A Panoramic view of Abbey Road's Studio Two

The screech coming from outside the studio walls sounded like the mating cry of an egret. "What in the name of Jehoshaphat is that?" I gasped, cringing behind a chair.     Tony, the guard at the desk, didn't even flinch. Tourist," he grunted, without looking up from his newspaper.     Ten minutes later, when the ugly episode was reprised, I flung myself onto the floor and assumed the position. "That's a tourist?" I challenged him, crabbing out from under a desk.     He nodded perfunctorily. "Definitely."     Skeptically, I peeked out the front door at the street. Sure enough, scattered in the crosswalk like tenpins was a group of sightseers, untangling themselves from necklaces of point-and-shoot camera straps. Minutes later, another car careened around the corner and - same thing: Tires screeched as the driver hit the brakes to avoid a new group of grinning tourists.     It goes on like this all day outside EMI (Electric and Musical Industries) Studios, a facility better known by the street it fronts in the tony St. John's Wood suburb of London. You'd think that zebra-stripe crossing at the intersection, where this street meets the unsung Grove End Road, was some sort of holy shrine the way it attracts crowds. OK, so The Beatles once crossed there - Paul strutting blithely, barefoot; John decked out spiritually, in a white suit and flowing maine; Ringo as rakish as he'll ever appear, in a splendid concoction of mortician's garb; and George looking as though he were headed to a work-release program. That was in 1969, as the final curtain was falling on the band's career, but that image served to hang a shingle on a rather ordinary piece of 19th century architecture that would immortalize it forever after by its nom de guerre: Abbey Road.     The name conjures up its own buoyant picture. It skips musically off the tongue - Abbey Road - and evokes images of a charming, quaint refuge in the leafy vicinity of, say, "Penny Lane" or "Strawberry Fields." Not that the joint needs much more resonance. The eponymous album was one of The Beatles' most melodious and produced a lineup of instant classics: "Come Together," "Here Comes The Sun," "Something," "She Came In Through The Bathroom Window" and "Because," to name a few.     Still, most of us mistakenly believe that Abbey Road Studios originated and flourished as a result of The Beatles' fabled album. That would be like attributing the dye-job to Dennis Rodman. The studio, in a structure that started life in 1831 as the nine-bedroom residence of an English nobleman, opened in 1931 as the first custom-built recording facility in the world. Before that, most music was recorded on location, in churches and social halls. There was no place that catered specifically to the world's great musicians, with state-of-the-art equipment and walls designed to give correct resonance to sound, eliminating echo.     Name recognition has its benefits, and for that Abbey Road will always be beholden to the Fab Four. And this year marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of its parent company, the recording industry giant EMI. Abbey Road is the jewel of its empire, and the hits, as they say, just keep on coming.     "Music was made here that touched peoples' hearts and lives," says Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, who recorded the legendary albums Dark Side of The Moon and Wish You Were Here in Studio Three. "That's why the building has this kind of shivery essence to it."     You can actually feel it at the moment you enter the front courtyard. The whitewashed walls are regularly defaced by visitors who scrawl reverent messages to their departed rock gods. "Hey John, I wish you were here," has been freshly scribbled near the entrance, along with "Let It Be, man - Love, Aaron" and "The Beatles are awesome - Adam from N.Y. (and his dad)." Dozens of older communiqués have withstood the rainstorms and fresh paint, many of them emotional tributes to the lads. (There are also messages about Yoko Ono, but they tend to be a bit nasty.) Paul McCartney confessed to me that occasionally he adds his own message to the wall "in the true, funky spirit of things." So, not to be outdone, I waited until the security guard made his rounds of the premises, then launched an attack with my trusty felt-tip. "You can't fly much higher," I wrote, "than with Lucy In The Sky."     On this particular day, the joint is rocking at full tilt. Each of Abbey Road's four studios is occupied by name-brand tennants in the throes of tumultuous creativity. The cast of You Can't Go Home Again is roaming around Studio One, putting the finishing touches on the West End soundtrack album. Oasis is down the hall in Studio Two, toiling in the very spot where their mentors, The Beatles, cut the vast majority of their hits. Studio Three has been taken over by British band Depeche Mode for some spontaneous demos, while songwriter Mark Owen hovers upstairs, in the Penthouse Studio, mixing several tracks.     "That's the beauty of Abbey Road," says Martin Benge, the soft-spoken former studio chief for EMI's London facilities, who began his tenure at Abbey Road as an assistant to Beatles producer George Martin in 1962. "It's design is so unique that it can accomodate so many different style of music at the same time."     The Monster, as Studio One is called, was designed along the same specs as a modern symphony hall and can handle a full size orchestra with a chorus of nearly 200 people. Envision Ben-Hur as a musical and you have a pretty good idea of its vastness. The room is a whopping 220,000 cubic feet, with ceilings that peak at 64 feet, making it the largest studio facility in Europe. A handclap in the empty space reverberates for a seemingly eternal two seconds. You could probably play ice hockey comfortably inside, although stray pucks would be hell on the acoustic tiling.     Although Studio One has been known primarily for its classical recording sessions, Benge cites the recording of The Beatles' "All You Need Is Love" single, which at least included some classical musicians, as its most famous session. The song was recorded during a live worldwide satellite television transmission on June 25, 1967, with the help of a 13-piece orchestra, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Marianne Faithfull, Keith Moon, Eric Clapton, Graham Nash, various wives and girlfriends, and everybody who was anybody in the British pop-culture community. But as to its being the studio's most famous session, I'm not so sure.     He concedes the argument when I raise the specter of Glenn Miller, who made his final recordings in Studio One on September 16, 1944, with an Allied Forces band that featured Dinah Shore on vocals. "Those sessions with Miller were like religious experiences," recalls Nat Peck, who played trombone on the dates and still lives within walking distance of the studio. "Glenn wanted to leave right afterwards, but the weather was awful. It was very foggy. And a friend of his said, 'What's

the matter - you want to live forever?' Well, after that, Glenn couldn't back down from the challenge." Unfortunately, his plane disappeared over the English Channel en route to France, and with it went one of the world's most beloved musical innovators.     Entering Studio Two, you resist the urge to light a candle and cover your head. Studio Two is the "Temple of Boom," where the Beatles presided, and as guitarist Chris Rea observes, "This place is what St. Peter's in Rome is to Catholics." If that's not quite the perfect analogy, nevertheless a certain sacred spirit prevails. The Beatles' presence, an unmistakable energy, is everywhere inside the bright, airy room, with its spectacular resident drum kit and offbeat staircase that leads to a second-floor control room. For the better part of four years, from 1966 through 1969, Studio Two was one of the few places where The Beatles still existed as a group. They would usually arrive in the afternoon and continue working until the early hours of the next morning.     "All those days were magical," recalls Alan Brown, Abbey Road's site services manager, "but one evening - August 20, 1968 - will always stand out in my mind. It was the dead of night. I was in the control room with George Martin when Paul sat down with his guitar and said, 'Let's give this song a run-through.' Then, to his own guitar accompaniment, he sang 'Mother Nature's Son.'     "What I came to learn immediately afterwards was that that was the night of the (Russian) invasion of Czechoslovakia, and at the simultaneous moment when tanks were rolling through the streets of Prague, there was the beauty here in London of Paul singing that enchanting, peaceful song. The whole building was still; there was hardly anybody around. And the words rolling off his tongue - 'Sitting in my field of grass ...' - made the irony complete." Peter Noone of Herman's Hermits     Studio Three offers no such historical perspective, but its pedigree remains pretty impressive. Used originally by George Martin as a rehearsal space and occasionally to record chamber music, the cozy corner suite was variously inhabited by no less than The Hollies, Cilla Black, Donovan, Herman's Hermits, The Yardbirds and George Harrison (he recorded "My Sweet Lord" and the album All Things Must Pass there). The studio was completely redesigned in 1988 as a self-contained environment for recording artists, with state-of-the-art facilities and an upstairs lounge that has its own kitchen, bathroom, shower and billiards table. Says Benge, "You can really move into the studio, shut the doors and live in there without having to leave until an album is finished."     Pink Floyd was the first group to use the renovated studio, and they did exactly that. For three weeks in the fall of 1988, hardly anyone at Abbey Road saw or heard from the band, leading to speculation that some bizarre cult ritual was in progress inside. It turned out they were holed up mixing their live album Delicate Sound of Thunder. "With all the customary weirdness and infighting," says Benge, "it was just business as usual."     Abbey Road may have harbored its share of cultural insurgents, but its revolutionary impact reaches far beyond the music. The studio has a history of technical innovation to rival the Bell Labs. Most of the technology found in modern recording facilities was first designed and built by EMI engineers. "The fundamentals of stereo were developed here by Alan Blumlein," says Alan Brown, "not to mention the moving coil microphone, large valve tape recorders and any sound effects needed in the course of a session. And when The Beatles came onto the scene, all hell broke loose."       The Beatles were the first artists to creatively experiment with recording techniques, in much the same way they'd experimented with drugs. Before that, a very strict engineering discipline remained in force in the industry, and it manifested itself at Abbey Road. The technical crew wore forbidding white lab coats and adhered to prescribed times for recording - only three-hour sessions a day, the last one ending precisely at 10 p.m. Equipment could only be used in the way for which it was intended, and that's the way it had to be. No exceptions. But The Beatles' curiosity rent the system asunder.     "They would articulate a feeling," says Brown, "and between us, it would be devised, even if it meant inventing a new effect." One such session produced phasing, which is the process of reversing the polarity of a recording signal to create an interesting sound effect (something previously unheard-of in those pre-digital, analog days of recording). It became a staple technique of recording studios. At another such session, The Beatles expressed their dismay about how much time it took to double track their vocals. Studio boss Ken Townsend responded by developing a technique that enabled him to record a single vocal track on two separate tape machines, slightly alter the speed on one to make it distinct from the other and then combine the two. An engineer dubbed the process ADT - artificial double tracking - but John Lennon was having none of it. Typically, irreverently, he would request "Ken's Flanger" when he wanted to double track his vocals or guitar; hence the recording term, flanging, which is now a part of every studio engineer's vocabulary.     "This place is more than four walls, more than a recording studio," says Scotty Meade, whose documentary, The Abbey Road Story, will be shown on television later this year. "It's got energy floating around that makes every musician play at and sound his best. And it causes ordinary people to behave in extraordinary ways."     Meade recalls an occasion, weeks earlier, when another car screeched around the corner and pulled up to the intersection at Abbey and Grove End. "The driver's window opened and a guy leaned out," he says. "It was obvious he'd been crying. He had an urn in his hand, and without hesitation, he dumped its ashy contents on the stripes where The Beales had walked. Immediately, you could see how relieved he was. He wiped his eyes, smiled and threw a little salute before driving off. It was one of the most amazing things I've ever witnessed.     The aura of the place has that effect on its fans, but it can be summed up rather neatly by Yehudi Menuhin, who since 1931 has recorded more than 250 classical works in Studio One. "Every time I go past Abbey Road Studios," he says, "I blow the place a kiss."

Previous | Misc. Mag Index