The Beatles Lyrics

by Hunter Davies

  Something in the way she knows

  And all I have to do is think of her

  Something in the things she shows me

  I don’t want to leave her now

  You know I believe and how

  Maxwell’s Silver Hammer

  Oh what fun Paul had writing this. Even after all these years, you can picture him smiling as he enunciates some of the tongue-twisting phrases which would have been so easy to mangle: ‘Joan was quizzical studied pataphysical’, ‘wishing to avoid an unpleasant scene’, ‘painting testimonial pictures’. He is clearly laughing when he sings ‘writing fifty times I must not be so’.

  ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’, from Abbey Road, in Paul’s hand. Five lines from the bottom, it was originally ‘ass’, which got changed to ‘fool’.

  So what is it about? Sounds a very cruel narrative. Someone called Maxwell goes around killing people with his silver hammer, first his girlfriend, then a teacher, then a judge, all a bit scary for the children, even though children do face horrors in some of our best-loved nursery rhymes and fairy tales.

  It is, of course, metaphorical. Just when things seem to be going well, bang bang, down comes disaster in the form of the hammer, and ruins everything. Things going wrong at the time with the Beatles were pretty easy to see–most of them surrounding Apple.

  During the recording itself, Paul only recalled one argument–about the time taken on ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’: ‘I remember George saying to me, “You’ve taken three days, it’s only a song.” “Yeah, but I want to get it right.” ’

  John hated the song, and lots of Beatles experts have dismissed it as twee and cute, but the music is music-hall jaunty, one of Paul’s many pastiche arrangements.

  In the manuscript, it was originally ‘Back in class again, Maxwell plays the ass again’. Playing the ass was a period phrase from the fifties when we read comics where characters called each other ‘silly ass’. It had fallen from use by 1969, leading to sniggers, especially in the USA. The word class got changed to school and ass became fool, thus creating a neat internal rhyme of school/fool instead of class/ass, though either would have worked and been pretty clever. Paul always attended to detail, even at this late stage in the Beatles game.

  Joan was quizzical, studied pataphysical

  Science in the home.

  Late nights all alone with a test tube.

  Oh, oh, oh, oh.

  Maxwell Edison, majoring in medicine,

  Calls her on the phone.

  Can I take you out to the pictures,

  Joa, oa, oa, oan?

  But as she’s getting ready to go,

  A knock comes on the door.

  Bang! Bang! Maxwell’s silver hammer

  Came down upon her head.

  Clang! Clang! Maxwell’s silver hammer

  Made sure that she was dead.

  Back in school again Maxwell plays the fool again.

  Teacher gets annoyed.

  Wishing to avoid an unpleasant scene

  She tells Max to stay when the class has gone away,

  You will wait behind

  Writing fifty times I must not be so

  But when she turns her back on the boy,

  He creeps up from behind.

  Bang! Bang! Maxwell’s silver hammer

  Came down upon her head.

  Clang! Clang! Maxwell’s silver hammer

  Made sure that She was dead.

  P. C. Thirty-one said, ‘We’ve caught a dirty one.’

  Maxwell stands alone

  Painting testimonial pictures oh, oh, oh.

  Rose and Valerie, screaming from the gallery

  Say he must go free

  (Maxwell must go free)

  The judge does not agree and he tells them so, oh, oh

  But as the words are leaving his lips,

  A noise comes from behind.

  Bang! Bang! Maxwell’s silver hammer

  Came down upon his head.

  Clang! Clang! Maxwell’s silver hammer

  Made sure that he was dead.

  Silver Hammer Ma, a, an.

  Oh Darling

  Paul got it into his head he wanted to sound raw and bluesy, tough and tired, so he sang it over and over again for a week to really knacker his voice–but he sounds more like John trying too hard, instead of Little Richard, whom he used to imitate so well back in their early years. It all sounds a strain, the music and the lyrics. So let’s move on quickly.

  Octopus’s Garden

  Paul and John didn’t need to write the traditional Ringo song for Ringo to sing and amuse the boys and girls–this time Ringo wrote it himself, his second and last Beatles song. The idea came to him on hols in Sardinia in August 1968 on Peter Sellers’ yacht when he had temporarily left the Beatles. He had turned down the offer of an octopus lunch–not surprising, Ringo did not go for fancy, foreign foods–but the captain of the boat told him about octopuses and their habits on the seabed, such as making a garden with stones, all of which Ringo found fascinating.

  It’s a jolly, popular song, with a country and western beat, though perhaps not quite as popular as ‘Yellow Submarine’, another aquamarine ditty. Ringo’s voice, with his Liverpool accent, easily manages to rhyme ‘in’ and ‘been’ in the third line, pronouncing ‘been’ as ‘bin’.

  George helped Ringo out with the words and thought it was a lovely song. ‘It gets deep into your consciousness… it is very peaceful. I suppose Ringo is writing a cosmic song without even realizing it.’ Which just shows you that the Beatles themselves could over-analyse Beatles lyrics as well as any fan.

  The manuscript–in Ringo’s hand–has some interesting spelling and grammar (‘knowes were weeve been’). Ringo, unlike the others, did not attend a grammar school. It is written on a sheet of promotional paper for Ringo’s 1969 film, The Magic Christian, in which he co-starred with Peter Sellers.

  I’d like to be under the sea

  In an octopus’s garden in the shade

  He’d let us in, knows where we’ve been

  In his octopus’s garden in the shade

  I’d ask my friends to come and see

  An octopus’s garden with me

  I’d like to be under the sea

  In an octopus’s garden in the shade

  We would be warm below the storm

  In our little hideaway beneath the waves

  Resting our head on the sea bed

  In an octopus’s garden near a cave

  We would sing and dance around

  In an octopus’s garden in the shade

  We would shout and swim about

  The coral that lies beneath the waves

  Lies beneath the ocean waves

  Oh what joy for every girl and boy

  Knowing they’re happy and they’re safe

  Happy and they’re safe

  We would be so happy you and me

  No one there to tell us what to do

  I’d like to be under the sea

  In an octopus’s garden with you

  ‘Octopus’s Garden’, from Abbey Road, in Ringo’s hand, with some excellent spelling. It is written on Magic Christian notepaper, the film Ringo starred in with Peter Sellers.

  I Want You (She’s So Heavy)

  There is not a lot to say about the lyrics as John himself has little to say, using a vocabulary of just twelve words–‘I want you / I want you so bad / it’s driving me mad’ and ‘she’s so heavy’.

  When I asked John why there were so few words, he told me, ‘This is about Yoko. She’s very heavy. There was nothing else I could say about her other than “I want you”. Someone said the lyrics weren’t very good, but there was nothing more I wanted to say.’

  And yet the song lasts for seven minutes and forty-four seconds, making it the second longest Beatles number. (The longest is ‘Revolution 9’ at eight minutes and twelve seconds, third is ‘Hey Jude’ at seven minutes four seconds.) The reason for the length is that it is mainly an in
strumental number, almost an orchestral exercise on a theme, coming back to the same notes, the same words, but in a slightly different way, worrying about it, unable to leave it alone, like a sore, returning to it all the time. The wailing, nagging, trancelike music fits with the words, even if neither of them goes anywhere.

  Here Comes The Sun

  Another minimalistic lyric, as if they were running out of words, had used them all up, or were getting tired, or perhaps not helping each other to correct and improve as they had done in the past. Most of the songs on Abbey Road were completed and arranged by the original begetter, which was not the way they’d worked in the past.

  In this instance, George’s inspiration only ran to ten or so lines, with a lot of repeating–but it is still a very cheerful, hopeful, excellent song. George had decided to sag off (i.e. play truant) from yet another Apple round-table board meeting about their finances and organization. He was fed up with signing endless forms, which they didn’t really understand, and went off to Eric Clapton’s garden. While walking round, communing with nature, he realized spring was coming, the awful winter of discontent at Apple could not possibly go on for ever–so on an acoustic guitar borrowed from Clapton, he wrote this song. One of George’s best–which just seems to have come to him, out of plein air.

  John was not involved in the recording, and missed bits of a few other Abbey Road sessions, as he had been injured in a car crash in Scotland with Yoko. The others just bashed on without him–something they would never have done seven years earlier. When John was eventually recovering, he and Yoko had a double bed from Harrods set up in the studio at Abbey Road. Yoko arranged for a microphone to be suspended over her head so she could offer her comments–which did not exactly thrill Paul.

  In the manuscript, despite the limited number of words, George couldn’t be bothered to write them all out so he used abbreviations like L.D. and H.C.T.S. He has written the words on what appears to be a sheet of headed paper with some sort of Eastern image and verses. (Could it be Sanskrit? Any suggestions?)

  ‘Here Comes The Sun’, from Abbey Road, in George’s hand, on mystical notepaper.

  Here comes the sun

  Here comes the sun, and I say

  It’s all right

  Little darling

  It’s been a long, cold lonely winter

  Little darling

  It feels like years since it’s been here

  Little darling I feel like ice is slowly melting

  Little darling

  The smiles returning to the faces

  Little darling

  It seems like years since it’s been here

  Sun, sun, sun, here it comes

  Sun, sun, sun, here it comes

  Little darling it feels like years since it’s been clear

  Because

  Yoko was tinkling away on the piano, playing Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ (she had studied piano as a gel, her father having hoped she would become a concert pianist). John was lolling, as ever, on the sofa, probably with a few relaxing medications to help him along. He asked if she could play some of the chords in the reverse order–and the resulting sounds inspired him to write ‘Because’. The connection with Beethoven was well spotted by Wilfrid Mellers: ‘The affinity between the enveloping, arpeggiated X sharp minor triads, with the sudden shift to the flat supertonic is, in the Lennon and Beethoven examples, unmistakable.’

  In the early days, academic musicologists like Mellers tended to compare the Beatles’ songwriting to Schubert’s, so the Beethoven reference was interesting. One of their fave numbers in the Cavern days had been ‘Roll Over Beethoven’. When asked what they thought about Beethoven, Ringo usually said he liked his work very much, ‘especially his poems’.

  The lyrics, once again, are sparse, just twelve lines, but they are quite poetic, combining Wordsworthian rhythms with modern usage: ‘Because the world is round, it turns me on. Because the wind is high, it blows my mind. Because the sky is blue, it makes me cry.’ It would have been easy to have mucked it up by having blue at the end, as they might have done back in 1962. Both Paul and George said it was their favourite song on Abbey Road. John was more matter-of-fact: ‘The lyrics speak for themselves, they’re clear, no bullshit, no imagery, no obscure references.’

  Only five lines in John’s hand have turned up, all a bit faded. They are written on the back of a business letter from John Eastman (representing Paul) to the other Beatles, during their interminable Apple rows. It gives us a date, 8 July 1969, and again reflects John’s habit of writing lyrics on any old scrap lying around.

  ‘Because’, from Abbey Road, five lines in John’s hand, written on the back of a legal letter about yet another row concerning Apple, NEMS and Allen Klein, their one-time business manager.

  Because the world is round it turns me on

  Because the world is round… aaaaaahhhhhh

  Because the wind is high it blows my mind

  Because the wind is high… aaaaaaaahhhh

  Love is old, love is new

  Love is all, love is you

  Because the sky is blue, it makes me cry

  Because the sky is blue… aaaaaaahhhh

  You Never Give Me Your Money

  This was one of those songs I could never get out of my head back when I first heard it. The opening four lines seemed to go round and round inside my brain. ‘You never give me your money, you only give me your funny paper / and in the middle of negotiations / you break down.’ Easy to sing, as it’s almost all on the same note.

  And then I could never remember how it went after that, the reason being that nothing really flowed on, nothing was connected. The song was made up of three if not four scraps of songs put together, using up leftovers.

  The first part, about not being given the money, came out of the Apple squabbles. None of them ever seemed to have any real money, it was always bits of paper and forms purporting to show where it had all gone, where it was going. There might also have been a double meaning–Paul saying to John that you never give me yourself, now you are with Yoko. But that could be reading too much into it.

  The next verse jumps rather awkwardly into the problems of a student, out of college, with no money. The last verse jumped again, to a sweet dream that had come true–meaning Linda, his loveheart, turning up to save him. So, quite a lot of scraps of lyrics, but not enough to make a whole song.

  Sun King

  We were now well into the second side of the album and from here to the end it is all short, unfinished pieces, filling up the side, unloading their minds, knowing it was going to be their last ever new album so better clear the decks in case we never come this way again. The songs run into each other, as a mad medley. In fact the working title was ‘A Huge Medley’.

  ‘Sun King’ was a mere scrap, just seven lines–in fact three lines, with the other four made up of nonsense. The Sun King was Louis XIV of France. John, supposedly had been reading Nancy Mitford’s biography of the Sun King, or at least a review of it.

  For the final four lines, John reverted to singing gibberish, throwing in all the stupid foreign phrases he could think of: mi amore, obrigado, quando, mundo–in cod Italian/Portuguese/Spanish.

  You could argue this was very avant-garde and revolutionary, like John Cage composing silent music, making a philosophical statement about the nature of art. Was John suggesting that words themselves were a nonsense? Who needs them, why do we tie ourselves to them, surely any words can be treated as lyrics, so come on, let’s see if we can do it. Or was he just being bloody lazy? Or having a joke? Whatever the answer, it amused him at the time and filled two and a half minutes on the album.

  Mean Mr Mustard

  ‘Sun King’ segues straight into ‘Mean Mr Mustard’ which then blends into ‘Polythene Pam’, and so on. They are connected in this way because they are all scraps, part songs, unfinished, embryos, not apparently good enough, or with no one willing enough to build them up and launch them as fully fledged,
grown-up songs.

  ‘Mr Mustard’ was by John–‘a bit of crap I wrote in India’–based on a newspaper story about a miser who hid cash in his rectum, some sort of tramp, a dosser, a down and out. When John saw a homeless person sleeping in a park, or a dirty old man begging in the street, he used to say that he would probably have ended up that way himself, had the Beatles not come along. Perhaps he was thinking of his dad, Alfred, who wandered off to sea and survived doing odd jobs like washing up in hotel kitchens.

  ‘Keeps a ten bob note up his nose’ was not, John maintained, a drug reference, but the sort of thing he imagined Mr Mustard doing, to hide whatever money he had. Ah, ten bob notes, I remember them well. A real note, not a coin, which was worth half an old pound note, both of them long gone. In the song, mean Mr Mustard has a sister, originally named Shirley, but changed to Pam in order to lead us into the next song…

  Polythene Pam

  Also written in India by John. This one goes back to their dodgy, dingy Cavern days, telling of some insalubrious female fan who dressed up in polythene–a synthetic plastic material that had just become popular in the 1950s. Two different girls have come forward and said they were the original–one who ate polythene and the other who enjoyed three-in-a-bed sessions with John wearing nothing but polythene bags. The song finished with a ‘yeah yeah’, in a heavy Scouse accent–another period touch. Before merging straight on into the next song.