by Steve Turner
The Beatles were aware of Kesey’s activities and later, when the Apple record label was founded, Kesey visited the office in Savile Row to record a spoken-word album.
On April 25, Paul arrived at Abbey Road studios with nothing more than the song title, the first line and a general idea for the tune. He said he wanted his new song to be like a commercial for the television programme, letting viewers know what was in store. Mal Evans was dispatched to find some real mystery tour posters from which they could lift phrases but, after visiting coach stations, returned empty-handed. When the backing track had been recorded, Paul asked everyone to shout out words connected with mystery tours which Mal wrote down. They came up with ‘invitation’, ‘reservation’, ‘trip of a lifetime’ and ‘satisfaction guaranteed’, but it wasn’t enough and so the vocal track was filled with gobbledy-gook until Paul returned two days later with a completed lyric.
Paul’s words were a mixture of traditional fairground barking and contemporary drug references. To the majority of the audience ‘roll up, roll up’ was the ringmasters invitation to the circus. To Paul it was also an invitation to roll up a joint. The Magical Mystery Tour was going to ‘take you away’, on a trip. Even the phrase ‘dying to take you away’ was a conscious reference to the Tibetan Book Of The Dead.
The track was used over an opening sequence made up of scenes from the film with an additional spoken section which declared: “When a man buys a ticket for a magical mystery tour, he knows what to expect. We guarantee him the trip of a lifetime, and that’s just what he gets – the incredible Magical Mystery Tour.”
FOOL ON THE HILL
Paul started work on ‘Fool On The Hill’ in March 1967 while he was writing ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’, although it wasn’t recorded until September.
Hunter Davies observed Paul singing and playing “a very slow, beautiful song about a foolish man sitting on the hill”, while John listened staring blankly out of the window at Cavendish Avenue. “Paul sang it many times, la la-ing words he hadn’t thought of yet. When at last he finished, John said he’d better write the words down or he’d forget them. Paul said it was OK. He wouldn’t forget them,” comments Davies.
The song was about an idiot savant, a person everyone considers to be a fool but who is actually a misunderstood visionary. Paul was thinking of gurus like Maharishi Mahesh Yogi who were often derided and an Italian hermit he once read about who emerged from a cave in the late 1940s to discover that he’d missed the entire Second World War. An experience which is said to have contributed to Paul’s image of the fool standing on the hill is recounted by Alistair Taylor in his book Yesterday.
Taylor recalls an early morning walk on Primrose Hill with Paul and his dog Martha, where they watched the sun rise before realizing that Martha had gone missing. “We turned round to go and suddenly there he was standing behind us,” wrote Taylor. “He was a middle-aged man, very respectably dressed in a belted raincoat. Nothing in that, you may think, but he’d come up behind us over the bare top of the hill in total silence.”
Both Paul and Taylor were sure that the man hadn’t been there seconds earlier because they’d been searching the area for the dog. He seemed to have appeared miraculously. The three men exchanged greetings, the man commented on the beautiful view and then walked way. When they looked around, he’d vanished. “There was no sign of the man,” said Taylor. “He’d just disappeared from the top of the hill as if he’d been carried off into the air! No one could have run to the thin cover of the nearest trees in the time we had turned away from him, and no one could have run over the crest of the hill.”
What added to the mystery was that immediately before the man’s appearance Paul and Taylor had, provoked by the beautiful view over London and the rising of the sun, been mulling over the existence of God. “Paul and I both felt the same weird sensation that something special had happened. We sat down rather shakily on the seat and Paul said, ‘What the hell do you make of that? That’s weird. He was here, wasn’t he? We did speak to him?’
“Back at Cavendish, we spent the rest of the morning talking about what we had seen and heard and felt,” continues Taylor. “It sounds just like any acid tripper’s fantasy to say they had a religious experience on Primrose Hill just before the morning rush hour, but neither of us had taken anything like that. Scotch and Coke was the only thing we’d touched all night. We both felt we’d been through some mystical religious experience, yet we didn’t care to name even to each other what or who we’d seen on that hilltop for those few brief seconds.”
In Magical Mystery Tour, the song was used over a sequence with Paul on a hilltop overlooking Nice.
FLYING
The Beatles had recorded two previous instrumentals – ‘Cry For A Shadow’ in Germany in 1961 (when backing Tony Sheridan as the Beat Brothers) and the unreleased ‘ 12-Bar Original’ in 1965. ‘Flying’ was the only instrumental to be released on a Beatles’ record.
Used as incidental music for Magical Mystery Tour, ‘Flying’ emerged out of a studio jam. Originally titled ‘Aerial Tour Instrumental’, it was registered as a group composition and featured a basic rhythm track with additional mellotron, backwards organ and vocal chanting. The cloud scenes over which ‘Flying’ was heard in the film, were originally shot by Stanley Kubrick for 2001 Space Odyssey but never used.
BLUE JAY WAY
‘Blue Jay Way’ was written by George in August 1967 during his visit to California with Pattie, Neil Aspinall and Alex Mardas. On arrival in Los Angeles on August 1, they were driven to a small rented cottage with a pool on Blue Jay Way, a street high in the Hollywood Hills above Sunset Boulevard. It belonged to Robert Fitzpatrick, a music business lawyer who was on vacation in Hawaii.
Derek Taylor, formerly the Beatles’ press officer and now a publicist working in Los Angeles, was due to visit them on their first night in town, but got lost in the narrow canyons on his way to the cottage, and was delayed. There was a small Hammond organ in the corner of the room and George whiled away the time by composing a song about being stuck in a house on Blue Jay Way while his friends were lost in the fog.
Blue Jay Way is a notoriously hard street to find – you can be geographically close and yet separated by a ravine. “By the time we got there the song was virtually intact,” says Derek Taylor. “Of course, at the time I felt very bad. Here were these two wretchedly jet-lagged people and we were about two hours late. But here, indeed, was a song which turned up in Magical Mystery Tour (the film) through a prism with about eight images, with George in a red jacket sitting and playing piano on the floor.”
Taylor was amused by what people made of the song. One critic thought the line in which George urged his guest not to ‘be long’ was advice to young people telling them not to ‘belong’ (to society, that is). Another acclaimed musicologist believed that, when George said that his friends had ‘lost their way’, he meant that a whole generation had lost direction. “It’s just a simple little song,” says Taylor.
YOUR MOTHER SHOULD KNOW
‘Your Mother Should Know’ by Paul could have been written as early as May 1967, when both John and Paul were working on songs for the Our World television special. Like ‘When I’m 64’, the song was a tribute to the music his father enjoyed singing when he was a young man in Jim Mac’s Jazz Band. Jim McCartney formed his own ragtime band in 1919 and played dates around Liverpool, performing numbers like ‘Birth Of The Blues’ and ‘Stairway To Paradise’. One day, Paul surprised his dad by recording one of his compositions under the title ‘Walking In The Park With Eloise’, under the alias of the Country Hams.
Paul wrote it at Cavendish Avenue and thinks it was affected by the fact that his Auntie Gin and Uncle Harry were staying with him at the time. It was the sort of song that they would have liked. Paul also had in mind the idea of ‘mother knows best’, a lament for those who were no longer close to their parents.
‘Your Mother Should Know’, however, found its way into t
he Magical Mystery Tour in a scene where the four Beatles, in white tail suits, descend a staircase and are joined by teams of formation dancers. Strictly speaking, any hit that Paul’s mother would have known would have been a hit before she was born in 1909, in the days when hits were not determined by record sales but by sales of sheet music.
I AM THE WALRUS
The sprawling, disjointed nature of ‘I Am The Walrus’ owes much to the fact that it is an amalgamation of at least three song ideas that John was working on, none of which seemed quite enough in its own right. The first, inspired by hearing a distant police siren while at home in Weybridge, started with the words ‘Mis-ter c-ity police-man’ and fitted the rhythm of the siren. The second was a pastoral melody about his Weybridge garden. The third was a nonsense song about sitting on a corn flake.
John told Hunter Davies, who was still researching the Beatles’ official biography at the time: “I don’t know how it will all end up. Perhaps they’ll turn out to be different parts of the same song.” According to Pete Shotton, the final catalyst was a letter received from a pupil of Quarry Bank School, which mentioned that an English master was getting his class to analyze Beatles’ songs. The letter from the Quarry Bank pupil was sent to John by Stephen Bayley who received an answer dated September 1, 1967 (which was sold at auction by Christie’s of London in 1992). This amused John, who decided to confuse such people with a song full of the most perplexing and incoherent clues. He asked Shotton to remind him of a silly playground rhyme which English schoolchildren at the time delighted in. John wrote it down: ‘Yellow matter custard, green slop pie, All mixed together with a dead dog’s eye, Slap it on a butty, ten foot thick, Then wash it all down with a cup of cold sick’.
John proceeded to invent some ludicrous images (‘semolina pilchards, elementary penguins’) and nonsense words (‘texpert, crabalocker’), before adding some opening lines he’d written down during an acid trip. He then strung these together with the three unfinished songs he’d already shown Hunter Davies. “Let the fuckers work that one out”, he apparently said to Shotton when he’d finished. Asked by Playboy to explain ‘Walrus’ some 13 years later, he remarked that he thought Dylan got away with murder at times and that he’d decided “I can write this crap too.”
The only serious part of the lyric, apparently, was the opening line with its vision of the unity behind all things.
The ‘elementary penguin’ which chanted ‘Hare Krishna’ was John having a dig at Allen Ginsberg who, at the time, was chanting the Hare Krishna mantra at public events. The walrus itself came from Lewis Carroll’s poem ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’.
The ‘eggman’ was supposedly a reference to Animals’ vocalist Eric Burdon who had an unusual practice of breaking eggs over his female conquests while making love and became known among his musical colleagues as the ‘egg man’. Marianne Faithfull believes that ‘semolina pilchard’ was a reference to Det. Sgt. Norman Pilcher, the Metropolitan police officer who made a name for himself by targeting pop stars for drug possession.
The recording of ‘I Am The Walrus’ began on September 5. It lasted on and off throughout the month because George Martin was trying to find an equivalent to the flow of images and word play in the lyrics by using violins, cellos, horns, clarinet and a 16-voice choir, in addition to the Beatles themselves. On September 29, some lines from Shakespeare (King Lear Act IV Scene VI) were fed into the song from a BBC broadcast.
LADY MADONNA
‘Lady Madonna’ was the first single to show that the way forward for the Beatles now lay in returning to the basic rock’n’roll of their early days. After Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Magical Mystery Tour, it was assumed that musical progression would mean more complexity, but the Beatles again defied expectations.
The main riff was taken from Johnny Parker’s piano playing on the instrumental ‘Bad Penny Blues’, a 1956 hit in Britain for jazz trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton and his band, that had been produced by George Martin. “We asked George how they got the sound on ‘Bad Penny Blues’,” said Ringo. “George told us that they used brushes. So I used brushes and we did a track with just brushes and piano and then we decided we needed an off-beat, so we put an off-beat in.” Lyttelton didn’t mind at all, as Parker had taken the riff from Dan Burley anyway. “You can’t copyright a rhythm and rhythm was all that they had borrowed,” he said. “I was very complimented. Although none of the Beatles cared for traditional jazz, they all knew and liked ‘Bad Penny Blues’ because it was a bluesy, skiffley thing rather than a trad exercise.” (Dan Burley and His Skiffle Boys, formed in 1946, was the source of the description ‘skiffle music’ first applied to the folk-blues-country style of Lonnie Donegan in Britain during the early 1950s.)
The song was intended by Paul to be a celebration of motherhood which started with an image of the Virgin Mary but then moved on to consider all mothers. “How do they do it?”, he asked when interviewed by Musician in 1986. “Baby at your breast – how do they get the time to feed them? Where do they get the money? How do you do this thing that women do?”
The singer Richie Havens remembered being with Paul in a Greenwich Village club when a girl came up to him and asked whether ‘Lady Madonna’ had been written about America. “No,” said Paul. “I was looking through this African magazine and I saw this African lady with a baby. And underneath the picture it said ‘Mountain Madonna’. But I said, oh no – Lady Madonna – and I wrote the song.”
Released as a single in March 1968, ‘Lady Madonna’ went to Number 1 in Britain but stalled at Number 4 in America.
THE INNER LIGHT
On September 29, 1967, John and George were guests of David Frost on the live late-night television show The Frost Report. The subject of this edition was Transcendental Meditation and it included an interview with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, filmed earlier the same day at London Airport.
In the invited audience at the studio in Wembley, north London was Sanskrit scholar Juan Mascaró, a Cambridge professor. The following month, Mascaró wrote to George enclosing a copy of Lamps Of Fire, a collection of spiritual wisdom from various traditions that he had edited. He suggested that George might consider putting verses from the Tao Te Ching to music, in particular a poem titled ‘The Inner Light’.
In his preface to Lamps Of Fire, first published in 1958, Mascaró wrote: “The passages of this book are lamps of fire. Some shine more and some shine less, but they all merge into that vast lamp called by St John of the Cross ‘the lamp of the being of God’.”
‘The Inner Light’ was the first song of George’s to appear on a single when it became the B side of ‘Lady Madonna’.
HEY JUDE
As John and Yoko started living together, not surprisingly, divorce proceedings began between John and Cynthia. An interim agreement was reached whereby Cynthia and Julian were allowed to stay at Kenwood while the two respondents took up residence in a Montagu Square flat in central London.
Paul had always enjoyed a close relationship with John’s son Julian, then five years old and, to show support for mother and child during the break-up, he drove down to Weybridge from his home in St John’s Wood bearing a single red rose. Paul often used driving time to work out new songs and, on this day, with Julian’s uncertain future on his mind, he started singing ‘Hey Julian’ and improvising lyrics on the theme of comfort and reassurance. At some point during the hour-long journey, ‘Hey Julian’ became ‘Hey Jules’ and Paul developed the lines ‘Hey Jules, don’t make it bad, Take a sad song and make it better’. It was only later, when he came to flesh out the lyric, that he changed Jules to Jude, feeling that Jude was a name that sounded stronger. He had liked the name Jud when he’d seen the musical Oklahoma.
The song then became less specific. John believed it was addressed to him, encouraging him to make the break from the Beatles and build a new future with Yoko (‘You were made to go out and get her…’). Paul felt that, if it was addressed to anyone, it was to himse
lf, dealing with the adjustments he knew that he was going to have to make as old bonds were broken within the Beatles.
The music drove the lyric, with sound taking precedence over sense. One line in particular – ‘the movement you need is on your shoulder’ – was intended as a temporary filler. When Paul played the song to John, he pointed out that this line needed replacing, saying it sounded as if he was singing about his parrot. “It’s probably the best line in the song,” said John. “Leave it in. I know what it means.”
Julian Lennon grew up knowing the story behind ‘Hey Jude’ but it wasn’t until 1987 that he heard the facts first-hand from Paul, whom he bumped into in New York. “It was the first time in years that we’d sat down and talked to each other,” says Julian. “He told me that he’d been thinking about my circumstances all those years ago, about what I was going through and what I would have to go through in the future. Paul and I used to hang out quite a bit – more than dad and I did. Maybe Paul was into kids a bit more at the time. We had a great friendship going and there seem to be far more pictures of me and Paul playing together at that age than pictures of me and dad.”
“I’ve never really wanted to know the truth about how dad was and how he was with me,” Julian admits. “I kept my mouth shut. There was some very negative stuff talked about me – like when he said that I’d come out of a whisky bottle on a Saturday night. Stuff like that. That’s tough to deal with. You think, where’s the love in that? It was very psychologically damaging and for years that affected me. I used to think, how could he say that about his own bloody son!”