2023-12-26 08:30:24
Lennon’s third demo, “Now and Then”, however, remained unfinished. After recording a first rough backing track on March 20 and 21, 1994, George Harrison threw in the towel. It is now released under the name The Beatles.
On the last surprise signed The Beatles, one man played a decisive role: Mal Evans. While working on Get Back, director Peter Jackson, with the help of his New Zealand production team, developed technology to teach a computer to reproduce the sound of a guitar, drums or in a given human voice. This allowed him, from a recording, to isolate each element and highlight it.
The system was named MAL (Machine-Assisted Learning), in reference to HAL 9000, the neurotic on-board computer from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Stanley Kubrick, and to the legendary assistant of the Beatles. And MAL was indeed as indispensable to Jackson and Giles Martin, responsible, in the little Beatles family, for adapting the group’s work to the listening habits of new generations, as Mal Evans was for the production of the original recordings. Through MAL, Martin was able to strip away every voice and instrument from the mono recordings of Revolver’s session work and create a stereo remix of the album. And MAL also helped Paul McCartney finish the last of the Beatles’ songs.
He had been working on it since 1994. In January, when he gave the eulogy speech to celebrate John Lennon’s entry into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, McCartney met Yoko Ono, who gave him some cassettes with demos unreleased songs by her husband dating from 1977. These were to serve as the basis for “new” Beatles songs, with the aim of adding an unreleased song to each of the three albums accompanying the Anthology retrospective. The idea of calling on Jeff Lynne, head of the Electric Light Orchestra and Harrison’s accomplice, was certainly a peace offering to his old friend George, from whom he had become estranged.
Unlike him, Harrison was very happy to no longer be a Beatles, and had only said yes to the Anthology because he needed the money following losing a lot of it with his film production company, HandMade Films. And Lynne was indeed the man for the job, at least for the DIY job. He managed to integrate the mono recordings of two Lennon songs, “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love”, on which the vocals and keyboards were not dissociable, with the backing tracks recorded separately by Starr, Harrison and McCartney ( which the press of the time derisively called the “Threetles”), incorporating a newly composed bridge. In terms of sound aesthetics, however, the result was more like the Electric Light Orchestra or the Traveling Wilburys than the Beatles.
Lennon’s third demo, “Now and Then”, however, remained unfinished. After recording a rough first backing track on March 20 and 21, 1994 at McCartney’s Hogg Hill Mill Studios, southeast of London, George Harrison threw in the towel. It became clear that Lynne had technically reached the end of what he might do and that it took more than a few harmonies, guitars and rhythms to make this demo a good song. The latest albumAnthology was therefore deprived of a new Beatles song.
In the documentary Mr. Blue Sky, McCartney later stated that one day he would slip into the studio with Lynne and finish the song. He had a mischievous laugh while telling this, as if it were a gag. But behind it, there was something deeper: when John Lennon and Paul McCartney saw each other in person for the last time, in 1976 or 1977 (they continued to call each other followingward to give each other news of their children and bread recipes), it was in the hallway of Lennon’s residence, at the Dakota Building, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, at the end of a harmonious evening. As they were leaving, the master of the house patted Paul on the shoulder and said to him: “Think regarding me every now and then, old friend.”
Maïk Bruggemeyer
Find this article on “Now and Then” from The Beatles in full in our issue 158, available on newsstands and via our online store.
1703583788
#Beatles #making
