Over 200 Fab Four enthusiasts attend latest Speaker Series at City Hall program with Scott Freiman
Over 200 guests attended The Malibu Library Speaker Series last week that featured composer, producer, and Beatles expert Scott Freiman.
Freiman deconstructed the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” The album is known for its unsurpassed adventure in concept, sound, songwriting, cover art and studio technology.
The Beatles were an English rock band formed in Liverpool in 1960, comprising John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr. They are known as the most influential band of all time and were integral to the development of 1960s counterculture and the recognition of popular music as an art form.
In “Deconstructing Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” Freiman looks at “Sgt. Pepper” from multiple angles, exploring the history behind the music. He conducts an educational journey into the creative process of The Beatles performances and recording sessions.
Freiman is the creator of “Deconstructing The Beatles,” a series of multimedia presentations about the composition and production techniques of the Fab Four. He has presented his lectures to sold-out audiences throughout North America at theaters, museums, and corporations and has been part of the Malibu Library Speaker Series twice: “Deconstructing the Magical Mystery Tour” in 2017 and “Deconstructing Abbey Road” in 2019. Freiman has lectured at colleges and universities and has taught a 13-part course at Yale University entitled “The Beatles in The Studio.”
Freiman compared one of their first songs, “Love Me Do,” in their “P.S. I Love You” debut album to their album “Revolver.”
“Their Indian instruments, backward guitars, tape loops, vocals going through rotating speakers, it’s as far away from ‘Love me Do’ than you can image, and that all happened in less than four years, pretty extraordinary,” Freiman said.
Freiman acknowledged two producers and engineers who worked alongside The Beatles.
“I always like to shout out these two guys: George Martin, the guy who signed the Beatles, and Geoff Emerick started off with “Tomorrow Never Knows,” and he is responsible for setting up the microphones,” Freiman said. “We owe them a lot of credit for this music to sound so good so many years later.”
Freiman said the song, “Penny Lane” complimented the song “Strawberry Fields Forever” in the Beatles album “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”
“‘Strawberry Fields’ is almost dream-like, ‘Penny Lane’ marches along, and it talks about this wonderful circle in Liverpool,” Freiman said. “I could talk about ‘Strawberry Fields’ forever.”
After the presentation, guests were able to ask Freiman questions such as how he was able to separate the vocals and instruments.
Malibu local and Beatles fan Dawn Hope Stevens attended the speaker series and brought a clipping of The Malibu Times newspaper, where her image was featured with her mother Hope Stevens at another speaker series with Freiman in October 2019.
“That was a really great Malibu Library event, I always want to learn something new, so that was exciting,” Stevens said. “When he talked about the ‘Strawberry Fields,’ I think that was new so that was really interesting.”
The next Malibu Library Speaker Series will feature author and journalist David Quammen on Wednesday, Oct. 18, at 7 p.m. at The Malibu City Hall Council Chambers.
Quammen wrote 18 books including “Breathless” (2022), “The Tangled Tree” (2018), “Spillover” (2012), “The Song of the Dodo” (1996), and most recently, “The Heartbeat of the Wild” (2023). Though he began his career as a novelist (“To Walk the Line” [1970] and three other works of fiction), in recent decades, he has written only nonfiction, focused mainly on science, the history of science, and the relationships of humans to landscape and biological diversity. For more information visit, malibucity.org/malibuspeakerseries.
