The Mellotron Group

 
""From the New York Times:

Norman Smith, Engineer for the Beatles, Dies at 85


By DOUGLAS SCHORZMAN
Published: March 7, 2008

Norman Smith, who was the lead recording engineer for every Beatles song
through 1965 and who as a producer helped usher in an era of psychedelic
rock when he discovered the band Pink Floyd, died Tuesday in East Sussex ,
England. He was 85.


The cause was cancer, his wife, Eileen, said. Mr. Smith, originally a
dance-hall and jazz musician, came to the recording business relatively
late, taking an entry-level job at EMI Recording Studios on Abbey Road in
London in 1959, when he was 36. But within a few years he played critical
roles for two of the biggest-selling bands in history.

Later, in the early 1970s, he had a moment in the spotlight himself, scoring
a Top 5 hit in the United States with his ³Oh Babe, What Would You Say,²
singing under the name Hurricane Smith.

Mr. Smith worked his way through the EMI hierarchy at a time when there was
a division between technical personnel and frontline engineers, who were
required to wear ties and jackets. (Reacting in part to this buttoned-down
style, the Beatles nicknamed him ³Normal.²) In his role, Mr. Smith was more
focused on capturing performances than on fiddling with tubes and wires.

³I was such an admirer of his musical prowess,² said Malcolm Addey, a
recording engineer and colleague of Mr. Smith¹s at EMI. ³He really knew it
inside out, as a player and arranger.²

Mr. Smith was the engineer on duty when the Beatles came into EMI studios
for their first sound test, in 1962. The relationship would become very
close, but it did not start so smoothly.

³First impressions of the group coming into the studio were not very great,
in point of fact,² Mr. Smith said in an interview in³Recording the Beatles,²
the definitive studio history of the group, by Brian Kehew and Kevin Ryan.
³I mean, ŒHere comes another scrappy group.¹ But I must say that I was taken
with their hairdos because we hadn¹t seen anything quite like them.²

Under the producer George Martin, it was Mr. Smith¹s role to choose the
equipment and techniques used to capture individual sounds in the studio and
then to weave them into a finished recording. In the Beatles¹ case, he
favored sounds that were more stark than those typically heard in the
ornamented and reverberation- drenched songs on popular radio.

³Norman thought the actual Beatles¹ sound, playing together in the room, was
great, and he wanted to preserve that,² Mr. Kehew said. ³And that was really
different from other records at the time.²

His approach made its mark on a remarkable stretch of hit songs from 1962
until early 1966. They included ³I Want to Hold Your Hand,² ³A Hard Day¹s
Night,² ³Help!² ³Day Tripper² and ³We Can Work It Out² ‹ all crisp and
energetic recordings that were increasingly experimental.

In the last full album he worked on with the Beatles, ³Rubber Soul,² in
1965, Mr. Smith helped the band members lay the groundwork for the
increasingly radical studio performances they would feature on later LPs
like ³Revolver² (1966) and ³Sgt. Pepper¹s Lonely Hearts Club Band² (1967).
One ³Rubber Soul² breakthrough was the use of a sitar on the song ³Norwegian
Wood.²

After Mr. Martin left EMI in 1966, Mr. Smith succeeded him as a senior
producer. He scouted and immediately signed the experimental group Pink
Floyd to a contract and produced its first two albums, ³Piper at the Gates
of Dawn² and ³Saucerful of Secrets,² both recognized as definitive works of
psychedelic rock. Mr. Smith also produced another art-rock band, the Pretty
Things.

Norman A. Smith was born on Feb. 22, 1923, and reared in Edmonton , North
London. He was trained as a glider pilot in the Royal Air Force during World
War II but did not see combat. Afterward, he worked day jobs and formed a
band, the Bobby Arnold Quintet, in which he played mostly drums and vibes
and performed in local clubs and dance halls, a practice he continued in his
early years at EMI, Mr. Addey said.

At age 50, Mr. Smith embarked on a solo singing career, taking the stage
name Hurricane from a movie title. His hit, ³Oh Babe, What Would You Say,²
was a song he had written and hoped to sell but ended up recording himself
at the urging of a producer, Mr. Addey said.

Besides his wife of 62 years, Mr. Smith is survived by his son, Nick, also a
recording engineer; his daughter, Dee Smith, a dancer and dance instructor;
and a grandson.

Toward the end of his life, Mr. Smith was gratified to be getting attention
from new generations of Beatles fans, Mrs. Smith said. Mr. Kehew traced much
of this renewed attention to a fascination with ³the scene behind the making
of the record.²

³The record itself has become more important than, say, the Maharishi or
dogs or wives,² Mr. Kehew said. ³And the people behind the scenes had almost
as much a hand in creating those sounds as the Beatles themselves.²""