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Lot Essay
One of the more unassailably well-provenanced Beatles guitars to come to auction over the last forty years, John Lennon’s 1963 Gretsch 6120 Chet Atkins Hollow Body electric guitar was notably used and photographed during the Beatles’ ‘Paperback Writer’ session at EMI Studio Three in London on 14 April 1966, in the midst of an intensely creative period for the band as they recorded their most innovative album yet, Revolver, and began their transition to a more experimental, studio-based band.
Refreshed and re-energized after an unprecedented three-month break, the Beatles reconvened at Abbey Road on 6 April 1966 to begin work on what would become their seventh studio album Revolver. After devoting their first week of sessions to the near-completion of the album tracks ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, ‘Got To Get You Into My Life’ and the Indian inspired ‘Love You To’, the band bowed to pressure from EMI to deliver their next single and interrupted their album sessions to lay down the non-album single ‘Paperback Writer’ and its B-side ‘Rain’ on 13 and 14 April 1966. Primarily composed by Paul McCartney, ‘Paperback Writer’ was the first of Paul’s character songs written in response to his Auntie Lil’s request that he write about something other than love. I remember showing up at [John’s] house with the idea for ‘Paperback Writer’, McCartney recalled in The Beatles Anthology. Because I had a long drive to get there, I would often start thinking away and writing on my way out, and I developed the whole idea in the car. I came in, had my bowl of cornflakes, and said, ‘How’s about if we write a letter: “Dear Sir or Madam,” next line, next paragraph, etc? I wrote it all out and John said, ‘Yeah, that’s good.’ It just flowed.
After completing overdubs on Harrison’s ‘Love You To’ earlier in the day, the Beatles recorded the rhythm track to ‘Paperback Writer’ during an evening session at EMI’s Studio Three from 8pm to 2.30am on 13 April. In his 2007 memoir Here, There and Everywhere, Geoff Emerick, who had replaced Norman Smith as chief engineer to the Beatles mere weeks before the Revolver sessions, recalled McCartney running through the song on piano for the other Beatles that afternoon: Paul pounded out a catchy melody, instantly hummable, filled with memorable hooks… Each time he would come to the chorus, Paul would stop playing and gesture to John and George Harrison, pointing out the high harmony part he planned on assigning each. By the time he finished the first run-through, it was obvious to everyone in the room that this was an instant hit. According to Mark Lewisohn’s The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, the rhythm track was recorded in two takes and only one was complete. Over the years, there has been a lack of consensus among Beatles historians and musicologists as to whether Lennon or Harrison recorded the rhythm guitar part on ‘Paperback Writer’, however Brian Kehew and Kevin Ryan, who had unfettered access to both EMI’s archives and the studio’s ex-employees while researching their comprehensive 2006 reference book Recording the Beatles, report that it was Lennon: Track 1 was filled with nearly all of the song’s instrumental content. Paul played the main guitar part of the song, accompanied by John, also on guitar. Ringo played drums and George contributed tambourine… Paul’s lead vocal and John and George’s harmony vocals were then double tracked on Tracks 3 and 4. Likewise, in the official liner notes for the 2022 reissue of Revolver, Keith Howlett records that John contributed harmony vocal and rhythm guitar. Although there is no known photographic record from the 13 April session, Lennon’s documented use of the Gretsch 6120 when recording for ‘Paperback Writer’ continued into the following day strongly indicates that he had opted for this guitar from the outset. Producer George Martin observed in The Beatles Anthology that ‘Paperback Writer’ had a heavier sound than some earlier work, no doubt partly attributable to McCartney’s heavy Rickenbacker bass line, but perhaps also courtesy of the hollow-body Gretsch on the rhythm track.
When the Beatles regrouped at 2.30pm on 14 April to pick up where they had left off the night before on ‘Paperback Writer’, they were joined in Studio Three by Beatles Book photographer Leslie Bryce and his editor Sean O’Mahony (writing under the pseudonym Johnny Dean), who would print a detailed account of the session in the June 1966 issue of the magazine. As the Beatles were still recording on to four-track machines at this time, the afternoon’s session was devoted to filling the remaining Track 2 with Paul’s bass part and other various overdubbed contributions. O’Mahony described the scene on entering the studio: We found John and Paul surrounded by a mass of equipment – most significant of all, were their massive new amplifiers… John sported green velvet trousers, a blue buttoned up wool vest and black suede boots. The basic track of ‘Paperback Writer’ had been recorded the previous day, and now John and Paul were working out a detailed backing… the studio was littered with pianos, grand pianos, amplifiers, guitars, percussion instruments, and other odd bits and pieces which were strewn over the studio floor. McCartney explained to O’Mahony: “The trouble is… that we’ve done everything we can with four people, so it’s always a problem to ring the changes and make it sound different. That’s why we’ve got all these guitars and equipment here.” McCartney’s comments highlighted that experimentation, whether that be with new instruments, equipment or recording techniques, was an overriding feature of the Revolver sessions as the band continued to push boundaries with their music. Enabled by Emerick and the other innovative engineers at EMI, the Beatles made use of a whole host of pioneering technologies for the first time including artificial double tracking (ADT), varispeed, reverse audio, tape loops, and repeat echo.
Illustrating the group’s experimental approach to the recording, Lennon and Harrison were both pictured using instruments anomalous to their ordinary set-up during the 14 April ‘Paperback Writer’ session – Lennon with the Gretsch and Harrison with a Burns Nu-Sonic bass. Of the many photographs that Bryce captured of Lennon – in both black and white and color – using the never-before-seen Gretsch 6120 during this studio visit, shots include Lennon picking out chords on the hollow-body guitar, Lennon (with accompanying glass of wine) plugged into one of the band’s new prototype Vox 7120 amplifiers, and Lennon experimenting with a WEM-Rush Pep Box, one of the earliest fuzz pedals. The latter image showed the back of the guitar’s body, clearly displaying distinctive marks in the wood grain that are likewise visible on the present guitar. Similarly, a distinctive wood grain pattern on the headstock can be seen in close-up color shots from the session, matching identically with the headstock grain on the present guitar and tying it irrefutably to the ‘Paperback Writer’ session. Yet another shot shows the group – with Lennon on the Gretsch and Harrison playing the Burns – running through the song before a take. In his report for The Beatles Book, O’Mahony specifically mentions the Gretsch when recounting one of the session’s various takes: John leaned on the piano while he listened to Paul’s ideas for a while. Then he picked up his orange Gretsch guitar and proceeded to pick away at it. At the same time Paul transferred to a Vox organ... [Paul] asked the engineer to play it back at half speed so that John and George could do some vocal bits. They were now all set to go. George Martin gave the OK. The recording light went on and the basic sound track was played back through the “cans” they each had clamped over their heads. They did several takes. Based on tape operator Phil McDonald’s scribbled notes from the session, this was only the second of several experimental attempts to fill Track 2 of the tape over the course of the afternoon’s session and was a vocal only overdub. With each progressive attempt wiped by the one that followed, the final Track 2 recording that completed ‘Paperback Writer’ featured only McCartney’s bass, Harrison’s guitar fills, and Lennon and Harrison’s ‘Frère Jacques’ backing vocals.
The Beatles took an hour’s break after completing overdubs on ‘Paperback Writer’, returning to Studio Three at 8.30pm to begin work on the single’s B-side ‘Rain’. Quoted in Keith Badman’s The Beatles: Off The Record, Lennon stated that he wrote the song about people who are always moaning about the weather all the time. Others interpret the song as the Beatles’ first psychedelic inspired composition. In his 1994 book Revolution in the Head, Iain MacDonald posits that Lennon’s ‘Rain’ expresses the vibrant lucidity of a benign LSD experience and explains that the track’s sheer sonic presence [is] an attempt to convey the lustrous weight of the world as it can appear to those under the drug’s influence. Interviewed for Barry Miles’ 1997 authorized biography Many Years From Now, McCartney claimed that he co-wrote the song with Lennon, astutely noting, however, that the most interesting thing about it wasn’t the writing, which was tilted 70-30 to John, but the recording of it. ‘Rain’ was the first song on which the Beatles utilized varispeed to record at non-standard speeds, as engineer Geoff Emerick would later explain to Mark Lewisohn: The Beatles played the rhythm track really fast so that when the tape was played back at normal speed everything would be so much slower, changing the texture. While still recognizable, the drums and guitars would sound deeper and thicker. We got a big, ponderous, thunderous backing, McCartney told Miles, and then we worked on top of that as normal, so that it didn’t sound like a slowed-down thing, it just had a big ominous noise to it.
It’s generally acknowledged that the group recorded ‘Rain’ using the same instruments and equipment they had used on ‘Paperback Writer’, with Lennon recording rhythm guitar on the Gretsch. In his 1999 book The Beatles as Musicians, musicologist Walter Everett agrees: Basic tracks were recorded on April 14 in a five-hour session. From that day’s work we have drums and Lennon’s distorted Gretsch Nashville guitar, both recorded much faster than heard, introducing a subtle but rich tone of queasy hesitation that could be likened to the nausea of an acid trip, in the center: the composer’s overdubbed lead vocal, recorded about a major second lower than heard, resulting in the brilliant iridescence of an acid-streaked sunshine, is heard on the left. The Beatles completed work on ‘Rain’ two days later on 16 April, overdubbing bass, tambourine and additional vocals, which notably included Lennon’s backwards vocals at the coda – one of the first times reverse audio would be used in a Beatles recording. ‘Paperback Writer’ / ‘Rain’ was released in the US on 30 May and in the UK on 10 June 1966, offering fans a glimpse of the band’s new musical direction almost two months before the unveiling of Revolver. Although it was the first Beatles single that failed to debut at number one in the UK charts, ‘Paperback Writer’ took the top spot from Frank Sinatra’s ‘Strangers in the Night’ the following week and topped the Billboard Hot 100 in the US for two non-consecutive weeks. Asked by Disc and Music Echo magazine, whether the Beatles were worried about not hitting the top spot, George Harrison responded: We just know we are making better records. The fact that they sell a lot isn’t enough any more. We’re interested in getting better sounds … There’s nothing more we can do.
Lennon kept the Gretsch 6120 in his home studio at his Surrey estate, Kenwood, until late 1967 when he gifted the guitar to his younger cousin David Birch. Birch’s mother Harriet was Lennon’s maternal aunt and the youngest of the five Stanley sisters, of which Lennon’s Aunt Mimi was the eldest and his late mother Julia the fourth. Birch had been living with Aunt Mimi at the time and had travelled up from her seaside home in Poole, Dorset, to stay at Kenwood for a few days in mid-November 1967. While the two cousins were hanging out in Lennon’s home studio at the top of the house, the teenage Birch asked Lennon if he had any guitars that he no longer needed as he was hoping to start a group of his own. Interviewed by Andy Babiuk for Beatles Gear in February 2012, Birch recalled: I was still young and cheeky enough to ask John for one of his guitars. He had so many! I had my eye on a blue Fender electric and asked if I could have that one. He said no and pointed to the orange Gretsch, and he said that I could have that one. And I’ve had it ever since. While in Birch’s ownership, the single-lever string mute and gold Gretsch pickguard with Chet Atkins signature were removed, and the Gretsch chrome rocking bar bridge was upgraded to a Gretsch roller bridge. Birch kept the guitar for almost fifty years until it was sold privately to Jim Irsay in late 2014.
REFERENCES:
R. Coleman (ed.), Disc and Music Echo, London, 14 May 1966.
M. Lewisohn, The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, London, 1988.
I. MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties, New York, 1994.
B. Miles, Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now, London, 1997.
The Beatles, The Beatles Anthology, London, 2000.
K. Badman, The Beatles: Off The Record, London, 2001.
B. Kehew and K. Ryan, Recording the Beatles, Houston, 2006.
G. Emerick, Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles, New York, 2007.
K. Howlett, ‘Track by Track’, liner notes to The Beatles, Revolver: Special Edition, Apple Records, 2022, super deluxe vinyl box set.
Refreshed and re-energized after an unprecedented three-month break, the Beatles reconvened at Abbey Road on 6 April 1966 to begin work on what would become their seventh studio album Revolver. After devoting their first week of sessions to the near-completion of the album tracks ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, ‘Got To Get You Into My Life’ and the Indian inspired ‘Love You To’, the band bowed to pressure from EMI to deliver their next single and interrupted their album sessions to lay down the non-album single ‘Paperback Writer’ and its B-side ‘Rain’ on 13 and 14 April 1966. Primarily composed by Paul McCartney, ‘Paperback Writer’ was the first of Paul’s character songs written in response to his Auntie Lil’s request that he write about something other than love. I remember showing up at [John’s] house with the idea for ‘Paperback Writer’, McCartney recalled in The Beatles Anthology. Because I had a long drive to get there, I would often start thinking away and writing on my way out, and I developed the whole idea in the car. I came in, had my bowl of cornflakes, and said, ‘How’s about if we write a letter: “Dear Sir or Madam,” next line, next paragraph, etc? I wrote it all out and John said, ‘Yeah, that’s good.’ It just flowed.
After completing overdubs on Harrison’s ‘Love You To’ earlier in the day, the Beatles recorded the rhythm track to ‘Paperback Writer’ during an evening session at EMI’s Studio Three from 8pm to 2.30am on 13 April. In his 2007 memoir Here, There and Everywhere, Geoff Emerick, who had replaced Norman Smith as chief engineer to the Beatles mere weeks before the Revolver sessions, recalled McCartney running through the song on piano for the other Beatles that afternoon: Paul pounded out a catchy melody, instantly hummable, filled with memorable hooks… Each time he would come to the chorus, Paul would stop playing and gesture to John and George Harrison, pointing out the high harmony part he planned on assigning each. By the time he finished the first run-through, it was obvious to everyone in the room that this was an instant hit. According to Mark Lewisohn’s The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, the rhythm track was recorded in two takes and only one was complete. Over the years, there has been a lack of consensus among Beatles historians and musicologists as to whether Lennon or Harrison recorded the rhythm guitar part on ‘Paperback Writer’, however Brian Kehew and Kevin Ryan, who had unfettered access to both EMI’s archives and the studio’s ex-employees while researching their comprehensive 2006 reference book Recording the Beatles, report that it was Lennon: Track 1 was filled with nearly all of the song’s instrumental content. Paul played the main guitar part of the song, accompanied by John, also on guitar. Ringo played drums and George contributed tambourine… Paul’s lead vocal and John and George’s harmony vocals were then double tracked on Tracks 3 and 4. Likewise, in the official liner notes for the 2022 reissue of Revolver, Keith Howlett records that John contributed harmony vocal and rhythm guitar. Although there is no known photographic record from the 13 April session, Lennon’s documented use of the Gretsch 6120 when recording for ‘Paperback Writer’ continued into the following day strongly indicates that he had opted for this guitar from the outset. Producer George Martin observed in The Beatles Anthology that ‘Paperback Writer’ had a heavier sound than some earlier work, no doubt partly attributable to McCartney’s heavy Rickenbacker bass line, but perhaps also courtesy of the hollow-body Gretsch on the rhythm track.
When the Beatles regrouped at 2.30pm on 14 April to pick up where they had left off the night before on ‘Paperback Writer’, they were joined in Studio Three by Beatles Book photographer Leslie Bryce and his editor Sean O’Mahony (writing under the pseudonym Johnny Dean), who would print a detailed account of the session in the June 1966 issue of the magazine. As the Beatles were still recording on to four-track machines at this time, the afternoon’s session was devoted to filling the remaining Track 2 with Paul’s bass part and other various overdubbed contributions. O’Mahony described the scene on entering the studio: We found John and Paul surrounded by a mass of equipment – most significant of all, were their massive new amplifiers… John sported green velvet trousers, a blue buttoned up wool vest and black suede boots. The basic track of ‘Paperback Writer’ had been recorded the previous day, and now John and Paul were working out a detailed backing… the studio was littered with pianos, grand pianos, amplifiers, guitars, percussion instruments, and other odd bits and pieces which were strewn over the studio floor. McCartney explained to O’Mahony: “The trouble is… that we’ve done everything we can with four people, so it’s always a problem to ring the changes and make it sound different. That’s why we’ve got all these guitars and equipment here.” McCartney’s comments highlighted that experimentation, whether that be with new instruments, equipment or recording techniques, was an overriding feature of the Revolver sessions as the band continued to push boundaries with their music. Enabled by Emerick and the other innovative engineers at EMI, the Beatles made use of a whole host of pioneering technologies for the first time including artificial double tracking (ADT), varispeed, reverse audio, tape loops, and repeat echo.
Illustrating the group’s experimental approach to the recording, Lennon and Harrison were both pictured using instruments anomalous to their ordinary set-up during the 14 April ‘Paperback Writer’ session – Lennon with the Gretsch and Harrison with a Burns Nu-Sonic bass. Of the many photographs that Bryce captured of Lennon – in both black and white and color – using the never-before-seen Gretsch 6120 during this studio visit, shots include Lennon picking out chords on the hollow-body guitar, Lennon (with accompanying glass of wine) plugged into one of the band’s new prototype Vox 7120 amplifiers, and Lennon experimenting with a WEM-Rush Pep Box, one of the earliest fuzz pedals. The latter image showed the back of the guitar’s body, clearly displaying distinctive marks in the wood grain that are likewise visible on the present guitar. Similarly, a distinctive wood grain pattern on the headstock can be seen in close-up color shots from the session, matching identically with the headstock grain on the present guitar and tying it irrefutably to the ‘Paperback Writer’ session. Yet another shot shows the group – with Lennon on the Gretsch and Harrison playing the Burns – running through the song before a take. In his report for The Beatles Book, O’Mahony specifically mentions the Gretsch when recounting one of the session’s various takes: John leaned on the piano while he listened to Paul’s ideas for a while. Then he picked up his orange Gretsch guitar and proceeded to pick away at it. At the same time Paul transferred to a Vox organ... [Paul] asked the engineer to play it back at half speed so that John and George could do some vocal bits. They were now all set to go. George Martin gave the OK. The recording light went on and the basic sound track was played back through the “cans” they each had clamped over their heads. They did several takes. Based on tape operator Phil McDonald’s scribbled notes from the session, this was only the second of several experimental attempts to fill Track 2 of the tape over the course of the afternoon’s session and was a vocal only overdub. With each progressive attempt wiped by the one that followed, the final Track 2 recording that completed ‘Paperback Writer’ featured only McCartney’s bass, Harrison’s guitar fills, and Lennon and Harrison’s ‘Frère Jacques’ backing vocals.
The Beatles took an hour’s break after completing overdubs on ‘Paperback Writer’, returning to Studio Three at 8.30pm to begin work on the single’s B-side ‘Rain’. Quoted in Keith Badman’s The Beatles: Off The Record, Lennon stated that he wrote the song about people who are always moaning about the weather all the time. Others interpret the song as the Beatles’ first psychedelic inspired composition. In his 1994 book Revolution in the Head, Iain MacDonald posits that Lennon’s ‘Rain’ expresses the vibrant lucidity of a benign LSD experience and explains that the track’s sheer sonic presence [is] an attempt to convey the lustrous weight of the world as it can appear to those under the drug’s influence. Interviewed for Barry Miles’ 1997 authorized biography Many Years From Now, McCartney claimed that he co-wrote the song with Lennon, astutely noting, however, that the most interesting thing about it wasn’t the writing, which was tilted 70-30 to John, but the recording of it. ‘Rain’ was the first song on which the Beatles utilized varispeed to record at non-standard speeds, as engineer Geoff Emerick would later explain to Mark Lewisohn: The Beatles played the rhythm track really fast so that when the tape was played back at normal speed everything would be so much slower, changing the texture. While still recognizable, the drums and guitars would sound deeper and thicker. We got a big, ponderous, thunderous backing, McCartney told Miles, and then we worked on top of that as normal, so that it didn’t sound like a slowed-down thing, it just had a big ominous noise to it.
It’s generally acknowledged that the group recorded ‘Rain’ using the same instruments and equipment they had used on ‘Paperback Writer’, with Lennon recording rhythm guitar on the Gretsch. In his 1999 book The Beatles as Musicians, musicologist Walter Everett agrees: Basic tracks were recorded on April 14 in a five-hour session. From that day’s work we have drums and Lennon’s distorted Gretsch Nashville guitar, both recorded much faster than heard, introducing a subtle but rich tone of queasy hesitation that could be likened to the nausea of an acid trip, in the center: the composer’s overdubbed lead vocal, recorded about a major second lower than heard, resulting in the brilliant iridescence of an acid-streaked sunshine, is heard on the left. The Beatles completed work on ‘Rain’ two days later on 16 April, overdubbing bass, tambourine and additional vocals, which notably included Lennon’s backwards vocals at the coda – one of the first times reverse audio would be used in a Beatles recording. ‘Paperback Writer’ / ‘Rain’ was released in the US on 30 May and in the UK on 10 June 1966, offering fans a glimpse of the band’s new musical direction almost two months before the unveiling of Revolver. Although it was the first Beatles single that failed to debut at number one in the UK charts, ‘Paperback Writer’ took the top spot from Frank Sinatra’s ‘Strangers in the Night’ the following week and topped the Billboard Hot 100 in the US for two non-consecutive weeks. Asked by Disc and Music Echo magazine, whether the Beatles were worried about not hitting the top spot, George Harrison responded: We just know we are making better records. The fact that they sell a lot isn’t enough any more. We’re interested in getting better sounds … There’s nothing more we can do.
Lennon kept the Gretsch 6120 in his home studio at his Surrey estate, Kenwood, until late 1967 when he gifted the guitar to his younger cousin David Birch. Birch’s mother Harriet was Lennon’s maternal aunt and the youngest of the five Stanley sisters, of which Lennon’s Aunt Mimi was the eldest and his late mother Julia the fourth. Birch had been living with Aunt Mimi at the time and had travelled up from her seaside home in Poole, Dorset, to stay at Kenwood for a few days in mid-November 1967. While the two cousins were hanging out in Lennon’s home studio at the top of the house, the teenage Birch asked Lennon if he had any guitars that he no longer needed as he was hoping to start a group of his own. Interviewed by Andy Babiuk for Beatles Gear in February 2012, Birch recalled: I was still young and cheeky enough to ask John for one of his guitars. He had so many! I had my eye on a blue Fender electric and asked if I could have that one. He said no and pointed to the orange Gretsch, and he said that I could have that one. And I’ve had it ever since. While in Birch’s ownership, the single-lever string mute and gold Gretsch pickguard with Chet Atkins signature were removed, and the Gretsch chrome rocking bar bridge was upgraded to a Gretsch roller bridge. Birch kept the guitar for almost fifty years until it was sold privately to Jim Irsay in late 2014.
REFERENCES:
R. Coleman (ed.), Disc and Music Echo, London, 14 May 1966.
M. Lewisohn, The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, London, 1988.
I. MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties, New York, 1994.
B. Miles, Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now, London, 1997.
The Beatles, The Beatles Anthology, London, 2000.
K. Badman, The Beatles: Off The Record, London, 2001.
B. Kehew and K. Ryan, Recording the Beatles, Houston, 2006.
G. Emerick, Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles, New York, 2007.
K. Howlett, ‘Track by Track’, liner notes to The Beatles, Revolver: Special Edition, Apple Records, 2022, super deluxe vinyl box set.