Dave Dexter, Capitol and the Beatles

In a thread on the Capitol Albums five years ago, I posted this quote from the pages of Dave Dexter's 1976 autobiography, 'Playback'...

When the Beatles started their second motion picture, Help!, I telephoned young Palmer in London. (Note to the readers here in the forum...he means Tony Palmer) Would there soon be a soundtrack album? He didn't know, he said. I eventually reached Martin, who not only produced records from the booth but sometimes helped sketch their arrangements and played piano on the background tracks behind vocals. Martin had a fast answer.

'No', he said. 'We plan no Help! album because the boys won't be featuring sufficient songs to fill an LP and it's a pity, really. United Artists doesn't have the American rights to the package as the did with A Hard Day's Night.'

So Capitol owned the rights to nothing.

We could issue the songs, of course, as singles. Yet there is a vast difference in two or three hit singles and an album that exceeds one million in sales. Several million dollars difference.

It took at least two months of writing, cabling, and telephoning to acquire two tape reels of the film's soundtrack scraps in my office. There MUST be a way to put together a full album of entertainment from a full-length movie, I told myself. And so I booked one of the two studios in the Tower's basement and, working late at night with one of the country's best sound engineers, John Krauss, we ran through each reel repeatedly on a big Ampex console.

I took notes, a pencil in one hand an a stopwatch in the other. I still have those notes. The indicate there were 36 segments in all, a majority of them brief musical effects and bridges composed by the movie's musical director, Ken Thorne. Much of the music was distorted electronically.

Nor did I have a synopsis of the picture. Someone in England advised me that the story pegged around Ringo's attempt to escape a murderous gang of Asiatic thugs, with the pursuit of the nosey drummer and his three pals encompassing scenes in the Bahamas, Austria, and England's Salisbury Plain. A ten-armed 'Goddess of Kaili' 40 feet tall figured in the plot.

So be it, whatever it was. Working around the seven original songs by Lennon and McCartney (Help!, The Night Before, You've Got To Hide Your Love Away, I Need You, Another Girl, Ticket To Ride, and You're Gonna Lose That Girl) by adventurous editing and by employing a number of mechanical tricks, I ended up with enough tracks to fill two 12-inch microgroove sides and justify the album's production as a 'complete original soundtrack' package.

There were snippets of music which I forced to repeat, like a motion picture loop. I even obliged to accept a dreadfully tired performance of the overture to the third act of Richard Wagner's 'Lohengrin' which the musical director Thorne had employed for the scenes shot high in the Austrian alps of Obertauren.

One batch of mish-mosh I entitled The Bitter End. Another mad, up-tempo passage I called The Chase. Two earlier hits, From Me To You and A Hard Day's Night, I spliced together from horrendously distorted tape fragments that sounded like rehearsal warmups and programmed them between the new tunes under the titles From Me To You Fantasy and Another Hard Day's Night. The bombastic Wagner bit I retitled In The Tyrol. On all makeshift selections I was careful to credit Thorne as sole composer.

Capitol, thanks to electronic skullduggery, had 12 tracks for an album. Livingston listened to the finished product the next morning in his Tower office. He was not enthusiastic.

'Is that', has asked, 'all there is?'

But he approved the product well aware of the demand for Beatles product. The last time I looked, sales of the bits-and-pieces Help! album in the United States alone totaled 1,500,000. Another million undoubtedly were sold in Canada, Mexico, and Central America.

So an album that might never have existed was responsible for a gross of more than $5 million. It is still selling today.

For the record, as much as I like the recordings as the Beatles intended they be heard, I love hearing 'She's A Woman' and 'I Feel Fine' awash in Duophonic glory. It reminds me of the Christmas in the mid-60's when my folks gave me a Playtape machine (Google it) with a few of the Beatles Playtape tapes with four cuts each on them. My favorite was the 'Beatles '65' tape with those tracks on it.

The American versions are the memory of Beatlemania here in the States. Those are the ones that stick in the mind of Americans who were there at the time. Those are the records that blew it open for the Beatles in America. What they released in Britain are the originals.

The great thing is that today, we can buy the memory and we can buy the original. And fanatics like myself have both.

 

Really?? Listening to it now on the Capitol Years, Vol. 1 and it's swimming in reverb.