During the production of the album The Beatles (1968), also known as the White Album , the Beatles faced recording sessions filled with tension between band members, and the exhausting environment reached the technical team with the departure of Geoff Emerick , the band's sound engineer.
Emerick worked with the Liverpool quartet on Revolver (1968), Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), singles like "Paperback Writer" and returning on Abbey Road (1969), but it was on the White Album that he decided to leave the band.
In chaotic recording sessions, it was difficult for Geoff Emerick to manage what everyone was working on and wanted to record. The engineer would go to one room to watch Paul McCartney play and record " Martha My Dear ," then go to another room to see something completely different where John Lennon was testing various sounds on the experimental " Revolution 9. "
It was during Lennon's " Cry Baby Cry " that the guitarist went so far as to belittle Emerick, causing him to quit working on the album and with the Beatles.
An article in the British magazine Far Out revealed what the sound engineer said upon leaving the recording studio and what the atmosphere was like during the recording sessions (via Far Out ):
“I lost interest in the White Album because they were really arguing amongst themselves and cursing each other. I said to George Martin , ‘Look, I’ve had enough. I want to leave. I don’t want to know anything more.’ George said, ‘Well, leave at the end of the week’ – I think it was a Monday or Tuesday – but I said, ‘No, I want to leave now, this very minute.’ And that was it.”
Geoff Emerick's departure didn't seem to affect how the band was playing. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison , and Ringo Starr had just creatively drifted apart, and forcing them into the same room to play the same songs was as much creative torture for them as it had been for the engineer.
The White Album was indicative of the strain in the musical and personal relationship of the Liverpool quartet, which is reflected in a record that sounds more like individual solo albums by each member within a Beatles studio album.
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