Name: The Summit, Part 2
Uploaded: 2014-02-24T20:02:15.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'The Summit, Part 2' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2014-02-24. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'The Summit, Part 2' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2014-02-24. Transcript available.

The Summit, Part 2

I'll just throw you this one, see what you make of this one.
Anybody, what makes the Beatles' music so special and so enduring?
You know, for me, listening to the Beatles as a totality,
what always strikes me is the distance they covered in such a short amount of
time.
If you look at Love Me Do, as simple as can be, in 1962,
and Strawberry Fields, extremely complicated, only four years later.
And here you had four guys who were self-taught, intuitive musicians,
no technical background to speak, just sort of picked up their instruments,
learned their repertoire from American records,
and began writing their own things and suddenly got to Strawberry Fields and
beyond.
And to me, that's just sort of a miracle.
For me, one of the miracles is something that there was a gentleman called Ken
Townsend,
who was a maintenance engineer, electronics engineer, on the very first session
that Beatles ever did.
And he continued on through and eventually became manager of DMI Studios.
And he got an MBA, I think he was.
Yes, that's right.
Same as the business.
He, in a recent interview, came up with something that fascinated me.
And just in case I had the opportunity, I have to write it down tonight.
From the date the Beatles first started to record, September 4th, 1962,
through January 4th, 1970, which was their last recording,
they recorded 212 songs, which comes out to be 13 and a half days between each
song written and recorded.
Ask an artist these days to do something like that, and they'll just burst out
laughing.
There was an immediacy for the Beatles, which was incredible.
Their whole training period in Germany, playing three shows a night, six nights
a week, I think it was.
Just six hours a night.
Yes, no artist these days would do that.
Plus they were coming out of the album so quickly.
It's that incredible, you could call it a work ethic that they developed in
Hamburg,
that they were constantly producing, and as Alan says, they were constantly
progressing.
And I think the reason for the progress was their incredible curiosity,
that they began as craftsmen.
They learned to hone the Chuck Berry licks, the Dwayne Eddy licks,
and put them into their own compositions.
They started to write their own songs.
And then they started to just pick up everything they heard from every walk of
life,
in terms of music, every style, all around the world.
They would find ways to bring that into what they were doing.
And so they were developing this incredible craft, at the same time that their
imaginations were just taking off,
that they were becoming artists, instead of just simple craftsmen turning out
the same song.
And there would be ideas in their songs that would recur, but they were really
hidden.
They were things that I've spent my life trying to uncover.
For instance, could I play an example?
One of my favorite sounds of all time is the open chord of a hard bass knife.
Which I can play right here.
Now that is, McCartney is playing a D on the bass.
Lennon is playing an F chord on his guitar, which has nothing to do with D.
D has nothing to do with F.
And Harrison is playing an F chord with a G on top.
A G has no part of either of those fundamental sonorities.
But they all work as an arresting sound.
And they were always looking for a gotcha idea to get a song across from its
first moment.
And people think, oh, well, what an unusual sound.
But they used it again.
And as an example here, I've got the introduction to I Don't Want to Spoil the
Party.
And the Hard Day is Tonight is in there.
Same arrangement, D in the bass, F chord, F with a G on top.
But I've had to repeat the chord five times.
Otherwise it would go by and you wouldn't notice it.
But see if you can hear the Hard Day is Tonight chord in Spoil the Party when I
repeat it.
So you wouldn't call them formulas.
But there are little things that they would learn from themselves as they were
constantly changing.
Do you have any idea of how they came up with that?
That strange combination of notes that don't really belong together and yet
they made something very special.
Right.
George Martin was right there when it happened.
He plays piano to boot on the same chord.
But I don't think there was any conscious intention.
McCartney knew the song was in G major.
And so a D would be a logical upbeat to begin a song in G major.
But I think it was George was asked about what is Paul playing.
And he said, I don't know.
You'd have to ask him.
George is credited with the guitar because the 12th string that he plays.
So why would they have played an F for a song in G?
Yeah.
Well, if you want to get into musical technical detail,
Lennon sings a lot of F in the song, which is not part of the G major scale.
But he brings a very blue, while the Beatles were getting very into blues in
early 64,
you hear it in Harrison's guitar in 63, but not many other places in their
singles.
But then Camp Army Love, McCartney just turned to blues and they turned a
corner there.
And so they were bringing in that lower and 7th scale degree, F in the key of G,
in a lot of Hard Day's Night in their early 64 recordings.
So, you know, Lennon was after that bluesy edge.
And maybe that's where that came from.
But they never talk about those really interesting, nitty-gritty musical fact.
Probably because they don't realize what they are, of course.
And I'm pretty sure a lot of that was just purely accidental.
Oh, yeah, that sounds good.
Because we'll keep it.
Yeah, but they had that inquisitiveness to go looking for it.
They wanted everything to be different all the time.
They never wanted something to sound just like...
A key part of that would be, as you say, Alan, that they had no formal musical
education.
And they'd grown up through the British school system in the 1950s,
where music lessons at school were very strictly classical and dead boring.
Because I actually had those kind of lessons myself, and people did it as well.
And, I mean, that's a way to kill the interest in music for someone.
And I would, you know, inspire.
It's great to hear that.
John joked about when William Mann wrote his piece at the end of 1963 about the
Aeolian cadences and the...
And the diatonic clusters.
And diatonic clusters.
Lennon said, Aeolian cadences, that sounds like some kind of exotic bird.
That's all they wanted to know.
Although that was an extraordinary piece in itself.
The Beatles' own way of handling it was to pick on its vocabulary.
And make light of it.
And, you know, they just thought it was a great joke.
But, actually, it was a tremendous honour.
When you really look at it now, from a period of 50 years on,
that in the Times newspaper, the classical music columnist,
who wrote a column for musicians.
It wasn't for general readership, but it was for musicians.
For him to say, in 1963, that two untutored guys from Liverpool, England,
pop guys, were the outstanding composers of the year,
was an extraordinarily bold statement.
And they were embarrassed by it.
But, I mean, looking back on it, you have to say that William Mann,
who wrote it, was really ahead of his time in spotting how good their songs
were.
And if you consider the British classical composers who were still alive at the
time,
Benjamin Brinkley, for starters, you know,
I wonder what he thought of that.
Yeah, I can't imagine.
That's the name that came in my mind.
Bruce, it's very, very big.
For this new book of mine, I actually tracked down a guy who...
Paul McCartney had music lessons, piano lessons, in 1958.
So he's already playing with John, and now he's going off for music lessons,
at his dad's suggestion.
And he went for these lessons, and the teacher, who was a young guy,
but already qualified, and he could tell that Paul was racing ahead.
He didn't want to be bogged down with detail.
He didn't actually want to know the dots.
He just wanted to know...
He wanted to have the music written out in, like, chord symbols,
like it would be for a guitar.
And there were about five lessons, and then Paul gave it up,
and went off to become, you know, one of the greatest musicians of all time,
without actually having had a proper education.
Do you think it would have hampered him if he had actually learned?
Yes.
For me, absolutely.
It was that, not knowing what's going on,
allowed them to try things that...
I always have this thing about other engineers,
that there are some that came from a technical background.
I came from the complete opposite, at EMI.
You were trained not to be an electronics wizard.
They just wanted you interested in the sound.
And there are too many engineers that won't do something,
because, well, if I turn that up that much,
it's going to overload capacity to C1,
which will cause harmonic distortion on the film.
If it sounds good, do it.
That's how come they got the distortion,
the revolution on the album.
It was overloading the desk.
That's what we used to use to record them.
If they'd known what was going on,
they would never have done that.
It was just, let's try it.
And that's what they were about all the time,
trying everything.
The byword for the Beatles really is to resist anybody telling you that you can't
do it.
If anyone said, you can't do that,
then they would say, well, we will do that.
That was their attitude.
And through that came so much,
because they just broke every rule.
That's exactly the way McCartney says he came up with the additions he made to
George Martin's arrangement for the yesterday string quartet.
He wanted to hear the cello play at E flat at one point.
And Martin said, no, Bach would never do that.
And McCartney said, well, we're doing it then.
And that same effect comes up in Penny Lane right after the Bach trumpet.
And the same effect comes in Blackbird,
which McCartney says he started as a Bach piece on the guitar.
Yes, that's right.
So it's like McCartney having to get his own voice in there.
Don't say it's Bach, it's McCartney.
Can you, at many of these recording sessions,
obviously you had a job to do as well,
but still you were around the guys when it was happening, we were not.
What was it like to be in that environment
where so much creativity was taking place?
It's what happened every day.
At the time, it was nothing special.
We never realised that 40, 50 years on, we'd still be talking about it.
And we'd forgotten most of it.
That's the problem, because it was so unimportant to us at the time.
There's something I've been asked about a lot.
Is I was the engineer when Clapton came in to play the guitar,
so I don't want my guitar jelly wheat.
I don't remember a thing about it.
So for my book, I actually tried to do the therapy to basically remember the
sessions.
Of course it didn't work.
So myself and my co-writer went and spoke to Chris Banks,
who was George Martin's assistant and was actually producing those sessions.
And John Smith, who was my second engineer at the time, I don't remember it
either.
It wasn't special.
It's only in looking back and becoming history become special.
But all the same, I understand all that completely.
In fact, several of your colleagues told me that they really didn't want to
work on Beatles sessions,
because these sessions would drag on for hours.
The Beatles tend to record a night, and most of them had families or whatever,
and they didn't want to be working all through the night.
So they would be assigned the Beatles and go,
Oh, no, not the Beatles.
Somebody else.
Well, hence, the two engineers being, new engineers being put on their sessions.
Before me was Jeff Amrick.
Well, he'd been an engineer for six months before being put on their sessions.
And it was because the older guys wouldn't touch them with a barge pole.
And then when Jeff got fed up working with them, I was sat behind the board.
The first session I ever did behind the board and pushing up the failures was,
your mother should know.
And I had no idea what the hell I was doing.
I had never done it before.
So my whole training, my whole learning process was,
we're t