Saturday, November 18, 2017

"The Ballad of John and Yoko" recording session.

Recorded in one day on April 14 1969 at EMI Studios (number 3). The session was originally a mixing session but both John and Paul attended the session and decided to record a new song by John describing his latest antics with Yoko.
George Martin produced and Geoff Emerick engineered (Mr. Emerick had not engineering a Beatles recording since July 1968 during the "White Album" sessions). It was said that George Harrison was busy shopping for a new home - moving out of Kinfauns in Esher; he would eventually move to Friar Park. Ringo was busy acting in the movie "The Magic Christian".
The original title for the song was "The Ballad Of John and Yoko (They're Gonna Crucify Me)" but the second half of the title was dropped for obvious reasons.
John played acoustic guitar and sang vocals/ Paul played drums. They played the song through eleven times and take ten was chosen for the commercial release.
Overdubs include Paul on bass, John on electric guitar twice. Once this was completed, Paul moved on to add some piano and then backing vocals. For percussion, John hit the back of his guitar and Paul shook some maracas. An eight hour session, all completed on eight tracks !! Only two Beatles and the beginning of an era: The song was mixed in stereo only; there are no true mono mixes, most so-called "mono" mixes are simply the stereo mix folded to one channnel.

2 comments:

  1. I wish all Beatle bloggers were this concise, great post.

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  2. This at a time when these two were not on the best of terms. What did you do yesterday afternoon? Wrote and recorded a hit song.

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