While the words are indisputably by John, it is one of only two Beatles songs where John and Paul came into conflict over the credit. Usually, when they looked back on the Lennon–McCartney songs, there was no disagreement over what proportion they had each contributed. But in this case, Paul has a clear memory of being given John’s words and then going to a Mellotron keyboard and setting it to music, inspired by the style of Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. John, however, maintained he wrote most of the music, with Paul only contributing the melody of the middle eight and some of the harmony.
‘In My Life’, from Rubber Soul, December 1965, in John’s hand, with some of the verses about Penny Lane and the tram sheds, which were never used.
‘It was the first song I wrote that was consciously about my life,’ John later said. ‘Before, we were just writing songs à la the Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, pop songs with no more thought to them than that–to create a sound. The words were almost irrelevant. I think this was my first major piece of work.’
The music is greatly helped by what sounds like a harpsichord, tinkling away like a Bach minuet, giving it a classical, timeless quality. This was George Martin, on a piano with the sound speeded up–his second major instrumental contribution to a Beatles song, after the string quartet on ‘Yesterday’.
This manuscript, which is one John gave me, has some of the early verses of his original longer poem–or rather, lyric, as he always intended it to become a song, though it is long and complete enough to be considered poetry. It is of interest to all Beatles fans because of the second verse, about Penny Lane, which was discarded. It also includes the tram sheds with no trams, St Columba’s Church and the Docker’s Umbrella. The latter was a place under the overhead light railway where the dockers used to shelter from the rain. The Abbey was an old cinema. There are a lot places named, some of them not quite clear.
The discarded verses appear to read:
Penny Lane is one I’m missing
Up Church Road to the clock tower
In the circle of the Abbey
I have seen some happy hours
Past the tram sheds with no trams
On the 5 bus into town
Past the Dutch and St Columbus
To the dockers umbrella that they pulled down
In the parks I spent some good times
Calderstones was good for [jumping]
But if you want to really find me
Really want to find me
All these places have their memories
Some with loves [or lives] forgotten now
Some its… to be with
some are dead and some are living
While the final verse went:
There are places I remember
All my life though some have changed
Some forever not for better
Some have gone and some remain
All these places had their moments
With lovers and friends I still can recall
Some are dead and some are living
In my life I’ve loved them all
But of all these friends and lovers
There is no one compares with you
And these memories lose their meaning
And I think of love as something new
Though I know I’ll never lose affection
For people and things that went before
I know I’ll often stop and think about them
In my life I love you more
Wait
Jointly knocked into shape, head to head, as they used to do in the old days, and also jointly sung, each taking alternate verses. If it sounds like a throwback, then it was. It was recorded for the Help! album, written mainly by Paul perhaps with Jane in mind, when they were filming in the Bahamas, but not used. They dug it out to make up the tracks on Rubber Soul. The girl is being told to wait–he’s coming back home. That’s all there is to the lyrics. At least it makes you realize just how good, and what an advance, most of the new songs were.
If I Needed Someone
George’s second song on the album and one he was quite dismissive of. ‘It’s like a million other songs written around the D chord. If you move your finger about you get various little melodies (and sometime you get maladies). That guitar line, or variations on it, is found in many a song and it amazes me that people still find new permutations of the same notes.’
The tune is indeed roughly all on one note, and a bit monotonous, so it’s surprising that he didn’t add any Indian musical instruments in the background. Perhaps he didn’t feel confident enough yet with his expertise on the sitar.
In I Me Mine he gives us no clue to the origin of the lyrics. The guy in the song sounds rather unappealing, telling a girl he might or might not ring her up, if he had more time, and anyway he is too much in love. With Pattie, we presume.
In the manuscript he has scribbled out a few words, redoing one line and changing ‘the wall’ to ‘my wall’.
If I needed someone to love
You’re the one that I’d be thinking of
If I needed someone
If I had some more time to spend
Then I guess I’d be with you my friend
If I needed someone
Had you come some other day
Then it might not have been like this
But you see now I’m too much in love
Carve your number on my wall
And maybe you will get a call from me
If I needed someone
Ah, ah, ah, ah
Carve your number on my wall
And maybe you will get a call from me
If I needed someone
George’s song ‘If I Needed Someone’, from Rubber Soul, December 1965, in George’s hand, with some minor corrections.
Run For Your Life
John borrowed the main line in this song–‘I’d rather see you dead little girl than see you with another man’–lifting it from an Elvis song, ‘Baby, Let’s Play House’, which came out in 1954. He was attracted by the intensity of that kind of love, and the jealousy that could lead him to wish someone dead. He admits in the song he is a wicked guy to think such thoughts. Which he clearly did. There was a cruel side to John, he abused Cynthia, was hurtful to women and mocked cripples. At least he was self-aware: ‘I’m not always a loving person. But I want to be that. I want to be as loving as possible… I am a violent man who has learned not to be violent.’
I imagine the lyrics are not those he might have written once Yoko came into his life–and in fact he later seemed to regret them, saying the song was written under pressure, it was just a glib throwaway song, an example of his worst work.
The manuscript is very faint–so put your best specs on.
Some early verses from ‘Run for Your Life’, from Rubber Soul, December 1965, in John’s hand but alas a bit hard to read.
I’d rather see you dead, little girl
Than to be with another man
You better keep your head, little girl
Or I won’t know where I am
You better run for your life if you can, little girl
Hide your head in the sand, little girl
Catch you with another man
That’s the end–ah, little girl
Well you know that I’m a wicked guy
And I was born with a jealous mind
And I can’t spend my whole life
Trying just to make you toe the line
Let this be a sermon
I mean everything I’ve said
Baby, I’m determined
And I’d rather see you dead
You better run for your life if you can, little girl
Hide your head in the sand, little girl
Catch you with another man
That’s the end–ah, little girl
7
REVOLVER
August 1966
Revolver was another evolution, even revolution, in that it revolved, hence the title, a
nother jokey one. The album cover was also different from anything so far: instead of a photograph, drawings of the Beatles by Klaus Voormann, a friend from their Hamburg days, are interspersed with cut-out photos of them and other bits, very arty and psychedelic. One of their ideas for Revolver was to have no space between the different tracks, so that it all flowed on, one continuous sound, but EMI said no.
They were now doing so many clever things in the studio, fashioning and sculpting the sounds, that they were creating songs they could not perform, and did not perform live on stage. None of the fourteen new tracks on Revolver got included in their stage shows. They were fed up with touring, and this gave them one more reason to want to give up playing in public.
In 1966 when I started interviewing the Beatles, I asked whether they listened to their own music. Many creative artists can’t bear to revisit their work. It depresses them, seeing how it didn’t turn out they way they hoped, or depresses them in another way, wondering how they did it, whether they can manage to do it all again.
John and Paul both said they never listened to their old stuff–except as an aide-mémoire before a new album, to see where the were up to. ‘I used to play the first four albums, one after the other,’ said John, ‘to see the progression musically, and it was interesting. I got up to Revolver and it got too many. It would be too much listening time, but you could hear the progressions, as we learnt about recording and the techniques got refined.’
Both John and Paul could not understand why anyone was surprised that they seemed to keep on progressing, wanting to do different things. It seemed to them utterly natural. In an interview with Michael Lydon, published in Newsweek in March 1966, Paul said:
If someone saw a picture of you taken two years ago, and said that was you, you’d say it was a load of rubbish and show them a new picture. That’s how we feel about the early stuff and Rubber Soul.
There was no mystery about our growth, it was only as mysterious as a flower is mysterious. There’s no more point in charting it than charting how many teeth I had as a baby and how many I have now. Nobody thought that was miraculous, except perhaps my mother. We were just growing up.
Revolver was issued in August 1966, during what turned out to be their last tour. This was their third and final USA trip, and their performance at Candlestick Park, San Francisco, on 29 August 1966 was to be their last live concert performance anywhere. Their final UK concert appearance had been in May 1966, at a New Musical Express event at Wembley.
From now on, they could take as long as they liked in the studio, and not have to break off to tour the world. They became a recording band, not a performing band. It also meant they were creating for a different sort of public. Instead of performing for audiences of screaming girls they were going underground, reflecting and inspiring the hippie, druggie, psychedelic, turned-on generation.
In Revolver, the lyrics covered subjects which would have seemed totally implausible just four years earlier: taxation, submarines, Buddhism, lonely spinsters, druggie doctors, sleep. Far-out topics and weird sounds, but Revolver also included some of the most beautiful songs they had written so far.
Paperback Writer
Recorded around the same time as the Revolver album, in April 1966, but came out before the album, in June, as a single, and set the pattern for writing about things that had nothing to do with romance or relationships. It was Paul’s creation, supposedly as a result of one of his aunts suggesting they wrote a song which was not about love.
Paul’s own memory is that while driving down to John’s house one day, the idea came to him for a song in the form of a letter. It would begin with Dear Sir or Madam, in the classic manner, and progress from there. He had had a letter from an aspiring novelist, wanting help, and liked the sound of ‘paperback writer’, knowing it was something he could easily fit a rhythm to.
An author called Peter Royston Ellis believes he was the paperback writer they had in mind, as the Beatles played the backing music to a poetry reading he gave in 1960. They had also had two paperbacks written about them in 1964. The True Story of the Beatles by Billy Shepherd was for the fans, published by the people behind the Beatles Monthly magazine. The other was more upmarket: The Beatles Progress was written by an American journalist called Michael Braun who had accompanied them on a few of their tours. This was published by Penguin–who in those days only did paperbacks. John of course had had two books out–small, thin hardbacks at first, later reissued as paperbacks.
Paperbacks were a post-war phenomenon in the UK, but mostly they were slim volumes in comparison to the one referred to in the lyrics. A thousand pages long? Dear God, no one in their right mind would have mentioned that to a paperback publisher.
Paul, right, signing autographs before The Ed Sullivan Show in New York, 9 February 1964.
The lyrics don’t in fact have a lot of logic to them. The reference to Lear was presumably Edward Lear, who never wrote novels, though John as a boy loved his nonsense poems. They’re fun nonetheless, with daft things thrown in like a dirty story of a dirty man, his clinging wife and a son who reads the Daily Mail–which John often did, looking for inspiration. The novelist is offering all the rights, insisting it will sell millions, promising he can make it longer, change the style–that’s typical of letters publishers receive even today.
The manuscript is interesting because Paul has written it out as if it is a letter–prose rather than verse, which is how lyrics are usually set out. Only when you read it do you realize it is the lyrics to the song, exactly as they were sung.
He signs it at the end: ‘yours sincerely Ian Iachimoe’. One of Paul’s jokes, apparently–what his name sounds like when played backwards.
The music itself contains a joke–which I must admit I had never spotted till I read Ian MacDonald’s erudite Revolution in the Head. In the second chorus, George and John are not singing ‘Paperback Writer’ but can be heard in the background chanting ‘Frère Jacques’.
‘Paperback Writer’, released as a single in June 1966, in Paul’s hand, written out as if it really is a letter, not verses.
Paperback writer, paperback writer.
Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book?
It took me years to write, will you take a look?
It’s based on a novel by a man named Lear,
And I need a job,
So I want to be a paperback writer,
Paperback writer.
It’s a dirty story of a dirty man,
And his clinging wife doesn’t understand.
His son is working for the Daily Mail
It’s a steady job,
But he wants to be a paperback writer,
Paperback writer.
Paperback writer, paperback writer.
It’s a thousand pages, give or take a few.
I’ll be writing more in a week or two.
I could make it longer if you like the style.
I can change it round,
And I want to be a paperback writer,
Paperback writer.
If you really like it you can have the rights.
It could make a million for you overnight.
If you must return it you can send it here,
But I need a break,
And I want to be a paperback writer,
Paperback writer.
Rain
I’d forgotten ‘Rain’, in fact I am not sure I ever listened to it properly at the time. It was the B side of ‘Paperback Writer’ and B-sides never got the same attention. Still not loved or known much by ordinary humming-along, Fab Four Beatles fans–but boy, the musicologists have gone to town on it over the years, seeing hidden musical depths, praising all the clever tricks, the backwards tapes, the heavy amplification, Ringo’s superb drumming, saying it was at least twenty years ahead of its time. According to American musicologists Stuart Madow and Jeff Sobul in their 1992 book The Colour of Your Dreams, it was the Beatles ‘first truly psychedelic song’.
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bsp; To me, it still sounds like a dirge, with a vague Indian mono beat in the background, and a lot of assorted noises as they try out stuff to amuse themselves and give George Martin and the technicians something new to do.
John says he discovered the joy of the backwards tapes at home while enjoying himself with some herbal stimulants; he accidentally threaded a tape of the stuff they had recorded that day into his machine backwards, and out came this weird sound.
The lyrics are, on the surface, totally banal. It’s about rain. You know, that wet stuff that falls down, that people are always moaning about. That’s what set John off–people complaining about the rain. He then moves on to say that rain and shine are just a state of mind. How true. How very sixth-form philosophical debating society.
I can see that it could be psychedelic in that the words and music were probably influenced by herbal concoctions, but I think interpreting it as some sort of hippie bible–that John is trying to give us a message, we should rise above rain and shine, transcend good and bad, and just rise up in the air, man–is pushing it a bit.
Taxman
The first track on the album–written by George, given pride of position for once. They were kind enough to include three of his songs altogether, his biggest tally so far.
George had been incensed when he discovered how much money they were giving the taxman. In the second line of the lyrics he says ‘one for you, nineteen for the taxman’, but in fact the top rate in 1966 for the highest earners was nineteen shillings and sixpence in the pound (95 per cent), the highest it has ever been in the UK. Or probably anywhere.
The Beatles Lyrics Page 14
