by Steve Turner
Julian hasn’t studied the words of ‘Hey Jude’ for some time but finds it hard to get away from the song. He’ll be in a restaurant when he’ll hear it played, or it’ll come on the car radio when he’s driving. “It surprises me whenever I hear it,” he says. “It’s very strange to think that someone has written a song about you. It still touches me.”
‘Hey Jude’ was the most successful Beatles’ single ever. It topped the charts around the world and, before the end of 1967, over five million copies had been sold.
THE BEATLES
The Beatles, or The White Album as it is commonly referred to,, confounded expectations because of its simplicity. It was as if the group had decided to produce the exact opposite of Sgt Pepper. Long album title? Let’s just call it The Beatles. Multi-coloured cover? Let’s go white. Clever overdubs and mixes? Let’s use acoustic guitars on a lot of the tracks. Other-worldly subject matter? Let’s sing about cowboys, pigs, chocolates and doing it in the road.
The change was in part due to the Beatles’ interest in the teachings of Indian guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Pattie Harrison had attended a lecture given by him in February 1967 and six months later she encouraged George and the rest of the Beatles to hear him speak at the Hilton Hotel in Park Lane, London. As a result of this meeting, they all embarked on a ten-day course on Transcendental Meditation, at University College, Bangor, in North Wales.
While in Bangor, on Sunday, August 27, 1967, they learned that Brian Epstein had been found dead at his Belgravia flat. The loss of Epstein, who had managed their career since early 1962 and had become something of a father figure, may well have made the Beatles even more open to the guidance of the Maharishi, whom they visited in India in February 1968.
The trip to India not only brought calm and self-reflection to their fraught lives but also rekindled their musical friendships. Paul Horn, an American flautist who was there at the same time, believes that meditation was a great stimulus for them. “You find out more about yourself on deeper levels when you’re meditating,” he said. “Look how prolific they were in such a relatively short time. They were in the Himalayas away from the pressures and away from the telephone. When you get too involved with life, it suppresses your creativity. When you’re able to be quiet, it starts coming up.”
On their return from India, the Beatles claimed that they had brought back 30 songs which they would be using on their next album. There were indeed 30 new songs on The Beatles but not all of them were written in India, and some of the Indian songs (like George’s ‘Sour Milk Sea’ and ‘Circles’) were never recorded by the Beatles. It’s probably fairer to say that about half of the album was written or at least started while they were away. Because they had no access to electric guitars or keyboards, many of these songs were acoustic.
John would later refer to The Beatles as being the first unself-conscious album after the Beatles’ great period of self-consciousness beginning with Rubber Soul and ending with Magical Mystery Tour and Yellow Submarine. The Beatles was released as a double album in November 1968 and rose to the Number 1 spot on both sides of the Atlantic.
BACK IN THE USSR
Friendly rivalry existed between the Beatles and the Beach Boys, and between 1965 and 1968 each new effort by either band spurred the other on to greater heights. When Brian Wilson heard Rubber Soul, he reported that it blew his mind to hear an album of such variety and consistency. “It flipped me out so much,” he said, “that I determined to try the same thing – to make an entire album that was a gas.” His reply was Pet Sounds, the Beach Boys’ crowning achievement, which contained ‘Sloop John B’, ‘Caroline No’, ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’ and ‘God Only Knows’. When Paul heard Pet Sounds, he was equally impressed and the influence could be heard on Revolver and Sgt Pepper.
Although they admired each other, the two groups had little social contact. Carl Wilson and Mike Love had seen the Beatles play in Portland, Oregon, on August 22, 1965, and called by the dressing room after the show. Brian Johnson had been present at the Waldorf Hotel in London when John and Paul were played a pressing of Pet Sounds in April 1966 and in April 1967, Paul dropped by the studios in LA where Brian Wilson was working on the Beach Boys track ‘Vegetables’.
The most prolonged contact came in February 1968, when all four Beatles and their partners travelled to Rishikesh, India, to study Transcendental Meditation under the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. On the course were three other professional musicians – Scottish singer Donovan, American flautist Paul Horn and Beach Boy Mike Love. The musicians spent a great deal of time together talking, jamming and songwriting.
One of the songs that came out of this encounter was ‘Back In The USSR’, written by Paul as a pastiche of the Beach Boys and Chuck Berry. The genesis of the song was a comment made by Love to Paul one morning over breakfast. “Wouldn’t it be fun to do a Soviet version of ‘Back In The USA’,” Love suggested, referring to Berry’s jingoistic 1959 single in which the singer expressed how mighty glad he was to be back home in civilized America with its cafes, drive-ins, skyscrapers, hamburgers and juke boxes. The Beach Boys had earlier drawn on this song and Berry’s ‘Sweet Sixteen’ for their tracks ‘California Girls’ and ‘Surfin’ USA’, in which they extolled the virtues of local ladies and surf beaches.
Paul acted on Love’s suggestion and came up with a parody that did for the USSR what Berry had done for the USA and for Soviet women what the Beach Boys had done for the girls of California. After a decade of songs which had made poetry out of the names of places such as Memphis, Chicago and New Orleans, it was striking to hear Moscow mentioned in rock’n’roll. “I just liked the idea of Georgia girls and talking about places like the Ukraine as if it was California,” said Paul. As a tribute to Love, the Beatles’ eventual recording imitated the vocal harmonies of the Beach Boys.
In a radio interview given in November 1968 Paul said, “In my mind it’s just about a (Russian) spy who’s been in America for a long time and he’s become very American but when he gets back to the USSR he’s saying ‘Leave it ‘til tomorrow to unpack my case, Honey, disconnect the phone.’ and all that, but to Russian women.”
‘Back In The USSR’ disturbed conservative Americans, because at a time of Cold War and conflict in Vietnam it appeared to be celebrating the enemy. Having admitted to drug-taking, were these long-haired boys now embracing communism? American anti-rock campaigner David A Noebel, author of Communism, Hypnotism and the Beatles, while unable to produce their party membership cards, was sure that they were furthering the cause of revolutionary socialism. “John Lennon and the Beatles were an integral part of the revolutionary milieu and received high marks from the Communist press,” he wrote, “especially for the White Album which contained ‘Back In The USSR’ and ‘Piggies’. One line from ‘Back In The USSR’ left the anti-Communists speechless: ‘You don’t know how lucky you are boy/Back in the USSR.’”
Through more diligent research, Noebel would have discovered that the official Soviet line was that the Beatles were evidence of capitalism’s decadence. Just as the Nazis declared jazz music and abstract painting ‘degenerate’ so the Communists railed against the evil of rock’n’roll and promoted folk music that extolled the virtues of the State. Young people in the Soviet Union were just as excited by the Beatles’ music as their Western counterparts but had to rely on bootleg recordings, smuggled imports and radio broadcasts from America and Britain. In 1988, with the Cold War about to be consigned to history, Paul paid tribute to his Soviet fans by recording an album of rock’n’roll standards on the official government recording label, Melodia. In May 2003 he played a concert in Red Square and had a private meeting at the Kremlin with Vladimir Putin who told him that he had listened to Beatles music as a teenager. “It was very popular,” he told Paul. “More than popular. It was a breath of fresh air, a window onto the outside world.”
“‘Back In The USSR’ is a hands-across-the-water song,” said Paul in 1968. “They like us out there. Even tho
ugh the bosses in the Kremlin may not, the kids do.”
DEAR PRUDENCE
Prudence was Prudence Farrow (younger sister of the American actress Mia Farrow) who attended the same course with the Beatles in India. The song was a plea to her to come out from her excessively long periods of meditation and relax with the rest of the group.
At the end of the demo version of ‘Dear Prudence’, John continues playing guitar and says: “No one was to know that sooner or later she was to go completely berserk, under the care of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. All the people around were very worried about the girl because she was going insane. So, we sang to her.” Later, John was to explain that Prudence had gone slightly ‘barmy’, locked in her room meditating for three weeks, “trying to reach God quicker than anyone else”.
Paul Horn, the American flautist, says that Prudence was a highly sensitive person and that, by jumping straight into deep meditation, against the Maharishi’s advice, she had allowed herself to fall into a catatonic state. “She was ashen-white and didn’t recognize anybody,” he says. “She didn’t even recognize her own brother, who was on the course with her. The only person she showed any slight recognition towards was Maharishi. We were all very concerned about her and Maharishi assigned her a full-time nurse.”
Prudence, whose living quarters were in the same building as the four Beatles and their partners, denies that she went mad but agrees that she was more fanatical about meditating than the Beatles were. “I’d been meditating since 1966 and had tried to get on the course in 1967, so it was like a dream come true for me,” she explains. “Being on that course was more important to me than anything in the world. I was very focused on getting in as much meditation as possible, so that I could gain enough experience to teach it myself. I knew that I must have stuck out because I would always rush straight back to my room after lectures and meals so that I could meditate. It was all so fascinating to me. John, George and Paul would all want to sit around jamming and having a good time and I’d be flying into my room. They were all serious about what they were doing but they just weren’t as fanatical as me. The song that John wrote was just saying, ‘Come out and play with us. Come out and have fun.’”
This she eventually did and got to know the Beatles well. The Maharishi put her in an after-lecture discussion group with John and George – who he thought would be good for her. “We talked about the things we were all going through,” she says. “We were questioning reality, asking questions about who we were and what was going on. I liked them and I think they liked me.”
Although the song was written in India and Prudence overheard various jam sessions between the Beatles, Mike Love and Donovan, John never played the song to her. “George was the one who told me about it,” she recalls. “At the end of the course, just as they were leaving, he mentioned that they had written a song about me but I didn’t hear it until it came out on the album. I was flattered. It was a beautiful thing to have done.”
Prudence is now married and lives in Florida where she teaches meditation. In October 1983, Siouxie and the Banshees had a British Top 10 hit with their version of ‘Dear Prudence’.
GLASS ONION
In an age of rapid social change, the Beatles were often regarded as prophets and every song was scrutinized for symbols and allusions. Who was the egg man in ‘I Am The Walrus’? Was the tea that was mentioned in ‘Lovely Rita’ really marijuana? Was ‘Henry The Horse’ street slang for heroin?
The Beatles had perhaps laid themselves open to this by mixing poetry with nonsense. John, in particular, had enjoyed obfuscating his point of view, perhaps because of his insecurity. However, by 1968, he was trying to write more directly and most of the work he brought back from India was less complicated. When a pupil from his old school wrote and asked him to explain the motives behind his songwriting, John replied that the work was done for fun and laughs. “I do it for me first,” he said. “Whatever people make of it afterwards is valid, but it doesn’t necessarily have to correspond to my thoughts about it, OK? This goes for anyone’s ‘creations’, art, poetry, song etc. The mystery and shit that is built around all forms of art needs smashing anyway.”
‘Glass Onion’ was a playful response by John to those who pored over his work looking for hidden meanings. He started to piece together the song using odd lines and images from some of the most enigmatic Beatles’ songs – ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, ‘There’s A Place’, ‘Within You Without You’, ‘I Am The Walrus’, ‘Lady Madonna’, ‘The Fool On The Hill’ and ‘Fixing A Hole’. In ‘Glass Onion’, he jokingly claimed that the walrus, from ‘I Am The Walrus’, was really Paul. (In some primitive cultures the walrus is a symbol of death and this was taken as confirmation by those who believed that Paul had been killed in a road accident in 1966, to be replaced by a double.) Finally, he came up with four new tantalizing images for his ‘literary’ fans to pore over – bent-back tulips, a glass onion, the Cast-Iron Shore and a dovetail joint. The bent-back tulips, explains former Apple press officer Derek Taylor, was a reference to a particular flower arrangement in Parkes, a fashionable London restaurant in the Sixties.
“You’d be in Parkes sitting around your table and you’d realize that the flowers were actually tulips with their petals bent all the way back, so that you could see the obverse side of the petals and also the stamen. This is what John meant about ‘seeing how the other half lives’. He meant seeing how the other half of the flower lives but also, because it was an expensive restaurant, how the other half of society lived.”
There were simple explanations for the other perplexing references: the Cast-Iron Shore was Liverpool’s own beach (also known as the Cassie); a dovetail joint referred to a wood joint using wedge-shaped tenons and Glass Onion was the name John wanted to use for The Iveys, the band that signed with Apple in July 1968.
The Iveys didn’t like the name Glass Onion and, instead, called themselves Badfinger after ‘Badfinger Boogie’, the original title of ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’.
OB-LA-DI OB-LA-DA
Paul first heard the words ‘Ob-la-di Ob-la-da’ uttered by Nigerian conga player Jimmy Scott, whom he met at the Bag o’ Nails club in Soho, London. A flamboyant and unforgettable character in dark glasses and African clothing, Scott was renowned for his catch phrases. His wife Lucrezia says that ‘ob la di, ob la da’ is a phonetic translation of something that his father would say to him in the Urhobo language used by the Warri people in the mid-West region of Nigeria. “It had a special meaning which he never told anyone,” she says. “Even the Beatles didn’t know what it meant. When I once asked Paul what it meant he said he thought it meant ‘Comme ci, comme ça’ but that isn’t right. To Jimmy, it was like a philosophy that he took with him through life.”
Jimmy Anonmuogharan Scott Emuakpor was born in Sapele, Nigeria, and came to England in the Fifties, where he found work in the jazz clubs of Soho. He played with Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames in the Sixties, backed Stevie Wonder on his 1965 tour of Britain and later formed his own Ob-la-di Ob-la-da Band. He provided music for some of the dance scenes in the Hammer film She (1965) that starred Ursula Andress, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Lucrezia says that the phrase was quite well known because in concert he would call out ‘Ob la di’ and the audience would shout back ‘Ob la da’ and then Scott would reply ‘Life goes on’. The fact that Paul used his catch phrase as the basis of a song ignited controversy. “He got annoyed when I did a song of it because he wanted a cut,” Paul told Playboy in 1984. “I said ‘Come on, Jimmy. It’s just an expression. If you’d written the song, you could have had the cut.’”
‘Ob-la-di Ob-la-da’ has been cited as the first example of white ska; although the phrase was Urhobo, the song Paul created around it and the characters he invented were from Jamaica. When recording the vocals, Paul made a mistake in singing that Desmond, rather than Molly, ‘stayed at home and did his pretty face’. The other Beatles liked the slip and so it was kept. Paul loved t
he song and wanted it to be a single. John always hated it.
Jimmy Scott played congas on the session (July 5, 1968) – the only time he worked with the Beatles. Lucrezia remembers being called in to hear a playback and taking in a headed letter made for the Ob-la-di Ob-la-da Band to show Paul how the phrase was spelt. Later that year, he appeared on the Rolling Stones’ Beggars Banquet album and in 1969 at the Stones’ free concert in Hyde Park. Around this time he was arrested and taken to Brixton prison to await trial on a charge of failing to pay maintenance to his ex-wife. He asked the police to contact the Beatles’ office to see if Paul would foot his huge outstanding legal bill. This Paul did, on condition that Scott dropped his case against him over the song.
Scott left England in 1969 and didn’t return until 1973 when he immersed himself in the Pyramid Arts project in east London, giving workshops on African music and drumming. In 1983, he joined Bad Manners and was still with them when he died in 1986. “We’d just done this tour of America and he caught pneumonia,” remembers Bad Manners’ front man Doug Trendle, aka Buster Bloodvessel. “When he got back to Britain he was strip-searched at the airport because he was Nigerian. They left him naked for two hours. The next day he was taken into hospital and he died. Nobody is too sure how old he was because he lied about his age when he got his first British passport. He was supposed to be around 64.”
In July 1986, a concert featuring Bad Manners, Hi Life International, the Panic Brothers, and Lee Perry and the Upsetters was mounted at the Town and Country Club, London, to raise money for the Jimmy Scott Benevolent Fund. He left at least 12 children from two marriages. “Jimmy was essentially a rhythmic, charming, irresistible man with the gift of the gab,” Lucrezia wrote in the benefit’s programme. “If life was sometimes dull, it shouldn’t have been, for his stories of people, of places, of incidents, were an endless stream bubbling with fun.”