And that was something I wanted to explore,
and then bring back and share with the band.
Sing the melody for a second.
-We were recording at Village Recorders
in Santa Monica, and we were recording
six days a week, and it was really horrible.
It's like, Lindsey with a microphone
on the tile floor, going ooh, ooh, ooh-ooh-ooh, ooh.
And we're just all like,
"Okay, that was great. Take two." [ Chuckles ]
And now -- and he's like...
♪ Ooh, ooh-ooh, ooh-ooh
Okay, take three."
And then he's taking the whole thing
and then he's slowing it down, and then he's recording that.
And then he's speeding it back up,
and then he's putting it through a Leslie,
and it was just hard for the rest of us,
because we kind of... we weren't always involved.
♪
-The title track, "Tusk,"
typifies the spirit of the album.
I wanted Mick to play, like, jungle drums,
so we got him going, and then we made a loop of it,
and everything else got added in after that.
♪ Why don't you tell me who's on the phone? ♪
Mick had the idea to put the marching band on
and that was sort of the coup de grace on that song
and it really pushed it over the top.
-♪ Why don't you ask him the list on this rove? ♪
♪ Oh oh-oh, oh oh-oh, oh
♪ Don't say that you love me
-Obviously, it reached the point where the ability to stay
in the studio as long as you want
and spend as much money as you want
may not necessarily have been an entirely good thing.
They were actually in the studio 24 hours.
Lindsey and whoever would come in in the daytime,
record stuff with one engineer, which Mick would come in
at night, dislike, erase, and replace.
So, in theory, they could have actually gone on forever
and ever and ever.
And of course, you know, prodigious amounts of cocaine
were involved in the process,
which added a certain piquancy to the whole thing.
♪
The Warner Bros. people never really took much stock
of what we were doing, but, when we delivered that album to them,
that would've been a funny moment to be a fly on the wall
because I know they were probably looking at each other
and going "What is this?"
-♪ Tusk!
-There was a kind of a backlash,
there was a kind of a negativity to it.
I remember Mick coming to me and saying, "You know, Lindsey,
we're -- we're not gonna do that again."
And I was like, "Okay."
♪
It did take many years for that album to rise to the surface,
to where now everyone else loves it
and I think a whole generation, especially indie band types,
seem to really get it.
It was, uh, a ballsy thing to do,
but it was just the need to experiment
and the need to be an artist.
[ Eurythmics's "Who's That Girl" playing ]
-Annie and I saw ourselves more like performance artists.
I would sit on a chair, and Annie would have a suit
and sing, and I wouldn't do anything.
-♪ The language of love
♪ Slips from my lover's tongue ♪
We always liked everything to be quite reduced.
And at the time that we were forming Eurythmics,
there was a fantastic evolution in the kind of equipment
that you could get access to in terms of recording.
♪ Who's that girl
♪ Running around with you?
♪ Tell me, who's that girl
♪ Running around with you?
It was the beginning of that kind of
bedroom recording studio.
You know, being the technological person
that he was, Dave was very clued in with this.
-I'd went out and bought a thing called a Caterpillar
which went with the Wasp.
[ Playing notes ]
-And I had this new drum machine that was a prototype.
In fact the outside of the computer was wood.
And it had a tiny little screen that was black and white
almost like early "Space Invaders"
or ping-pong, you know?
And I had a TEAC Portastudio.
So with these things, I'd worked out how to sort of
make a little sequence like... [ imitating notes playing ]
And that was the beginning of Eurythmics.
[ "Love Is a Stranger" playing ]
-We didn't like big, intimidating studios.
You go in there, and it's all, you know, big desks,
and it's very glossy
and it's like -- it's like a big Rolls-Royce
as opposed to like a little Volkswagen.
We liked the Volkswagen.
We didn't go for the Rolls-Royce.
♪ Love is a stranger in an open car ♪
♪ Tempt you in and drive you far away ♪
We didn't care for the status quo.
What we referred to at the time as like prehistoric dinosaur
big rock bands, you know.
So we wanted to do it in a very different way -- our own way.
♪ And drive you far away
So we knew someone who had this massive picture framing factory,
and at the very, very top, there was a kind of attic room,
so the roof was like that.
And there was lots of little cables, and we'd sit for hours,
and he would be noodling, and I would be like this.
-I was programming it, and Annie kind of woke up and went,
"Whoa, what the hell is that?"
And she got sort of really excited about it,
put some weird harmonies on it.
We really went all the way out in experimenting,
nothing to do with pop music.
-♪ And I want you
♪ And I want you
♪ And I want you so it's an obsession ♪
And that was where we first started
with Eurythmics songs, Eurythmics recordings:
"Sweet Dreams," "Love Is a Stranger,"
all the early stuff; that's where we recorded.
♪ An obsessio...n
-This is like 1982, and it was kind of the beginning of loads
of artists going, "Whoa, hang on a second. I can do that."
And all of this music started to come out
that wasn't made in big commercial studios,
and it was kinda made in people's bedrooms,
and...and it was cool.
[ Beck's "Loser" playing ]
♪ In the time of chimpanzees, I was a monkey ♪
♪ Butane in my veins so I'm out to cut the junkie ♪
The first few albums I did were all done at someone's house
who just had a little setup.
They weren't in real studios.
There was maybe a 3- or 4-hour window.
He's like, "Yeah, you can come by
and then my girlfriend's coming home,
and then we can't record after that because, uh,
the microphone's set up in the kitchen."
And then halfway through singing it,
shoes are flying at the engineer.
His girlfriend has had it, you know,
of living in a recording studio.
♪Soy un perdedor ♪
♪ I'm a loser, baby
♪ So why don't you kill me?
-Home studios of the analog era, they were basically
miniature versions of the existing recording studio
in your home and you had four tracks, and you made records.
What digital technology did in a way
is get rid of the studio entirely,
and now the recording studio was your computer,
and you could make music anywhere.
[ Bon Iver's "Flume" plays ]
-♪ I am my mother's only one
When I made "For Emma,"
this was up at my dad's hunting lodge.
All I had was my old big block G4 computer
and a Pro Tools interface.
It's funny to think it was Mac OS 9,
which seems so bizarre to some people now. Me, too.
Um, but that's all I had.
♪ Only love is all maroon
Pro Tools has been my musical voice.
I mean, it's my way of understanding songs.
It's my tool of songwriting now, where it's like,
I enjoy so much being able to open up a session, blank tape,
so to speak, and just create an environment.
With a guitar, it used to be really exciting to me
to sit down at a desk
and use the room that I was in and sing and play, and...
But when I'm looking to write a new song now,
I'm waiting for an environment to sort of be
created accidentally, so then I can kind of step into it,
just like when somebody picks up a guitar,
and there's a chord they play,
they're instantly writing a song.
-I was right around the first generation of kids
who were making music alone in their bedrooms on a computer.
That's really how I started to make music.
It wasn't really in bands or in relation to other people.
It was very much this insular, layering method of making music.
[ Clicking ]
♪
-It takes me a while to find even where I am sometimes,
'cause there are so many tracks.
♪
-♪ For the lover
♪ For the love
-These are all the tracks down here.
They are all the violin and French-horn tracks
that we had to mix down to a smaller amount of tracks.
You have an infinite amount of layers that you can add.
So you have a billion more variables
on where a song could go.
-Being a recording artist means, you know, push --
pushing and stretching all these limits and boundaries
of what music can sound like.
[ Singing various notes ]
When I discovered that I could use a looping pedal to
create this multitrack sound live in front of people,
that was awesome.
Let's do this thing. All right?
What I do onstage is that I stamp with my foot
on the looping pedal and that starts the recording
-Whoo! [Cheering]
If I press the pedal again,
it will give me another layer on top of that.
It's looping and looping and looping and I can stack
layers and layers upon each other, of sound.
[ Previous drumbeat plays ]
-You know the worlds of sound
that I had been hearing my whole life and what drew me
to recorded music suddenly were at my -- not my fingertips --
my toe tips.
♪ Ah
[ Singing various notes ]
It's an organic sound being put into a digital device
played by a human.
And so there's all these weird, like, ew, what -- you know,
what is that? What's happening here?
But that to me is really -- that's where we're living now
is that, you know, in that "in between" space.
♪ What's the bizness, yeah?
♪ Don't take my life away, don't take my life away ♪
♪ From a distance, yeah
♪ Don't take my life away, don't take my life away ♪
♪ Ah, oh
There are no limitations these days.
Because we are multitracking, because we're overdubbing,
you know, it's -- it's completely limitless.
-That's where you going, yeah.
♪
-There's so much more technology around nowadays that,
as a producer, you have to manage all of that technology
that's available to you.
[ Radiohead's "Lotus Flower" playing ]
And if you have the discipline to sort of compartmentalize
what you're doing, then you benefit.
♪ I will shape myself into your pocket ♪
♪ Invisible
♪ Do what you want
But the way that I personally deal with that is by just
ignoring a lot of it.
Because I know that it's of no value to me.
It's like, "No, I'm not going to use Pro Tools to record."
You know, use a tape machine where it will be easier
to just like, put it in the computer
and take the good bits.
Use a razor blade.
Select things with a pencil, and cut them with a razor blade
and stick them back together with tape.
I still do it, because it's sort of a meditation of some sort.
In the process, you have time to think about what you're doing,
and that works better a lot of times.
Things sound better for some reason.
An edit done on tape sounds better
than an edit done in the computer.
It just does.
-I love the idea that we're in the position now to be able to
pick and choose the different recording practices
from the different eras.
And sometimes you put one something, you know,
you put something that's quite retro
on top of something very modern,
and you create something very new.
[ Laughter, indistinct conversation ]
-When the drums come in, just the drums.
[ Indistinct conversations ]
♪
[ Drum beating, birds calling ]
[ Button clicks ]
[ Birds continue calling, drum continues beating ]
[ Playing "Give Up the Ghost" ]
-One of the underlying stories of rock music is this constant
experimentation with sound.
Because of multitracking,
you really make the music during the mixing.
And you can create drama in the music.
You could make things that were not musically feasible before.
You could make things that
didn't really belong to performances.
-♪ Don't haunt me
♪ Don't haunt me
♪ Gather up
♪ The lost and sold
-All eras of recording are happening simultaneously.
I have a lot of musician friends who only record on tape,
some who only record on their laptop,
on a program that comes free with your computer.
And, uh, they all have big records that people listen to.
-♪ Don't haunt me
♪ I think I should
♪ give up the ghost
♪ Into your arms
-You know, when I first came into the record business,
the ideal for any recording engineer in a studio
was to make the most lifelike sound you could possibly do,
to make a photograph that was absolutely accurate.
Well, the studio changed all that
and certainly what we were doing,
because instead of taking a great photograph,
we could start painting a picture.
By overdubbing, by different kind of speeds,
you are painting with sound.
-♪ Into your arms
♪ Into your arms
Please tell me that sounded all right.
♪
-"Soundbreaking" is available on DVD.
The companion book is also available.
To order, visit shopPBS.org or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS.