by Steve Turner
Asked in December 1967 whether he had aspirations as a songwriter, Ringo replied: “I try. I have a guitar and a piano and play a few chords, but they’re all just chinga-lingas. No great tune comes out as far as I’m concerned.”
The truth is he’d been trying to get the Beatles to record ‘Don’t Pass Me By’ for years. During an interview for radio in New Zealand on their June 1964 tour of Australasia, Ringo could be heard urging the others to “sing the song I’ve written, just for a plug”. Paul responded by saying: “Ringo has written a song called ‘Don’t Pass Me By’. A beautiful melody. This is Ringo’s first venture into songwriting.”
After Paul and John had sung a verse, Ringo was asked more about it: “It was written as a country and western but Paul and John singing it with that blues feeling has knocked me out. Are the Beatles going to record it? I don’t know. I don’t think so, actually. I keep trying to push it on them every time we make a record.”
It was to remain unrecorded for another five years. “Unfortunately, there’s never enough time to fit Ringo’s song on an album,” Paul explained in 1964. “He never finished it.”
WHY DON’T WE DO IT IN THE ROAD?
One of the great strengths of the Lennon and McCartney team was that, although they now rarely sat down and created a song from scratch together, they did urge each other on to greater heights in what was increasingly to become solo work.
Sometimes they would try to outdo each other by composing in a style more often associated with the other. The White Album contained the sensitive ‘Julia’ and sentimental ‘Goodnight’ by John in Paul’s style, as well as gritty Lennon-like rock’n’roll numbers like ‘Helter Skelter’ and ‘Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?’ from Paul. ‘Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?’ upset John because Paul recorded it with Ringo in a separate studio at Abbey Road and Paul’s chosen style – a risqué lyric and sparse arrangements – was close to the style he had become associated with.
Paul had the idea for the song while in India when he saw two monkeys copulating in the open. He was struck by the apparently uncomplicated way in which animals mate compared with the rules, rituals and routines of human sex.
“The Beatles have always been a rock group,” Paul explained in November 1968. “It’s just that we’re not completely rock’n’roll. That’s why we do ‘Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da’ one minute, and this the next. When we played in Hamburg we didn’t just play rock’n’roll all evening because we had these fat old businessmen coming in – and thin old businessmen as well – and they would ask us to play a mambo or a samba. I never usually write a song and think: ‘Right, now this is going to be about something specific.’ It’s just that the words happen. I never try to make any serious social point. Just words to go with the music. And you can read anything you like into it.”
I WILL
Paul spent 67 takes getting ‘I Will’ right on September 16, 1968, with Ringo playing on cymbal and maracas and John tapping the rhythm with a piece of wood. It was the first of Paul’s songs to be written about Linda and he was still adding and changing lines as it was being recorded.
Unsurprisingly, there’s a sense of anticipation in the lyric, provoked no doubt by the knowledge that Linda and her daughter were arriving in London the very next week. Paul had previously only met Linda in London during the Sgt Pepper period and on two subsequent visits to America, but he obviously felt he knew enough about her to be confident in offering her his love ‘forever and forever’.
He had started the song in India but being unhappy with the original lyric he stripped it off and started again.
JULIA
Although many of John’s songs were shaped by the trauma of losing his mother as a teenager, ‘Julia’ was the first time he directly introduced his mother into a Beatles’ song.
Julia Stanley was born in Liverpool in 1914 and married Frederick Lennon in 1938. John was the only child they had together. By the time John was five, Julia gave birth to another man’s child and John was taken into the care of Julia’s sister Mimi. His mother was attractive and unconventional. She taught John to play banjo and it was through her that John heard his first Elvis Presley records.
Julia’s sudden death in a road accident in 1958 came just when John was becoming close to her again. He’d started using her home in Blomfield Road for band practices with the Quarry Men because Aunt Mimi didn’t like loud music in her house.
Although ‘Julia’ was addressed to his mother, it was also a coded message to his new love, Yoko Ono. The ‘ocean child’, who John says is calling him, is clearly a reference to Yoko whose name in Japanese means ‘child of the ocean’. “It was in India that she began writing to me,” John said. “She would write things like ‘I am a cloud. Watch for me in the sky.’ I would get so excited about her letters.”
The first two lines of the song are taken from Sand And Foam, a collection of proverbs by the Lebanese mystic, Kahlil Gibran, first published in 1927. Gibran wrote: “Half of what I say is meaningless; but I say it so the other half may reach you.” The rest of the song, John said, was finished with help from Yoko herself when they met up back in England because, besides being an artist and film maker, she was a poet who wrote in a minimalist style.
BIRTHDAY
The songs on The Beatles composed in India were guitar-orientated because guitars were the only instruments available at the ashram.
However, ‘Birthday’ was written in Abbey Road Studios, on September 18, 1968, with Paul thumping out the basic tune on a piano. According to John, Paul had been thinking of ‘Happy, Happy Birthday’, a 1957 hit in America for the Tuneweavers, but wanted to produce something which sounded contemporary and rock’n’roll. It was also Linda Eastman’s 26th birthday in six days’ time and Paul knew that she was arriving in London the following week, just in time to celebrate.
Paul went in the studio late in the afternoon and worked out the basic keyboard riff, the start of which was based on the introduction of Rosco Gordon’s ‘Just A Little Bit’ (1960). Later, George, John and Ringo came in and added a backing track. During the evening, the four of them took a break and went round to Paul’s house to watch the British television premiere of The Girl Can’t Help It (1956), which starred Jayne Mansfield and featured music by Fats Domino, Gene Vincent, the Treniers, the Platters, Little Richard and Eddie Cochran.
Perhaps inspired by this dose of early rock’n’roll, the Beatles returned to the studio around 11pm and completed the vocals. Each of the Beatles threw in lines and Yoko Ono and Pattie Harrison helped with the backing. “We just made up the words in the studio,” said Paul. “It’s one of my favourite tracks on the album because it was instantaneous. It’s a good one to dance to.”
John’s opinion, volunteered 12 years later, was par for the course: “It’s a piece of garbage.”
YER BLUES
‘Yer Blues’ was the most despairing song John had written to date, representing an anguished cry to Yoko for help. John felt he was at a crossroads in his life: his career as a performing Beatle was nearly over, his manager was dead and now he was contemplating bringing an end to his marriage.
He felt loyalty to Cynthia and yet he knew that in Yoko he’d met his artistic and intellectual match. She was, he later said, the girl he had always dreamed of meeting; the girl he had imagined when he wrote ‘Girl’.
During the stay in Rishikesh, John and Cynthia were often separated because of their different meditation routines and it wasn’t until the flight back to London from Delhi that John mentioned to Cynthia his indiscretions during their six-year marriage. She was shocked: “I never dreamt that he had been unfaithful to me during our married life. He hadn’t revealed anything to me. I knew of course that touring abroad and being surrounded by all the temptations any man could possibly want would have been impossible to resist. But even so my mind just couldn’t and wouldn’t accept the inevitable. I had never had anything concrete to go on, nothing tell-tale.”
John later said that t
his dilemma had made him feel suicidal. In this song, he jokingly compares himself to ‘Mr Jones’, the witless central character in Dylan’s ‘Ballad Of A Thin Man’. Musically, ‘Yer Blues’ was indicative of the direction he would eventually take with his post-Beatles career.
MOTHER NATURE’S SON
Both John and Paul wrote songs after hearing a lecture by the Maharishi about the unity of man and nature, but it was to be Paul’s ‘Mother Nature’s Son’ that made the album’s final selection.
John’s song, ‘A Child Of Nature’, made similar observations about the sun, sky, wind and mountains but, whereas Paul fictionalized his response by writing in the character of a ‘poor young country boy’, John wrote about himself ‘on the road to Rishikesh’.
A demo of ‘A Child Of Nature’ was made by John in May 1968, but the Beatles didn’t record it. Three years later and with a new set of lyrics it became ‘Jealous Guy’.
Paul had always been a lover of the countryside and when he wrote ‘Mother Nature’s Son’ he had in mind a song he had heard when he was younger called ‘Nature Boy’ (1947) , made popular by Nat ‘King’ Cole. Although the song was started in India it was completed at his father’s house.
EVERYBODY’S GOT SOMETHING TO HIDE EXCEPT ME AND MY MONKEY
Initially known as ‘Come On, Come On’, the song was built up from its title. John said it was a clear reference to his relationship with Yoko. “That was just a nice line which I made into a song,” he said. “Everybody seemed to be paranoid except for us two, who were in the glow of love…everybody was sort of tense around us.”
It wasn’t until his return from India that the friendship turned into an affair and Cynthia knew what was happening. Yoko started to attend recording sessions for the new album, much to the annoyance of the other Beatles. The British press also found it difficult to accept Yoko and this irked John and was to play a part in his eventual move to America. “In England, they think I’m someone who has won the pools and gone off with a Japanese Princess,” he once said. “In America, they treat her with respect. They treat her as the serious artist she is.”
The rapid ‘ Come on, come on, come on…’ chorus sounds similar to what became known as the ‘gobble chorus’ section of the Fugs’ track ‘Virgin Forest’ that appeared on The Fugs’ Second Album (1966). Barry Miles, then running the Indica Bookshop, supplied the Beatles with the latest underground releases from America, including work by The Fugs.
SEXY SADIE
‘Sexy Sadie’ appears to be a song about a girl who leads men on, only to make fools of them, but was written about the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, after John had become disillusioned with him. Knowing that he could never record a potentially libellous song called Maharishi, he titled it ‘Sexy Sadie’, but on the demo recording of the track he let rip with a string of obscenities directed towards his real quarry.
There were two reasons why the Beatles decided to leave Rishikesh. They had been told that the Maharishi was only after their money and a rumour suggested he had made a sexual advance to a women on the course. It unnerved them and the three Beatles told the guru they were leaving. Pressed to explain their decision, John reportedly said, “Well, if you’re so cosmic, you’ll know why.”
Paul Horn, who remembers them leaving, believes the fall-out was inevitable: “These courses were designed for people who had a solid background in meditation. The Beatles didn’t have the experience and I think they were expecting miracles. George was really interested but Ringo wasn’t into Eastern philosophy at all. John was and always sceptical about anything until it had been proven to him. Paul was easy-going and could have gone either way.
“The big fuss came because there were some people there who were more interested in the Beatles than learning to meditate and they became hangers-on. One woman was really into the Beatles and started all this crap about the Maharishi making passes at her. There were a lot of rumours, jealousies and triangles going on and she got back at the Beatles through saying this about the Maharishi. The bottom line, though, is that it was time for them to go home. This was just the catalyst.”
HELTER SKELTER
The concept for ‘Helter Skelter’ came from a music paper’s rave review of a new single by the Who. Paul didn’t think the single matched the hyperbole and set himself the challenge of writing something that could legitimately be described in that language.
The single, ‘I Can See For Miles’, was released in October 1967 and reviewed by Chris Welch in Melody Maker. “Forget Happy Jack sitting in sand on the Isle of Man,” wrote Welch. “This marathon epic of swearing cymbals and cursing guitars marks the return of the Who as a major freak-out force. Recorded in America, it’s a Pete Townshend composition filled with Townshend mystery and menace.”
It’s impossible to be certain that this was the review, because Paul’s description has changed over the years. In 1968, he said the review had said “The group really goes wild with echo and screaming and everything,” but 20 years later he claimed it described the Who single as, “the loudest, most raucous rock’n’roll, the dirtiest thing they’d ever done.” However, Paul’s account of the effect that the review had on him had’t changed: “I thought ‘That’s a pity. I would like to do something like that.’ Then I heard it and it was nothing like it. It was straight and sophisticated. So we did this. I like noise.”
Despite being described as having ‘swearing cymbals’ and ‘cursing guitars’, ‘I Can See For Miles’ had a discernible melody throughout and could not properly be described as raucous. Paul wanted to write something that really did ‘ freak people out’ and, when the Beatles first recorded ‘Helter Skelter’ in July 1968, they did it in one take which was almost half an hour long. They returned to it in September ‘out of their heads’, and produced a shorter version. At the end of it, Ringo can be heard shrieking, “I’ve got blisters on my fingers.”
Most British listeners were aware that a helter skelter was a spiral fairground slide but Charles Manson, who heard the White Album in December 1968 thought that the Beatles were warning America of a racial conflict that was ‘coming down fast’. In the scenario that Manson had developed, the Beatles were the four angels mentioned in the New Testament book of Revelation who, through their songs, were telling him and his followers to prepare for the coming holocaust by escaping to the desert.
Manson referred to this future uprising as ‘Helter Skelter’ and it was the daubing of these words in blood at the scene of one of the murders that became another vital clue in the subsequent police investigation. It was because of the song’s significance that Vincent Bugliosi, the LA District Attorney who prosecuted at Manson’s trial, named his best-selling account of the murders Helter Skelter.
LONG LONG LONG
More than any other Beatle, George was inspired to write by hearing other songs. The chords of ‘Long Long Long’ were suggested to him by Bob Dylan’s haunting track ‘Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands’. George was fascinated with the movement from D to E minor to A and back to D and wanted to write something which sounded similar. He scribbled the lyric out in the pages of an empty ‘week at a glance’ diary for 1968 and called it ‘It’s Been A Long Long Long Time’ which then became the working title.
‘Long Long Long’ sounds like a straightforward love song but, according to George, the ‘you’ in question here is God. He was the first Beatle to show an interest in Eastern religion and the only one to carry on with it after the others became disenchanted with the Maharishi following their visit to India. George did, however, alter his allegiances, distancing himself from Maharishi and Transcendental Meditation and becoming publicly identified with the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, later producing their Hare Krishna mantra as a hit single.
REVOLUTION
The Summer of Love was followed by the Spring of Revolution. In March 1968, thousands marched on the American Embassy in London’s Grosvenor Square to protest against the war in Vietnam. In May, students rioted in Paris
. Unlike Mick Jagger, who made an appearance at Grosvenor Square, John surveyed these events from home, keeping in touch through the news media and the underground press. He began work on ‘Revolution’ while in India and completed it at home when Cynthia was away in Greece. He took it to Paul as a potential single but Paul said the song wasn’t commercial enough.
This wasn’t the song of a revolutionary but rather the song of someone under pressure from revolutionaries to declare his allegiance. Easily the most politically conscious of the Beatles and unapologetically left-wing in outlook, John had become a target for various Leninist, Trotskyist and Maoist groups, who felt he should lend both moral and financial support to their causes.
‘Revolution’ was John’s reply to these factions, informing them that, while he shared their desire for social change, he believed that the only worthwhile revolution would come about through inner change rather than revolutionary violence. However, he was never absolutely sure of his position, hedging his bets on the slow version of the song released on the album. After admitting that destruction can come with revolution, he sang ‘ you can count me out/in’ obviously unsure of which side of the debate to come down on. On the fast version, recorded six weeks later and released as the B side of ‘Hey Jude’, he omitted the word ‘in’.
The omission provoked much hand-wringing in the underground press. The American magazine Ramparts called it a ‘betrayal’ and the New Left Review: “a lamentable petty bourgeois cry of fear”. Time magazine, on the other hand, devoted a whole article to the song which it said, “criticized radical activists the world over”.
The nature of John’s dilemma was revealed in an exchange of letters published in a Keele University magazine. In an open letter, student John Hoyland said of ‘Revolution’, “That record was no more revolutionary than Mrs Dale’s Diary (a BBC radio soap). In order to change the world, we’ve got to understand what’s wrong with the world. And then – destroy it. Ruthlessly. This is not cruelty or madness. It is one of the most passionate forms of love. Because what we’re fighting is suffering, oppression, humiliation – the immense toll of unhappiness caused by capitalism. And any ‘love’ which does not pit itself against these things is sloppy and irrelevant. There is no such thing as a polite revolution.”
