by Steve Turner
In his reply, John wrote: “I don’t remember saying that ‘Revolution’ was revolutionary. Fuck Mrs Dale. Listen to all three versions of ‘Revolution’ – 1, 2 and 9 and then try again, dear John (Hoyland). You say ‘in order to change the world, we’ve got to understand what’s wrong with the world and then destroy it. Ruthlessly’. You’re obviously on a destruction kick. I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it – people. So, do you want to destroy them? Ruthlessly? Until you/we change your/ our heads – there’s no chance. Tell me one successful revolution. Who fucked up communism, Christianity, capitalism, Buddhism etc? Sick heads, and nothing else. Do you think all the enemy wear capitalist badges so that you can shoot them? It’s a bit naive, John. You seem to think it’s just a class war.”
Interviewed later by journalists from the magazine, John (Lennon) said: “All I’m saying is I think you should do it by changing people’s heads, and they’re saying we should smash the system. Now the system-smashing scene has been going on forever. What’s it done? The Irish did it, the Russians did it and the French did it and where has it got them? It’s got them nowhere. It’s the same old game. Who’s going to run this smashing up? Who’s going to take over? It’ll be the biggest smashers. They’ll be the ones to get in first and, like in Russia, they’ll be the ones to take over. I don’t know what the answer is but I think it’s down to people.”
It was a position John was to hold to. In 1980, he said that ‘Revolution’ still stood as an expression of his politics. “Count me out if it’s for violence. Don’t expect me on the barricades unless it’s with flowers.”
HONEY PIE
‘Honey Pie’ was a tribute to Jim McCartney from his son. “My dad’s always played fruity old songs like this, and I like them,” Paul said. “I would have liked to have been a writer in the Twenties because I like the top hat and tails thing.”
Just as he believed ‘Helter Skelter’ was written for him personally, Charles Manson found further instructions in ‘Honey Pie’. After all, it was addressed to people in the USA, inviting them to display the magic of their ‘Hollywood song’? Manson lived near Los Angeles. What could be clearer?
SAVOY TRUFFLE
George had been friendly with Eric Clapton since meeting him in April 1966 and ‘Savoy Truffle’ was a playful song about Clapton’s love of chocolate. This habit contributed to Clapton’s tooth decay and George was warning him that one more soft-centred chocolate and he’d have to have his teeth pulled out.
The song’s lyric is made up of the exotic names then given to individual chocolates in Mackintosh’s Good News assortment such as Creme Tangerine, Montelimar, Ginger Sling and Coffee Dessert. Savoy Truffle was another authentic name, whereas Cherry Cream and Coconut Fudge were invented to fit the song.
Derek Taylor helped with the middle eight by suggesting the title of a film he’d just seen called You Are What You Eat which was made by two American friends, Alan Pariser and Barry Feinstein. It didn’t scan properly so George changed it to ‘you know that what you eat you are’.
CRY BABY CRY
In 1968, as Hunter Davies was finishing his band biography, John told him: “I’ve got another (song) here, a few words, I think I got them from an advert: ‘Cry baby cry, Make your mother buy’. I’ve been playing it over on the piano. I’ve let it go now. It’ll come back if I really want it.” The lines came back to him while he was in India where Donovan remembers him working on it. “I think the eventual imagery was suggested by my own songs of fairy tales. We had become very close in exchanging musical vibes.”
Partly based on the nursery rhyme ‘Sing A Song Of Sixpence’ and, via the advert, partly on the playground taunt ‘Cry, baby, cry,/ Stick a finger in your eye/ And tell your mother it wasn’t I’, the song includes John’s own creations the Duchess of Kirkaldy and the King of Marigold. Kirkaldy is in Fife, Scotland, and was where John used to stop off on his way to Durness for family holidays as a boy.
REVOLUTION 9
‘Revolution 9’ was neither a Lennon and McCartney song nor a Beatles’ recording but an eight minute, 15 second-long amalgamation of taped sounds which John and Yoko mixed together.
The album track of ‘Revolution’ originally clocked in at over 10 minutes; more than half of it consisting of John and Yoko screaming and moaning over a range of discordant sounds, created to simulate the rumblings of a revolution. Subsequently, they decided to clip the chaotic section and use it as the basis of another track, which turned into ‘Revolution 9’.
At this point, home-made tapes of crowd disturbances were brought in and other sound effects were found in EMI’s library. Due to the lack of sophisticated multi-track recording, all three Abbey Road studios had to be commandeered, with machines being specially linked together and tape loops held in place with pencils. John operated the faders to create a live mix.
With so many overlapping sounds, it is almost impossible to identify all the individual noises and spoken comments. Mark Lewisohn, who studied the original four-track recording, divided these into: a choir; backwards violins; a backwards symphony; an orchestral overdub from ‘A Day In The Life’; banging glasses; applause; opera; backwards mellotron; humming; spoken phrases by John and George and a cassette tape of Yoko and John screaming the word ‘right’ from ‘Revolution’.
The most memorable tape, (which supplied part of the title), was the sonorous voice intoning ‘Number Nine, Number Nine’. This was apparently discovered on a library tape, which may have formed part of a taped examination question for students of the Royal Academy of Music.
Once again, Charles Manson thought that John was speaking personally to him through the hubbub, taking the number 9 as a reference to Revelation chapter 9 with its vision of the coming apocalypse. Manson thought John was shouting ‘rise’, rather than ‘right’, and interpreted it as an incitement to the black community to rise against the white middle class. ‘Rise’ became one of Manson’s key phrases and was found painted in blood at one of the murder scenes.
Paul was in America when ‘Revolution 9’ was put together and was disappointed at its inclusion on The Beatles, particularly as he had been making sound collages at home since 1966 and realized that John would now be seen as the innovator.
GOOD NIGHT
‘Good Night’ is certainly the most schmaltzy song ever written by John. If it had been one of Paul’s songs, John would probably have dismissed it as “garbage” but his final comment was only that it was possibly “over-lush”.
John wrote it, he said, for Julian as a bedtime song just as, 12 years later, he would write ‘Beautiful Boy’ for his second son, Sean. The melody appears to have been ‘inspired’ by Cole Porter’s ‘True Love’ (1956) song from the musical High Society that became a hit for Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly.
Julian wasn’t aware that John had written the song for him until he was interviewed for this book. This was probably due to the fact that his parents split up within a few weeks of its composition.
DON’T LET ME DOWN
John had always expressed fears of being let down by those he had put his trust in. ‘If I Fell’ was the template for a number of songs in which he confessed his need for love and his anxiety over being rejected.
Written about Yoko and released as the B side of ‘Get Back’ in April 1969, this same old worry was expressed as an agonizing cry having found someone who loved him more than anyone had ever done before. Influenced by Yoko’s minimalist approach to art, he has cut out all embellishments, reducing his perennial plea to the form of an urgent telegram.
LET IT BE
Committed to completing a final movie for United Artists, but with no inclination of emulating Help or A Hard Day’s Write, the Beatles fulfilled their contract with Let It Be, an 80-minute colour documentary of the group rehearsing at Twickenham Film Studios, recording at Apple Studios and playing live on the roof of the Apple office in London. These three strands were filmed in January 1969 but the film wasn’t premiered until May 1970, when a
boxed album and book set was prepared for the release. The album wasn’t available separately until November 1970.
The plan had been to make an album called Get Back and to film the recording process for a television documentary. There was a possibility of including a live show and a number of venues were considered – the Roundhouse in London, Liverpool Cathedral, the QE2, Tripoli, Tahiti and a Roman amphitheatre in Tunisia.
The film and album that evolved involved compromises. Instead of being a document of musical creativity, Let It Be became a record of musical disintegration. To get the album finished, Paul assumed control, pushing and prodding where necessary, while John and George sulked, openly displaying their resentment.
Rows over the album contributed to the group’s final break-up. The American Allen Klein, now acting as their manager, wasn’t happy with the quality of the tapes which engineer Glyn Johns had edited down, and so he brought in a fellow American, the producer Phil Spector, to beef up the production. When Paul heard what Spector had done to ‘The Long And Winding Road’, he requested that it be restored to its original form. After this request was ignored, Paul announced his departure from the Beatles.
The Let It Be album was scrappy. Because it was the last album released, it’s often assumed it was the last album recorded. But, after the squabbling that characterized Let It Be, the Beatles went on to record Abbey Road, an album which George Martin still ranks as his favourite.
By the time Let It Be was released the Beatles had disbanded. Paul had already released his first solo album, although it wasn’t until December 1970 that their union was officially dissolved following Paul’s lawsuit. Let It Be reached the top of the British and American album charts after its release in May 1970. The advance orders of almost four million in the US were the largest for any album ever. In 2003 the album was re-released with Spector’s contributions wiped off and titled Let It Be… Naked. The running order was re-shuffled, ‘I’ve Got A Feeling’ (originally the B side to ‘Get Back’) was added and ‘Dig It’ and ‘Maggie Mae’ were left off. The plan was to restore the album to what the four Beatles had originally intended.
TWO OF US
Performed in the documentary by John and Paul on acoustic guitars, ‘Two Of Us’ sounds like a song about their Liverpool teenage years together – burning matches, lifting latches and going home to play more music together. But the ‘two of us’ were not Paul and John but Paul and Linda. One of the most attractive things to Paul about his new girlfriend was her unpretentious ‘hang-loose’ approach to everything. In a life restricted by schedules and contractual obligations, he relished being with someone who seemed consistently laid-back, someone with whom he could forget he was a Beatle.
Soon after they met in London during the autumn of 1968, Linda taught Paul the joys of getting completely lost. She would drive him out of the city with no destination in mind and with the sole intention of ending up miles from anywhere. To a Beatle, who was constantly told where and when he was needed this was an exhilarating return to freedom. “As a kid I loved getting lost,” explains Linda. “I would say to my father – let’s get lost. But you could never seem to be able to get really lost. All signs would eventually lead back to New York or wherever we were staying! Then, when I moved to England to be with Paul, we would put Martha in the back of the car and drive out of London. As soon as we were on the open road I’d say ‘Let’s get lost’ and we’d keep driving without looking at any signs. Hence the line in the song ‘two of us going nowhere’.
“Paul wrote ‘ Two Of Us’ on one of those days out,” Linda explains. “It’s about us. We just pulled off in a wood somewhere and parked the car. I went off walking while Paul sat in the car and started writing. He also mentions the postcards because we used to send a lot of postcards to each other.”
DIG A PONY
‘Dig A Pony’ was largely composed in the studio and the words make very little sense. At one point it was called ‘Con A Lowry’ (possibly a reference to a make of organ used in the studio) but John changed it to ‘Dig A Pony’, “because ‘I con a Lowry’ didn’t sing well… It’s got to be d’s and p’s, you know.”
Similarly, the line ‘I do a road hog’ started as ‘I dig a skylight’ and then became ‘I did a groundhog’. “It had to be rougher,” John argued. “I don’t care if skylight was prettier.” The chorus was taken from a separate song of John’s written about Yoko called ‘All I Want Is You’. The original song listing for the album used this title rather than ‘Dig A Pony’.
In January 1969 when the song was recorded, John explained the secret of its composition, “I just make it up as I go along”. In September 1980, he laconically concluded, “(just) another piece of garbage”.
ACROSS THE UNIVERSE
The oldest song on the Let It Be album, ‘Across The Universe’ was recorded in February 1968 and first featured on a charity album for the World Wildlife Fund in December 1969.
A song about writing songs, or at least about the mysteries of the creative process, John was often to refer to it as one of his favourite Beatles’ songs because of the purity of the lyric. The words had come to him while in bed at Kenwood. He had been arguing with Cynthia and, as he lay there trying to sleep, the phrase ‘pools of sorrow, waves of joy’ came to him and wouldn’t leave until he got up and started writing the words down. “It drove me out of bed,” John said. “I didn’t want to write it. I was just slightly irritable and I couldn’t go to sleep.”
Written after having met the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in England but before studying with him in India the chorus mentions Guru Dev, who was Maharishi’s guru. John wanted this to be the single that the Beatles put out while they were away in India but it lost out to ‘Lady Madonna’. David Bowie later recorded a cover version for his Young Americans album (1975) on which John played guitar.
I ME MINE
As George became more deeply involved in Eastern thought, he tried to reconcile his position as a rock star with the religious demands of relinquishing his ego in order to attain enlightenment.
It was his belief that it is our preoccupation with our individual egos – what ‘I’ want, what belongs to ‘me’, what’s ‘mine’ – that prevents us from being absorbed into the universal consciousness, where there is no duality and no ego. “There is nothing that isn’t part of the complete whole,” George said. “When the little ‘i’ merges into the big ‘I’, then you are really smiling!”
The waltz tune of ‘I Me Mine’ was inspired by Johann Strauss II’s ‘Kaiserwalzer’, a 60-second extract of which had been used as background music on a BBC2 TV documentary Europa: The Titled and the Unentitled the evening before. The version was by the Vienna Philarmonic Orchestra conducted by Willi Boskovsky. George had seen the programme and developed a tune from what he remembered.
DIG IT
Credited to all four Beatles, ‘Dig It’ started as a fledgling song by John called ‘Can You Dig It’ which consisted of variations of the title being sung over a riff.
The version released on Let It Be was an excerpt from a much longer jam in which all the Beatles made up lines on the spot, hence the shared composer credit.
There was a lot of time spent hanging around reading newspapers when they recorded which might account for the references to the FBI and CIA. Transcripts of studio conversations reveal George talking about blues guitarist B B King and distinguishing him from fellow blues man Freddie King. Matt Busby was the heroic manager of Manchester United, one of England’s most popular and successful football teams. Busby would have been in the news because twelve days before this recording he had announced his retirement after 24 years with the club.
LET IT BE
Released as a single in March 1970, ‘Let It Be’ sounded as if it had been recorded as the Beatles’ swansong yet it dated from January 1969. No one had any idea that it was going to be the last single.
Paul had written ‘Let It Be’ out of his general feelings of despair, as the Beatles began to fall
apart at the seams. The documentary had started out as a record of a rehearsal followed by a live performance, but it was to become a record of the group’s death throes.
By now, John preferred to spend his time with Yoko whose presence around the studio was not welcomed by everyone. George had already quit the group once and was discouraged at the way his songs were being instantly rejected. Even Ringo had taken off for a short holiday during the recording of The White Album when the atmosphere got really bad.
Paul was clearly trying to take over the role of leader because he felt that without organization and discipline nothing would be achieved. “I think we’ve been very negative since Mr Epstein passed away,” Paul can be heard saying in the film. “We haven’t been positive. That’s why all of us in turn have been sick of the group. There’s nothing positive in it. It’s a bit of a drag. The only way for it not to be a bit of a drag is for the four of us to think – should we make it positive or should we forget it?”
Although Paul’s role may have been necessary, it didn’t make him popular. The others began to resent his role as organiser. ‘Let It Be’ was written by Paul as a response to all this pressure: “I wrote it when all those business problems started to get me down,” he said. “I really was passing through my ‘hour of darkness’ and writing the song was my way of exorcizing the ghosts.”