by Steve Turner
Paul, who kept in contact with Jimmy, also contributed a quote. “He was a great friend of mine,” he wrote. “In the Sixties we used to meet in a lot of clubs and spent many a happy hour chatting until closing time. He had a great positive attitude to life and was a pleasure to work with.”
Two British cover versions of ‘Ob-la-di Ob-la-da’ were recorded and the one by Scottish group Marmalade went to Number 1. The Beatles’ version was only released in America, but not until 1976.
WILD HONEY PIE
The shortest and most repetitive of any Beatles’ lyric, ‘Wild Honey Pie’ emerged from a spontaneous singalong in Rishikesh.
“It was just a fragment of an instrumental which we were not sure about,” said Paul. “But Pattie Harrison liked it very much, so we decided to leave it on the album.”
Coincidentally, Mike Love had recently co-written a Beach Boys’ track entitled ‘Wild Honey’.
THE CONTINUING STORY OF BUNGALOW BILL
Bungalow Bill, the song says, ‘Went out tiger hunting with his elephant and gun. In case of accidents he always took his mum.’ Written by John while in India, it recounts the true story of Richard Cooke III, a young American college graduate, who visited his mother Nancy while she was on the course in Rishikesh.
John described Bungalow Bill as “the all-American bullet-headed Saxon mother’s son” and Cooke agrees that it was an accurate description of him when he first met the Beatles. Cooke was over 6ft tall, dressed in white and sporting a crew cut. “The other Beatles were always real nice to me but John was always aloof,” he says. “They epitomized the counter culture and I was the classic good American boy and college athlete. There wasn’t a whole bunch that we got to connect on.”
The tiger-hunt the song refers to took place three hours from Rishikesh. Cooke and his mother travelled by elephant and then hid in a tree on a wooden platform known as a marchand to await the arrival of a tiger.
“Rik sat down and I stood behind him,” remembers Nancy. “It wasn’t long before I saw this flash of yellow and black. I let out a yell and Rik twirled and shot the tiger right through the ear.”
“I was pretty excited that I had shot a tiger,” remembers Cooke. “But the Texan who organized the shoot came over to me and said, ‘You shot it, but don’t say a word. As far as the world is concerned you didn’t shoot this tiger.’ He wanted to be the one who went back home with the skin and the claws as his trophy.”
It was when they arrived at the ashram that Cooke began to feel some remorse, wondering whether the killing of the animal would bring him ‘bad karma’. He and his mother had a meeting with Maharishi that was also attended by John and Paul.
“It was a fluke that they happened to be sitting there when I had this conversation with Maharishi,” says Cooke. “My mother is a very vocal person and she was talking excitedly about killing the tiger and Maharishi looked pretty aghast that his followers could actually go out and do something like this. It was the only time I ever saw him almost angry.”
“Rik told him that he felt bad about it and said that he didn’t think he’d ever kill an animal again,” recalls Nancy. “Maharishi said – ‘You had the desire, Rik, and now you no longer have the desire?’ Then John asked, ‘Don’t you call that slightly life-destructive?’ I said, ‘It was either the tiger or us. The tiger was jumping right where we were’. That came up in the lyric as ‘If looks could kill it would have been us instead of him.’”
Bungalow Bill was an allusion to Buffalo Bill, the performing name of American cowboy showman William Frederick Cody (1846–1917) who was a hero in post-war schoolboy comics. It became ‘Bungalow’ because all the accommodation in Rishikesh was in bungalows. Ian MacDonald points out in Revolution In The Head that the tune appears to be based on ‘Stay As Sweet As You Are’ which was written by Mack Gordon and Henry Revel and was used in the 1934 film College Rhythm.
Cooke knew nothing of ‘Bungalow Bill’ until he started getting postcards saying ‘Hey Bungalow Bill. What did you kill?’ from friends who had recognized him in the song. He now divides his time between Hawaii and Oregon and works as a photographer for National Geographic magazine. His mother Nancy lives in Beverly Hills, California.
WHILE MY GUITAR GENTLY WEEPS
George was reading the I Ching, the Chinese book of changes, and decided to apply its principles of chance to his songwriting. At his parents’ Lancashire home, he picked a novel off the shelf with the intention of writing a song based on the first words that he came across. The words were ‘gently weeps’ and so George began to write.
He started recording in July 1968 but felt that the other Beatles weren’t showing sufficient interest in the song. In September, he brought in his friend Eric Clapton to play lead guitar while he played rhythm.
HAPPINESS IS A WARM GUN
For this song, John stitched together three songs that he had started but which didn’t seem to be going anywhere. The first was a series of random images picked up from a night of acid tripping with Derek Taylor, Neil Aspinall and Pete Shotton at a house Taylor was renting near Dorking in Surrey. “John said he had written half a song and wanted us to toss out phrases while Neil wrote them down,” says Taylor. “First of all, he wanted to know how to describe a girl who was really smart and I remembered a phrase of my father’s which was: ‘She’s not a girl who misses much’. It sounds like faint praise but on Merseyside, in those days, it was actually the best you could get.
“Then I told a story about a chap my wife Joan and I met in the Carrick Bay Hotel on the Isle of Man. It was late one night drinking in the bar and this local fellow who liked meeting holidaymakers and rapping to them suddenly said to us, ‘I like wearing moleskin gloves you know. It gives me a little bit of an unusual sensation when I’m out with my girlfriend.’ He then said, ‘I don’t want to go into details.’ So we didn’t. But that provided the line, ‘She’s well acquainted with the touch of the velvet hand’. Then there was ‘like a lizard on a window pane’. That, to me, was a symbol of very quick movement. Often, when we were living in LA, you’d look up and see tiny little lizards nipping up the window,” continues Taylor.
“‘The man in the crowd with multi-coloured mirrors on his hobnail boots’, was from something I’d seen in a newspaper about a Manchester City soccer fan who had been arrested by the police for having mirrors on the toe caps of his shoes so that he could look up girls’ skirts. We thought this was an incredibly complicated and tortuous way of getting a cheap thrill and so that became ‘multi-coloured mirrors’ and ‘hobnail boots’ to fit the rhythm. A bit of poetic licence,” adds Taylor. “The bit about ‘lying with his eyes while his hands were working over time’ came from another thing I’d read where a man wearing a cloak had fake plastic hands, which he would rest on the counter of a shop while underneath the cloak he was busy lifting things and stuffing them in a bag around his waist.
“I don’t know where the ‘soap impression of his wife’ came from but the eating of something and then donating it ‘to the National Trust’ came from a conversation we’d had about the horrors of walking in public spaces on Merseyside, where you were always coming across the evidence of people having crapped behind bushes and in old air-raid shelters. So to donate what you’ve eaten to the National Trust (a British organization with responsibilities for upkeeping countryside of great beauty) was what would now be known as ‘ defecation on common land owned by the National Trust.’ When John put it all together, it created a series of layers of images. It was like a whole mess of colour,” Taylor concludes.
The second section begins ‘I need a fix’ and came out of his relationship with Yoko who played a motherly, and some might say superior, role in his life. For most of their relationship he would refer to her as ‘Mother’. This was also a time when he was dabbling in heroin, a drug that was later to get a grip on him.
The final section was inspired by something in an American gun magazine that George Martin had pointed out to him. There was a line on
the cover reading ‘Happiness is a warm gun in your hand…’, an obvious play on Peanuts cartoonist Charles Schulz’s 1962 book Happiness is a Warm Puppy. The apparently bizarre juxtaposition of killing and pleasure stimulated John’s imagination at a time. “I thought, what a fantastic thing to say,” said John. “A warm gun means that you’ve just shot something.”
The music and vocal delivery of this section emulated ‘ Angel Baby’ by Rosie and the Originals (1960) a track that John loved. Rolling Stone writer Jonathan Cott interviewed John on September 18, 1968 and noted that, “John played Rosie and the Originals’ version of ‘Give Me Love’.” This was the B side of ‘Angel Baby’. Five days later, John began recording ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’.
On his copy of the lyric sheet John wrote ‘dirty old man’ by the first section, ‘the junkie’ by the second and ‘ the gunman (satire of 50’s R + R)’ by the third. Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll!.
MARTHA MY DEAR
The name Martha came from Paul’s two-year-old Old English Sheepdog, but this song is a plea to a girl who has always been the singer’s muse: he asks her to remember him because he still believes that they were meant for each other. In January 1968, Paul and Jane Asher had announced that they were going to get married during the year but Paul began dating other girls while Jane was away acting and in July she called off the engagement.
“We still see each other and love each other, but it hasn’t worked out,” Jane said. “Perhaps we’ll be childhood sweethearts and meet again and get married when we’re about 70.”
The song began as a two-handed piano excercise, something designed to stretch him musically. Explaining the genesis of the song in 1968 he said; “Mainly I come up with a tune and some words come into my head. In this case these happened to be ‘Martha my dear’. They don’t mean anything. I don’t ever try to make serious social comment. You can read anything you like into it but really it’s just a song. It’s me singing to my dog!”
‘Martha My Dear’ was recorded in October 1968 – by which time Linda Eastman had become Paul’s girl-friend. Jane began a relationship with cartoonist Gerald Scarfe in the early Seventies and they married in 1981.
I’M SO TIRED
During the Beatles’ stay in Rishikesh, there were two 90-minute lectures each day and much of the rest of the time was taken up with meditating. Students were expected to build up their periods of meditation slowly as their technique improved. One person on the course reportedly claimed to have clocked up a 42-hour session. John found that this life of stillness and inner absorption meant that he couldn’t sleep at night and consequently he began feeling tired during the day.
‘I’m So Tired’, written after three weeks in India, was also about the things he was beginning to miss. The Academy of Meditation was alcohol- and drug- free and John’s mind was turning to his beloved cigarettes and the possibility of a drink. Sometimes a friend of his would smuggle some wine in.
Most of all he was missing Yoko Ono. The couple had not yet begun an actual affair because John wasn’t sure how to end his marriage. He had briefly entertained the idea of inviting her to India but realized that the complications of having Cynthia and Yoko under the same roof would be too great.
BLACKBIRD
There are a number of stories surrounding the creation of ‘Blackbird’. One has it that Paul woke early one morning in Rishikesh to hear a blackbird singing, picked up his guitar to transcribe the bird song and came up with the music. Another suggests that he was inspired by news reports of race riots in America and translated the plight of oppressed racial minorities beginning to flex their muscles into the image of a bird with broken wings struggling to fly.
Paul’s step-mother, Angie McCartney, says that it was written for her mother, Edie Stopforth, and that she has a copy of a studio take where Paul says, “This one’s for Edie” before recording it. “My mother was staying with Jim and I after a long illness,” she says. “During that time Paul visited us and spent some time sitting on mum’s bed. She told him that she would often listen to a bird singing at night. Paul eventually took a little tape recorder up to her room and recorded the sound of this bird.”
Paul has said that the tune was inspired, not by a blackbird’s singing, but by his memory of Bach’s Bourrée in E minor (from the lute suite BWV 996) that he had learned as a teenager from a guitar manual. He was partly thinking of the racial situation in America and wrote it as if offering encouragement to the typical black woman facing oppression.
Although written in 1968 it’s difficult to pinpoint the exact month since Paul has said that he wrote it not in India but on his Scottish farm. It’s likely that he started the music in India, influenced by Donovan, and completed it between his return on March 26 and the demo recordings at George’s house late in May. This makes it more likely that the lyric was written in the aftermath of Martin Luther King’s death on April 4. On June 11 he performed it for an Apple promotional film that was being directed by Tony Bramwell.
The use of the term ‘blackbird’ to refer to people of African origin dates back to the slave trade and was always used pejoratively. In the sixties it was appropriated by the civil rights campaigners and given a positive spin. A civil rights musical, Fly Blackbird, with songs by C. Bernard Jackson and James Hatch, opened off-Broadway in 1962 and went on to win an Obie for Best Musical.
In the summer of 1968, Paul serenaded the fans gathered outside his home with an acoustic version of ‘Blackbird’. Margo Bird, a former Apple Scruff (the term for the group of fans who used to congregate outside the Apple offices in Savile Row) remembers: “I think he had a young lady round, Francie Schwartz. We’d been hanging around outside and it was obvious she wasn’t going to be leaving. He had a music room right at the top of the house and he opened the sash window, sat on the edge and played it to us. It was the early hours of the morning.”
Paul often cites ‘Blackbird’ as evidence that the best of his songs come spontaneously, when words and music tumble out as if they had come into being without conscious effort on his behalf.
PIGGIES
George referred to ‘Piggies’ as “a social comment” although the song did little more than mock the middle-classes by calling them pigs, a Sixties term of derision usually reserved for the police. Pigs were also the animal chosen by George Orwell in Animal Farm to represent tyrannical leaders.
The song became notorious in 1971 when it was revealed that Charles Manson, the self-appointed leader of the infamous Manson ‘family’, had interpreted the words as a warning to the white establishment that they were to get ready for an uprising.
Particularly significant, in Manson’s disturbed mind, was the suggestion that the piggies were in need of ‘a damn good whacking’. According to witnesses, this was one of Manson’s favourite lines, and one that he quoted frequently before his imprisonment for involvement in the murders which many saw as the final dark chapter in the hippie era.
The clue that eventually linked the eight murders – five at the residence of film star Sharon Tate, two at Leno LaBianca’s and one at Gary Hinman’s – was the painting of the word ‘pig’, ‘pigs’ or ‘piggy’ in the victims’ blood. The LaBiancas were even stabbed with knives and forks, apparently because these utensils are mentioned in the last verse.
George was horrified at Manson’s misguided interpretation of what he felt was a rather tame song, pointing out that the ‘damn good whacking’ line had been suggested by his mother when he was looking for something to rhyme with ‘backing’ and ‘lacking’. “It was nothing to do with American policemen or Californian shagnasties,” he said.
ROCKY RACCOON
‘Rocky Raccoon’ was a musical Western, written by Paul while in India. Set in the mountains of Dakota (probably because of the Doris Day song ‘Black Hills Of Dakota’ from the movie Calamity Jane), it tells the tale of young Rocky whose girl, Nancy Magill, runs off with Dan. Rocky pursues Dan and attempts to shoot him down but is beaten to the draw. Afterward
s, Rocky is treated in his hotel room by a doctor stinking of gin. “We were sitting on the roof at Maharishi’s just enjoying ourselves when I wrote this one,” said Paul. “I started laying the chords and originally the title was ‘Rocky Sassoon’. Then me, John and Donovan started making up the words, they came very quickly and eventually it became ‘Rocky Raccoon’ because it sounded more cowboyish.”
The lyric bears more that a passing resemblance to Robert Service’s ‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew’ (1907), a poem that also tells a story of love and revenge with similar-sounding characters. In both works a shooting takes place in a saloon. The femme fatale in Rocky’s case is described in the line ‘she called herself Lil…but everyone knew her as Nancy’. In Dan McGrew’s case the lady is ‘known as Lou’.
Apple Scruff Margo Bird heard that the character of the doctor was drawn from real life. “Paul had a quad bike which he came off one day towards the end of 1966. He was a bit stoned at the time and cut his mouth and chipped his tooth,” she says. “The doctor who came to treat him was stinking of gin and because he was a bit worse for wear he didn’t make a very good job of the stitching. That is why Paul had a nasty lump on his lip for a while and he grew a moustache to cover it.”
DON’T PASS ME BY
‘Don’t Pass Me By’ was Ringo’s first complete Beatles’ song. Until then, his only contribution to the Beatles’ songwriting had been the titles for ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ and ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, plus whatever musical contributions he made to ‘Flying’ and ‘What Goes On’.
