By ROB SHEFFIELD -an excerpt from Rolling Stone article- you can read the full version here
Geoff Emerick was just a lad of 19 when he became the Beatles’ engineer, bringing his own brash approach to the experimentation the band was beginning to try in the studio.
“He brought a new kind of mind to the recordings, always suggesting sonic ideas, different kinds of reverb, what we could do with the voices. He was quite prepared to break rules. bosses at EMI didn’t like it,” Martin says. “He got severely reprimanded when they found him putting a microphone in a pail of water to see what the effect was. (which you'll find in Octopusse's Garden)
The primal boom in Ringo’s drums, the massive thump everyone else went mad trying to copy? A wool sweater, which Emerick stuffed into the drum during the sessions for “Tomorrow Never Knows.”
the band, who quickly came to depend on the wizardry of their teenage engineer, who they lovingly called “Ernie” or “Emeroids.” Whereas Paul might say, ‘This song needs brass and timpani,’ John’s direction might be more like ‘Give me the feel of James Dean gunning his motorcycle down a highway.
At another session, John presented Emerick and Martin with an impossible task: edit two different versions of “Strawberry Fields Forever” into one song. As Martin tried to explain why it couldn’t be done, John walked out with the simple words: “You can do it.” His faith was well-placed. After hearing Emerick’s delicate tape splice, John crowed, “Good on yer, Geoffrey!” As McCartney sang on Revolver, this kid had “another kind of mind there.”
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McCartney wooed him back for Abbey Road, a much mellower experience. “Quite muted,” Emerick recalled. “Everyone seemed to be walking on eggshells, trying not to offend.”
As McCartney put it later, “It was nice to return home, to something we knew and understood: George Martin, Abbey Road Studios, songs done quite quickly … not too much heavy breathing.”
The band joked about calling the album Everest, after the cigarette brand Emerick smoked in the studio. (“His ciggies were just lying on the control room desk, and we went, ‘What about that? Everest!’) They even bantered about traveling to Mount Everest to shoot the cover photo, until they contemplated the prospect of having to spend that much time together. Finally, Ringo said, “Fuck it; let’s just step outside and name it Abbey Road.”
