Welcome To the Machine

Ask twenty people which popular music group or solo performer of the past fifty years was the most innovative artiste after the Beatles broke up, and you're likely to get as many different answers.  Which makes sense, since the various forms of pop that the Beatles brought together have become fragmented ever since they split - not unlike American politics, in fact.  But most people will undoubtedly agree that the most important player in pop since the Beatles is not a who but a what - the synthesizer, which Beatles author Mark Lewisohn said revolutionized music as much as the Beatles themselves had done.  As fate would have it, the synthesizer's rise coincided with the Beatles' last hurrah; the Abbey Road sessions would make productive use of this strange, new electronic apparatus, which proved to be as much a machine as an instrument. 

Some of the earliest synthesizers were developed by one Robert Moog, an American inventor with a fascination for electronics who had learned to play the piano as a boy.  They were quite large and relied on a lot of wiring.  Coincidentally, the NASA space program in the United States would facilitate the development of microchips that would make synthesizers more accessible.  But in 1969, the year of Apollo 11, the synthesizer was very much an exclusive, expensive item.   

The Beatles didn't see anything particularly scary in the synthesizer.  To them, it was just another instrument, and it furthered their own interest in electronic music. George Harrison, who got a two-tiered-keyboard Moog for himself, even released a whole album of synthesizer experiments, Electronic Sound, in 1969 after Bernie Krause of the experimental-music duo Beaver and Krause introduced George to the instrument while George was in Los Angeles producing an album for Jackie Lomax.  There are only two tracks on Electronic Sound - "Under the Mersey Wall," which takes up side one, and "No Time or Space," which takes up side two.  Krause later said that he played "No Time or Space" as a demonstration for George based on ideas for his next album with partner Paul Beaver and claimed that George had recorded and used it without his knowledge.  George did give a credit to Krause on the front cover - which featured a painting by George of Krause himself - but as Krause had not intended to let George use it on his own LP, his credit was painted over.  Most Beatles fans overlooked the controversy, as they also overlooked the album; released on the Beatles' short-lived experimental Zapple label, it only reached number 191 on the Billboard album chart.   

Reviews of Electronic Sound were surprisingly divided, with many critics wondering why the hell George was playing with rather than playing this keyboard instrument and other critics praising him for creating interesting backwashes that show him to be a quick study with the Moog.  Having heard it, I would suggest that the truth lies somewhere in between, but unless you're really into electronic music, you'll likely find it to be a waste of time. 

George brought his synthesizer to EMI Studios during the Abbey Road sessions, and Paul McCartney, the leading proponent of electronic music in the Beatles, quickly gravitated to it, and so did John Lennon and Ringo Starr.  Rock musician Alan Parsons, in 1969 a tape operator at EMI Studios, recalled that everyone in the studio complex was fascinated by the contraption, and that all four Beatles tried various experiments with it before figuring out how to put it to use.  And they put it to extraordinary use, employing synth lines with incredible subtlety and using it in different ways.  John's synthesizer overdub on his song "Because" made the song more majestic and his use of the Moog for "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" produced a great deal of intensity, while George's synth overdub on "Here Comes the Sun" produced a bright, warm ambiance, and you already know about Paul's synthesizer lines on "Maxwell's Silver Hammer."

But here's something you may not have known.  Paul didn't use the keyboard of the Moog to play the lines on "Maxwell's Silver Hammer," choosing instead to pick out the notes on the ribbon that the keys struck by running his finger along it.  Parsons has said that Paul's ability to find the notes is a testament to his expertise with any instrument.

The Beatles may have seen the synthesizer as a device to supplement traditional musical instruments, but for many artists, over time, it would become a substitute for them.  It was not clear at first that this was going to be the case.  Stevie Wonder and the Who's Pete Townshend both used synthesizers judiciously and to great effect, as would Paul McCartney on his solo and Wings albums, and Family's Poli Palmer would show similar restraint with his synthesizer on that band's Fearless and Bandstand albums from the early seventies.  But for every rock and soul musician who restrained themselves on the synthesizer, there would be a Keith Emerson who'd go so overboard with it, he'd need a life raft to be brought back on stage.  When the microchip democratized the synthesizer, it was only a matter of time before numerous pop acts that arose out of the post-punk pop scene would increasingly rely on these new computerized keyboards.  The Human League opened the floodgates with their 1982 hit "Don't You Want Me," a song where every sound - even the percussion - was electronic.  Many of the hit songs from the 1980s were primarily electronic; if there was a traditional instrument involved at all, it sounded like an afterthought.  It got even worse as synthesizers became more and more able to reproduce the sounds of regular instruments, something the Mellotron keyboard, a forerunner to the synthesizer and an instrument periodically used on Beatles records, was capable of doing, though it proved not to be the threat to traditional instruments that the synthesizer became.

Today, we've gotten to the point where most pop performers - especially rappers - keep trying to get every possible note out of a computer program, and old-fashioned  instruments that require hours of practice to master are increasingly falling by the wayside.  When electronic music was in the hands of the Beatles, or even, later, an intelligent experimentalist like Britain's Thomas Dolby, there were still enough aspiring guitarists and gainfully employed piano teachers to keep tradition alive. Now you don't even need to play a keyboard.

We need to go back a time to when the synthesizer was the servant and not the master.  But short of another Beatles, don't bet on it.