Beatles Box Sets

Here, There, and Everywhere: My Life Recording The Beatles by Geoff Emerick and Howard Massey is probably my favorite book on The Beatles because it allows me to take such an intimate look at the recording of classic Beatles LPs like 1966′s Revolver, the first album that Emerick was lead recording engineer on.

The book isn’t entirely about recording The Beatles, it’s really a Geoff Emerick autobiography with an obvious focus on his time recording The Beatles, however if you think that that may make it less interesting, I really don’t think that is true. I actually think it helps make his stories about The Beatles seem more “real.” I also enjoyed his perspective on life in London at the 1960s. He had a keen interest in technology and reading his story about how he was interested in this new fangled technology called “stereo” I believe this was in the late ’50s was very cool.

This book gives a great look into The Beatles as musicians although not really in a music theory sort of way, if you’re interested in that – you should check out the two books that are called The Beatles as Musicians.

We get a glimpse of Paul working tirelessly to get his bass lines on Sgt. Pepper perfect and we see George improve his guitar playing abilities through the decade. Emerick was an essential part of the band’s sound during their most creative period in the mid ’60s. And that means he has really interesting stories on how some of the most unusual sounds that The Beatles got down on tape came to be.

He describes in great detail how George wrote the backwards guitar solo in “I’m Only Sleeping.” He also talks about how they got the distortion sound on the guitar on “Revolution.” All of these kind of details that may not be of too much interest to casual fans are extremely interesting to people like myself who like to record music.

It’s not all about the music though. He also describes in great detail what it was like to be in the studio with these guys. He describes their personalities in ways that makes them seem much more human. Overall he does make Paul come off sounding the best probably. Some may question his motives on that as he was closest to Paul of all of the Beatles and he ended up working on some of his solo albums but it’s more likely that Paul was the type of guy that most people would like most in a day to day sort of situation.