Geoff Emerick, the Beatles
chief recording engineer who worked on some of the band’s most seminal
albums, has died according to his manager William Zabaleta. He was 72 and
believed to have suffered a heart attack.
Said Zabaleta in a statement to
Variety: “Today at around 2’o’clock, I was making my way back from Arizona
to Los Angeles to pick up Geoff so we could transport some gold records
and platinum plaques to our show in Tucson. While on the phone, he had
complications and dropped the phone. I called 911, but by the time they
got there, it was too late. Geoff suffered from heart problems for a long
time and had a pacemaker. … When it’s your time it’s your time. We lost
a legend and a best friend to me and a mentor.”
Emerick, born Dec. 5, 1945, began
working as an assistant engineer at Abbey Road at just 15 years-old and,
just a few months months in, was face-to-face with John Lennon, Paul McCartney,
George Harrison and Ringo Starr in the London studio. He apprenticed and
later worked on such early Beatles’ recordings as “Love Me Do”, “I Want
To Hold Your Hand,” “She Loves You,” and “A Hard Day’s Night.” Later becoming
the band’s chief engineer, he helmed “Revolver,” “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely
Hearts Club Band,” “The White Album” and “Abbey Road” as well as the dual-sided
single “Penny Lane”/”Strawberry Fields Forever.”
Other than George Martin, Emerick
was the behind-the-scenes brains that helped shape the Beatles sound. When
John Lennon asked Emerick to make him sound like “the Dalai Lama singing
on a mountain” for “Tomorrow Never Knows” on “Revolver,” one of the effects
Emerick used was to put Lennon’s voice through a spinning Leslie speaker.
As Andy Babiuk describes in the book “Beatles Gear,” Emerick’s “open-minded
approach and willingness to ignore standard recording practices and techniques
when necessary was exactly what the group was looking for.”
Speaking to Variety in July 2017,
Emerick cited “A Day in the Life” as a high point of his time with the
Beatles. “The night we put the orchestra on it, the whole world went from
black and white to color,” he said.
Emerick was a Grammy Award winner
for his work on “Sgt. Pepper’s” and “Abbey Road” as well as Paul McCartney
and Wings’ “Band on the Run.” He is credited on albums by Elvis Costello
(“Imperial Bedroom”), Badfinger, Supertramp, Cheap Trick and America, among
many others. In 2006, he released the book “Here, There and Everywhere:
My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles.”
Emerick had many upcoming appearances
scheduled, including one on Saturday in Tuscon under the banner Geoff Emerick’s
London Revival, where he was due to talk about his work with the Beatles.
He was also to be one of several Beatles experts at The White Album International
Symposium scheduled for Nov. 8 to 11 at Monmouth University in New Jersey
to honor the 50th anniversary of the release of “The White Album,” which
is being reissued as a box set with outtakes and a new 2018 mix.
Denny Laine, who was a member of
Paul McCartney and Wings, tweeted upon hearing the news: “Geoff was a brilliant
engineer and a fine man.”
~ October 2, 2018
