Sometimes, dreams do come true. Howard Massey, a 52-year-old music journalist, recording engineer and Centerport resident, has spent the better part of the last five years traveling between Long Island, Los Angeles and London, hanging out with a friend, j

Sometimes, dreams do come true. Howard Massey, a 52-year-old music journalist, recording engineer and Centerport resident, has spent the better part of the last five years traveling between Long Island, Los Angeles and London, hanging out with a friend, just sitting and listening to Beatles records, reminiscing and chatting. Their conversations, however, documented by Gotham Books' recently published Here, There And Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of The Beatles, are timeless, invaluable moments of rock 'n' roll history, offering an extremely rare glimpse into the realm and recording process of The Beatles.

Massey's friend happens to be Geoff Emerick, the guy who actually recorded most of the Fab Four's records.
"As a Beatles fan, it was just a dream come true. There's no other word to describe it," laughs Massey.

"The idea that I'm sitting in my living room listening to Sgt. Pepper with the guy who actually recorded it. It's, like, how much better than this does it get?

"
Sure, there have been a million books written about The Beatles. None, however, have been written from Emerick's perspective. And the long, winding "series of left turns" that has been Massey's career path led him here.

Massey was raised in Brooklyn and heard his first Beatles record at the age of 11, sparking his interest in sound engineering. He attended Stony Brook University for music and did a five-year stint in England working with artists that included Madness and Elvis Costello. Returning to LI, he wrote technical books about synthesizer programming and began writing for music magazines, which involved him interviewing dozens of famed producers and engineers.

(Here...

is Massey's 12th book.) That's how he met Emerick, while reporting an article for EQ Magazine, and the two hit it off. Massey sifted through the hundreds of hours of audio of their conversations, editing and knitting Emerick's dialogue together to make it flow as a seamless narrative.

"I'd sort of had the idea in my head for a long time, but it was really waiting for the right person to do it with," says Emerick. "It was brilliant."
Emerick was 15 years old when he started as an engineering assistant at EMI Studios on the fabled Abbey Road (now Abbey Road Studios) in London.

And he was there—minus the time he walked out on the hellish White Album sessions—from the first Beatles album through their last, crafting the sounds of such landmark works as Revolver and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. There were only eight people, including The Beatles, in the studio during most of the Emerick's also known as a trailblazer in sound recording, due to the groundbreaking innovative techniques he used.

He sees sound as visions and was willing to bend conventional recording rules in order to create the sounds he and the Beatles heard in their heads. And, he stresses, it's not the stuff one can learn in school. Emerick credits it all to his imagination.

"It's more important not to be schooled," explains Emerick. "When we were making those records, we were - although they were a big band - we were just human beings making music in a studio. So the book really is a human story more than just a story of iconic people.

" Howard Massey and Geoff Emerick will be signing copies of their book at Book Revue, 315 New York Ave., Huntington, at 8 p.m.

on March 31. For more information, call 631-271-1442.