With producer George Martin and engineers Ken Scott and John Smith in tow, Lennon and McCartney crossfaded and edited the tracks, ensuring that the album, like Sgt. In order to create a sense of balance, they apportioned George's songs across all four sides. Their strategy distributed the heavier rock and roll tracks on side three, with the animal-oriented songs relegated to side two. As John later recalled, "Paul and I sat up putting the White Album in order until we were going crazy" ( All We Are Saying 55). Recorded between May and October 1968, the White Album's progress from text to art concluded on October 16th, when Lennon and Paul McCartney conducted a 24-hour session at EMI Studios in which they organized the songs in an effort to establish thematic unity. The group had seldom exhibited such a self-conscious and highly organized approach to their art. Yet for all of their geniality, the Esher Tapes were calculated rough drafts-coherent blueprints for the upcoming project. With its enthusiastic handclaps, ad-libs, and lighthearted harmonies, it makes for one of the Beatles' most convivial recordings. The band had rarely, if ever, sounded more uninhibited and free. With its splendid acoustic introduction, the demo for "Revolution" offers a perfect case in point. In contrast with their painstaking efforts in the studio, the Esher Tapes witness the Beatles working in unison and exalting in the pure joy of their music. During the last week of May, the bandmates gathered at Kinfauns, where George Harrison had fashioned a home recording studio, complete with an Ampex four-track reel-to-reel tape recorder.Īt Kinfauns, the Beatles compiled 23 demos in preparation for recording the songs that would eventually comprise the White Album. "We got our mantra, we sat in the mountains eating lousy vegetarian food, and writing all these songs. "The entire White Album was written in India," John Lennon later remarked. Begun in May 1968 at EMI's Abbey Road Studios, the album was a font of creative activity that rivals, if not supersedes, some of the most prolific moments of their career.
But at the same time, it was also their most determined, self-conscious effort. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), The White Album was decidedly more fragmentary and generically diverse. In contrast with the band's previous opus Sgt.
As the essayists in this special issue demonstrate, we are only just beginning to understand the LP's unique creative achievements. Originally loosed upon the world as The Beatles in November 1968, the so-called White Album is easily the most contentious and least understood masterwork among the band's unmatched artistic corpus. In many ways, the Beatles' ninth and longest studio album is their most enigmatic release.
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