The Beatles Lyrics

by Hunter Davies

  In the manuscript, he has numbered just two verses–but there is a third, the second line of which he has crossed out and redone. John has written it out in capitals, as his handwriting was not always clear, so the others could sing the words without mistakes. The ninth line ‘was bringing her down’ became ‘is bringing her down’ which makes it more immediate.

  ‘Ticket To Ride’ single, April 1965, written by John in his clearest capitals.

  I think I’m gonna be sad,

  I think it’s today, yeah.

  The girl that’s driving me mad

  Is going away.

  She’s got a ticket to ri-hide,

  She’s got a ticket to ri-hi-hide,

  She’s got a ticket to ride,

  But she don’t care.

  She said that living with me

  Is bringing her down, yeah.

  She would never be free

  When I was around.

  I don’t know why she ridin’ so high,

  She ought to think twice,

  She ought to do right by me.

  Before she gets to saying goodbye,

  She ought to think twice,

  She ought to do right by me.

  My baby don’t care, my baby don’t care.

  My baby don’t care,

  Yes It Is

  This was the B side of ‘Ticket To Ride’ when it first came out as a single–but unlike ‘Ticket To Ride’, it did not appear on the album.

  John is telling a girl not to wear red because ‘red is the colour my baby wore’, which would make you think he is referring to a previous girlfriend, though it sounds a bit dictatorial, telling any girl what to wear.

  Ian MacDonald’s theory was that it was a transmutation–and that really it is about John’s dead mother Julia, who was red-haired. I asked Julia Baird, her daughter, if her mother wore red. ‘Never never, always black black black, sometimes dark blue, but never red.’ I think that answers that.

  John never offered this explanation in any interview I can find, so who knows what originally inspired the song. It is deeply emotional and tender but at the same time rather lugubrious–and the lyrics are some of John’s poorest. ‘Red is the colour that will make me blue / in spite of you it’s true / yes it is it’s true.’ John himself later admitted that he was embarrassed by these lines.

  It’s Only Love

  John was also a bit embarrassed by this song, especially the rhymes, such as ‘dries’ and ‘butterflies’, and the rather lazy line: ‘the sight of you makes nighttime bright, very bright.’ When singing that last ‘bright’, you can hear him putting on a silly Scottish accent for the r, as if to let us know he realized it was a bit of a dud.

  ‘I always thought it was a lousy song,’ John told Playboy. ‘The lyrics were abysmal.’

  It’s interesting that, when looking back, John was always more critical of his lyrics than the tunes, knowing he should have tried harder.

  At one time, he was thinking of giving the song to another singer–Billy J. Kramer. In the end, they were desperate for material for the new album and decided to hang on to it. John’s working title for the song was ‘That’s a Nice Hat’, which suggests that he had never rated it. George Martin and his orchestra later recorded an instrumental version of it under John’s original title.

  The song, though short and simple with not much to it, is romantic and, by John’s standards, optimistic, with only a passing reference to the fact that they have fights. ‘It’s Only Love’ is a put-down, distancing himself, but at the same time you believe he means it, and that he is in love.

  The manuscript, an early scribbled version, indicates that he did try quite hard to polish it, as there are several lines and phrases in this version that he didn’t use in the end. In the third line, he has written: ‘Why am I so glad when I’m beside you.’ In the final version, glad becomes shy, which has a different meaning.

  In the second verse, which was not used at all, he is experimenting with rhymes for ‘blame’ and ‘complain’, even if they don’t quite make sense. They are hard to decipher but appear to read: ‘Can’t explain or name, I think it’s pain, heh again / I’m ashamed the flame of love is maimed, now and then / You’re to blame the same as I / I’ll complain in vain, and I still love you.’

  In the third verse, he has a second line, trying more corny rhymes: ‘Though my plight the sight of you is bright rather tight / Write the slight away, we’ll make it up girl…’

  ‘It’s Only Love, from the Help! LP, August 1965, an early scribbled version in John’s hand.

  I get high when I see you go by

  My oh my.

  When you sigh, my, my insides just fly,

  Butterfly.

  Why am I so shy when I’m beside you?

  It’s only love and that is all,

  Why should I feel the way I do?

  It’s only love, and that is all,

  But it’s so hard loving you

  Is it right that you and I should fight

  Every night?

  Just the sight of you makes nighttime bright,

  Very bright.

  Haven’t I the right to make it up girl?

  It’s only love and that is all,

  Why should I feel the way I do?

  It’s only love, and that is all

  But it’s so hard loving you

  Yes it’s so hard loving you–loving you.

  You Like Me Too Much

  George’s other contribution on the album. It’s an upbeat and fairly cheerful love song to his wife Pattie, with no moans as in his previous songs. The song sounds very Lennon–McCartneyish and is well up to their standards with a jaunty bar-room piano accompaniment. There is one line, one thought, in which he says, ‘if you ever leave me, I will follow you’, which alas foretold what was to come. Pattie did eventually leave George, for his friend Eric Clapton (who wrote ‘Layla’ and also ‘Wonderful Tonight’ with Pattie in mind) and they got married in 1979.

  Tell Me What You See

  A simple childlike song, phrased as if asking a child a question: look into these eyes, what do you see? And the answer is me. Which is quite neat–but that’s as far as it gets. There is no story, no situation unfolds. Presumably it began as another love song from Paul to Jane, telling her to trust him, even if there are some black clouds around. John helped out with the final version.

  Paul, when talking to Barry Miles in Many Years From You, appears not to remember much about it: ‘Not awfully memorable. Not one of the better songs, but they did a job, they were very handy for albums or B sides.’

  ‘Put your trust in me’ sounds vaguely biblical, the sort of verses and sayings that John and Paul would have recited at Sunday school.

  John later recalled a childhood memory of a religious motto hanging on a wall: ‘Big and black the clouds will be / Time will pass away / If you put your trust in me / I’ll make bright your day.’ They used these exact words in the lyrics.

  He took the piss out of this in his second book, A Spaniard in the Works, at the end of the story entitled ‘Silly Norman’: ‘However blackpool tower maybe / in time they’ll bassaway / Have faith and trumpand BBC / Griffs’ light make bright your day.’

  In the lyrics for ‘Tell Me What You See’ those original religious lines are used, without any suggestion of mockery.

  I’ve Just Seen A Face

  Another of the many songs Paul composed in the music room at Jane Asher’s house–along with ‘And I Love Her’, ‘Every Little Thing’, ‘Eleanor Rigby’, ‘You Won’t See Me’ and ‘I’m Looking Through You’. It has a vaguely skiffle beat, with some tumbling, descending chords thrown in, which Paul was quite pleased with. It was a song he played to his Aunty Gin, who liked it very much, and it was known as Aunty Gin’s theme, until he knocked the words into shape.

  Yesterday

  Paul woke up one morning in his attic bedroom in Wimpole Street with a melody in his head that he couldn’t erase. He went to the piano, beside
his bed, and played it through. The tune had arrived almost intact, with the glory and the freshness of a dream (which is Wordsworth, ‘Intimations of Immortality’, but Paul over the years used similar phrases to recount how it had first came to him). Worried that it was someone else’s tune that had crept into his subconscious, for several weeks he played it to friends, such as the singer Alma Cogan, asking if they recognized it.

  He put some silly words to it, calling it ‘Scrambled Eggs, supposedly followed by ‘oh baby how I love your legs’ just to give him some words to sing when he played it to the other Beatles. They all laughed at the words, but liked the tune.

  It was during a long car drive while on holiday in Portugal with Jane in May 1965, after they had started recording the album, that he finally put some proper words to it. After fitting ‘Yesterday’ to the first three notes he needed a rhyme, and came up with ‘all my troubles seemed so far away’. That left him needing another three-syllable word, and out popped ‘suddenly’.

  Paul and Jane Asher: it was at her house that he woke up with the tune for ‘Yesterday’.

  In many ways, the words seemed to come almost as easily as the tune, albeit spread over a longer period of time. The lyrics are short, just eleven lines, with little development.

  John always thought the melody was beautiful, but the words, though good, didn’t get very far and were not resolved. That in a way is a strength, leaving it vague. Why had she gone, why was a shadow hanging over her, what was the wrong thing he had said? This is never explained, leaving some analysts to suggest he wasn’t in fact talking about a row with a current love, i.e. Jane, which is how it appears, but remembering the death of his mother all those years earlier. That was a huge shadow that must have hung over him, though at the time of her death he admits he didn’t grieve openly as much as he should. So was he thinking of his mother? Paul has admitted that might well have been at the back of his mind, but says he wasn’t aware of it when writing the lyrics.

  In the studio, when he eventually had the words and had played it to them, and they were getting down to the musical arrangement, Ringo and the others admitted they couldn’t really add anything to it–it was perfect as it was. It would be best if Paul sang it on his own, accompanied on his own acoustic guitar.

  George Martin suggested a string quartet, but to begin with Paul was not keen on the idea, worried that it might appear pretentious. They still saw themselves as a rock’n’roll band and didn’t feel comfortable with anything that sounded too upmarket and classical. They feared that tarting it up with lush strings might make it sound schmaltzy, like Mantovani. George Martin remembers Paul saying that if they did use a string quartet, he did not want any vibrato–the throbbing, vibrating sound violinists make when pressing very hard on a string, and then vibrating their fingers, to give it richness and depth. George explained that all professional violinists play that way, but he would try to restrict it.

  George Martin duly hired a string quartet–two violinists, a viola and cello–and wrote out the parts for them. It was George’s first major contribution to any of their compositions, but Paul was still involved, going to George’s house to discuss the arrangement and then supervising the studio recording.

  ‘Yesterday’ was the first Beatles number to be a pure solo with none of the other group members involved. It was to be their final composition on the Help! album, but it was not released as a single in the UK, as Paul did not want to go against the normal Beatles format, which was to have all four Beatles playing on their singles. It was, however, released as a single in the USA the following year, where it went to number 1.

  This manuscript version was written out for me by Paul, very neatly, in 1967, so it has no changes or corrections–although he has added the word ‘middle’ just to make it clear. It went on show with other Beatles lyrics at the British Museum in 1986 then moved to the British Library. The Queen stopped to read it when she opened the new British Library building in 1998, spending much longer studying it than Magna Carta–which of course she can’t read, no more than I can.

  Full lyrics to the original ‘Scrambled Eggs’ version have appeared on the internet, with all the verses, some of them quite good, but I always suspected it might be some Beatles fan, amusing themselves by declaring they had discovered Paul’s original manuscript. So I sent it to Paul himself.

  ‘The extra words about “Scrambled Eggs” as you expected, are a spoof. I certainly didn’t write them and the nearest I get to it is doing a joke on the Jimmy Fallon Show in America when we took the original verse and added a verse about waffle fries “Oh my baby how I love your thighs”!’

  ‘Yesterday’, first heard on the LP Help! in August 1965, written out ever so neatly by Paul.

  Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away

  Now it looks as though they’re here to stay

  Oh I believe in yesterday.

  Suddenly, I’m not half to man I used to be,

  There’s a shadow hanging over me.

  Oh yesterday came suddenly.

  Why she had to go I don’t know she wouldn’t say.

  I said something wrong, now I long for yesterday.

  Yesterday, love was such an easy game to play,

  Now I need a place to hide away.

  Oh, I believe in yesterday.

  ‘Yesterday’ is now the most recorded song ever, hundreds of artists having performed it over the decades–an estimated 2,200 cover versions had been done by 2013. I still like the line ‘Love was such an easy game to play’, which has nicely cynical overtones.

  Songs do have a life of their own. Good ones will outlive us all, travel down through the generations, and can mean different things at different times to different people.

  As a song, ‘Yesterday’ has certainly lasted, but has it lasted intact? Has it been loved to death? Battered and bruised by all the usage and attention? Possibly. I don’t think it would be in my top ten Beatles numbers to take to a desert island. Too obvious, too corny. Which I suppose is a silly thing to say. It has lasted, and been loved, because it is a perfect song.

  Sheet music for ‘Yesterday’. They all smoked at one time, not just Ringo.

  6

  RUBBER SOUL

  Plus singles, 1965

  Was Rubber Soul the breakthrough? Was that when we knew the Beatles were not just another run-of-the-mill incredibly successful, highly popular, ever so enjoyable, fabulously fashionable, greatly loved band but, oh you know, there will be another excellent lot along any moment who will sell just as many and be just as popular?

  They had of course broken through, in normal pop music and sales terms, back in 1963. Beatlemania was still going strong. Three years is a lifetime in popular music, as it is in politics, so they had had more than a good run already. Why would they want or try or need to change?

  Looking back over those three years after they made their debut as recording artists in October 1962, there had been some great tunes to hum along and dance to–‘Ask Me Why’, ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’–and some half-decent lyrics, such as ‘And I Love Her’, ‘I Feel Fine’ and of course ‘Yesterday’. But most of them had been love songs, fairly conventional in word and thought.

  Now, in the October of 1965, as they began working on a new album and a new single, there was a definite sea change, a push forwards, sideways, upwards, outwards. It was like a coming of age; they became maturer and more confident, no longer confined by what had gone before or the conventions dictating the format of popular songs; they felt able to experiment, find their own style, express themselves, try new things in words, music and instruments.

  With the lyrics, though they were still loving love songs, the big change was trying to tell stories, create narratives and scenes which had a beginning and an end–something they had not done before. They also became fond of jokes, teases, pastiches, parodies.

  Most of their earlier songs had started in their heads with a
phrase, a hook, an observation, two or three or four or five words which they played with, put a tune to, a musical phrase to go with the lyrical phrase. Once they liked the sound and idea, tried it on each other, they la-la’d the rest of the words, ad-libbing, using whatever came into their heads. Then they had to look for a middle eight, before getting back to the chorus, the main idea. Finally they fitted words to the tune and then wrote them down. This pattern was now undergoing a change, with John in particular, and the lyrics were starting to come first. It was part of a deliberate attempt to be himself, writing about himself, creating music the way he had created his poems, writing words down, thinking about them, then coming up with the tune later.

  According to John, with Rubber Soul, ‘We finally took over the studio. In the early days we had to take what we were given, we had to make it in two hours, one or two takes was enough, and we didn’t know how you could get more bass. Then we got contemporary.’ Back in 1962 they had been deferential, doffed their caps to the professionals, bowed to the men in suits. Now they were the ones calling the tune. They were like a group of workers who had got control of the factory.

  The album’s title is a rather weak pun–a play on soul music and rubber sole. Paul explained that he had heard some old American criticizing the Rolling Stones, saying they were good, but really ‘plastic soul’. Playing with the expression, they changed it to rubber soul.

  The cover photograph (taken by Robert Freeman) was an accidentally stretched photo, which elongated their faces, making them look rubbery rather than cute mop tops. It was a joke, a play on the title, but perhaps also intended to hint at deep, mystical qualities lurking inside their souls. To some, the sight of their distorted faces and glazed eyes on the front of the album supported the theory that drugs were beginning to play a part. But Rubber Soul is not an album about drugs, nor is it psychedelic–that came later. They did not record while under the influence; working in the studio was a hard slog given the time constraints they were under and they knew they would never get anything done if they were to indulge in pot or LSD. The drugs were taken at home. Sometimes the images that came to them in a drug-induced state did inspire songs, but Ringo always said that most of those songs turned out to be rubbish and never saw the light of day.