The Beatles Lyrics
Page 24
Your Mother Should Know
Having recorded the introductory song, they then took a break for about four months, before recording the second track. This one doesn’t have much in the way of lyrics either, apart from inviting everyone to get up and dance to a song your mother should know. Musically, there is no middle eight, the whole thing consists of a chorus–and very nice it is too, a pastiche of the sort of songs Paul’s family used to sing and dance to around the piano at Christmas time. It looked good in the accompanying film with the four Beatles in white suits descending a staircase to be joined by a team of dancers. Even John seemed to be enjoying himself.
Paul wrote it in Cavendish Avenue at a time when some of his relations were staying with him, playing it on a harmonium while they listened in the next room. It’s Paul having one foot in real life, able to be psychedelic and multi-layered and use Indian instruments, and the other foot in the past, able to commune with all generations.
I Am The Walrus
John’s contribution to Magical Mystery Tour could not be more different–another of the stream-of-consciousness nonsense he wrote in his poems and letters, stuff that he never thought, back in 1962, he would ever get away with in a pop song. And yet it is in some ways just as nostalgic as Paul’s efforts.
Many of the lines are straight pinches from his childhood, all of them still totally familiar to me, though probably not to most people under the age of fifty. In British school playgrounds in the fifties, we used to recite a poem that went ‘yellow matter custard’; another playground favourite was ‘umpa umpa, stick it up your jumpa’, which John can be heard chanting at the end of the song. Other influences are clearly Edward Lear’s nonsense and Alice in Wonderland.
I was with John when the first stirrings of the song came to him. It was the day I arrived to find he wasn’t talking, but while we were swimming in the pool the sound of a police car sparked off a rhythm in his head. He later started putting words to the rythmn: ‘Mist-er Cit-ee police-man sitting pretty’. In 1968 he told interviewer Jonathan Cott about it: ‘I had this idea of doing a song that was a police siren, but it didn’t work in the end [sings like a siren] ‘I-am-he-as-you-are-he-as…’ You couldn’t really sing the police siren.’
He ended up with three scraps of songs which were eventually put together and the lyrics completed. According to Pete Shotton, it was the arrival of a letter from Quarry Bank schoolboy Stephen Bailey telling him that the lyrics to Sgt. Pepper were now being analysed by school teachers and academics, that prompted John to include some of the dafter phrases in ‘I Am The Walrus’: ‘Let the fuckers work that one out’ so he said to Pete.
The words have indeed been heavily analysed over the years. The reference to pigs in a sty has led some to interpret it as an anti-capitalist rant, which John said was never his intention. Others have claimed it is anti-education, because he mocks the ‘expert texperts’ who made snide remarks while he was crying by asking who is the joker now, i.e. who’s having the last laugh. That was one of John’s pet themes: he always felt his teachers were against him and did not recognize his brilliance.
But even nonsense words have to come from somewhere, there must have been a thought process that threw them up. John admitted that he was thinking of Allen Ginsberg when he wrote ‘elementary penguin singing Hare Krishna’, as Ginsberg used to chant it at his performances.
While John was working on the final version, before going into the recording studio, I misheard the line ‘waiting for the man to come’. It sounded to me like ‘waiting for the van to come’, which I told him was a phrase from my school days, when someone thought to be potty or mad would be told that a van would come and take them away. John liked the image and so changed man into van.
Some words are made up, such as crabalocker, which sounds connected with fishwife. I like the idea ‘how they snied’; was he picturing pigs making snide comments? Semolina and pilchards were foods from the fifties that we all hated.
The walrus came from Lewis Carroll’s ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’–though John at the time had not realized that the walrus was the bad guy, so it should have been ‘I am the carpenter’.
I only recently heard of a possible explanation for the eggmen. Eric Burdon, leader of the Animals, with whom John had shared a few wild parties, supposedly enjoyed breaking an egg on the naked body of a girl.
The music caught the surrealist feeling of the words, with a swirling crescendo of sounds, from rock to classical orchestra music, a chorus of backing singers and backdrop of people talking.
The manuscript, in John’s hand, has some changes: ‘pornographic policeman’ became’ pornographic priestess’, ‘through a dead dog’s eye’ became ‘from a dead dog’s eye’ and ‘you been a lucky girl, you let your knickers down’ became ‘you been a naughty girl’. It was not officially banned by the BBC, for they allowed the song to be included in the Magical Mystery Tour film, but on November 27th 1967, the Controller of BBC1 issued an internal memo saying it contained “a very offensive passage” and the record itself could not be played on radio or TV, which included programmes such as Top of the Pops and Juke Box Jury. ‘Other possible outlets are similarly blocked off.’
I am he
as you are he
as you are me
and we are all together.
See how they run
like pigs from a gun
see how they fly. I’m crying.
Sitting on a cornflake, waiting for the van to come.
Corporation tee-shirt, stupid bloody Tuesday,
man, you been a naughty boy, you let your face grow long.
I am the eggman, oh, they are the eggmen–
Oh, I am the walrus GOO GOO G’JOOB.
Mr City, policeman sitting pretty little policemen in a row,
see how they fly
like Lucy in the sky
see how they run. I’m crying–I’m crying.
I’m crying–I’m crying.
Yellow matter custard dripping from a dead dog’s eye.
Crabalocker fishwife, pornographic priestess,
Boy, you been a naughty girl you let your knickers down.
I am the eggman, oh, they are the eggmen–
Oh, I am the walrus, GOO GOO G’JOOB.
Sitting in an English garden waiting for the sun,
if the sun don’t come, you get a tan from
standing in the English rain.
I am the eggman, oh, they are the eggmen–
Oh, I am the walrus, G’JOOB, G’GOO, G’JOOB…
Expert texpert choking smokers,
Don’t you think the joker laughs at you? Ha ha ha!
See how they smile
like pigs in a sty,
see how they snied. I’m crying.
Semolina pilchard, climbing up the Eiffel Tower.
Elementary penguin singing Hare Krishna
man, you should have seen them
kicking Edgar Allan Poe.
I am the eggman, oh, they are the eggmen.–
Oh, I am the walrus GOO GOO GOO JOOB
GOO GOO GOO JOOB GOO GOO
GOOOOOOOOOJOOOOOOOOOB.
‘I Am The Walrus’, from the Magical Mystery Tour EP, December 1967, in John’s hand. The ‘lucky girl you let your knickers down’, seven lines from the end, became ‘naughty girl’. And I should think so, too.
The Fool On The Hill
This was the song I heard Paul playing to John while they were working on ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’. Paul has since said he might have been thinking of a maharishi–but he could not have been thinking of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, as they did not meet him until August 1967 and the song, with most of the words, had been written in March. So it was a guru figure in general that had come into his mind, a foolish savant, the sort who sits on a hill or in a cave and people think he is either very wise or very foolish. Paul, looking back, remembered that he enjoyed singing ‘perfectly still’. Another example of how composers, like novel
ists, are often sparked off or fall in love with a particular word or phrase.
Alistair Taylor, a friend of theirs who worked at NEMS, remembers walking with Paul one morning at daybreak on Primrose Hill and coming across a man who one minute seemed to be there and the next disappeared–which fascinated Paul, making him wonder who the man had been. The music, complete with flutes and fairground roundabout noises, does have a spinning, ethereal quality to it.
The lyrics are well worked–the idea of a man with a thousand voices whom nobody hears, with eyes in his head that see the world spinning round. But he gives us no clue to the fool’s identity.
‘The Fool On The Hill’, from Magical Mystery Tour, with the reverse side (left) containing a line-up for Sgt. Pepper, and other notes and lists. The orange handwriting appears to be John’s and the blue Paul’s.
In the first manuscript (one of mine, now in the British Library), there are only the first few lines, but on the reverse are some interesting notes, such as a list of Sgt. Pepper titles. I shalll leave the experts to work out the rest. In the second–on Hotel Negresco notepaper–the fool is sitting perfectly still, then gets changed to ‘keeping perfectly still’.
Another version of ‘The Fool on the Hill’, written on hotel notepaper from Nice, mainly in Paul’s hand.
Day after day, alone on a hill,
The man with the foolish grin is keeping perfectly still
But nobody wants to know him,
They can see that he’s just a fool,
And he never gives an answer,
But the fool on the hill sees the sun going down,
And the eyes in his head see the world spinning round.
Well on the way, head in a cloud,
The man of a thousand voices talking perfectly loud
But nobody ever hears him,
or the sound he appears to make,
and he never seems to notice,
And nobody seems to like him,
they can tell what he wants to do,
and he never shows his feelings,
Oh, oh,
’Round and ’round and ’round.
He never listens to them,
He knows that they’re the fools
They don’t like him,
The fool on the hill sees the sun going down,
And the eyes in his head see the world spinning ’round.
Ooh,
’Round and ’round and ’round
Blue Jay Way
George wrote this in Los Angeles, having just arrived. The Beatles’ friend and one-time PR Derek Taylor, who was then working in LA as a publicist, was supposed to meet him but he’d got lost in the fog. So while he waited for Derek to arrive, George amused himself by sitting at a small Hammond organ and writing a song. ‘By the time I got there, the song was practically intact,’ said Derek later. ‘At the time I felt very bad, being two hours late.’
Some people have imagined that George was making a complicated pun out of ‘don’t be long’/‘don’t belong’–i.e. don’t take part in society–and that the phrase ‘lost their way’ meant lost their way in life, not just on a foggy road. But there were no messages. The lyrics are about what they say they are about.
I used to have the original manuscript, which George let me have while I was doing the biography, but some years later he asked for it back in order to include it in his book I Me Mine. There are an extra four lines at the end, beginning ‘When I see you at the door’ presumably part of the original, which were not used in the recorded version.
There’s a fog upon L. A.
And my friends have lost their way
We’ll be over soon they said
Now they’ve lost themselves instead.
Please don’t be long
Please don’t you be very long
Please don’t be long
For I may be asleep
well it may go to show
And I told them where to go
Ask a policeman on the street
There’s so many there to meet.
Please don’t be long
Please don’t you be very long
Please don’t be long
For I may be asleep.
Now it’s past my bed I know
And I’d really like to go
Soon will be the break of day
Sitting here in Blue Jay Way.
Please don’t be long
Please don’t you be very long
Please don’t be long
‘Blue Jay Way’, from Magical Mystery Tour, in George’s hand–with four extra lines at the end, not used.
All You Need Is Love
Before Magical Mystery Tour came out, they produced a single in July 1967 which was their contribution to a landmark in television history. The Beatles had been approached by the BBC to take part in the biggest live television programme ever, a global event linking twenty-six countries, with contributions from Europe, the Americas, Africa, Japan and Australia. Technologically, it was a massive undertaking, especially at that time. As a publicity tool, with global reach, it was also a good move for the Beatles, though they didn’t really need it, considering they were known throughout the world already. Brian Epstein, who was still alive at the time (he died a month later) certainly thought so. After a long absence from the recording studio he suddenly appeared in publicity shots taken at rehearsals for the programme, sitting adoringly with his boys.
John also thought it was a good idea. He liked the challenge of creating a simple song with words and music that would be easily understood by all nationalities, all cultures. And he liked the idea of creating a slogan, a song with a simple message.
Both John and Paul went off to think of suitable ideas–but it was John’s ‘All You Need Is Love’ that surfaced first and was chosen.
The global TV broadcast was aired live on 25 June 1967, with the Beatles in colourful clothes surrounded by their celebrity friends, including Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull and Eric Clapton, who all joined in with the chorus and held up balloons and placards. The broadcast was transmitted in black and white–this was, after all, 1967–so the full effect of the colourful clobber was rather wasted.
On a personal note, most references books that list the personal guests of the Beatles present include moi. When I first saw this, I rushed to my diary for 25 June 1967 and for some reason it was blank. In the months before and afterwards, I have lots of entries for Abbey Road, or Paul’s house, indicating I was watching them compose and record, but nothing for that evening. So was I there? The awful thing is, I really can’t remember. I have looked for myself on the video, but quite a lot of people at that time looked like me. I now imagine I was there, because the event is so well known. Or perhaps I was just at the rehearsals.
George Martin did a great job on the musical special effects, beginning with the ‘Marseillaise’, to give it an international flavour, and it ends with bursts of ‘Greensleeves’, ‘In the Mood’ and ‘She Loves You’. It’s a jolly, rousing, happy-clappy cheerful song with a good, catchy title–but what about the lyrics? Hmm. There is a lot of repetition of ‘All you need is love’, plus eight clever-sounding lines where John gets carried away with the notion that there’s nothing/nobody/nowhere you can’t sing/make/see/be. Paul later said there were some lines in the lyrics he did not understand–presumably one of those lines. Is it true there’s nothing you can make that can’t be made? Science is continually discovering things we didn’t know–though I suppose you could say that God knew about them all the time, being awfully clever. And is there nowhere you can be you where you were not meant to be? I suppose so, if you believe in Fate.
All the same, the basic message is clear: you can do anything you want, if you want to–a philosophy which is still very fashionable today. And of course love conquers everything, love is what matters, love is all, etc, which was the Beatles message in ‘The Word’ and elsewhere.
I once asked John about the title, ‘All You Need Is Love’, a
nd he pointed out a detail I had overlooked: it can be taken in two ways. At one level it means that love is the most important thing in the world, but it can also mean that love is the one thing you are lacking, the thing you haven’t got.
The love in ‘All You Need Is Love’ is a different, more universal, abstract concept than the love in ‘She Loves You’ and most of their early songs.
The manuscript is a neat version in John’s hand of those ‘There’s nothing you can do…’ lines, which he used as a crib in the studio. Perhaps in case he got the negatives in the wrong place. It was sold at auction in 2005 for $1 million.
‘All You Need Is Love’ single, July 1967, in John’s awfully neat handwriting. All you need to buy it now would be $1 million, plus…
Love, Love, Love.
There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done.
Nothing you can sing that can’t be sung.
Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game.
And it’s easy.
Nothing you can make that can’t be made.
No one you can save that can’t be saved.
Nothing you can do but you can learn how to be you in time.
It’s easy.
All you need is love.
All you need is love.
All you need is love, love.
Love is all you need.
Nothing you can know that isn’t known.
Nothing you can see that isn’t shown.
Nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be.