The teenager who shaped the Beatles

Todd Leopold at CNN:

Storylifelyrics_1John Lennon had a new song. It was a droning, trippy affair with lyrics adapted from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and he knew exactly what he wanted.

“I want my voice to sound like the Dalai Lama chanting from a mountaintop,” he told Beatles producer George Martin as Martin’s new engineer, a 19-year-old handling his first Beatles session, listened in. It would be the engineer’s job to make Lennon’s wish come true.

Welcome to the world of the Beatles, Geoff Emerick.

Emerick managed to fulfill Lennon’s request (he ran the Beatle’s voice through a Leslie, an amp with two spinning speakers) on what became “Tomorrow Never Knows.” Over the next few years, he was Martin’s right-hand man for the majority of Beatles recordings, including “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and “Abbey Road.”

More here.