Studio One, AIR Studios, London
Producer: Paul McCartney
Engineer: Geoff Emerick
Wings recorded the backing track for the Band On The Run song ‘Jet’ on 9 October 1973.
They had attempted to record the song on 3 October, but remained unhappy with the results. The remake from this day became the basis of the album version.
The backing track had Paul McCartney on drums and Denny Laine on rhythm guitar. They then added more electric guitar, and Linda McCartney recorded a synthesizer part.
Paul then overdubbed his lead vocals, and all three members of Wings added several tracks of backing vocals. The day’s final overdubs were piano and bass guitar, both played by Paul.
The session caused issues for studio engineer Geoff Emerick, who noticed a build-up of oxide on the tape heads. This was causing the tape to lose fidelity, with the treble noticeably suffering.
Everyone was excited by how well the song was coming together, and the creative ideas were flying fast and furious – the sixteen tracks of the tape were filling up rapidly. My assistant engineer on the session was a fellow by the name of Pete Swettenham, who had at one time been the guitarist in a band called Grapefruit, one of Apple’s earliest signings. He seemed competent enough, and I thought he was doing a good job, but then I started hearing something funny during the playbacks: the top end on the cymbals wasn’t there anymore. ‘What’s going on?’ I asked Pete. He sidled over to the multitrack machine, leaned down to have a look, and casually said, ‘Well, there’s a pile of oxide on the tape machine.’What?? This was a major problem, and I was furious that Pete hadn’t noticed it earlier. Assistants were supposed to keep the heads of the tape machines scrupulously clean, and they were supposed to stay on top of things like this. Oxide shedding was something that occurred with distressing frequency back in the 1970s because tape manufacturers were experimenting with different ways of adhering the magnetically charged iron oxide particles – the ‘recording’ component in recording tape – to the backing. If the glue was faulty, or if a batch of tape was improperly manufactured, the particles would begin to come off, or ‘shed.’ The top end, or treble, would start to disappear from the sound and eventually the tape would become completely unplayable and could even damage the machine. Not only was it irreversible, each time you played back or even rewound the tape, it got worse. The only thing you could do was to quickly make a second-generation copy of the audio on a good reel of tape and hope that the sound hadn’t deteriorated too badly by that point. It was just our luck to have this one bad reel of tape just as we were recording such a great song.
Paul, Denny, and Linda were out in the studio, happily playing away, oblivious to the disaster in the making that was occurring in the control room. I had to think quickly: do I tell Paul, or don’t I? I mulled it over and finally came to the conclusion that there was no point in telling him. The damage was already done, and making Paul aware of it would only upset him and kill the vibe. It was already late at night and I was hoping they would wrap things up soon and go home so I could make a copy before the tape became unplayable. I decided to try to mask the problem, which was becoming most noticeable on the crack of the snare drum and sizzle of the hi-hat. Every time we’d play the tape back, I would add more treble to the monitors so that Paul couldn’t hear that the top end was disappearing.
We finally did what I thought was the last overdub of the night. Breathing a sigh of relief, I looked over at Pete and said, ‘Thank God!’
Then, of course, Denny said, ‘How about if we just add one more guitar?’ and I thought, Oh no! We had almost gotten to the point where you could see through the tape – that’s how much oxide had been shed. But to my relief, Paul vetoed the idea and everyone packed up for the night. As soon as they left, I copied ‘Jet’ onto a fresh reel of multitrack tape, and I never said a word to Paul about it, but that’s why the song has a distinctively solid sound. Fortunately, that was the only technical gremlin we encountered at AIR.