16 | Rolling Stone | RollingStoneAus.com Ju ne, 2017
The Fab Four’s
Buried Treasures
The biggest revelations from the
never-heard recording sessions‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts
Club Band’
The first take of the theme song is a long,
raw Hendrix-style guitar jam, stretching
out at the end as McCartney rants, “I feel
it, oh, baby, I feel it, I feelfreeeeenow!”‘A Day in the Life’
The original ending, with the
Beatles humming that famous
final chord, before they decided
to do it with pianos instead.
“Have you got the note?” John
Lennon asks his bandmates.
“Stop freaking out!”‘Getting Better’
An aggressive take driven by
McCartney’s Wurlitzer keyboard.
Lennon gives him some advice: “Sing
it – you know, ‘I gotta admit’, and all that- properly.”
‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’
A take with Lennon leading on acoustic
guitar, while McCartney follows on
electric keyboard. Lennon’s raw-power
vocal is a worldaway from the ethereal
dreaminess of the final version.R&R
GETTY IMAGEST
he beatles have been noto-
riously cautious about digging
through their vaults – 1995’s
Anthology documentary project
took more than 25 years for the group to
approve and release, while fi lms like Let
It Be remain under wraps, even though
they would be guaranteed moneymak-
ers. Which is why it’s so surprising that,
50 years after the release of the band’s
most famous album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lone-
ly Hearts Club Band, the Beatles are issu-
ing a new box set featuring 34 never-heard
tracks from the sessions – the fi rst time
they have released unheard studio mate-
rial since Anthology.
Today, Giles Martin, the producer and
son of the late George Martin, sits at the
control board at Abbey Road’s Studio Two
in London, playing back some of the lost
treasures. The studio looks the same as it
did when the Beatles made the album here
in 1967 – even the same baffl es hang on
the wall. “Abbey Road is a bit like a salad
bowl or a teapot,” says Martin. “The walls
absorb music.” While there are no entirely
new songs – not even the mythical lost
1967 psychedelic jam “Carnival of Light”
(“It’s not really part of Pepper,” says Mar-
tin) – there are revelatory outtakes of every
song: a rocked-up “Fixing a Hole”, full of
R&B harpsichord; a version of “Within
You Without You” in which George Har-
rison gives his instructions to the Indian
musicians (“OK, the main thing is the tim-
ing”). Says Martin, “My dad said record-
ing George was like watching someone
make a carpet thread
by thread, thinking
about each bit.”
Martin says that talk
of the project began
after he remixed the
Beatles’ hits collection
1 in 2015. Encouraged
by those mixes (which
didn’t include any Sgt.
Pepper songs), Paul
McCartney and Ringo Starr agreed it was
time to give the same treatment to their
psychedelic masterpiece. Fans have always
complained about the diff use stereo mix of
the 39-minute original album; the mono
version was the one George Martin, en-
gineer Geoff Emerick and the band spent
weeks mixing, while the stereo version was
a rushed afterthought, without the group’sPEPPERLAND
At Abbey
Road, 1967involvement. The remix is full of nuances
any fan will notice, especially the bottom
end – Starr’s kick drum reveals new dimen-
sions. “There’s nothing new – this is the
album they made,” Martin says. “All we do
is peel back the layers of compression that
were necessary to release music in 1967. It’s
their album now. It’s just boys in a room,
making noise.”
The project is a tribute to the band and
George Martin, who passed away in early
2016 while the work was underway. “It was
emotional, hearing the old man’s voice in
the playbacks,” Martin says. “I’ve been
working for my dad since I was 15. As his
hearing started to fade, I became his ears.”
Asked if this box will heat up the demand
for similar treatments of other LPs, such as
Abbey Road , Martin winces: “Can I have
two weeks off fi rst?”
Even Apple Corps insiders seem sur-
prised the release came together so fast.
Martin started working on it in late 2015,
and McCartney, Starr, Olivia Harrison and
Yoko Ono had to approve it, right down to
the colour scheme of the packaging.
Martin says going back to Pepper was a
discovery for the band as well. He recalls
playing McCartney various outtakes of
“Within You Without You”. “I don’t know
how long it had been since he’d heard that
song – probably a long time,” he says. “Paul
closed his eyes, listened and said, ‘Hey,
George was really good!’ ”Beatles Open ‘Sgt. Pepper’ Vault
Inside the legendary album’s new 50th-anniversary box set,
featuring dozens of unreleased outtakesBY ROB SHEFFIELD