MusicRadar
The No.1 website for musicians
Alan White from Yes: What The Beatles mean to me
Drummer played with Harrison and Lennon
Joe Bosso, Fri 11 Sep 2009, 1:37 pm UTC
"Phil was a quiet guy. He never said too much. He and John would confer about things and I would be in the control room trying to figure out what they were saying. I tossed out some ideas for how the drum parts should go, and they ended up using them.
"The parts in the song where the drums kind of explode, the fills that I do - I came up with this idea of going off the meter, playing a fill and then going back into the main rhythm. I kind of sprang it on John and Phil and they loved it. Phil said, 'Alan, just keep doing that. It's making the whole song!' [laughs]
"It was interesting watching Phil do a bit of his Wall Of Sound technique: you didn't play one tambourine, you played 15 tambourines. Same with pianos: you didn't play one piano, you played four.
"Actually, I played piano along with John on that track. Plus there was Gary Wright and Klaus Voorman. The only thing that Phil didn't do multiple tracks of were the drums themselves - I did one pass and that was it."
Well, Phil must've liked what you did because next you played with George Harrison on All Things Must Pass.
"The Wall Of Sound really came into play on that one. It wasn't talked about, but it just seemed necessary. People always ask me if my drums are doubled or tripled on that album and the truth is, they weren't. It was one performance, one take, boom! We were working so fast that I didn't have time to think - I just had to go with the flow of the music.
"We cut the whole thing in three weeks, which is amazing when you consider how much material is on the album. It was mostly the Delany and Bonnie band, which included Eric Clapton. A really good bond between the musicians existed during those sessions."
