by Bob Spitz
Almost immediately they struck on a tone that distinguishes these songs from their previous output. “Ticket to Ride,” released as a single in advance of the movie, sounds like nothing a rock ’n roll band had ever produced. The entire character of the song is a drastic departure, with its reflective lyrics and tense, irregular patterns that make more demands on a listener. “It was a slightly new sound at the time,” John said, upgrading “slightly new” to “pretty fucking heavy” in practically the next breath. Despite the hard language, no one disagreed with his opinion. His chafing vocals swerve around the rambling guitar lick and devious drum fluctuations that play havoc with the tempo, driving it to a playful, if inscrutable, ending. There is no bouncy middle eight, no obvious chorus. In “Ticket to Ride,” John gives voice to self-pitying romantic disappointment, stripped of all adolescent pretensions and reduced to the bitter aftertaste that clings to rejection. “Resentfulness, or love, or hate—it’s apparent in all work,” he explained years later, during a particularly abrasive critique. “It’s just harder to see when it’s written in gobbledygook.”
“Ticket to Ride” is hardly gobbledegook, and not at all the self-penned effort for which John eventually took credit. In a hasty reflection, he reduced Paul’s contribution to “the way Ringo played the drums.” However, Paul later argued: “We sat down and wrote it together…. [W]e sat down and worked on that song for a full three-hour songwriting session, and at the end of it all we had all the words, we had the harmonies, and we had all the little bits.”
That wasn’t always the way John and Paul wrote songs. “John and I don’t work on the Rodgers and Hart pattern, one doing music and one doing lyrics,” Paul explained in an uncharacteristic footnote about their creative process. “He writes a whole song on his own, or I write a whole song on my own, or if we do a song together either he might do the words and I the music, or the other way round.”
Aside from “Help!” and “You’re Going to Lose That Girl,” which were near-perfect collaborations, the rest of the material fell somewhere within that boundless range. John brought in most of “It’s Only Love” and “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” while Paul contributed “Another Girl,” which he wrote in Tunisia, and “The Night Before”—a mixed bag in the absolute sense. The one thing they have in common was that they are all Lennon-McCartney compositions. In the almost eight years of the partnership, it had seemed fruitless to try to reconcile their different styles—John’s jagged emotional urgency, Paul’s giddy romanticism; John’s uncompromising, stripped-down homage to rock ’n roll, Paul’s “lyrical melodies dressed in clever harmonic frameworks”; John “impatient,” Paul “real optimistic”—because, in the larger picture, they merged seamlessly into the universally recognized Beatles sound. It serves no purpose trying to dissect the songs to determine who contributed what.
But energy and tone reveal their own clues. The influences for “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” did not go unnoticed. According to Paul, the song “is just basically John doing Dylan.” And the lyrics could never have come from McCartney.
Success begat insecurity—the greater the Beatles’ popularity, the more threatened and anxious John had become, not only from his part in the band’s snowballing commercialism but over his appearance and his songwriting as well. Weight, too, had become a nagging problem—John had gotten “plump,” according to a friend—and he was demoralized and depressed by worsening vision. “He was paranoid about being short-sighted,” George recalled, “and we’d have to take him into a club and lead him to his seat, so that he could go in without his glasses on and look cool.”
Like Paul.
He was getting tired of hearing Paul described as “the handsome Beatle” or “the cute Beatle,” tired of seeing Paul charm the media, posing as the band’s spokesperson, voicing opinions he didn’t share. Never had John seen anyone turn on the gas like that; throw the spotlight on him and he popped off like a parrot on speed. “He’s a good P.R. man, Paul,” John said, only half seriously. “He’s about the best in the world, probably, he really does a job.” Even as a rock ’n roller, Paul continued to court the kind of establishment approval that offended John. Paul was slick, as slick as they came—“He could charm the Queen’s profile off a shiny shilling,” says Bob Wooler and not at all kindly—and it stuck in John’s craw. Paul still deferred to John, but skillfully. He knew how to play the angles, which is what it took to humor a cranky hothead like John. Paul could dance archly around his partner’s subtle moods, but on tiptoe, always ready to concede center stage rather than risk confrontation.
“We were different. We were older,” John believed. “We knew each other on all kinds of levels that we didn’t when we were teenagers.” Amenities were sacrificed in the transition. Gone was the extraordinary bond that had distinguished the first years of their partnership. In its place was a creative tension, an emotional chess game of sorts, whose pieces were toggled back and forth over squares of mutable interest, that seemed to satisfy each of their impulses to lead—and be led.
John plowed the tremendous emotional upheaval into his songs. He said “Help!” grew out of one of the “deep depressions” he went through, during which he fought the desire “to jump out the window.” Clearly, he wasn’t speaking literally; the people closest to John never recall any suicidal tendencies. But dissatisfied with the direction the Beatles were taking, coupled with his appearance and dispiriting marriage, he was left feeling despondent and “hopeless” during the writing. “I was fat and depressed and I was crying out for ‘Help,’ ” John insisted later on, drawing that conclusion after years of psychotherapy. “He was feeling a bit constricted by the Beatle thing,” Paul observed, although that impression, too, might only have become clarified over the years, with distance and more insight. George insisted that John developed that theory “retrospectively.” At the time he began writing “Help!” it was fashioned as a work for hire upon learning from Dick Lester that it would be the movie’s new title. Paul was summoned to Kenwood especially “to complete it,” he recalled, which they did without delay, nailing it in one productive two-hour session in the upstairs music room.
[IV]
The Beatles spent the first half of 1965 in an exaggerated vacuum, ping-ponging between movie studio and recording studio. Socializing was out of the question. Aside from a brief holiday abroad the last week in May, Brian filled all their spare time with “non-stop” frivolous radio and TV appearances to plug the latest single, “Ticket to Ride,” and to boost anticipation for the forthcoming film. Otherwise, there was precious little contact with the outside world.
In early May, during a break at Twickenham Studios, Brian showed up in a dither and assembled the Beatles in a dressing room. He behaved “rather secretively,” according to Paul, who was more than used to Brian’s affectations, but he sensed that something extraordinary was in the offing. “I’ve got some news for you,” Brian announced with great theatricality, “the Prime Minister and the Queen have awarded you an M.B.E.”
If Brian expected whoops of jubilation, he must have been roundly disappointed. None of the boys had any idea what he was talking about. M.B.E.: it might have been a sports car, for all they knew. Or better: a tax exemption. (George later joked that it stood for “Mr. Brian Epstein.”) As mostly working-class lads from Liverpool, they had little insight into the proprieties surrounding titled Britons. In 1965, with the aristocracy still in high esteem, such honors seemed inaccessible and distant, if not otherworldly, to most commoners. And the Beatles, as famous and widely loved as they were, were still—in their own minds and English culture—as common as crumpets. They were clearly “astonished.”
What they discovered was this: under a charter signed in 1917, King George V and his successors were empowered to recognize distinguished service to Crown and country through a clutch of five honorary awards. The highest rank was Knight or Dame Grand Cross (G.B.E.), then Knight or Dame Commander (K.B.E. or D.B.E.), followed by Command
ers (C.B.E.) and Officers (O.B.E), before Members of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (M.B.E.). “The M.B.E., barely a notch above ‘Guv,’ is the sort of perk given out to senior hospital staff, school headmasters, and local government factotums,” says a cultural historian, “but hardly the creme de la creme of U.K. social hierarchies.” Still, it was coveted by recipients as a toehold to a knighthood—or at least as a license to dream—and for a while it was awarded sparingly, for acts of heroism in the war.
By the time the Beatles were considered, however, M.B.E.s were handed out as routinely as souvenir lapel pins. They were awarded twice annually—on the New Year and the Queen’s birthday, in June—and each list of recipients submitted by the prime minister’s office numbered in the thousands. “I think a grateful government must have given us the M.B.E. for all the taxes we paid,” John joked, which wasn’t that far off the mark. Harold Wilson told the press that he intended to use the honors list to encourage exporters, and while he personally admired the Beatles (he was originally, after all, their M.P. from Liverpool, Huyton), the award was for the “great commercial advantage in dollar earnings to this country” from the sale of 115 million records. Despite some initial concern from staff, Wilson dismissed all worry that the Queen would disapprove. It was “doubtful if Queen Elizabeth [had] time to read through all the 2,000 or so names and citations on the list, nor [was] it likely she would ever object to any of them,” the press concluded.
“I was embarrassed,” John said, recalling his initial reaction. “We all met and agreed it was daft.” Jokes flew about the Queen’s soundness of mind. Since it was policy to assure the palace that the award would be accepted in advance of a formal announcement, the Beatles took a consensus and agreed: “Let’s not.”
Eventually, Brian convinced them otherwise, but that didn’t so much resolve their indecision as take it public. Opinion on the street was clearly divided on whether the Beatles were worthy of such an honor. The press was especially critical, taking an edge that dripped with contempt. “It seems that the road from rebellion to respectability is much shorter than it used to be,” the Sun editorialized. Another caption referred to the musicians as “Sir George, Sir John, Sir Paul, and Sir Ringo,” sounding a note of mockery. But the most vehement dissent came from an unexpected friend, Donald Zec, the Mirror’s entertainment columnist, who was said to be “irate” over the selection. “In the name of all that’s sane if not sacred, isn’t pinning a royal medal onto four Beatles jackets just too much?” he wondered. “What about the Dave Clark Five, the Bachelors, the Animals, and the Rolling Stones?” Only the Daily Telegraph struck a deferential tone, arguing that the honor was not sufficient enough and suggesting a “more generous award,” such as a knighthood.
In the days that followed, controversy turned to vehement protest, as decorated M.B.E.s, furious over the Beatles’ appointment, began firing off angry letters to the palace—and the press. “I am so disgusted with the Beatles being given this award that I am considering sending mine back,” threatened George Read, an elderly Coast Guardsman decorated for bravery. Colonel George Wagg didn’t wait. The aging war veteran returned twelve of his medals, quit the Labour Party, and took it out of his will, while another disgruntled war hero, Paul Pearson, returned his M.B.E. to the Queen, complaining that “its meaning seems to be worthless.” And a former member of Canada’s House of Commons, Hector Dupuis, shipped his medal back with a note denouncing the “superior authority’s wish to honor sorry fellows with whom I have no desire whatever to be associated.”
In the midst of the M.B.E. ruckus, the Beatles continued to record, padding their new Help! soundtrack with enough material for it to pass as an album. On the afternoon of June 15, Paul took center stage in Studio Two at Abbey Road and ran through what he considered to be “a strange uptempo thing” called “I’ve Just Seen a Face,” which he wrote in the Ashers’ music room at Wimpole Street. Originally titled “Auntie Gin’s Theme,” it was intended for the film but ultimately omitted, since it was still unfinished at the start of production. As Paul performed it now, however, it was all right there, right where he wanted it, a juggernaut of simple, streamlined lyrics that didn’t flow so much as barrel along breathlessly, picking up steam—“dragging you forward,” as he described the feeling—with each successive line. He’d sung it slower at one time, and with less of a country-and-western feel, but there wasn’t a note out of place in the playback, leading him to feel “quite pleased with [the result].”
There was plenty of time left before the dinner break to lay down another track, and without much preparation, Paul led the Beatles into the frenzied, all-out rock assault, “I’m Down,” intended as the B-side of the “Help!” single. Paul had mimicked Little Richard often over the years, belting out near-flawless covers of “Good Golly, Miss Molly,” “Lucille,” and “Long Tall Sally,” but the spitfire intensity of “I’m Down” drove the style way over the top. It was inconceivable that a skinny white boy could make that kind of sound. With little rehearsal other than a brief run-through, Paul threw his head back and let loose with what a critic described as a “larynx-tearing, cord-shredding” vocal that nearly cut his boyhood idol for its ferocity. It was a frightening performance. There are moments during the song when it sounds as though Paul has lost all control of the vocal; he just keeps pressing, pressing, veering close to the point where the vocal exceeds the boiling point and dissolves into noise. Close—but not quite, thanks to the tightly contained boundaries set by Ringo’s backbeat.
A light rain fell during the dinner break. The Beatles had run around the corner to a familiar coffee shop, where they spent slightly more than an hour scarfing down sandwiches, smoking, and exchanging personal news, probably about Paul’s recent purchase of a house near Abbey Road. For most of the time they pointedly avoided talking about the session, which had gone as well as anyone expected. The songs they’d done that afternoon were certainly up to par and suitably polished—an accomplishment that must have given them satisfaction—even though they’d broken no new ground.
There were still a pair of additional tracks to record—“It’s Only Love,” which John and Paul had written as a throwaway for George, and Ringo’s party piece, a send-up of Johnny Russell’s “Act Naturally”*—but Paul was eager to try something first. Tuning a Spanish-style acoustic guitar, he dragged a barstool to the middle of the cavernous studio and sat slope-shouldered over the wide walnut neck, tickling the strings, limbering up, while the engineers, Norman Smith and Phil McDonald, adjusted two mikes to suit George Martin’s instructions. Curiously, the other Beatles stood around, smoking, attentive but uninvolved. There had been some early discussion about their roles in the forthcoming recording, but as plans progressed they’d decided to stay on the sidelines until Paul went through a take or two by himself, “as simply as possible.”
To make Paul more comfortable, Martin had the studio lights dimmed to a shade resembling candlelight and moved the other Beatles out of his sight line before retreating with the engineers into the overhead control booth. There was a short last-minute lull while Smith spun dials to get a proper balance. When he finally flashed the thumbs-up, Paul stabbed out his cigarette in an ashtray, cleared his throat, and delivered a “remarkably controlled” take of a ballad that would become the most recorded song of all time.
“Yesterday” had been rattling around Paul’s head for nearly two years, since he “woke up one morning with the tune,” tumbled out of bed, and before even washing his face ran through it at the upright piano propped against the wall by the window in his room. What was the source of his inspiration? The question gnawed at him for weeks afterward. Had it come in a dream, as he initially suspected? Was it something he’d heard that his subconscious refused to let go of? Paul hadn’t the foggiest. The chords just kept coming, one after another, falling neatly into place. The melody sounded familiar, to say nothing of cozy, like one of the old standards that his father used to pound out after dinner at Forthlin
Road, and while the overall impression it left was “very nice” indeed, Paul convinced himself the tune was “a nick,” something he’d lifted.
And what a tragedy, too. The melody is gorgeous, with an effortless, natural flow that brings its evocative sound together. One chord doesn’t so much suggest the next as dictate the progression, leaving no other option lest it collapse like a sand castle in a puff of mediocrity. From the beginning, Paul felt “it was all there… like an egg being laid… not a crack or a flaw in it.” The melody haunted him. “It was fairly mystical,” he explained. He couldn’t let go of it.
