Who Wrote the Beatle Songs
Page 21
In the studio, on March 1 and 2, 1967, Paul played Hammond organ on this song, stopped to sound like a celesta. George Martin comments:
The beginning of “Lucy,” that hesitant, lilting introductory phrase, is crucial to the staying power of the song. It is also a marvelous piece of composition, based around five notes only. . . . Curiously, this introductory fragment was not formally composed; it evolved from the chords that John originated for the song, and in a similar way to “Strawberry Fields Forever,” Paul improvised in his favourite arpeggio style until the magic phrase arrived. [69]
Clearly Paul sometimes arrived at melody by improvising from chords.
John often claimed the song. [70] However, he sometimes mentioned contributions from Paul. When asked about the phrase “newspaper taxis” in 1968, he said, “That was a Paul line, I think.” [71] In 1971 he stated “Me — and once again, folks, this was Julian’s title. It was nothing to do with LSD. I think Paul helped with the last verse.” [72] Helping with the lyrics of the last verse is a typical occurrence for “finishing” collaboration on a Beatle song.
Paul remembers thoroughgoing collaboration following John’s idea, his title and beginning. In an early interview, he said:
So we had a nice title. We did the whole thing like an Alice in Wonderland idea, being in a boat on a river, slowly drifting downstream and those great cellophane flowers towering over your head. Every so often it broke off and you saw Lucy in the sky with diamonds all over the sky. This Lucy was God, the big figure, the white rabbit. You can just write a song with imagination on words and that’s what we did.” [73]
In 1974, Paul said, “I don’t knock it [the song] because I helped write it.” [74] And ten years later, he remembered, “And we said, ‘That’s a great title,’ and we wrote the psychedelic song based on it.” [75] A decade later, Paul again described collaborating on the song from the ground up after John got the title and the beginning melody: “So we went upstairs and started writing it.” [76]
Though this song came from John’s idea and beginning, I accept that there was a substantial amount of collaboration on it. Paul’s opening melody alone is a major musical contribution. He also made contributions to the lyrics.
Getting Better — (McCartney-Lennon)
(lead vocals: Paul) (recorded on March 9, 1967)
According to Hunter Davies, he and Paul were walking Primrose Hill near St. John’s Wood during the first day of spring, and Davies, or Paul, said, “It’s getting better,” then Paul starting to laugh, remembering how in Australia, on tour, Ringo had been ill and another drummer, Jimmy Nicol, filled in for him. Every night after a performance, they would ask him how things were going, and Jimmy would say, “It’s getting better.” Paul laughed and began to sing, “It’s getting better, It’s getting better all the time.” [77] Then Paul went home and began to write the song. “I went home with him and he then worked on four bars of it,” wrote Davies. [78]
Later, John came in and they had a typical collaborative session, searching for rhymes and phrases that would fit the music.
When John came around, Paul said, “Let’s do a song called ‘It’s Getting Better.’” So they got going, both playing, singing, improvising, and messing around. When the tune was at last taking shape, Paul said, “You’ve got to admit it’s getting better.” [John said] “Did you say ‘You’ve got to admit it’s getting better’”? Then John sang that as well. [79]
In 1995, Paul said he didn’t remember the genesis of the idea for the lyrics, but did remember discovering the music. “He had the music for the song title when John arrived.” [80] He remembered, “The ‘angry young men’ and all that was John and I filling in the verses about schoolteachers. We shared a lot of feelings against teachers who had punished you too much. . . or who had just been bastards generally.” [81]
Paul claimed this song, beginning in 1984, but always mentioned contributions from John:
Wrote that at my house in St. John’s Wood. All I remember is that I said, “It’s getting better all the time,” and John contributed the legendary line “It couldn’t get much worse.” Which I thought was very good. Against the spirit of that song, which was all super-optimistic. . . then there’s that lovely little sardonic line. Typical John. [82]
John also ascribed this song to Paul, but mentioned his contributions to the lyrics. “Paul — I think I helped with some of the words in the middle,” he said in 1971. [83] Nine years later, he said it was “Paul and me,” from “Paul’s main lick.” The line about being cruel to his woman and beating her, was John, “I am a violent man who has learned not to be violent and regrets his violence.” [84]
George Martin mistakenly stated that Paul and John had not collaborated on the song, though he recognized that “It couldn’t get much worse” came from John. [85]
Fixing A Hole — (McCartney)
(lead vocals: Paul) (recorded on February 9 and 21, 1967)
This is another song attributed to Paul by both Paul and John. [86] In 1973, Paul described a tape he had of him writing the song: “It’s great because on the tape I’m writing ‘Fixing a Hole,’ and I’m going through all these words and it goes on for hours, gradually getting the tune.” [87]
In the year he wrote it, Paul explicated the lyrics, which were about:
the hole in your make-up which lets the rain in and stops your mind from going where it will. It’s you interfering with things as when someone walks up to you and says, ‘I am the Son of God.’ And you say, ‘No you’re not; I’ll crucify you,’ and you crucify him. Well that’s life, but it is not fixing a hole . . . when I wrote it, I meant if there’s a crack or if the room is uncolorful, then I’ll paint it. [88]
In 1995, he turned to the lyrics again:
“Fixing a Hole” was about all those pissy people who told you, ‘Don’t daydream, don’t do this, don’t do that.’ It seemed to me that that was all wrong and that it was not time to fix all of that. Mending was my meaning. Wanting to be free enough to let my mind wander, let myself be artistic, let myself not sneer at avant-garde things. . . . It’s pretty much my song, as I recall. [89]
In 1980, John said, “That’s Paul, again writing a good lyric.” [90]
And so we have a song whose writing is non-controversial. Or so it seems. Once again, there is a new question: how much did Mal Evans help with the song? Mal strongly claimed contributing to it. “I stayed with him for four months,” he said, “and . . . We wrote ‘Sgt Pepper’ and also another song on the album, ‘Fixing a hole.’” [91] In addition, as we have seen with the “Sgt. Pepper” song, both Paul and Ringo reflect that Mal was involved in Paul’s songwriting at this time. So we should at least consider the possibility that Evans helped Paul fill up gaps in the lyrics of “Fixing a Hole.” Without support from Paul or other insiders, however, I don’t accept it as certain.
Another theory about the beginnings of the song is that Paul wrote it after repairing the roof of his farmhouse in Scotland. [92] Paul, in Many Years from Now, convincingly refutes this theory, and the idea that it refers to drug needles. [93]
She’s Leaving Home — (McCartney-Lennon)
(lead vocals: Paul and John) (recorded on March 17, 1967)
Like other songs on Sgt. Pepper , notably “A Day in the Life,” this song came from a newspaper story. In this case, a seventeen-year-old girl, Melanie Coe, disappeared from her home. “That was a Daily Mirror story again,” Paul said in an early interview. “This girl left home and her father said, We gave her everything, I don’t know why she left home. But he didn’t give her that much, not what she wanted when she left home.” [94] Paul wrote this moving ballad from that beginning.
He brought it to John to work on and John added some lyrics, but unusually, music too. John added the “counter-melody,” and its “answering words,” which functioned like the commentary of a Greek chorus. [95] Paul said John’s counter-melody was “long sustained notes.” [96] John also said that he wrote the lines “We gave her e
verything money could buy” and “We never thought of ourselves.” That was easy to write, he said, as those were things that Aunt Mimi would say. [97]
The lyrics of the two middle sections are as follows:
She
(We gave her most of our lives)
Is leaving
(Sacrificed most of our lives)
Home
(We gave her everything money could buy)
She’s leaving home after living alone for
(Bye bye)
So many years
She
(We never thought of ourselves)
Is leaving
(Never a thought for ourselves)
Home
(We struggled hard all our lives to get by)
She’s leaving home after living alone for
(Bye bye)
So many years
One might conclude that Paul wrote the verses to this song, and John wrote the entire middle section. However, Paul’s use of the descriptive word “counter-melody” is unique here. Usually a countermelody comes in on top of the main melody. In addition, the “long sustained notes” would be “She . . . is leaving . . . home.”
John, for his part, claimed that he wrote lyrics on this song, not music, though this may reflect his artistic focus on lyrics. The music might have come with the lyrics.
Paul seems clear: “when I showed it [the song] to John, he added the Greek chorus, long sustained notes.” [98]
Paul claimed this song in 1984: “I wrote that. My kind of ballad from that period.” [99] But in 1995, he described it as a collaboration: “It was largely mine, with help from John.” [100] John put it on a list of collaborative songs in 1971, and said, “Both of us. Paul had the basic theme,” then John added those lines mentioned above.
I accept this as mainly Paul’s song, but the middle section was a collaboration with John.
This is, like “Eleanor Rigby,” a study in feminine loneliness. “It’s a much younger girl, but the same sort of loneliness,” Paul said in an early interview. [101] The view of Paul as merely a purveyor of mindless optimism is obviously flawed. He certainly has an optimistic side (as was seen in “It’s Getting Better”) but he also has a focus that is deeply concerned with tragedy, loneliness, human isolation.
Though some assume that George Martin arranged the strings, Paul actually worked with producer-arranger Mike Leander on this song. The Beatle had originally planned on recording with Martin, but when the producer had commitments for the near future, Paul went ahead and did the arrangement with Leander. Martin was deeply offended. “He [Martin] was busy and I was itching to get on with it; I was inspired,” said Paul in 1984. “I think George had a lot of difficulty forgiving me for that. It hurt him; I didn’t mean to.” [102]
Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite! — (Lennon-McCartney)
(lead vocals: John) (recorded from February 17 to March 31, 1967)
This is a “found” song, with lyrics taken directly from a poster. John was searching for a new song one day, when he saw a circus poster he’d bought, hanging in his front room. And the lyrics were all there, waiting to be inserted into a song. Paul happened to be visiting and they began inserting names and phrases from the poster into a verse structure, and at some point came up with suitable quirky music.
John often claimed this song, but Paul’s anecdotal memories of being part of that original songwriting session are quite convincing. I believe it is another case of John claiming a song that was his idea, and in which he had dominated the songwriting session.
He said, in 1967,
“Mr. Kite” was a straight lift. I had all the words staring me in the face one day when I was looking for a song . . . I wasn’t very proud of that. There was no real work. I was just going through the motions because we needed a new song for Sergeant Pepper at that moment. [103]
In the same year, he said that, in writing the song, he “just did it. I shoved a lot of words together, then shoved some noise on.” When people asked him what the inner meaning of “Mr. Kite” was, he responded, “There wasn’t any . . . I didn’t believe in it when I was doing it. But nobody will believe it. They don’t want to. They want it to be important.” [104]
Paul, in 1984, said the words came off the circus poster, but “We stretched it a bit.” [105] He explained, in 1989, “So we’d do stuff like that, pulling something that attracted us like that.” [106] Then in 1995, Paul remembered:
We just sat down and wrote it. We pretty much took it down word for word and then just made up some little bits and pieces to glue it together. It was more John’s because it was his poster so he ended up singing it, but it was quite a co-written song. We were both sitting there to write it at his house, just looking at it on the wall in the living room. But that was nice, it wrote itself very easily. [107]
In 2013, Paul started playing “Mr. Kite” in his live show. Asked why he included it, he said that he thought that this “crazy, oddball song . . . would freshen up the set.” Then he continued:
And I have great memories of writing it with John. I read, occasionally, people say, “Oh, John wrote that one.” I say, “Wait a minute, what was that afternoon I spent with him, then, looking at this poster?” He happened to have a poster in his living room at home. I was out at his house, and we just got this idea, because the poster said “Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite” — and then we put in, you know, “there will be a show tonight,” and then it was like, “of course,” then it had “Henry the Horse dances the waltz.” You know, whatever. “The Hendersons, Pablo Fanques, somersets…” We said, “What was ‘somersets’? It must have been an old-fashioned way of saying somersaults.” The song just wrote itself. So, yeah, I was happy to kind of reclaim it as partially mine. [108]
So this is a clear divergence in testimony. I accept that it was John’s idea to use the language from the poster as a song — it was typical of him to use “found poetry” like this — but then the song was developed and finished with collaboration. Possibly Paul made a contribution to the music.
When John was asked if Henry the Horse was a code word for heroin, he denied that he had even been introduced to heroin at that time, and said the song came completely from the poster, “like a painting, a pure watercolor.” [109]
George Martin’s contribution to the experimental, fairground atmosphere of the song was substantial. He said that John wanted to give the impression of
sawdust in the ring, to give the idea of a fairground and a circus. So I started working out my electronic sounds to make it just that. I got lots and lots of steam-organ sounds, genuine calliope noises, which are tapes of ‘Liberty Bell,’ Sousa marches, that kind of thing. [110]
These were recorded onto a master tape, which was cut into 15-second pieces and these cuttings were played at random in the background, while John and Martin played organs, Martin adding “swooping” chromatic runs. This achieved the effect Martin wanted: “a kind of miasma of sound, a background whirly-hurly-burly.” [111]
SIDE 2
Within You Without You — (Harrison-Shankar)
(recorded on March 15 and 22, and April 3, 1967)
The first song George contributed to Sgt. Pepper , “Only a Northern Song,” was apparently rejected by George Martin or Paul and John, and later ended up on the Yellow Submarine album. George’s great Indian song, “Within You Without You,” was his second offering. He began writing it at the house of Klaus Voorman (the Beatles’ German friend from Hamburg days who had done the artwork for Revolver ) in Hampstead, on a harmonium. “I was doodling on it, playing to amuse myself,” he said in 1968, “when ‘Within You’ started to come. The tune came first then I got the first sentence. It came out of what we’d been doing that evening — ‘We were talking.’ That’s as far as I got that night. I finished the rest of the words later at home.” [112]
According to George, the music derived directly from a composition by Ravi Shankar:
“Within You Without You” was a s
ong that I wrote based upon a piece of music of Ravi’s that he’d recorded for All-India Radio. It was a very long piece — maybe thirty or forty minutes — and was written in different parts, with a progression in each. I wrote a mini version of it, using sounds similar to those I’d discovered in his piece. [113]
When George played it to the Beatles and George Martin, “nobody was overwhelmed,” said engineer Geoff Emerick. “Personally, I thought it was just tedious. Of course, just hearing him run it down on acoustic guitar gave very little idea of the beautiful song that it was to turn into once all the overdubs were completed.” [114] George Martin never did like the song, but worked carefully on the arrangement, using a string orchestra and Indian musicians from the “Asian Music Circle” of northern London playing exotic Indian instruments. [115] “We came along one night, he had about four hundred Indian fellows playing here and it was a great swinging evening, as they say,” said John in 1967. [116]
The Indian influences on the Beatles from Rubber Soul (with the sitar on “Norwegian Wood”) to The White Album (songs written in India) are remarkable. George had gone to India in September 1966, and had become more interested in Indian mysticism and music than in recording Beatle albums. Otherworldly religion began to pervade his lyrics. “We’re all one,” he said in 1967. “. . . The realisation of human love reciprocated, it’s such a gas. . . . These vibrations that you get through Yoga, Cosmic chants and things like that, I mean it’s such a buzz! It buzzes you out of everywhere. . . . It buzzes you right into the astral plane.” [117]
When I’m Sixty-Four — (McCartney-Lennon)
(lead vocals: Paul) (recorded December 6 to 21, 1966)
Paul wrote this when he was about sixteen, around 1958, an instrumental piano piece in the music hall tradition — “rooty-tooty variety style,” as he said in 1995. [118] He vaguely thought it might be used for a musical comedy someday. [119] The Beatles would play it at the Cavern when the amps blew out — Paul would bang it out on the piano, and, John reports, “This was just one of those that was quite a hit with us.” [120]