The Beatles Lyrics
Page 29
Helter Skelter
Paul then decided to do his shouty bit, showing he could keep up with John and also with the fashion at the time for loud heavy music, as exemplified by Pete Townshend and The Who. While up at his Scottish cottage, he read a review in a music newspaper about The Who’s latest record being the loudest, rawest and dirtiest they had done. This inspired Paul to have a go at something that would freak everyone out and prove that he wasn’t just a ballad writer. Even the late Ian MacDonald, normally the most cerebral and technical and wordy of music critics, called it a ‘drunken mess’.
The subject matter is clear enough to most Brits–because we all know that a helter skelter is a fairground ride, a fast, furious, scary spiral ride, where you ride on a mat at breakneck speed from the top of a winding slide all the way down the bottom, so the analogy of taking a ride on a girl who is coming down fast, whom he might break, is readily understood sexual innuendo. The term ‘helter skelter’, meaning a headlong, disorderly haste or scramble, had actually been in popular use long before the fairground ride came along.
All this was lost on American Charles Manson, alas. He took it be a literal incitement to kill. The crazy, wild, dirty, incredibly loud music encouraged his dangerous fantasies. He managed to see hidden meanings in almost all of the songs on the album, finding references to the black races in ‘Rocky Raccoon’–‘coon’ being a derogatory term for a black person–and in ‘Blackbird’. But it was ‘Helter Skelter’ that became the soundtrack to his killing spree. When he was arrested, Manson talked specifically about the record and how it was about confusion which you can’t see, coming down fast, so you have to kill or be killed.
The lyrics, and the music, sound highly sexual, and pretty frantic at that, but when interviewed by Barry Miles in 1996, Paul said the helter skelter was merely a symbol of descent from top to bottom ‘like the rise and fall of the Roman Empire’. You what?
On the record, which took fifty-two takes to get right, you can hear Lennon at the end saying ‘How’s that?’ and Ringo replying ‘I got blisters on me fingers.’
The part manuscript is in Mal Evans’s careful handwriting, but the instructions for the recording of the song are written by Paul.
‘Helter Skelter’, from The White Album, lyrics in Mal’s hand, instructions by Paul.
When I get to the bottom I go back to the top of the slide
Where I stop and I turn and I go for a ride
Till I get to the bottom and I see you again.
Do you don’t you want me to love you
I’m coming down fast but I’m miles above you
Tell me, tell me, tell me, come on tell me the answer
You may be a lover but you ain’t no dancer.
Helter skelter, helter skelter
Helter skelter.
When I get to the bottom I go back to the top of the slide
Where I stop and I turn and I give you a thrill
Till I get to the bottom and I see you again.
Will you, won’t you want me to make you
I’m coming down fast but don’t let me break you
Tell me, tell me, tell me the answer
You may be a lover but you ain’t no dancer.
Well do you, don’t you want me to love you
I’m coming down fast but don’t let me break you
Tell me, tell me, tell me the answer
You may be a lover but you ain’t no dancer.
Look out
Helter skelter, helter skelter
Helter skelter.
Look out helter skelter
She’s coming down fast.
Yes she is.
Yes she is
(I got blisters on me fingers)
Long Long Long
George’s soppy love song–at least, that is how it appears, with stuff like oh how I love you, and want you, and need you, so happy I found you, etc. You come away convinced it must be about his wife Pattie or some girlfriend. But in I Me Mine George says it was not about a girl, but God. Hmm.
The sound is interesting, with George almost whispering the words, and with a distant drumbeat, but the words are clumsy: ‘How can I ever misplace you’ makes God, or the girl, sound like a parcel.
The manuscript, in George’s hand, was written on a sheet torn out of a diary for the week of 11 August 1968. Not often we can date the composition of a song. It was then recorded 7–9 October.
At the bottom, George has listed some of his other songs–‘Savoy Truffle’ and ‘Piggies’, plus ‘Not Guilty’ which was not recorded by the Beatles but by George himself in 1979.
It’s been a long long long time,
How could I ever have lost you
When I loved you.
It’s been a long long long time
Now I’m so happy I found you
How I love you
So many tears I was searching,
So many tears I was wasting, oh.
Oh—
Now I can see you, be you
How can I ever misplace you
How I want you
Oh I love you
You know that I need you.
Ooh I love you.
‘Long Long Long,’ from The White Album, in George’s hand, on the very day he wrote it?
Revolution 1
The same lyrics as on the B side of ‘Hey Jude’, except for that one vital addition–‘in’ added to ‘out’, sounding like a quick afterthought, and easy to miss. The tempo is much slower and relaxed and amused, and at the end he adds a bit of a chorus where they go shooo bee doo.
Honey Pie
Oh, didn’t Paul write some fun songs, brilliant pastiches which sound better, more polished, more realistic, more genuine than the songs being parodied. In this case a 1920s ragtime song about a North of England girl who makes it big in Hollywood–a little present to his father, who played these sort of old music-hall songs in his jazz band days. It begins as they all did–with a very slow, almost spoken introduction–before we are into the action of the music, with everyone wanting to get up and dance or sing, or both, like in ye good old days. Oh, we were happy them.
On the first side of the album, there is another song called ‘Wild Honey Pie’, but it is a mere scrap, under a minute long, with no real lyrics apart from the repetition of the words ‘Honey pie’. Another piece of self-reflection.
The ‘Honey Pie’ manuscript shows some minor changes in the intro. The contract for the song has also somehow emerged–which is interesting as it shows that in 1968 the publisher, Northern Songs (Dick James Company), was still taking 50 per cent of the fees.
How the performing rights fees were divided for ‘Honey Pie’, 1968–half to Northern Songs, half to John and Paul.
‘Honey Pie’, from The White Album, 1968, in Paul’s neat capitals, but with some changes.
She was a working girl
North of England way
Now she’s hit the big time
In the U. S. A.
And if she could only hear me
This is what I’d say.
Honey pie you are making me crazy
I’m in love but I’m lazy
So won’t you please come home.
Oh honey pie my position is tragic
Come and show me the magic
of your Hollywood song.
You became a legend of the silver screen
And now the thought of meeting you
Makes me weak in the knee.
Oh honey pie you are driving me frantic
Sail across the Atlantic
To be where you belong.
Will the wind that blew her boat
Across the sea
Kindly send her sailing back to me.
Honey pie you are making me crazy
I’m in love but I’m lazy
So won’t you please come home.
Savoy Truffle
The first words ‘crème tangerine’ and ‘pineapple heart’ might make you think this was
John, going back to Lucy and marmalade skies–but it is George, emptying a box of chocolates, naming each one as he goes. Almost all the words are real names of choccies in a box of Mackintosh’s Good News. It started because of Eric Clapton and his love for chocolates, which George told him would lead to all his teeth falling out–and they did. When he got stuck for some bridging words, Derek Taylor suggested the phrase from of a film he had just seen, You Are What You Eat, which George turned into ‘you know that what you eat you are’. The origin of the phrase goes back to the French epicure Brillat-Savarin in 1826 when he wrote ‘Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are’. There is a brief pause to try and make the words more meaningful, as if he might also be thinking of a girl with the line ‘I feel your taste all the time I am apart’. But so far as the lyrics go it’s a bit of a cheat and pretty pointless. It’s almost as if the Beatles at this stage, with a double album to complete and vast sales assured, are saying to themselves, We can write any old song on any old thing, just watch us–and listen. And they did.
George’s manuscript has a few changes, but all heavily scored out.
Crème tangerine and Montélimar
A ginger sling with a pineapple heart
A coffee dessert–yes you know it’s good news
But you’re going to have to have them all pulled out
After the Savoy truffle.
Cool cherry cream, nice apple tart
I feel your taste all the time we’re apart
Coconut fudge–really blows down those blues
But you’ll have to have them all pulled out
After the Savoy truffle.
You might not feel it now
But when the pain cuts through
You’re gonna know and how
The sweat is going to fill your head
When it becomes too much
You’ll shout aloud
But you’ll have to have them all pulled out
After the Savoy truffle.
You know that what you eat you are,
But what is sweet now, turns so sour—
We all know Obla-Di-Bla-Da
But can you show me, where you are?
‘Savoy Truffle’, from The White Album–George’s lyrics, all about real chocolates, but some he had second thoughts about.
Creme tangerine and Montélimar
A ginger sling with a pineapple heart
A coffee dessert–yes you know it’s good news
But you’ll have to have them all pulled out
After the Savoy truffle.
Yes, you’ll have to have them all pulled out
After the Savoy truffle.
Cry Baby Cry
This was one of the scraps of songs John told me about in 1967 while doing the biography. ‘I’ve got another song here, a few words, I think I got from an advert: “Cry baby cry, make your mother buy.” I’ve been playing it over on the piano. I’ve let it go now. It’ll come back if I really want it. I do get up from the piano as if I have been in a trance. Sometimes I know I’ve let a few things slip away.’
The title lines were taken from a TV advertisement, as John never turned the TV off, regardless of what was on. He eventually fitted lyrics to the tune while in India, relying on half-remembered childhood nursery rhymes, the kind you might sing to a baby, such as ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’: ‘The Queen was in the parlour, eating bread and honey…’ The Duchess of Kirkcaldy appealed to him because he liked Scottish names and places. (And the Beatles did actually play in Kirkcaldy, back on 6 October 1963.) The music is rather haunting, even if the words are mainly random. John later described the song as rubbish.
Revolution 9
No lyrics, as such, so does not concern us here. In fact, I doubt if many Beatles fans have ever played it since 1968 when they first heard it–though musicologists and techies and avant-gardists have had good fun trying to work out how it was done. Putting a load of old sounds together, backwards tapes, overheard conversations, scraps from the archives–that’s how it was done. The New Musical Express, in its review on 9 November 1968, described it as ‘a pretentious piece of old codswallop’.
Before it begins, after the end of ‘Cry Baby Cry’, we hear a few seconds of Paul singing, ‘Can you take me back’. It sounds as if it could have been turned into a nice song, like ‘I Will’, but we only get a few bars. The rest was not released. Then it’s into the dreaded ‘Revolution 9’–all eight minutes of it.
The repetition of ‘Number nine, number nine’ constitutes the only words you can hear clearly, and they came from some old Abbey Road archives of a taped music examination for Royal College of Music students.
John, George and Yoko did this together while Paul was away, and he wasn’t exactly thrilled by the result, though he too was keen on avant-garde music. ‘Revolution 9’ was the extended ending to ‘Revolution’. Presumably it was all meant to be a revolution in music, that you should change your normal acceptance of how music should sound, rise up, open your ears. To Manson of course it all made perfect sense–and perhaps it was this track that drove him truly mad.
Good Night
I can’t say I like ‘Good Night’ any better–though I can see why it was stuck in after ‘Revolution 9’ right at the end of the album, bringing it all to a close. It is a pastiche of lush Hollywood movie music, all lush strings and over-the-top harmonies and treacly choruses, sung by the Mike Sammes Singers.
It’s a John song, surprisingly–well, I was surprised, always having assumed from its schmaltziness that it must be by Paul. John’s defence was that he wrote it as a bedtime song for Julian, his son. All it says is good night, sweet dreams, with no wit or irony or half-decent similes, and even ‘The sun turns out his light’ is corny. John gave it to Ringo to sing–not wanting his own image to be tarnished.
Ah well, it was a long album. An amazing achievement, to record in so short a time so many new songs, some of which are dreamy and beautiful and lyrical and others loud and exciting and shattering and yes, revolutionary. Especially when you know all the other things which were happening in their young lives…
12
YELLOW SUBMARINE
1969
The Beatles were under contract to United Artists to do another film, but they were not keen. They had not really enjoyed making Help! and Magical Mystery Tour had been hammered by the critics, so why bother, when they had so many other new things, and new people and plans, going on in their lives?
Were they getting spoiled, too big for their boots, too bored? Probably a bit of each. On the other hand, they felt trapped by various managements and companies who had made a fortune out of them, such as United Artists and Northern Songs, who had them under contracts that they had signed ages ago when they didn’t quite know where they were going and what they might want to do.
So when the idea of an animated film came up, a cartoon based on a story spun out of their earlier children’s song ‘Yellow Submarine’ (released in 1966 on their Revolver album), in which they would not have to act, but would get away with doing only one cameo appearance in the final sequence, they agreed. Initially the fans assumed and hoped their real voices would be used, but in the end their words were spoken by actors.
The film opened in July 1968 but the LP did not come out till January 1969. Only four new songs were provided by them for the film, and for the LP. And even then, there was a feeling these were left-over songs, not considered good enough for earlier albums or singles. The other songs in the film were old songs, recorded some time ago, such as ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’. On the LP a lot of the space was filled up with instrumental numbers, composed and orchestrated by George Martin for the film score.
The film turned out to be enjoyed by fans and critics alike, and is seen now as a pioneer in the field of animation; even the Beatles later said they thought it was really good. The album, however, compared with all the treasures on The Double White Album, was disappointing; it seemed a bit of a cheat, putting it out as
if it were filled with new Beatles songs.
Derek Taylor did the sleeve notes for the album–and it seemed even he could not be roused to do any work. He told us his name was Derek, a name given by his mother, and he had been asked to write the notes for this album, but really he had nothing new to say about the Beatles. Instead he reprinted a review of The Double White Album, written by Tony Palmer. Which wasn’t even new either, having appeared in the Observer.
Only A Northern Song
I am amazed George got away with this–and it did appear as if he did not want to write the song at all. George was a very small minority shareholder in Northern Songs–just 1.6 per cent shared with Ringo, compared with Paul and John who had 15 per cent each. He still got a performing royalty, but he felt he was only working for others’ gain. (It was later in 1969, after the Yellow Submarine album was released, that Dick James, without telling them, sold his share to ATV and Lew Grade, followed a few months later by Paul, John and George.)
The title gives it away–disparaging itself, suggesting it was only a bit of inferior, provincial material. He tells us that if we think the chords are going wrong, they are, that’s how he wrote it; and if you think the harmony is out of key, you are right, because there is nobody there, nobody bothering to do it properly, so up yours, Northern Songs Ltd.