Probably the oldest known Lennon–McCartney number, written by John not long after they first met back in 1957, in their Quarrymen days when they would bunk off school and go to Paul’s house. They were trying to do a skiffle railway song, like the ones that were very popular at the time, such as ‘Rock Island Line’ and ‘Cumberland Gap’. They had recorded it in 1963, but George Martin–who in those days was still in charge of such decisions–thought it wasn’t good enough. Which it wasn’t. Lines like ‘Come on baby, don’t be cold as ice’ were not exactly poetic. Now, looking to fill up the Let It Be album, they decided they could get away with it. But even Paul admitted ‘we hated the words’.
The Long And Winding Road
The road itself has been named by Beatles analysts as the B842, a long and winding road from Paul’s cottage in Scotland with sixteen miles of twists and turns before it reaches anywhere–though Paul himself has never confirmed this was the road he had in mind. In his authorized biography, Many Years from Now, he says simply that he wrote it as a sad song, during some stormy recording sessions.
The lyrics are in fact very good, verging only marginally on the maudlin (‘pools of tears’); rhyming ‘cried’ with ‘tried’ is a bit feeble, but as a love song, about the long and winding road that leads to your front door, i.e. to love, it is moving and poignant.
Its worth has rather been obscured by the fact that it was this song that led to so many rows and scenes. In the Beatles history books, the experts tend to concentrate on the dramas of the recording sessions, rather than on the content.
The song had been recorded quickly, and not very well. John, who had done a poor job himself, therefore decided to call in Phil Spector to knock it into shape–without telling Paul, who was busy with his own solo album. Paul was naturally furious.
Spector turned it into a lush, mushy, orchestral smoochy number, like a corny Hollywood film score, with an over-the-top female choir in the background.
John’s defence was that if Paul had been allowed to work on it again, they would never have got Let It Be finished.
For You Blue
A George number, but unusually for him it’s a happy-go-lucky, catchy blues song, with no Indian influences or mystical, magical, mysterious lyrics. He also manages a very convincing falsetto, the sort of stuff usually left to Paul. John can be heard chattering in the background, but it doesn’t distract, nor mock the song. It’s a love song, presumably for Pattie; he loves her because she’s sweet and lovely. What could be nicer?
‘For You Blue’, from Let It Be, in George’s hand, with the title given a plural.
Because you’re sweet and lovely girl I love you,
Because you’re sweet and lovely girl it’s true,
I love you more than ever girl I do.
I want you in the morning girl I love you,
I want you at the moment I feel blue,
I’m living every moment girl for you.
I loved you from the moment I saw you,
You looked at me; that’s all you had to do,
I feel it now I hope you feel it too.
The Let It Be album finishes with ‘Get Back’, which had already been released as a single.
When the delayed album finally came out in May 1970, there was alas no chance of them getting back.
14
ABBEY ROAD
September 1969
This was the last album they made, though not the last to be released. It came out seven years after their first one. And surprisingly, despite all the chaos and confusion, the splits and splinters in their personal and professional lives, they went out on a high. George Martin has said he thought it was their best album.
It was as if with Abbey Road they had decided to forget their differences for a moment, forget the mess they had made and were making of the Let It Be project, and try to go back to how they had been almost a decade earlier. They even included some soppy love songs. Plus several songs revealing how they really felt exploited and as if they were carrying the weight of the world upon their shoulders.
In Beatles’ time, seven years counts as seventy years in normal human time. So much had happened to them, so much had been done by them, in such a short span, that it’s hard to remember that they were playing and creating as Beatles for such a very short spell.
John, Paul, George and Ringo were still in their twenties when it all unravelled, and yet they seemed to have been around for so long that we looked upon them as elder statesmen, established figures with power and prestige. For Paul and Ringo at least, and even George, those seven years as Beatles turned out to be but a minor fraction of their adult lives. You wouldn’t think so, of course, if you chanced upon a library of Beatles books, shelf after shelf of them, two thousand volumes at least, giving anyone arriving from Mars the impression they must have been on Earth for centuries, to have attracted all that attention.
Back in 1962, when they started recording, they were so young and fresh-faced, wide-eyed about being in a proper studio, walking around London, getting invited to parties. Being simple souls, they wrote songs to a simple formula, with a simple beat. Or so we thought. We lumped them together at first, as if they were interchangeable, writing and playing and together, eyeball to eyeball.
As they gathered success, homes, families, more time, more interests, more stimulants–of every sort–they began to create more on their own, bringing in songs half or nearly finished. And we began to see that they were writing different songs in different ways–being different people.
The lyrics were never as polished and crafted and slick as Gershwin, Cole Porter or Noël Coward. They were often self-indulgent, confused. But at their best, they rang true, delivering meanings and messages and emotions. And yes, they were literary, popular poetry, giving us words and phrases that have passed into the language.
They left us with a range of songs and lyrics, with narrative stories, images, emotions and dreams. And it turned out we had three composers, not one joint composer. John, Paul and George created songs that eventually would be recognized as distinctly theirs.
But these were not poems set to music. You can see from most of the scraps of the manuscripts which have survived that they were rarely whole poems completed before the band went into the studio–unless of course they were versions that got written out, when finished, for the others to see. The songs were made by fitting words and music together, not from parts completed separately.
The early songs were meant to be danced to, with not much thought given to the words, apart from appealing to a female teenage audience, which of course is not as easy as it might appear. The lyrics then moved on from boy–girl love to more complex relationships. In the third stage, they were generally more concerned with the world within.
Once they had moved on from basic love songs, and got control of their own records, there were no barriers: any subject, however apparently trivial or silly, might surface in their lyrics. While they progressed from romantic love to abstract love and concepts such as Peace and Love and Understanding, they were not politically revolutionary or iconoclastic in their lyrics. John drew back from encouraging physical violence. There was never any overtly raw sexual content. Unlike today.
On the whole, the lyrics meant what they said. Unlike Dylan, they did not often go in for metaphor or symbolism. Of course some meanings were less obvious, but that was usually intended–employing word play, word association, stream-of-consciousness, or just plain nonsense.
Looking back, at the time of Anthology in 1995, Paul was quite pleased with what they had achieved with their lyrics. ‘There’s hardly any of them that says “Go on, kids, tell them all to sod off, leave your parents.” It’s all very “All You Need Is Love” or “Give Peace a Chance”. There was a good spirit behind it all.’
The range of their lyrics, and their songs, was helped by the fact that the band’s three creative forces were in many ways polar opposites–something we had never realized, and probably they didn’t
either, not at first. Paul is on the whole cheerful, optimistic, thumbs up, conservative with a small c, and also wanting to be liked, craving an audience. John appeared to scowl behind his granny specs, which we thought were purely to assist with an eyesight problem, but he was often scowling inside as well. He hardly cared about being popular, being liked. He could be contrary, selfish, cruel–and yet loving. These differences created sparks which created songs.
Words were John’s first concern whereas with Paul the melody came first. In the early years, it was thought by some that John was the lyric writer while Paul did the music. But each could do either, and do it as well as the other one could, thus spurring each other on. With success, they were able to reflect their true selves much more. But with success, the sparks flared into flames, igniting blazing rows. The rivalry that had once been cooperative, then competitive, became incendiary. Yet they still loved each other.
George was the biggest surprise of all. He seemed like a typical George at first, his name suggesting an ordinary, simple lad, no great depths. John, aided by Paul, kept him in his place for many years, which was on the guitar, hardly letting him sing on stage. When George first started writing songs, they were not encouraging. ‘There was an embarrassing period,’ John once said, ‘where his songs were not that good and nobody wanted to say anything. He wasn’t just in the same league for a long time. That’s not putting him down–he just hadn’t had the practice as a writer as we had.’ Which of course is putting him down.
George himself, back in 1967, told me that he thought that all three of them had been discouraged from progressing in the early years. ‘We had to go on stage all the time and do it, with the same old guitars, drums and bass. We just had to stick to basic instruments. We were held back in our development.’
In an interview with an American magazine, Crawdaddy, in 1977, George complained that the Beatles had helped to hold him back. ‘The problem was that John and Paul had written songs for so long it was difficult. They had such a lot of tunes and they automatically thought theirs should have priority, so I’d always have to wait through ten of their songs before they would even listen to one of mine. I had a little encouragement from time to time, but it was very little. It was like they were doing me a favour. I didn’t have much confidence in writing songs because of that. They never said “Yeah that’s a good song.” When we got into things like ‘Guitar Gently Weeps’, we recorded it one night and there was such a lack of enthusiasm. So I went home really disappointed because I knew the song was good.’
One of George’s problems as a composer was that he didn’t have a composing partner. John and Paul had each other, to criticize and encourage. He was essentially a loner, who didn’t really want help or togetherness, but wanted to go his own way, do his own thing.
Yet George in many ways turned out to be the most complicated of them all. He was the first to realize it was all a nonsense, being a Beatle, being famous. He was the first to realize that exploring what was inside–and outside–was much more important. Again, this was reflected in his music.
Ringo had the only exotic name–OK, it was an assumed one, but a fancy-sounding one–yet he turned out to be the common man, the only one who didn’t really change and kept his feet planted firmly on the ground. He only contributed two Beatles lyrics, so has not featured much, but he was an essential part of their success.
Over the decades, people have tried to sum up the different characters of the four Beatles. Likening them to the four seasons has been popular, and also the four apostles, the four phases of the Moon, the four corners of the Earth, the Four Stooges–or were there only three? I remember them being compared, in terms of their roles and what they contributed, with the four members of Beyond the Fringe, because, like them, one was Jewish. (This theory fell apart when it was pointed out that Ringo was not in fact Jewish.)
In 1973, Wilfrid Mellers, in his book about their music, had compared them to the four elements: Paul was Air and so needed John’s Fire while Ringo’s Earth needed George’s Water. I’m not sure about George being Water, but then in 1973 George was still developing.
George did, however, reach a peak as a Beatle with Abbey Road, producing two of his best ever songs, ‘Something’ and ‘Here Comes The Sun’. They knew Abbey Road was their swansong when they were making it, the end of that particular road, and they did try to get along, to make it work, producing some well-rounded songs–except for some on the second side which sound a bit hurried.
Abbey Road, obviously, was named after Abbey Road, where they had been recording since they began. The cover photograph was taken by the late Iain Macmillan and shows them on the pedestrian crossing on Abbey Road itself, near the EMI studios. Long-haired John, the leader, leads them over in a white suit. Ringo is next, in a black suit. Paul has bare feet. A bearded George is in jeans. Pick the bones out of that–and millions did, even analysing the significance of the registration numbers of the vehicles that can be glimpsed in the background. The crossing–which today has been moved a few yards further on, for safety reasons–is one of the most photographed locations in London, despite being utterly boring and, er, pedestrian.
No sleeves notes at all on the album alas, no printed copy of the lyrics. I did miss that.
Come Together
John wrote this during his and Yoko’s 1969 Toronto bed-in–which also produced ‘Give Peace a Chance’ (not included here as it was not a Beatles song but a Plastic Ono Band number). Timothy Leary, while visiting John and Yoko in the bedroom, had asked John for a campaign song as he was running against Ronald Reagan for Governor of California. Leary’s slogan was ‘Come together–join the Party’. John made up a new tune and some words to go with the slogan and taped it. Leary got arrested for drug possession and ended up in prison.
Later, back in London, John brought it into the studio and, with Paul’s help, knocked it into shape. It was chosen as the first song on the Abbey Road album.
Leary, thinking he had been given the song, complained to John. John explained that he was like a tailor–if he does a suit for a customer who then doesn’t return, he sells it to someone else. John also had trouble when it was proved that he had lifted one of the phrases about ‘old flat top’ from a Chuck Berry record.
Those niggles aside, the song proved very popular, especially amongst the left-wing hippie, druggie brigade, who latched on to the line ‘One thing I can tell you is you got to be free’. It seems unlikely that they understood all the other lines, but then, who does? It was just John throwing in random thoughts and phrases. Some are fairly easy to trace. The first two lines–‘He got O-no sideboard / He one spinal cracker’–refer to Yoko and her habit of giving asides during their interviews and also standing on his naked back to ease his spine.
Some clever clogs have suggested that each verse refers to a different Beatle. ‘Holy roller’ was the spiritual George. ‘He got monkey finger, he shoot Coca-Cola’ was Ringo. ‘Got to be good looking cause he’s so hard to see’ was Paul. And the Ono sideboard remark referred to John and Yoko.
The BBC banned the record for a while. No, not because of sexual connotations in the title; it was that reference to Coca-Cola that upset them. Commercial endorsements were not allowed.
John was always proud of the record, and his voice singing it, but admitted the lyrics were gobbledygook.
Something
George, despite being fed up being a Beatle, managed to produce one of the Beatles’ classics. ‘Something’ was quickly issued as a single–George’s first A side in the UK–and has since been covered by scores of artists. After ‘Yesterday’, it is reckoned to be the most recorded Beatles song. And yet, poor old George, when Frank Sinatra performed it, he used to introduce it as a Lennon–McCartney number.
According to George, there was no story behind it. He just wrote it on the piano in an empty studio while the others were busy on The Double White Album, being bossed around by Paul. (He didn’t use those words, but that’s the implicati
on.) It was too late to be included in that album, but was ready in time for Abbey Road, after the others had helped with the middle eight.
There is some suggestion that he pinched the first line from another singer, James Taylor, who was working at the same time at Abbey Road, though his song did not come out till later. Taylor never protested, and was flattered to think it might be true. As we know, lines have to come from somewhere–and that somewhere is not always clear or traceable.
The lyrics are probably George’s best–a simple love song, clearly with Pattie in mind–who else could it have been at that stage of his life? Alas, his wondering and worrying about whether their love would grow proved correct.
In George’s manuscript, there is a final verse he didn’t use–just as well, as it’s a bit lame, especially ‘that woman don’t make me blue’.
One hates to be pedantic, but there is also a spelling mistake in the third line–the sort of slip Paul rarely made.
‘Something’, the second track on the Abbey Road album, the last one they worked on, released October 1969. In George’s hand, with a final verse he never used.
There’s something in the way she moves
Attracts me like no other lover
Something in the way she woos me
I don’t want to leave her now
You know I believe and how
Somewhere in her smile she knows
That I don’t need no other lover
Something in her style that shows me
I don’t want to leave her now
You know I believe and how
You’re asking me, will my love grow?
I don’t know, I don’t know
You stick around now it may show
I don’t know, I don’t know
The Beatles Lyrics Page 32
