Brian buzzed me and I went into his office. “The Shea stadium master has come from the Ed Sullivan people”, he said. “Can you book a viewing theatre so we can watch it?”
I booked a theatre at Wardour Street for the afternoon and Brian and I went along, firmly clutching the film so nobody would steal it. When it was put in the projector, we settled down on one of the wide, plushy seats and the lights went down. Fifty-four minutes later, when the lights came up, we sat in silence for few moments, then we both reached out for our cigarettes and simultaneously lip up.
“What do you think?”, Brian asked.
“No good, Brian”, I said.
He took another puff. “I agree. We can’t allow it to go out like that. Do you think, you can fix it, Tony?”
“I’ll try”, I said.
In every industry on this earth there is a stock phrase. A little saying that passes for an explanation so that a work-in-progress can move on without workers and supervisors standing around and agonizing. In the music industry that phrase is, “Don’t worry. We’ll fix it in the mix”. This is a real Alfred E. Neuman, “What me worry?” MAD magazine approach if there ever was one, but we are all entitled to hope.
Now three and a half years from their first addition George Martin and I sat at CTS (Cine Tele Sound), postynch studios is Kensington Garden Square, in Bayswater, and watched the Shea stadium footage. The visuals were good but the sound was awful. The Beatles’ own amps were the top of the line, but still not powerful enough. To compound the problems, they couldn’t hear themselves against the nose of the crowd and were out of the tune and out time. When we finished watching, George said, “Oh dear.”
I said, “You’re right. The pictures are good, but the sound sucks. We could redo the music sound to picture and synch it.” It was standard movie technique to “loop” actors’ dialogue if, for instance, the wind on the set or a passing plane drowned out their voices.
I knew that George was thinking. But would EMI permit this? It was one thing for a concert to be filmed live, it was another thing for the Beatles to go into the studio and cut new tracks. In simple terms, it raised thorny issues about the Beatles’ exclusive recording contract with EMI. We talked it quietly through. I said, “If we take this problem to EMI, they will agonize for months and the BBC want to broadcast it on the first of March. The other thing is, even if we do redo it, no one must know. This is being sold as an “original soundtrack”
George Martin was always pragmatic. If a thing needed to be done, it got done. “Right”, he said. “There might be union problems too. They are making a big issue over miming and dubbing live performances.
I must admit I was a bit surprised that he had gone to the heart of the problem so quickly, and didn’t refuse to take a risk, because I always saw him as very establishment. He has patrician good looks – in fact, at the fancy dress parties, which were quite craze then, he and his wife Judy always dressed up as Prince Phillip and the queen, ald looked every inch in the part. I has always liked and admired him very much. He was very gentle, well-read and knowledgeable, not a snob in any way despite running an important record label, and had a keen sense of humor. Now, I warmed to him.
We arranged a date for the Beatles to come in and schedule to work from. I stressed that no one must know, and it was all very hush-hush, which intrigued them. It was a strange period in their lives. The had played their last UL concerts three weeks earlier, in early December, although it wasn’t advertised as such. For the concert at the Empire Theater in Liverpool alone, 40 000 fans applied for tickets, against two houses of two thousand five hundred seats each house. Other concerts took the m across England, ending at the Capital Cinema in Cardiff, Wales, on December 12, 1965. As usual, you couldn’t hears the Beatles through the screaming of the fans.
As they filed into CTS with their instruments, I Said, “Don’t forget, act naturally’ The were amused. This was the title of one of Ringo’s song in the Shea Stadium set.
“So what’ this all about, Tone?” Ringo asked.
‘You have to lay down a new soundtrack, sound to picture”, I Said. I explained the problems and they were quick to grasp what have to be done, and why it had to be secret. “if anyone asks, the story is that soundtrack has been sweetened”, I said, adding, “Think ‘Honey Pie’”
“Sound like ‘money pie’ to me”, said John.
We rerecorded all the songs for the filnal version of the film, close-synching it all carefully to match the picture, frame by frame. Ringo didn’t sing at all in overdubs, because ‘Act Naturally’ was impossible to do again in picture. George’s “Everybody’s Trying to be my baby” and Paul’s “She’s a Woman” were bad visually and orally and were cut altogether. We ran out of time to John’s “Twist And Shout” because postsynching a very boring and time-consuming process and John was fed up with the time it was taking.
“I’ve got a party to go”, he said.
George Martin and Paul thought we should try to carry on and tried to persuade him to stay, but he was adamant and left to go to one of P.J. Proby’s wild events in Chelsea. The others shrugged, packed up their gear and left as well. George Martin and I stayed to dub a few more things/ I enjoyed spending times with him because he really was very pleasant and easy to work with. We found the final tapes of the Beatles at Hollywood Bowl concert from the year before and overdubbed some og the audience’s screaming in the right places. The film ended up 48 minutes long, cut by eight minutes and I took it to the labs for processing.
When the Beatles came to view the finished work, they were amazed by the quality of the film. It was very pretty, with lots of edited-in footage of them in the helicopter, flying over New York on the way to Shea, and them backstage chatting. The sound was brilliant. The synchs and overdubs, seamless. We never told the Ed Sullivan people, or anyone, else.
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