by Steve Turner
THIS IS A CARLTON BOOK
First published by Carlton Books Limited 1994
This edition published by
Carlton Books Limited 2009
Text copyright © Steve Turner 1994, 1999, 2005, 2009
Design copyright © Carlton Books Limited 1994, 1999, 2005, 2009
All rights reserved.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher‘s prior written consent in any form of cover or binding other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed upon the subsequent purchaser.
eISBN 978-1-78011-188-9
This book is dedicated to the memory of T-Bone Burnett and Larry Norman in memory of many hours of Beatle-talk over the years.
CONTENTS
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
SGT PEPPER’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND
Penny Lane; Strawberry Fields Forever; Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band; With A Little Help From My Friends; Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds; Getting Better; Fixing A Hole; She’s Leaving Home; Being For The Benefit of Mr Kite!; Within You Without You; When I’m Sixty-Four; Lovely Rita; Good Morning, Good Morning; A Day In The Life
MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR / YELLOW SUBMARINE
All You Need Is Love; Baby, You’re A Rich Man; Hello Goodbye; Only A Northern Song; All Together Now; Hey Bulldog; It’s All Too Much; Magical Mystery Tour; The Fool On The Hill; Flying; Blue Jay Way; Your Mother Should Know; I Am the Walrus; Lady Madonna; The Inner Light; Hey Jude
THE BEATLES
Back In The USSR; Dear Prudence; Glass Onion; Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da; Wild Honey Pie; The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill; While My Guitar Gently Weeps; Happiness Is A Warm Gun; Martha My Dear; I’m So Tired; Blackbird; Piggies; Rocky Raccoon; Don’t Pass Me By; Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?; I Will; Julia; Birthday; Yer Blues; Mother Nature’s Son; Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey; Sexy Sadie; Helter Skelter; Long Long Long; Revolution; Honey Pie; Savoy Truffle; Cry Baby Cry; Revolution 9; Good Night; Don’t Let Me Down
LET IT BE
Two Of Us; Dig A Pony; Across The Universe; I Me Mine; Dig It; Let It Be; I’ve Got A Feeling; One After 909; For You Blue; The Long And Winding Road; Get Back; The Ballad of John and Yoko; Old Brown Shoe; You Know My Name
ABBEY ROAD
Come Together; Something; Maxwell’s Silver Hammer; Oh Darling; Octopus’s Garden; I Want You; Here Comes The Sun; Because; You Never Give Me Your Money; Sun King; Mean Mr Mustard; Polythene Pam; She Came In Through The Bathroom Window; Golden Slumbers; Her Majesty; Carry That Weight; The End
LIVE AT THE BBC
I’ll Be On My Way
ANTHOLOGY 1–3
Free as a Bird; Real Love; Christmas Time (Is Here Again); In Spite of All the Danger; You’ll Be Mine; Cayenne; Cry for a Shadow; Like Dreamers Do; Hello Little Girl; You Know What To Do; If You’ve Got Trouble; That Means a Lot; 12-Bar Original; Junk; Not Guilty; What’s the New Mary Jane; Step Inside Love; Los Paranoias; Teddy Boy; All Things Must Pass; Come and Get It.
DISCOGRAPHY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PREFACE
This book tells the stories behind the Beatles’ songs, which I’ve defined as songs written and recorded by the Beatles. It looks at the how, why and where of the songwriting and traces the inspiration back to source.
Having said that, this is not a book about how the Beatles recorded the songs, nor about who played what on which sessions. Mark Lewisohn has done that job definitively in The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions. Neither is it a book of in-depth musical analysis. For this approach, see Twilight Of The Gods by Professor Wilfrid Mellers (Schirmer Books, 1973) or The Songwriting Secrets Of The Beatles by Dominic Pedler (Omnibus Press, 2003).
Also exemplary is Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald (Fourth Estate, 1994). MacDonald takes the same song-by-song approach that this book takes and his insights and depth of knowledge about popular music of the sixties are unparalleled.
This is also not a book that explains what the Beatles ‘were really trying to say’. Although I’ve given outlines of many songs and have referred to psychological factors that I believe influenced the standpoint of the writing, I’ve left the task of interpretation to others. If you do want to know what Paul was saying, read a book like Paul McCartney: From Liverpool To Let It Be by Howard DeWitt (Horizon Books, 1992) or, if you want to catch the drift of John’s intellectual development, read The Art and Music of John Lennon by John Robertson (Omnibus, 1990) or John Lennon’s Secret by David Stuart Ryan (Kozmik Press, 1982).
What I have tried to do is simply to tell the story of how each song came into being. It could have been a musical inspiration, such as trying to write in the style of Smokey Robinson. It could have been a phrase that just wouldn’t go away, like the ‘waves of sorrow, pools of joy’ line that compelled John to write ‘Across The Universe’. Or it could have been an incident like the death of socialite Tara Browne which led to the writing of a section of ‘A Day In The Life’.
My primary source has been the words of the Beatles themselves. I was fortunate enough to meet John, interviewing him and Yoko at the Apple office in Savile Row in the summer of 1971, shortly before Imagine was released. I remember complimenting him on the personal nature of his new songs that had come after an intense period of therapy. “My songs have always been personal,” he responded. “‘Help!’ was personal. ‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’ was personal. ‘I’m A Loser’ was personal. I’ve always been on that kick.”
I didn’t meet Paul until 1992 when I was asked to help Linda in the writing of the text for her photographic book Linda McCartney’s Sixties: Portrait Of An Era. I had hoped that Paul would contribute his own memories but he decided that he couldn’t just dip into a project like this and yet didn’t have the time to make a full commitment. He did, however, point out some discrepancies in the stories I had collected so far which I was then able to change.
The most reliable comments on the songs being those made by the Beatles themselves, I’ve drawn extensively on the published interviews I have personally collected since beginning my first Beatles’ scrapbook in 1963. Those that I had missed, I searched out at the National Newspaper Library and the National Sound Archives in London. There were seven invaluable written accounts which I found myself coming back to repeatedly and without which I wouldn’t have known where to start. In order of publication these were: Alan Aldridge’s interview with Paul McCartney published as A Good Guru’s Guide To The Beatles’ Sinister Songbook in the Observer magazine, London, on November 26, 1967; The Beatles by Hunter Davies, 1968; Lennon: The Greatest Natural Songwriter of our Time by Mike Hennessey in Record Mirror, October 2, 1971 (reprinted in Hit Parade, April 1972); Lennon Remembers by Jann Wenner, 1971; I Me Mine by George Harrison, 1980, The Playboy Interviews with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, 1981 and Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now by Barry Miles (1997). There were also two radio series which shed light on the songwriting: Mike Read’s McCartney On McCartney, broadcast on BBC Radio 1 during 1989, and The Lost Lennon Tapes, an American production featuring demo tapes from John’s private collection which Yoko had allowed to be broadcast for the first time.
As informative as all these were, they didn’t tell me the whole story. Many of the anecdotes are already well known. I wanted to interview the people who were around when the songs were written, or who had even been the subject of songs. I also wanted to track down the newspaper stories which had provided ideas, the books from which they’d taken lines and the places which had inspired them. I wanted to surprise even th
e remaining Beatles themselves because I knew that they didn’t know who Mr Kite really was or what happened to the girl whose story inspired ‘She’s Leaving Home’.
The definitive book on this subject won’t be written until John’s and George’s journals, letters and work books are made public and Paul and Ringo sit down in front of a microphone and share everything they remember about the 208 songs which the Beatles recorded. The chances are, though, that John’s material will remain locked in vaults for the foreseeable future because much of it refers to people still living and Yoko believes that it is too sensitive to release. The six-part television series The Beatles Anthology and the accompanying ‘biography’ of the Beatles was disappointing to anyone expecting the remaining members of the Beatles to tell hitherto-untold stories.
That’s why it was worth compiling this book. It may be the closest we’ll ever get to understanding how the Beatles conjured up their songwriting magic.
Steve Turner
London, November 1998 and March 2005
INTRODUCTION
The second half of the Beatles’ career saw them pushing the popular song form as far as they could then imagine it going. I can still remember my surprise on first hearing ‘Paperback Writer’ because the words of the title were so unlike anything I’d heard in a chart song before. Pop songs were about girls and cars and dancing, not about paperback books or prospective authors.
From 1966 onwards the Beatles didn’t seem to consider any subject as inappropriate. At least half the songs on Revolver were nothing to do with love and their primary inspiration was no longer the work of other artists. They grabbed song ideas from overheard conversations, anecdotes, newspaper headlines, esoteric books, posters, dreams, TV commercials, paintings and everyday occurrences. They were equally voracious musically, listening to Asian music, avant-garde jazz, musique concrete and experimenting with the possibilities of tampering with magnetic tape.
Revolver, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the soundtracks for Magical Mystery Tour and Yellow Submarine all developed from the pursuit of altered states of consciousness. The Beatles (The White Album), although mostly written during a meditation course in India, marked a return to basics – comic book stories, guttural blues, folk style guitar – and a break with their recent psychedelic past. Let It Be, another film soundtrack, was an attempted return to the music that had first inspired them. Abbey Road reprised their good points while showing that they were still capable of surprise.
This period of their career saw George Harrison emerging as a composer and John playing less of a central role in the Beatles as Yoko Ono loomed larger in his life. In 1964 and 1965 John had been a major contributor to the group’s hit singles. After Sgt. Pepper, Paul came to dominate. ‘Hello Goodbye,’ ‘Magical Mystery Tour,’ ‘Lady Madonna,’ ‘Hey Jude’, ‘Get Back’ and ‘Let It Be;’ were all written by Paul. The partnership that produced ‘She Loves You’ and ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ was over.
Almost forty years after the band stopped playing together, their songs still mean a lot to us. For those of us who grew up with them they are like old friends that we never tire of meeting. Because they brightened up our lives and perhaps even helped in awakening our intellectual and spiritual curiosity our feelings towards them are forever warm. Finding out where they came from helps us find out where we came from.
SGT PEPPER’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND
The fruitful period which produced the singles ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ as well as the Sgt Pepper album was the first in which the Beatles could be totally devoted to the studio because they were free of touring commitments. They took an unprecedented 105 hours to record both sides of the single and then a further five months to complete the album.
Paul conceived the album as a show staged by a fictional Edwardian brass band transported through time into the psychedelic age and played, of course, by the electronically equipped Beatles. Released in June 1967, Sgt Pepper was the album of what became known as ‘The Summer Of Love’ – a brief season when the hippie ethic developed in San Francisco seemed to pervade the whole of the Western world. For anyone who was young at the time, the music automatically evokes the sight of beads and kaftans, the sound of tinkling bells and the aroma of marijuana masked by joss sticks. Despite this, there were only four songs on Sgt Pepper – ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’, ‘She’s Leaving Home’, ‘Within You Without You’ and ‘A Day In The Life’ – that even alluded to the social upheaval caused by the changing youth culture.
The rest of the songs were very British pop songs, tackling a range of domestic subjects from neighbourliness (‘A Little Help From My Friends’) and self-improvement (‘Getting Better’), through suburban living (‘Good Morning, Good Morning’) and home decoration (‘Fixing A Hole’), to Victorian entertainment (‘Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite’). The language of the songs was often deliberately antiquated – ‘guaranteed to raise a smile’, ‘may I inquire discreetly’, ‘meeting a man from the motor trade’, ‘a splendid time is guaranteed for all’, ‘indicate precisely what you mean to say’ – as if this really was an Edwardian production staged by the good Sergeant Pepper and his men from the local Lonely Hearts club.
Yet, the spirit of 1967 suffused the album in significant ways. It was a fruit of the belief that limits to the imagination were culturally imposed and should therefore be challenged. Anything that seemed technically possible was worth an attempt from a climaxing orchestral frenzy on ‘A Day In The Life’ to a note of such a high frequency that only a dog could hear it on the play-out groove.
Sgt Pepper was one of the first records to have a gatefold sleeve, printed lyrics, decorated inner bag, free gift and a cover designed by a celebrated artist. Its reputation as the first ‘concept album’ though is undeserved. Merle Travis’s Folk Songs From the Hills (1947) was a concept album as was Frank Sinatra’s In The Wee Small Hours (1955) and, more recently, Johnny Cash’s Blood Sweat and Tears (1963) and Bitter Tears (1965). Indeed, it’s arguable whether Sgt Pepper was a concept album at all. The only unifying theme was the Pepper song and its reprise and the photographs on the sleeve. There was no theme holding the individual songs together. “Basically Sgt Pepper was McCartney’s album, not Lennon’s,” says Barry Miles, who was the group’s main contact on the London underground scene at the time. “People make the mistake of thinking it must have been Lennon’s because he was so hip. Actually, he was taking so many drugs and trying to get rid of his ego that it was much more McCartney’s idea.”
PENNY LANE
Penny Lane is a Liverpool street but also the name given to the area that surrounds its junction with Smithdown Road. None of the places mentioned in ‘Penny Lane’ exists in the lane itself. Anyone not raised in this area of Liverpool might find it , as musician and art critic George Melly once put it, a “dull suburban shopping centre”. But to Paul and John, who had spent their early years in the area, it represented a time in their lives when everyone appeared to be friendly and the sun shone for ever in a clear blue sky. Living in the bubble of fame their memories of childhood were more gilded. As John had observed in ‘She Said, She Said’, ‘When I was a boy, everything was right.’
John had incorporated Penny Lane into an early draft of ‘In My Life’, but it was Paul who made it work. He created a Liverpool street scene that could have been taken from a children’s picture book with a pretty nurse, a jolly barber, an eccentric banker, a patriotic fireman and some friendly passers by. “It’s part fact,” he admitted. “It’s part nostalgia.” At first it sounds as though a summer scene is being described (‘blue suburban skies’) but then rain is mentioned as well as someone selling poppies (November 11). The point is that the song is a series of snapshots, not all of them necessarily taken on the same day.
There was a barber’s shop in Penny Lane, run by a Mr Bioletti who claimed to have cut hair for John, Paul and George as children; there were two banks (Barclays and Lloyds), a fire station i
n Allerton Road and, in the middle of the roundabout, a shelter. The banker without a mac and fireman with a portrait of the Queen in his pocket were Paul’s embellishments. “I wrote that the barber had photographs of every head he’d had the pleasure of knowing,” said Paul. “Actually he just had photos of different hairstyles. But all the people who come and go do stop and say hello.”
Finger pie was a Liverpudlian sexual reference included in the song to amuse the locals. “It was just a nice little joke for the Liverpool lads who like a bit of smut,” said Paul. “For months afterwards, girls serving in local chip shops had to put up with requests for ‘fish and finger pie’.”
Liverpool poet Roger McGough, who was in the music and satire group Scaffold with Paul’s brother Mike, believes that ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘Strawberry Fields’ were significant because, for the first time, British rather than American landmarks were being celebrated in rock’n’roll.
“The Beatles were starting to write songs about home,” McGough says. “They began to draw on things like the rhymes we used to sing in the streets and old songs our parents remembered from the days of the music halls. Liverpool didn’t have a mythology until they created one.”
Today, because of the song, Penny Lane is a Liverpool tourist attraction and this itself has altered the area. The original street signs were stolen years ago and their replacements have had to be screwed to walls and placed beyond easy reach. The barber’s shop has become a unisex salon with a picture of the Beatles displayed in the window. The shelter on the roundabout has been renovated and re-opened as Sgt Pepper’s Bistro. The Penny Lane Wine Bar has the song’s lyrics painted above its windows.
STRAWBERRY FIELDS FOREVER
In the autumn of 1966, John went to Spain to film the role of Private Gripweed in Dick Lester’s How I Won The War. While relaxing between shots on the beach at Almeira he began composing ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, a song he conceived as a slow talking-blues. Further work on the song took place in a large house he was renting in nearby Santa Isabel.