Tuesday, June 12, 2007

O No!


Maybe you already knew this, but right as the Beatles convened to start laying down what would become Abbey Road, John and Yoko were in a pretty serious car accident in Scotland and were laid up for a week while the rest of the band started work on the record. Eventually, John showed up, with Yoko close behind, as she had already begun by this time her habit of sitting (mostly silently) in the studio while the boys made records.

This time, after John was warmly welcomed back, he was followed by a troupe of deliverymen, carrying a bed that they set up in a corner of the EMI studio. And Yoko proceeded to plop herself in there, then and every day thereafter, clad only in a nightgown and occasionally a tiara, while her husband went to work.

In his marvelous book Here, There and Everywhere, studio engineer Geoff Emerick talks about how the individual Beatles would never share their food with other people in the studio -- not the staff, and not even each other. They each were fed what they wanted to be fed, and no one else got any. One day George Harrison had left a packet of cookies on the top of his amp when the band came into the control room to listen to playbacks of the song "The End." Suddenly, Harrison began staring agape at the floor of the studio, where Yoko had lurched out of bed and shuffled across the room, heading straight for George's amp. She took one cookie out of the wrapper and was popping it into her mouth when George screamed out, "That b#$%@! She's just taken one of my biscuits!"

Of course, since the Beatles were locked away in the control room, Yoko didn't hear a thing, and happily consumed the rest of the cookie.

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