Who Wrote the Beatle Songs

by Todd M Compton

  Paul and George wrote the melodic guitar duet that begins the song, a significant contribution. “We wrote it [the duet] at the session and learned it on the spot — . . . then we sat and played it,” Paul said. [116]

  For No One — (McCartney)

  (lead vocals: Paul) (recorded on May 9, 16 and 19, 1966)

  Paul wrote this in March 1966 while he was on a skiing vacation with Jane Asher in the Swiss Alps, near Kloster, in a little bathroom in a chalet. [117] It took him about a week to finish the song. [118] In 1989, he explained how he liked songs about the daily life of working girls, such as his early solo single, “Another Day.” [119] In 1995, he commented on another theme in the song: “I suspect it was about another argument. I don’t have easy relationships with women, I never have.” [120] So this may reflect problems in his relationship with Jane. He later rerecorded the song for his ill-fated movie, Give My Regards To Broad Street , and explained, “I’d written the song, took it to the studio, one day recorded it, end of story. It’s just a record, a museum piece. And I hated the idea of them staying as museum pieces.” [121]

  Alan Civil, distinguished classical hornist, played the remarkable French horn solo. But who wrote it? Even the solos of Beatle songs are disputed territory. Civil says that he made up his solo entirely, with no help at all from George Martin or Paul McCartney. “McCartney sang nothing,” he said. “Nobody seemed to know what they wanted at all, even George Martin. . . . I was entirely responsible for inventing the motive.” [122] Paul’s memories flatly contradict this: “George asked me, ‘Now, what do you want him to play?’ I said, ‘Something like this,’ and sang the solo to him, and he wrote it down. Towards the end of the session, when we were getting the piece down for Alan to play, George explained to me the range of the instrument: ‘Well, it goes from here to this top E,’ and I said, ‘What if we ask him to play an F?’” [123] Both Civil and McCartney are quite anecdotally convincing, but I lean toward the songwriter.

  Paul and John agree that this is a Paul song. John not only attributed this to Paul, but was generous in his praise for it. “Paul. Another of his I really liked,” he said in 1971. [124] And in 1980 he enthused: “Paul’s. One of my favorites of his, too. . . . A nice piece of work, I think.” [125]

  Dr. Robert — (Lennon-McCartney)

  (lead vocals: John) (recorded on April 17 and 19, 1966)

  Much of the commentary on “Dr. Robert” revolves around the identity of the pill-dispensing doctor in the song’s title. John said that he himself was the doctor. “Another of mine,” he said in 1980. “It’s mainly about drugs and pills. It was about myself, I was the one that carried all the pills on tour.” [126]

  Pete Shotton, on the other hand, said that the doctor of the song’s title was “Charles Roberts,” who was part of the Andy Warhol entourage. [127] However, according to Miles/McCartney, the song was based on Dr. Robert Freymann, a New York physician. [128] Paul gave one more option for interpreting the doctor in 1995, as he described the song as a fantasy and parody, rather than a realistic portrait. [129]

  John claimed the song as his own in 1980 (“Another of mine”), but in 1971 he thought some collaboration was possible: “Me — I think Paul helped with the middle.” [130] In 1995, Paul seemed to regard it as a collaboration: “John and I thought it was a funny idea: the fantasy doctor who would fix you up by giving you drugs, it was a parody on that idea. It’s just a piss-take. As far as I know, neither of us ever went to a doctor for those kind of things.” [131]

  It is probably the familiar pattern of a song started by John, and finished with collaboration.

  I Want To Tell You — (Harrison)

  (lead vocals: George) (recorded on June 2, 1966)

  George said that this song “is about the avalanche of thoughts that are so hard to write down or say or transmit.” [132]

  Got To Get You Into My Life — (McCartney)

  (lead vocals: Paul) (recorded on April 7 and June 17, 1966)

  This Motown-influenced rhythm and blues song with brass appears to be a straight love song, but it had a drug-related secondary meaning — it was “an ode to pot,” Paul said, written not long after he had first been introduced to marijuana. “I didn’t have a hard time with it [marijuana] and to me it seemed it was mind-expanding, literally mind-expanding.” [133] However, the song also works as a love song; it is one of many cases of lyrical double meanings in the Beatles’ oeuvre.

  In his interviews Paul has acknowledged no contribution from Lennon to this song. “That’s mine; I wrote it,” he said in 1984. [134] In 1980, John agreed that this was Paul’s, saying that he didn’t even help with the lyrics: “Paul’s again. I think that was one of his best songs, too, because the lyrics are good and I didn’t write ’em.” John thought the song was about LSD, not marijuana. [135] However, nine years earlier, Lennon thought that he (and George) might have helped with the lyrics: “Paul. I think George and I helped with some of the lyric. I’m not sure.” [136]

  Granted John’s strong statement in 1980 that the lyrics were written by Paul, it seems likely that the song is wholly by McCartney.

  Tomorrow Never Knows — (Lennon-Tibetan Book of the Dead- McCartney-Starkey)

  (lead vocals: John) (recorded on April 6, 7, and 22, 1966)

  Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert wrote The Psychedelic Experience : A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead in 1964. John Lennon bought a copy in March 1966, and followed Leary’s invitation to take a trip with LSD: “I did it just like he said in the book.” [137] In the introduction to the book is the sentence, “When in doubt, relax, turn off your mind, float downstream.” [138] That turned into the first line of “Tomorrow Never Knows.” John apparently wrote music to the song that was like a chant, and used only one chord, C, as in much Indian music. (However, in the second half of the verse, the Beatles added a B flat overlay over the C that in effect gives the song two chords. [139] )

  John premiered it to the other Beatles and George Martin at Brian Epstein’s house in Chapel Street in Belgravia. Paul said:

  We were there for a meeting. George Martin was there so it may have been to show George some new songs or talk about the new album. John got his guitar out and started doing “Tomorrow Never Knows” and it was all on one chord. This was because of our interest in Indian music. [140]

  Paul was worried about how George Martin would react to a heavy philosophical song all on one chord, but, wise producer that he was, Martin said, “Rather interesting, John. Jolly interesting!” [141] The song was scheduled for recording.

  It was originally called “The Void,” but John decided to use one of Ringo Starr’s homely sayings, “Tomorrow Never Knows,” for the song’s title “sort of to take the edge off the heavy philosophical lyrics.” [142] Ringo did indeed use the phrase. In a 1964 Beatles press conference, he told how someone had cut some of his hair unexpectedly at a public occasion. “I was talking away and I looked ‘round, and there was about 400 people just smiling. So, you know — what can you say! John: What can you say! Ringo: Tomorrow never knows.” John laughed. [143]

  Apparently John just had the first “verse” so he and Paul had a songwriting session with the song. They managed to fill out two “verses,” but couldn’t stretch it to three. [144] “We racked our brains but couldn’t come up with any more words, because we felt it already said everything we wanted to say in the two verses,” said Paul. [145]

  But something needed to be done for that third verse. Then Paul had the idea to use experimental music he’d been toying with at home to fill the gap. He’d been playing with a tape recorder, taking the erase head off and recording a sound over and over again on a tape until it was “saturated.” He called these tape loops. [146] They had “funny, distorted, dense little noises on them,” said George Martin. [147] Paul’s immediate inspiration for this experimental music was the experimental “classical” composer Karl­heinz Stockhausen — “these saturated loops were inspired by his work,” he s
aid. [148] This idea for the song was accepted. George Martin remembered that Paul “told the others, and they, too, took the wipe heads off their recorders and started constructing loops of taped gibberish.” [149] The Beatles brought in some thirty tapes and George Martin selected sixteen of them for “Tomorrow Never Knows.” [150]

  So just as John added significantly to performance-composition in Paul’s “Yellow Submarine,” Paul added significant performance-composi­tion to John’s song here.

  John had originally envisioned the song as sung by thousands of monks chanting. “That was impractical, of course,” he said in about 1970, “and we did something different.” [151] As George Martin remembered, John wanted his voice “to sound like the Dalai Lama, singing from a Tibetan hill top.” So Martin put his voice through a Leslie speaker. A tambour was added, and tape loop noises that sounded like seagulls. This didn’t approximate John’s original mystical vision. “It was a bit of a drag,” he said, “and I didn’t really like it. I should have tried to get near my original idea, the monks singing.” [152] Nevertheless, this is how the finished product was created.

  John claimed this song in a number of interviews. In 1971, he said, “Me — this was my first psychedelic song.” [153] Paul, in 1966, agreed: “Every track on the LP has something special. . . . George wanted to get his Indian stuff on the record, I wanted to do some new electronic things, and John even had a song in which his inspiration was The Tibetan Book of the Dead .” [154] But a year later, still very early, Paul said, “The song was John’s idea but we all had a bash at it.” [155] In this song, the experimentalism of the recording is part of the composition, and Paul claimed much of this. In 1966, he said, “we’ve got this track (Tomorrow Never Knows) with electronic effects I worked out myself.” [156]

  Beatle insider Neil Aspinall said in 1966 that Lennon brought only the words to the studio, and the Beatles came up with the “tune” there:

  The words were written before the tune and there was no get­ting away from the fact that the words were very powerful. So all four boys were anxious to build a tune and a backing which would be as strong as the actual lyrics. The basic tune was written during the first hours of the recording session. [157]

  This statement is impressively early, and Aspinall was apparently a first-hand witness; if this is true, then the melody of the song was truly collaborative, with all the Beatles contributing. However, this conflicts with Paul’s statements that when he first heard the song John was playing it on one chord. In other words, it sounds like there was a song with words (at least the first section) and tune when Paul first heard it.

  Unless John was singing it on one note before they showed up at Abbey Road to record it. It’s an interesting theory, but I tend to think that John came up with the first section of the lyrics and the tune long before the recording studio. Perhaps John and Paul and George worked on the melody when they got to the studio.

  In any event, the end result was a song that had come a long way from “Love Me Do.” It became an overwhelming climactic ending to an album that was amazingly different from Please Please Me , which had been released just a few years before.

  While Sgt. Pepper has generally been ranked highest of the Beatle albums in music polls and in collective critical taste, Revolver has sometimes been regarded as the Beatles’ finest achievement. [158]

  * * *

  [1] In Hutchins, “John Lennon Interview”.

  [2] “Beatlemania strikes again.”

  [3] Lost Lennon Tapes, Oct. 21, 1991, cf. Sheff, The Playboy Interviews, 187-88. Miles, Many Years from Now , 209.

  [4] Paul and John, radio interview with Keith Fordyce, August 29, 1966, summarized in Winn, That Magic Feeling , 39.

  [5] Miles, Many Years from Now , 209.

  [6] Hennessey, “Who Wrote What,” Record Mirror (1971).

  [7] Cott, “The Rolling Stone Interview.”

  [8] Anthology , 199.

  [9] Sheff, The Playboy Interviews, 187-88.

  [10] Miles, Many Years from Now , 210.

  [11] Ibid.

  [12] Ibid.

  [13] Winn, Way Beyond Compare , 361.

  [14] Miles, Many Years from Now , 210.

  [15] Lennon, Rolling Stone Interview, Dec. 1970, BBC, part 3; Wenner, Lennon Remembers , 58.

  [16] Hennessey, “Who Wrote What,” Record Mirror.

  [17] Sheff, The Playboy Interviews, 188.

  [18] Read, “McCartney on McCartney,” episode 2. John put this on a list of songs written by Paul alone. Hennessey, “Who Wrote What,” Record Mirror.

  [19] “Beatlemania Strikes Again” (1966).

  [20] Turner, A Hard Day’s Write , 101.

  [21] Alan Smith, “My Broken Tooth.”

  [22] “In The Beatles’ Song Writing Factory.” Paul began this song with “a musical phrase or part of a tune,” John said. “He thought that out in the car on his way to my house.”

  [23] Alan Smith, “My Broken Tooth.”

  [24] Read, “McCartney on McCartney,” episode 3. Miles, Many Years from Now , 279. Anthology , 212. In these interviews, he seems to present himself as the only writer, but his early interview is preferable evidence.

  [25] In 1995, Paul said they had no music until they went upstairs (Miles, Many Years from Now , 279), but John’s testimony thirty years earlier is preferable. “In The Beatles’ Song Writing Factory.”

  [26] Many Years from Now , 279.

  [27] Uncut interview, in Sawyer, Read the Beatles , 246.

  [28] Cott, “The Rolling Stone Interview.”

  [29] Hennessey, “Who Wrote What,” Record Mirror.

  [30] Lost Lennon Tapes, July 18, 1988, cf. Sheff, The Playboy Interviews, 189.

  [31] George Harrison also described the song as a McCartney-dominated collaboration. Harry, The Paul McCartney Encyclopedia , at “Paperback Writer.”

  [32] Beatles Recording Sessions , 74. George Martin, With a Little Help , 85.

  [33] In 1971, he put “Rain” on a list of songs he wrote alone (Hennessey, “Who Wrote What,” Record Mirror ), and in 1980, he said, “That’s me again.” Lost Lennon Tapes, July 18, 1988, cf. Sheff, The Playboy Interviews, 207.

  [34] Miles, Many Years from Now , 280.

  [35] Lost Lennon Tapes, July 18, 1988, cf. Sheff, The Playboy Interviews, 207; Lennon in Alterman, “The Beatles: Four Smiling, Tired Guys” (1966); Lennon, in Beatles, “Press Conference in New York City (August 22, 1966)”; Lennon in Cott, “The Rolling Stone Interview” (1968).

  [36] Smith, “The Beatles: Ringo Played Cards.” Similar: Martin, With a Little Help , 78-79.

  [37] Harrison, I Me Mine , 94; Anthology , 206.

  [38] Sheff, The Playboy Interviews, 161.

  [39] Smith, Off the Record , 261. Paul on the song: Goodman, “Paul and Linda McCartney,” 107. Anthology , 207.

  [40] Miles, Many Years from Now , 281-84.

  [41] Davies, “All Paul.” For another early account of writing the song, Alterman, “The Beatles: Four Smiling, Tired Guys” (1966). “When I started doing the melody I developed the lyric. It all came from the first line. I wonder if there are girls called Eleanor Rigby? Originally I called her Miss Daisy Hawkins. Father MacKenzie was Father McCartney originally.”

  [42] Read, “McCartney on McCartney,” episode 3. Davies, “All Paul” (1966). Donovan remembered hearing the song when it had lyrics “Ola Na Tungee. Blowing his mind in the dark with a pipeful of clay. No one can say.” Leitch, The Autobiography of Donovan , 152. Miles, Many Years from Now , 282. Pritchard and Lysaght, The Beatles: an Oral History , 208. This seems to conflict with Paul’s memories of getting the beginnings of the final lyrics when he got the melody. Maybe “Ola Na Tungee” was a second verse lyric that was later rejected.

  [43] Davies, “All Paul” (1966); Goodman, “Paul and Linda McCartney Interview” (1984), 107. Snow, “Paul McCartney.”

  [44] Aldridge, “Beatles Not All That Turned On,” 139. Goodman, “Paul and Linda McCartney Interview” (1984),
107. Garbarini and Baird, “Has Success Spoiled Paul McCartney?” (1985), 62.

  [45] Miles, Many Years from Now , 281-84. There is a demo by Paul recorded about late March 1966. Winn, That Magic Feeling , 7.

  [46] It is unclear how much of the lyrics were done at this time. Possibly two verses, Interview in Smith, Off the Record , 201, but this seems to conflict with the report that the last verse was written in the studio.

  [47] Davies, “All Paul” (1966). Aldridge, “Beatles Not All That Turned On,” 139. Miles, Many Years from Now , 281-84.

  [48] Aldridge, “Beatles Not All That Turned On,” 139. Read, “McCartney on McCartney,” (1989), episode 3. However, in the earliest interviews, Paul said that he looked it up himself. Davies, “All Paul” (1966).

  [49] Lost Lennon Tapes, Jan. 7, 1991, cf. Sheff, The Playboy Interviews, 151-52.

  [50] Sheff, “All We Are Saying: Three Weeks With John Lennon,” interview with David Sheff, cf. Sheff, The Playboy Interviews, 151-52.

  [51] Williams, “Produced by George Martin” (1971).

  [52] Davies, The Beatles , 274.

  [53] Shotton and Schaffner, The Beatles, Lennon and Me, 214-17.

  [54] Everett II, 51. Martin said Fahrenheit 451 was the immediate influence, but he was apparently mistaken, as Fahrenheit 451 was not released in the U.K. till September 16, 1966, long after “Eleanor Rigby” was recorded.

  [55] Davies, “All Paul.” Tobler and Grundy, “George Martin.”

  [56] Emerick, Here, There and Everywhere , 127.

  [57] In a 1966 interview, George Harrison simply called it “Paul’s.” Alan Walsh, “George—More to Life.”

  [58] Wenner, Lennon Remembers , 82. Similar: Letter to George Martin/Richard Williams, Sept. 1971, in Davies, The John Lennon Letters, 213. “At least 50% of the lyrics of Eleanor Rigby was written by me in the studio and at Paul’s place.”

  [59] Hennessey, “Who Wrote What,” Record Mirror.

  [60] Lost Lennon Tapes, Jan. 7, 1991; cf. Sheff, The Playboy Interviews, 151-52.