Brian Kehew: The Beatles Archivist Preserving Rock’s Lost Recordings | The Magnificent Others

The Magnificent Others with Billy Corgan

Billy Corgan interviews Brian Kehew, Beatles archivist and co-author of 'Recording the Beatles,' diving into the technical magic behind rock

Key takeaways

• The Beatles pushed EMI engineers to invent new sounds, with George Martin playing a crucial role in shaping their sonic identity.
• Vintage equipment like mixing boards and tape machines had unique character due to hand-built craftsmanship and lack of standardized manufacturing.

Main topics

• Vintage recording equipment and studio history
• The Beatles' innovative use of EMI studios and engineering

Notable quotes

"When you put stuff through [old boards], it does sound better than anything else."

Conclusion

Brian Kehew reflects on the enduring legacy of analog recording, the importance of

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) Don't worry about what other people think. Yeah. What other people think is fashion or what other people think is the cool music... Yeah. Speaker 2 (0:08) ...is very important. I feel like we should do like some sort of warning, like this may get really into nerd territory since we both love our gear. When you play with something older, it has character. Synthesis is the only way you can have sound without environmental affectation. The new thing's coming out. didn't sound so good to me and I trusted my ears. I heard your name 500 times before I ever actually talked to you. Speaker 3 (0:33) It's true and Speaker 2 (0:34) it's not true. Speaker 2 (0:38) Brian Kihu, thank you for being here. Thank you. I feel like we should do like some sort of warning, like this may get really into nerd territory since we both love our gear. I try not to. Speaker 3 (0:50) It's one of those tendencies where you have to, it's like sports people. When they get together, it starts to amplify to a point where normal humans don't like it. Speaker 2 (0:58) Yeah, well, in full disclosure, I've always admired you from afar because you kind of have like the dream job I would love to do if I wasn't doing what I do. So I'm very envious of the worlds that you go into. So hopefully that will come across in the interview. I wanted to start with something funny. Oh, so 1992, Chris Cornell of Soundgarden with Cameron Crowe arranges us for to be in the movie Singles with a song. We send the demo of the song Drown. Great. We're going to record, but the band's constantly on tour. So we get booked into Lenny Kravitz's studio in New Jersey. With Hank, I can't remember Hank's last name. Henry, yeah. Henry. Speaker 3 (1:35) Yeah. Speaker 2 (1:36) Henry was there. Lenny wasn't. But I remember going to the studio somewhere in the haze of our touring in 1992, and I'm walking down the hall, and I see the Red 37. And I'm like, is that the... It was just like laying in the hall, you know what I mean? And I thought, that was the first time I had this conscious thought of like, wow, you could own that stuff? So that is Red 37, Speaker 3 (1:59) R-E-D-D, is a... Technical name. That's the number of the Beatles, one of the Beatles mixing boards. Yeah. Right, from the Speaker 2 (2:07) 60s. Now, that particular board would have been involved, like, is it, it's the... Early Beatles. Oh, it's more early, yeah. Yeah, first two years, let's say. Right. So I just remember thinking, like, and I took a picture of it, which I still have, and I was like, how do you arrange to own this historic year? Shouldn't this be in a museum somewhere? Yeah. Or, so, and now that board's for sale. It seems no one's willing to pay the price. Speaker 3 (2:32) It's hard to say what those things are worth because once something like a pencil loses its intrinsic value of what it can do for you, maybe because George Washington owned this axe or whatever, Jimi Hendrix's guitar, then there is no value to it. And so... Are you not Speaker 2 (2:48) sentimental about that type of stuff? Oh, yeah. Speaker 3 (2:50) I Speaker 2 (2:50) just bought Speaker 3 (2:51) some Beatles gear last week. Can you tell me? Original... tape recorder from Abbey Road. Okay. It may not be a main Beatles thing, but it was an Abbey Road four-track. Speaker 2 (3:00) Oh, it's a four-track, yeah. Speaker 3 (3:01) Yeah. And I do use tape machines all the time, so that has some function for me. So I try to stick with things like that that I like, but if you or I found a incense stick from, you know, the White Album Sessions, we would want to put it on a shelf and show it off. Speaker 2 (3:18) Yeah. But is that a board you would want to own? I call it the Lenny board. Speaker 3 (3:22) Yeah, but I'm kind of grounded and realist about these things. For example, that board has very strange levels and can only put out a couple channels at a time. What would you or I use it for? Speaker 2 (3:34) I see. Speaker 3 (3:35) That being said, we've done some work at Abbey Road and they have older boards. And when you put stuff through them, it does sound better than anything else. Speaker 2 (3:42) Really? Yeah. You think it was the hand sort of manufacturing that they did? Because back then, there weren't manufacturers the way we think of them today. Like, it was all done at EMI, right? Yeah, Speaker 3 (3:52) it's not a secret, but one of the things people don't think about was 50s and 60s recording was still new. So you couldn't just grab a catalog from most companies and buy something. So at Ivy Road, for example, they were making their own tape machines. They made their own mixing boards. And so that's the way it worked in those days. You had to go. design something for your needs. It was cool. Speaker 2 (4:14) I have the infamous Recording the Beatles book that you and Kevin Ryan did. Speaker 3 (4:19) Yeah. Speaker 2 (4:21) So my understanding is, but please correct me, is it just started as kind of a personal passion project where you just started kind of trying to figure stuff out? Can you illuminate me on that? Speaker 3 (4:30) Yeah, Kevin and I, in fact, Kevin should be sitting here every time we talk about these things because he does so much work with me. We are true partners in that, but we started out. Speaker 3 (4:41) independently, producer-engineer people making music, and he had the idea to make a book about the tech side of the Beatles. How did they make drum sounds? How did they mix tracks and things? And I had the same idea. He was in Texas. I was in California. We hadn't met for quite a few years. And then finally somebody introduced us. And it's a great lesson in humility, but also better in partnership and that working with the right people makes you so much better. Speaker 1 (5:08) So Speaker 3 (5:08) it's not that two of us is twice as good. It's like eight times better when Speaker 2 (5:12) we work together. Yeah. Cause, um, Because I bought the book when it immediately came out. If people don't know, I recommend it because it's such an insight into one of the great sort of recording periods of all time, not just the Beatles. But as you know, because you're... studio guy like me, it's like we would sit around and think, how did they get that sound? And there really wasn't like, there was kind of, there was always colloquial talk like, you know, the bass sound on Rain by the Beatles and how they used a speaker and, you know, but you would hear these things, but there was no like, there was no good go-to resource like this is actually how they did it. Speaker 3 (5:49) There were no recording magazines back then. We're used to these things existing now. There was no, certainly no websites and things, but. The making of movies, the making of recordings was a mystery. So we had to go do primary research, which I guess seems to be rare, although people, we found a lot of people make a phone call or two and then put out a story or a book. But we decided to take the long road, get to know people. We're still friends with most of them that are around and hundreds of contacts. And we go deeper and deeper. And what so-and-so says, we feed it to them, and they change it and adjust it, and we feed it back. And it gets you closer to the truth, if there is a truth. But in the case of more technical things, there's pretty close to a truth a lot. When the Speaker 2 (6:32) book came out, I was surprised that there had never been that book. I mean, there had been sort of similar things, like, I guess, anecdotal stories, but nothing that was comprehensive. This was the reason the book was made, Kevin Speaker 3 (6:45) and myself. are the perfect people that wanted that book. Oh, Speaker 2 (6:49) I wanted it too, Speaker 3 (6:51) yeah. We're the same cloth. And most people that work, I realized at least once a week we would mention the Beatles. Somebody would say, oh, how did the Beatles do this or that? And it was kind of a mystery. They also lived in that world of EMI Studios, which was the original name of Abbey Road. They had their own equipment. So when you see them with a tape machine, we have no reference point for what that is. So it seems even more mysterious, even if it is a tape machine or a microphone. Speaker 2 (7:16) Yeah. Yeah. Speaker 2 (7:20) This occurred to me when I got the book. It's like, because the book is chock full of like, now this might seem super nerdy, but I was totally geeking out. There's like actual pictures of the sessions, but it's not of the band standing there with their gear. It's just like, here's the micing for a certain kit. Here's the way the studio looked. Like all these behind the scenes photos that had never been seen by, I think, by anybody that I'd ever seen. Speaker 3 (7:40) We have a theory that every picture of the Beatles recording, we own it. I mean, at least I have a copy of it. Thousands and thousands. And so. When we found photographers, which was another way to research it, there's 36 shots on a roll of film, if you will. And they'd have two or three good shots where their faces are bright and there's a good pose with a guitar. And we're like, no, we want to see the other shot. When you were shooting sideways in the corner and it shows the Mellotron next to the microphone and something procedural that we didn't have. So all the cool pictures of the Beatles jumping on the steps and stuff. not useful to us, but all these cool pictures that we found for the book. Speaker 2 (8:17) Yeah. You Speaker 3 (8:18) know, here's George and Paul and there's like five instruments sitting around them. Amazing for what we wanted. Yeah. And there is more coming. Speaker 2 (8:25) Really? Oh, yeah. Hold that thought for a second. But so, because it seems to me you just don't call up, you know, Abbey Road and say, hey, by the way, let us into your archives. Because, you know, the Beatles are probably the most exhaustively researched. musical subject in our lifetime, I cannot think of something that's more greatly explored. So I got to imagine there's a sort of a kind of a wariness there, a privacy wariness. I don't know. You're not some crazy fan. How did you get through the layers of bureaucracy there? Speaker 3 (8:55) I would like to think we were at least aware of that going into it because we rarely mentioned the B word when we talk to people. Yeah, no, it's true. We would say, I want to talk to you, an engineer person, about your days at Abbey Road EMI. In fact, we would say EMI because it was the more proper term. Oh, yeah. And who did you work with? We worked with the Shadows and Helen Shapiro. And I did some Beatles sessions. And then we'd start connecting with them. And they understood that we knew what they were talking about and the people in their world. So Kevin and I both developed a feel for. Our focus is the Beatles, of course. It's what we all care about. And for good reason. They're beyond amazing. But everything else also informed us what Freddie and the Dreamers might have caused something to happen in the Beatles world. So why wouldn't you want to know about it? I see. So going deep into it and not mentioning the B word was a very critical thing. Speaker 2 (9:48) What ignited your passion for recording? Were you a musician who kind of fell into recording? Speaker 3 (9:57) I have some early memories of like my parents having a little hi-fi system at home, a little stereo thing. And one of the speakers stopped working and I took a screwdriver and took it apart. And then there was one wire connected and one wire was loose. Connected it up and my mom said, how did you know how to do that? I didn't know, but I was fascinated by how it worked. Speaker 2 (10:16) And Speaker 3 (10:16) then what happens if you put your finger on the speaker? What happens if you put some paper over the speaker? Tin foil. And then one of those people that... just likes to mess around with sound as you probably do with, with everything, you know, guitars and pedals. And we all do. It's, uh, it's an art form to sculpt sound into different shapes and then put them together. Speaker 2 (10:36) Yeah. So speaking of the B word, what, what was your sort of point? Cause, uh, back to, I think our common language here is that, um, as a musician at some point you, at least in my, I mean, Even Ozzy talked about it. At some point, the Beatles become this kind of touchstone of understanding. It's a sort of a kind of a Rosetta Stone because of the width of the recording history and because of the common knowledge. You can basically walk in any studio in the world. And if you kind of speak Beatle language from a recording point of view, you can kind of find common ground. Right. So what was your what was your first kind of like? I'm not saying which. Beatles album or song did you love? What was the first time you thought, wow, I wonder how they did that as a recording unit or as a production unit? Speaker 3 (11:20) I even know where I was on the freeway when I heard Birthday from the White Album, great track. And they have this weird piano sound on there. And I thought, that is so weird. No one has a piano. It's a piano. It's an acoustic piano, but weird. Kind of weird filter sound. And I went, what the hell is that? And I had amps, I had pedals. I was working in music stores and I was like, I don't know what would do that. And it was driving me crazy. And there was no one to talk to. No one knew. There was Speaker 2 (11:52) no book. And Speaker 3 (11:52) so years later, this man named Ken Scott, who became a close personal and family friend of ours, who's one of the greatest recording producers. Speaker 2 (12:01) Also did Pipers at the Gates of Dawn. Many. Floyd. Yeah, of course. All the way up through Missing Persons even. Speaker 3 (12:08) Exactly. I asked Ken, you worked on that session, and he was really proud of saying, oh yeah, I took the piano track down into the room, put a Vox amp on the floor, and I went, oh, the mid-range boost, MRB is what it's called, and it's like a filter that boosts low, middle, and high frequencies, and he was musically playing the knob as they recorded it through the amp, and I was like, wow, there's my question answered. From the guy. Yeah, but now there's 10,000 more questions to do. But that was the moment when I thought, wouldn't that make a great book? I would buy it. Most people would want it, and it's never been talked about. Speaker 2 (12:45) Yeah. It's hard to quantify this question, even because I'm not a particularly technical person. Speaker 2 (12:59) Okay. What did they call in-house at Abbey Road, what we now know as Abbey Road, what did they call the department that made stuff? Was it an engineering department? Oh, Speaker 3 (13:08) the nickname was the Amp Room, which is kind of different. We don't think of Fender amps or Gibson amps. They were thinking of amplifiers, meaning rack-mounted boosters of signals, that kind of thing. But they were the tech guys, Speaker 2 (13:22) which in England they call a boffin. Okay. So those guys are there. Speaker 2 (13:29) At what point did they start actually making their own equipment in-house? Speaker 3 (13:33) It was kind of an ongoing thing because you're probably aware of how echo chambers work, and the Beatles had an echo chamber to use. Each of the studios there had an echo chamber. So before we have all these other possible ways to make that sound, they had taken the 1950s technology designed here in America of an empty room with a speaker in it and a mic to make sound bounce like when you sing in the bathroom. It's that kind of trick. And so they had echo chambers that they had built themselves. Those guys were doing it in the 50s, pre-Beatles. And even some of the pianos, like one of the pianos they wanted for a guy named Russ Conway, and he wanted the honky-tonk sound. So they were literally lacquering the hammers and detuning the strings. Let's make one of our pianos the weird out-of-tune piano. Speaker 2 (14:17) So Speaker 3 (14:17) the people that worked there were also creative, but in talking to them over and over again about this strange group, the Beatles, the Beatles were pushing them to be more creative. They said, we weren't even that adventurous, but they'd be like, put the drums in the corner, put the vocal in the corner, try these weird things, put a microphone under a glass of water. What does it sound like? And so things they wouldn't have thought of, the way the Beatles think was highly creative. So when Kevin and I do talks, we often say, you know, you can buy all that. tape machines and microphones the Beatles had, but you won't be them because your brain is not the Beatles. Where Speaker 2 (14:54) do you think that came from within the group? You know, they each had it. Speaker 3 (14:59) They all had a version of it. Maybe obviously John Lennon, who went to art school and years ago talking to Pete Townsend, who I know, who also went to art school, he told me, they don't teach you to paint in art school in England. Sid Barrett went to art school. These people went, it's not how to paint or how to be a sculptor. It's how to be an artist in the world. Speaker 2 (15:21) Yeah. It's Speaker 3 (15:22) how to be different than everybody who's stuck in a box. Speaker 2 (15:24) So Speaker 3 (15:25) they learned to think differently. Pete Townsend learned to smash instruments from there. Sid Barrett learned to do bizarre things with lights and sound there. They taught their artists to become those people and they really impacted the world. So Lennon certainly went to art school, but I think Paul was as creative in his own ways. Speaker 2 (15:46) Yeah. When I was doing some research to talk to you, my understanding is that one of the Beatles. recording consoles was missing, but now that's apparently not true. Do you know what I'm talking about? Was it the Revolver console? Well, Speaker 3 (16:00) I would say the main board that they used, no one has a clue about it. Right, that's what I'm saying. Speaker 2 (16:05) And I looked and it seemed to... I knew you would know. So there's one of these boards where it's just disappeared into the ethers. No one knows where it went, right? Speaker 3 (16:13) Doug Feiger, RIP, who was the leader of the NAC, became a good friend of mine in later years. He's also a massive Beatles nerd, one of the biggest. And he said, I bought that console. It was at Abbey Road. It was in a back room. I paid $5,000 for it, which I don't know what the exchange rate was, but it wasn't that much. And this is when the NAC is peaking early 80. And he said, I bought it, but the shipping was so much because it's heavy steel. It weighs more than a car in some cases. Shipping was so much, I just left it there. And then a year later, they said, somebody else wants it. Will you let it go? Sure, just give me my $5,000 back. So it sold to someone else and we never found it. But years ago, I was at... a great English studio called British Grove, which Mark Knopfler owns. And they record the Stones there and all kinds of great people. And I was visiting, interviewing one of their techs who is an ex-Abbey Road guy. And he got a phone call as I was sitting there. Oh, an old EMI board in Italy? Send me some pictures. And he sent me pictures of the identical board to the one at Abbey Road, but with one change. And I was like, it looks just like the board we've all been looking for from Sergeant Pepper from Revolver. and the white album, but it's not. It's from Italy. So EMI had studios all over the world, in Japan and in California with Capitol. And so that board turned up and I said, just buy it. It's the only one in the world at this point that is. So they have that identical brother-sister console is a British Grove. Speaker 2 (17:44) I heard about that. But again, to be redundant, no one knows where the actual... one called beetle board no i mean Speaker 3 (17:53) a lot of stuff is gone and that's just talking to people it's Speaker 2 (17:56) so crazy right you think it's got to be somewhere right Speaker 3 (17:59) we we probably uh fyi we talked about recording the beetles and kevin and i have taken it out of print almost 10 years ago to rebuild it meanwhile the price of the old ones went through the roof which is unintentional but we want to make it twice as big We have so much information, more photos, more stories, more stuff. It will probably be hopefully twice as good as far as detail and depth and accuracy. But one of our friends got us pictures of the auction they had there in the early 80s where they were selling off all the old equipment and the Mellotron. This hurts my heart. Time machine and a bank account is all you need, right? But in 1980, what could you have afforded? Yeah. Right? Almost anybody. And in England. It's not even current right now to like old equipment. They tend to be a more forward-thinking recording community. America loves the old stuff. But you can see in the pictures there, Beatles 4-track, Beatles 8-track, Beatles 4-track, the Mellotron from the White Album. The Mellotron went for 1,000 pounds to Mike Oldfield. Now McCartney has it. But, you know, they were selling the 4-track machines used on various Beatles records, some of them, for like 300, 400 pounds. And yet they were not that usable. 24-track was in. Sort of like buying an old Apple computer now. Who thinks of that? Who wants to do it? Speaker 1 (19:24) Whereas Speaker 3 (19:25) other things are very cool. But when I was growing up and into guitars and amps and things, if you wanted Fender and Gibson, you didn't want Dan Electro. You didn't want Silvertone. And now those are cool, you know? Speaker 2 (19:36) Yeah. This is kind of the cheesy, obvious question, but has anything really surprised you in this? process of pluming the recording archives and so something that really stuck out like Speaker 3 (19:49) Well, we like to see that the Beatles are greater than we thought they were. In other words, over and over again, they proved that they were pushing ahead, even at their own peril. I mean, I remember talking to one guy who said the Beatles were washed up after 64 because they had those great songs and they were tight and they were harmonic and they were beautiful and they were clean. And then they just started messing around. True in one way of looking at it. The Beatles are bulletproof up through 1964 and a half. I mean, some of the best. tight pop songs ever written, but that's not I Want You, She's So Heavy, which jams on and on at the end, which is a piece of art in a different way. Speaker 2 (20:30) No, the chances they took, I think, because they're so successful that people don't really understand that the chances were really monumental. You know what I mean? They were Speaker 1 (20:39) risking a Speaker 2 (20:40) lot more Speaker 1 (20:40) than Speaker 2 (20:41) just whether or not people were going to like what they were doing. They were the top pop group in the world. And if you compare it to a Taylor Swift or Olivia Rodrigo, you know, Imagine taking those mad leaps of aesthetics and sonics. Speaker 3 (20:56) There's very few people, I mean, you could say Bowie, but