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Tuesday, February 21, 2012

The Untold Story Behind "Hey Jude"

Below is an interesting video of The Beatles recording one of their biggest and most iconic songs - "Hey Jude." The video was shot for a BBC television show called most appropriately Music. Take note about 2:22 where you'll see engineer Ken Scott (in the fashionable pink shirt), George Harrison and producer George Martin together in Abbey Road (actually it was still called EMI Studios at the time) Studio 2.

The real story is that what you hear on the video was almost the basic track to the song, but not quite. The film company, doing what film people do ("Don't worry, you won't even know we're here"), put everyone on edge, causing Paul McCartney and George H. to get into a row (which is why George is in the control room instead of playing). The next day the band took what they thought was the basic track to Trident Studios because it was the only studio in London that had an 8 track tape machine at the time, and the band wanted the extra tracks for the various overdubs to come. It seems that they had a difficult time transferring what they did at Abbey Road to 8 track, so they wound up recutting "Hey Jude" again and then finishing it at Trident.

There's a lot more to the story, including how the song had to be saved at the last minute due to a giant problem, but you'll have to wait until Ken's memoirs are published. The book is titled Abbey Road To Ziggy Stardust and will be available for preorder soon (publish date is June 6th). In the meantime, you can  read a lot more about the book by going to the Abbey Road To Ziggy Stardust website.



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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Absolutely Amazing!

KenMac55 said...

That is one historic piece of film. Thank you for making it available.

Mike Sorensen said...

Hey Bobby,

This post was fantastic. Such a great story and footage. I love the fact that after all this time there are still what seems like weekly bits of new history revealed about the Beatles story.

I hope you don't mind but I posted on my blog about your story and pointed my readers your way so hopefully a few more eyes on this for you.

Keep up the great work.
Cheers
Mike

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