Why Are the Beatles Still Inescapable 66 Years On? Jason Kruppa Has a Theory
Described as "addictive" and "essential," the Producing the Beatles podcast explores the Fabs' catalog with technical and emotional curiosity. Here's a conversation with its creator, Jason Kruppa.
It’s been sixty-six years since the Beatles disbanded, and we still can’t seem to stop talking about them.
Why? Podcaster Jason Kruppa has some ideas. The force behind the Producing the Beatles podcast, Jason walks a fine line, exploring the nuts and bolts of those epochal productions without ever losing sight of their emotional impact. We recently convened over Zoom; what follows is an edited version of the conversation.
Genesis of the Podcast
Seth: I have so many questions. Let’s start with the with the most obvious: What drives you?
Jason: I mean, the short answer is probably ADHD, but that’s what keeps me going. I guess 35 years ago, maybe longer, a friend of mine gave me a cassette tape, and it had “Mystery Fabs” written on it, and it was all of these bootleg outtakes nobody at that point had ever heard—this is before Anthology. And I thought: Oh my God. You know, these were all—like “Strawberry Fields”—early takes, some of which would come out later, some of which have never been officially released.
And sort of the light went on. I thought: Wow, this is really cool. And it really grew from there. By the early 2000s I was, I think, properly obsessed. I was listening to Revolver a lot and thinking: How’d they make these sounds? And I play a little guitar and little keyboards, and I was sort of tinkering, trying to figure out why things work, how things work.
The more I looked into it, the more I realized that a lot of that was from their producer [George Martin] who knew the studio inside and out. And I just thought: Well, how did he know how to do this stuff? And so I started digging back into his career, and that landed me, eventually, at EMI archives and Abbey Road and Mark Lewisohn, just sort of where you would expect this to go.
I realized, after I started making them, I could use it as an excuse to teach music. I’m not a trained musician, but I like talking to trained musicians…[and] you know, everybody’s a Beatles fan. I reach out to people in the orchestra, or reach out to people in universities or other writers, and [they] love to discuss this with you. So I’ve been very lucky, not only people who are actually there at the sessions have talked to me, but you know other people have their own angle on this, and through their own experience, can bring me sort of a different point of view.
How Important is “The Gear”?
Seth: There’s a really fine line between curiosity and slavishness. And as someone interested in how things work, it’s tempting to sort of fall down these very technical holes: What’s the importance of using vacuum tube-powered mixing desks, or Studer tape machines? All this minutiae attempts to explain why their art is so resonant, with mixed results. What I admire is that your work really dances on that line, and it satisfies both urges. Do you have thoughts about that balance?
Jason: I mean, the gear is important. Obviously, it affects the sound. But I think their approach to gear was: How can we make something sound a particular way? How can we change a sound, or manipulate a sound?
To me, it’s more the process of…how do you get there? Like, what inspires these ideas, what gets John thinking: “I want to sound like the Dalai Lama on the top of a mountain”? And then how does he work in tandem with the studio people to get those sounds? Some of that’s unknowable, because we can’t be inside their heads. As much documentation as there is, some things just aren’t written down.
But I think, over time, you can see a process. And one of the fascinating things about hearing outtakes—and in rare cases where we have whole sequences of the recording of a single song, right?—you can hear, you see this developing. I think that explodes on Revolver, and then they sort of carry forward from there.
I mean, I think you could probably do this with a lot of different artists. Joni Mitchell is one that I keep going back to. If somebody gave me the keys to her tape archive, I’d be like: Alright, we’re doing a podcast!
But you know, there is an energy in the Beatles’ stuff that is really rare, because it’s these four guys—five guys with George Martin and the engineers. You can hear it in the songs, this kind of electricity that I think is still there, that I still pick up on.
Seth: I have to cop to this idea that “the olden days” were simpler and thus somehow better. Can you speak to that?
Jason: I mean, if you can’t find good music [being made today] you’re not looking; I want to put that out first. I’m not one of these people who’s like: The best music that was ever made just happens to be the stuff that I discovered between the ages of 16 and 22. You know, your neural pathways are forming, and so it’s going to be vivid, and you’re going to remember [that] stuff, so it's understandable, but it's not really accurate. [Note: This recent post with Walter Martin refers to this so-called “reminiscence bump.]
Seth: A friend and I were talking about an album she and her band made in the late ‘90s [see The Drawback to Living: Unwound on Grief, Gratitude, and Finding Yourself]. Instead of renting a studio, they bought an 8-track deck and learned how to use it. With that format you all have to play together, and if you want to fix something you generally have to do it all over again. You’re making decisions on the fly and unless you have an unlimited tape budget (as very few bands did, ever) you’re stuck with them. Again I can’t prove it, but I would argue there’s a power to being in the moment and just knowing this is the path forward, and then committing to that.
Jason: In terms of technology limitations can be a very good thing. George Martin has said you have twenty-four, forty-eight, an endless number of tracks, [and] then suddenly you can do anything. But when you had four tracks, these guys had to plan ahead, and then they all had to be playing several overdub tracks. For instance, there will be three or four Beatles playing at the same time on a single track. So in addition to forcing you to be economical, it also forces you to play together. And as they move into eight track, one of the points I’ve made before is that you don’t have to do that quite as much. Paul could go in and record an entire song on his own and overdub everything onto the eight tracks.
John wasn’t as inclined to do that, because I think he was really driven by the group idea. His ethos was that this was a band. And this is not to take anything away from Paul, who I think is absolutely a genius, but he was so driven that I think…you can worry over these things endlessly. And we see this with George, with All Things Must Pass, where he begins on eight-track in Abbey Road, and then when he goes to the overdub phase, he goes to Trident where they have sixteen tracks. And he worries for months over these arrangements, and he’s redoing things [endlessly].
It’s also representative of what happened with artists in the ‘70s and ‘80s, where you begin overdubbing, and you just go down that rabbit hole. And that is a much different thing than four guys in a studio recording an overdub at the same time on four different microphones, or maybe two different microphones, and having to be face to face. There’s a kind of intensity there, and there’s a focus, and there’s….
Again, to go back to that word “economy,” it really sort of brings everything to a pinpoint, like: This is the thing that we’re trying to achieve. Having four or five people who are kind of on the same wavelength and driven to achieve this thing, I think that changes things completely. And I mean, these guys are obviously very specially talented, and their chemistry together was just unique. So that’s going to create something in and of itself.
Seth: Then there’s the Sergeant Pepper’s remix project (under George Martin’s son, Giles). And I was really touched by that, because that album takes up a big chunk of my interior emotional space. I was moved by it, and of course it also changes things like clarity and focus and emotional impact. Do you have thoughts about that trade-off?
Jason: I mean, remixing is a really fine line. Rubber Soul is the album that needs to be remixed the most; the way George Martin originally mixed it, it’s instruments in one channel and voices in the other for the most part. And it’s not a very satisfying listen on headphones, for one thing, but it also doesn’t do justice to the arrangements. The vocal overdubs on that album are really detailed and lush, and you don’t get that from the mono mix or the two point stereo mix, I guess you could say.
I have a friend who’s really good at separating these mixes. And now with machine learning, we have the tools to separate this stuff even further. And so I’ve been able to create true stereo mixes of the vocal tracks, for instance, on Rubber Soul, I put them all up on YouTube. And obviously that’s not how you want to hear the album mixed in its proper form, but it shows the detail that’s there and the depth of these arrangements. So it’s good to have a sense of that.
But other end of that is, you know, they were thinking in mono until at least ’68. And in mono, the attitude is like: The whole thing is an effect. The entire sound of this is an effect that you want to hit. Some sounds are going to stick out, but you don’t want it to be so clinically clear that every single instrument is sort of in its own little box across the stereo soundstage, and then it becomes just the sort of sterile thing that that doesn’t hit you all at once. And I think the the beauty of the older mixes is that you get that impact, that singular effect of the mix and the arrangement of what they intended the song to be. And that’s a fine line. I think in some cases, [Giles] has done it. In some cases he’s maybe gone too far in the other direction.
Seth: Many years ago, I read about a survey on audio formats. What it found was that younger listeners preferred the sound of mp3s to what we would consider more hi-fidelity formats. Which I found kind of shocking. I thought: Obviously, greater fidelity sounds better, but that’s not completely true; it’s relative. The devices are always changing, the technology is always changing, but we, the listeners, are also changing throughout time.
Jason: Yeah. And some of it, I think, is what you’re exposed to. You know, people who are used to a brick-walled mix—and that’s all you hear on the radio, or something you’ve downloaded—and then hear something that’s got dynamic range, [they think]: That doesn’t have any power; that’s like, kind of boring. So it’s a matter of what you’re exposed to, and you can’t argue people’s experience.
But my suggestion is that you try to experience more and and not just, you know, one method of listening, or one type of music. The great thing about the Beatles is that they were very catholic in their tastes. Everything was fodder. And because of their unusual place—being the Beatles, having this stature—I’d say they had license to push technology more than most. I know they had to fight with engineers or fight with management, in some cases, to push technology where it’d not yet gone before, but it came out in really surprising ways.
Seth: What’s the story or incident, or the song or approach, that surprised you most in researching the Beatles’ evolution?
Jason: I mean, this is one thing that’s then elaborated throughout their career: It’s changing the speed of the tape so that you can record slower or faster. Obviously you can speed it up and get the Chipmunks. But it’s doing this in different ways to get different effects, like with keyboards, like the piano on “Good Day Sunshine,” so that George Martin could play it in this specific key to get a specific effect. I talk about that in one of the episodes, with “Lovely Rita,” same kind of thing. I wouldn’t point to that as the one thing that defines their sound or their career—or why they were so popular. But it’s definitely one element and it’s often so subtle that it you don’t really register it. But not knowing necessarily how it was done, it’s going to stick in your mind.
Seth: It strikes me as a paradigm shift. I mean, instead of performing the songs in a room, the band are now metaphorically reaching through the cable and manipulating the medium upon which those songs are recorded. And that’s fascinating!
Jason: Yeah. It’s very music concrete, as I talk about in the episode on “Tomorrow Never Knows.”
Seth: That’s a great segue; can you share what’s coming up?
Jason: Later, at the end of this season, I’m planning to cover “Penny Lane.” The basic track of that is Paul at the piano, and then he has the Mrs. Mills jangle box piano, some of which I think is recorded at half-speed and then played back faster. And then a Hohner Pianet through a Vox amp, and then harmonium for these sort of low drones, and then they have percussion along with that. So that’s a really good example of several people playing on one track, and in its isolated state it’s very weird. But it shows that he’s planning this already, from this elemental take into what it’s eventually going to be. But you don’t really hear that in its sort of basic state.
And the second thing is just, again, that sensitivity to texture. Those keyboard instruments all have a different texture. And in some cases they blend. There’s one instance where—I think it’s the Hohner and the grand piano—sort of blend, and they create this almost organ sound.
And again, you don’t really notice. The only reason I’ve taken any note of this is because I’ve taken all of this apart and listened to these things in isolation and gone, Oh, well, that’s where that I thought that was an organ, but that’s not; that’s these two keyboard instruments interacting. And the overall takeaway is that this is a very orchestral way of thinking.
If you look at a large orchestral arrangement, you’ll see the piccolos doubling the flutes an octave above, or you’ll see the basses doubling the cellos an octave below. That’s just very sort of standard procedure. And it’s to create depth in the arrangement. And [the Beatles are] doing this in tons of examples throughout their career, and you don’t notice it until you maybe take it apart and look at the individual elements. You go: Oh, okay, this is what’s happening. And then put it back together, and you realize the overall effect.
Seth: That’s a perfect example because it gets to sort of what I’m searching for, which is: Why is this art so resonant in ways that can be difficult to name?
Jason: This is one clue, or one facet of that. And, I mean, go back to the musicality. There’s the experimentation, there’s the technology, but there is a really deep, strong musicality in these songs. The deeper I dig with the stuff, the more I discover: Oh, it’s there at the very foundation of these songs. It’s from the very beginning. So that, to me, is a big part of the experience.
Seth: That’s so cool. Thank you for indulging me!
Jason: No, that’s…that’s why I’m here.