I've been reading this book: Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles by Geoff Emerick. I can't put it down.
Emerick was 15 years old when he was hired by EMI studios in London as a sort of apprentice recording engineer. He fortuitously witnessed the Beatles' first ever recording session, and then worked on almost everything the Beatles did thereafter, including being chief engineer on The Revolver and Sgt. Pepper.
Here's a typical passage from the book. The Beatles have just finished their last world tour, and are in the midst of announcing that they will never tour again, all the while preparing to record Sgt. Pepper. They are complaining about their treatment during their just-concluded world tour:
"Bloody Yanks," muttered Harrison.
"What are you on about?" Lennon snapped. "I was the one in the line of fire, not you."
"Well, I wasn't the one who was daft enough to compare us to Jesus," Harrison retorted testily.
Lennon shot him a dirty glance and went into a sulk. The topic seemed to depress him immensely.
John's ill-advised remark in a newspaper interview about the Beatles being "bigger than Jesus" had had far-reaching repercussions on the group's career, impacting especially on their popularity in America, to the extent where they had received death threats while on tour; some zealots were even burning their albums. It had even affected us at EMI to some degree. Earlier that fall, Brian had persuaded Lennon to record a formal apology for broadcast to American radio stations, but the problem was that John was away on holiday and unavailable to come into the studio in person. He was apparently willing to phone it in, but for some reason Brian [Epstein] deemed that unacceptable -- not remorseful enough, perhaps? As a result, our technical boffins spent a few hurried days designing a dummy head into which John's telephoned apology would be played: the idea was that the cavities of this little plaster head would somehow make his voice more realistic, as if he were actually in the studio talking on a high-quality microphone instead of over a low-fidelity phone line. In the end, Lennon changed his mind and the apology never did materialize, but it just goes to show the lengths to which EMI would go to accomodate the Beatles; if it had been any other artist, they would never have devoted the time and resources to such a foolish idea.
"[T]his little plaster head" of John Lennon? WTF?? The book is fascinating and is full of stuff like the quotation above. I highly recommend it.