by Steve Turner
The White Album was being recorded at Abbey Road at exactly the same time as Taylor was recording at Trident Studios in London’s Soho. Indeed, on October 3, George was at Trident recording ‘Savoy Truffle’ with Paul and Ringo and probably heard the track then.
“I’ve always assumed George must have heard it but I never actually spoke to him about it,” says Taylor. “I’d written ‘Something In The Way She Moves’ about two years before I recorded it and, strangely enough I’d wanted to call it ‘I Feel Fine’, but of course that was a Beatles’ track.
“I often notice traces of other people’s work in my own songs,” Taylor continues. “If George either consciously or unconsciously took a line from one of my songs then I find it very flattering. It’s certainly not an unusual thing to happen. I’d made a tape of ‘Something In The Way She Moves’ and about seven other songs about a couple of months before I met Peter Asher. I know Paul listened to it at Apple but I’m not sure who else listened to it.”
The basic writing of ‘Something’ must have taken place in October because George has said that he worked it out on piano in Studio 1, while Paul was overdubbing in Studio 2. The only reason it wasn’t included on the White Album was because the track selection had already been completed.
George first offered ‘ Something’ to Joe Cocker and Jackie Lomax but then, in May 1969, decided to record it with the Beatles for Abbey Road. ‘Something’ was an enormously successful song for George, becoming the second most covered Beatles’ song after ‘Yesterday’ (Ray Charles and Smokey Robinson both did versions) and giving him his first American Top 10 hit.
It had always been assumed that he wrote the song about Pattie but in a 1996 interview he said, “I didn’t. I just wrote it and then somebody put together a video that used some footage of me and Pattie, Paul and Linda, Ringo and Maureen and John and Yoko… actually, when I wrote it I was thinking of Ray Charles.” However, Pattie still believes that he had her in mind. “He always told me that it was about me,” she says.
MAXWELL’S SILVER HAMMER
A song, driven by strong rhymes, in which medical student Maxwell Edison uses his silver hammer to kill first his girlfriend, then a lecturer and finally a judge. Delivered in a jaunty, vaudevillian style, the only indication of Paul’s recent avant-garde leanings was the mention of ‘pataphysics’, a word invented by Alfred Jarry, the French pioneer of absurd theatre, to describe a branch of metaphysics.
“John told me that ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ was about the law of karma,” says former Apple employee Tony King. “We were talking one day about ‘Instant Karma’ (John’s 1970 single with Yoko Ono and the Plastic Ono Band) because something had happened where he’d been clobbered and he’d said that this was an example of instant karma. I asked him whether he believed that theory. He said that he did and that ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ was the first song that they’d made about that. He said that the idea behind the song was that the minute you do something that’s not right, Maxwell’s silver hammer will come down on your head.”
OH! DARLING
Paul wanted his voice to sound raw on ‘Oh! Darling’, so he sang it through again and again each day for a week before finally recording it. “I wanted it to sound as though I’d been performing it on stage all week,” he said.
Inspired by the rock’n’roll ballads of the late Fifties, Jackie Wilson’s in particular, it was a simple song pleading for a loved one to stay in exchange for lifelong devotion.
John never rated Paul’s job on vocals and reckoned he could have done better. “It was more my style than his,” he said.
OCTOPUS’S GARDEN
Ringo’s second (and last) Beatles’ song was inspired by a family holiday in Sardinia which he took in 1968 on board Peter Sellers’ yacht. After Ringo had turned down the offer of an octopus lunch, the vessel’s captain started to tell him all he knew about the life of octopuses.
“He told me how they go around the sea bed picking up stones and shiny objects to build gardens with,” said Ringo. “I thought this was fabulous because at the time I just wanted to be under the sea too. I wanted to get out of it for a while.”
To most listeners, it was a children’s seaside song in the vein of ‘Yellow Submarine’ but, in 1969, George revealed that there were hidden dimensions. Even though Ringo only knew three chords on the piano, George said, the drummer was writing “cosmic songs without really noticing it.”
I WANT YOU
Consisting only of the repeated title line and the information that the desire is driving John mad, the lyric of ‘I Want You’ was once read out on BBC TV’s current affairs programme 24 Hours as an example of the banalities of pop music.
This incensed John, who was convinced that its simplicity made it superior to ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and ‘I Am The Walrus’. To him, this was not a reversion to mindless monosyllabic pop but simply economy of language.
‘I Want You’ was written as a love song to Yoko. John admitted the influence she had on his new style of writing, saying that eventually he wanted to compose a perfect song using only one word. A 1964 poem of Yoko’s consisted of the single word ‘Water’.
HERE COMES THE SUN
Written by George, ‘Here Comes The Sun’ was an expression of delight at being able to slip away from the interminable business meetings which were now taking up so much of the Beatles’ time.
In January 1969, John and Yoko met with music business manager Allen Klein and shortly afterwards declared that he would be looking after their business affairs, despite the fact that the New York lawyer John Eastman, brother of Linda, had recently been brought in to represent the Beatles collectively. This was the beginning of a bitter drawn-out conflict over who should manage the Beatles and what should be done about the chaotic state of their finances. Despite the tremendous sales of Beatles’ music over the past six years, John claimed, “all of us could be broke in six months”.
Klein offered to restructure Apple, organize a takeover bid for the shares the Beatles didn’t own in Northern Songs and renegotiate a better royalty deal with EMI. He was able to persuade John, George and Ringo of his ability to do these things but Paul remained loyal to Eastman. As a result the Beatles’ existence was now under threat and the frequent meetings at Apple were fraught with tension. One morning in the early spring, George decided it was all getting a bit too much like school, and so he took a day off from the round table routine and went to see his friend Eric Clapton at his country home in Ewhurst, Surrey.
Borrowing one of Eric’s acoustic guitars, George took a walk around the gardens and, basking in the first real sunshine of the year, he felt a sudden flush of optimism and started to write ‘Here Comes The Sun’. “It was such a great release for me simply being out in the sun,” said George at the time. “The song just came to me.”
BECAUSE
John was relaxing on a sofa at home, while Yoko played the first movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No 14 in C Sharp Minor (‘Moonlight Sonata’) on the grand piano. John has said that he asked her if she could play the same chords in reverse order. This she did, and it proved to be the inspiration for ‘Because’.
The similarity between the opening of the ‘Moonlight Sonata’ and ‘Because’ is striking, although close scrutiny reveals it to be a straightforward lift rather than the reversal of notes John suggested. Musicologist Wilfrid Mellers, author of Twilight Of The Gods: The Music of the Beatles puts it this way, “The affinity between the enveloping, arpeggiated C sharp minor triads, with the sudden shift to the flat supertonic, is, in the Lennon and Beethoven examples, unmistakable.”
There was a touch of irony in the idea of a Beatle borrowing from Beethoven because there was a common perception at the time that rock’n’roll was antithetical to classical music and that no one could genuinely appreciate both. It also probably didn’t help that the Beatles had recorded Chuck Berry’s ‘Roll Over Beethoven’, an irreverent piece of advice to classical composers asking them to make way for
rock’n’roll.
One of the first questions the Beatles were always asked in America was, ‘What do you think of Beethoven?’ It was Ringo who answered. “I love him,” he said. “Especially his poems.” But it was John, in particular, who came to regard Beethoven as the supreme composer, and one with whom he felt kinship. By 1969, he was no longer trying to be the artistic equal of Elvis or the Rolling Stones, but of Picasso, Van Gogh, Dylan Thomas and Beethoven.
YOU NEVER GIVE ME YOUR MONEY
‘You Never Give Me Your Money’ announced the medley of half-finished songs which dominate the second side of Abbey Road. Paul collected the songs and carefully worked out a way of linking them together. ‘You Never Give Me Your Money’ itself is made up of three distinct fragments. The first, which develops the line in the title, was an allusion to the Beatles’ financial problems saying that instead of money all they ever seemed to get was ‘funny paper’.
“That’s what we get,” said George. “We get bits of paper saying how much is earned and what this and that is but we never actually get it in pounds, shillings and pence. We’ve all got a big house and a car and an office but to actually get the money we’ve earned seems impossible.”
The next fragment, which mentions being penniless after leaving college, may have referred to the same problems but was written in the jolly, nostalgic style of Paul’s ‘woke up/ got out of bed’ section of ‘A Day In The Life’. The final piece was about the freedom of Paul’s new life with Linda, where he could just pack the car and drive out of town leaving his worries behind.
SUN KING
As with ‘Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite!’, John’s opinions on ‘Sun King’ came to alter over the years but this time, changing from good to bad. In 1971, he referred to it as something that had come to him in a dream, implying that it was an inspired piece of work. By 1980, it had been revalued as just another piece of ‘garbage’.
Historically, the Sun King was Louis XIV of France and it could have been he who John dreamt about, a dream wherein the King entered his palace to find all his guests were laughing and happy. Nancy Mitford had recently published a biography of Louis which was titled The Sun King and John may have read it or at least seen it. It may also have been a jokey reference to George’s song ‘Here Comes The Sun’.
The closing lines of the song are composed of those Italian, Spanish and Portuguese words which tourists pick up, strung together in no particular order – ‘paparazzi’, ‘obrigado’, ‘parasol’, ‘mi amore’. The original title of the song was ‘Los Paranoias’.
According to George, the point of musical departure was Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Albatross’, a dreamy instrumental which had been a British Top 10 hit in the early part of 1969.
MEAN MR MUSTARD
John said that ‘Mean Mr Mustard’ was inspired by a newspaper story about a miser who concealed his cash wherever he could in order to prevent people forcing him to spend it. The line about stuffing a ‘ten bob note’ (a British ten shilling note) up his nose John admitted was his own invention, claiming that it had absolutely nothing to do with snorting cocaine.
Tony Bramwell believes another colourful London character also provided John with inspiration for this song. “There was an old ‘bag lady’ who used to hang around the Knightsbridge end of Hyde Park, close to the army barracks,” he remembers. “She had all her possessions in plastic bags and slept in the park. I’m sure that she had something to do with the song.”
The reference to a ‘dirty old man’ in the last line may have been to the character of Albert Steptoe in the BBC TV situation comedy Steptoe & Son (1962–1974) who was always referred to by his son Harold as a ‘You dirty old man’. It became a catch phrase in Britain around the same time that the actor who played Steptoe, Wilfrid Brambell, took on the part of Paul’s grandfather in A Hard Day’s Night. (This explains the many references in the movie to Paul’s granddad being ‘very clean’.)
Written in India, ‘Mean Mr Mustard’ was recorded with ‘Sun King’ in one continuous piece. In the original version, Mr Mustard had a sister called Shirley but John changed it to Pam when he realized that it could more easily segue into ‘Polythene Pam’.
POLYTHENE PAM
Although John initially insisted that ‘Polythene Pam’ was about “a mythical Liverpool scrubber (promiscuous girl or groupie) dressed up in her jackboots and kilt”, the song was actually based on two people who he had known. The name came from Pat Dawson (then Pat Hodgett), a Beatles’ fan from the Cavern Club days who, because of her habit of eating polythene, was known to the group as Polythene Pat. “I started going to see the Beatles in 1961 when I was 14 and I got quite friendly with them,” she remembers. “If they were playing out of town they’d give me a lift back home in their van. It was about the same time that I started getting called Polythene Pat. It’s embarrassing really. I just used to eat polythene all the time. I’d tie it in knots and then eat it. Sometimes I even used to burn it and then eat it when it got cold. Then I had a friend who got a job in a polythene bag factory, which was wonderful because it meant I had a constant supply.”
But Polythene Pat never dressed up in polythene bags as the song says. That little quirk was taken from an incident involving a girl called Stephanie, who John met in the Channel Islands while on tour in August 1963.
Although John wouldn’t elaborate when he spoke to Playboy in 1980, he did supply a few clues. “(Polythene Pam) was me remembering a little event with a woman in Jersey, and a man who was England’s answer to Allen Ginsberg, who gave us our first exposure…”
England’s answer to American beat poet Ginsberg turned out to be Royston Ellis, a young writer who first met the Beatles in May or June of 1960 when invited to read poetry at Liverpool University. What John went on reluctantly to tell Playboy was that Ellis was the first person to introduce the Beatles to drugs when he showed them how to get high from the strips inside a Benzedrine inhaler.
The “little event with a woman”, as John described it, actually took place on the Channel island of Guernsey, not Jersey, when John met up with Ellis who had a summer job there as a ferry boat engineer. After the Beatles’ concerts at the Auditorium in Guernsey on August 8, Ellis and his girlfriend Stephanie took John back to the attic flat Ellis was renting and this is where the polythene came into the story. “(Ellis) said Miss X (a girl he wanted me to meet) dressed up in polythene,” John later remembered. “She did. She didn’t wear jackboots and kilts. I just sort of elaborated. Perverted sex in a polythene bag. I was just looking for something to write about.”
Ellis, who now lives in Sri Lanka and writes travel books, can’t recall any ‘perverted sex’ but he can recall the night spent in a bed with Stephanie and John. “We’d read all these things about leather and we didn’t have any leather but I had my oilskins and we had some polythene bags from somewhere,” he says. “We all dressed up in them and wore them in bed. John stayed the night with us in the same bed. I don’t think anything very exciting happened and we all wondered what the fun was in being ‘kinky’. It was probably more my idea than John’s. It could have all happened because in a poetry booklet of mine which I had dedicated to the Beatles there was a poem with the lines: ‘I long to have sex between black leather sheets, And ride shivering motorcycles between your thighs.’
“At the time, it meant nothing to me. It was just one event during a very eventful time of my life,” Ellis adds. Besides being a poet, Ellis was a pundit on teenage life and a chronicler of emergent British rock’n’roll. When they met, he had just completed The Big Beat Scene, an excellent survey of late Fifties British beat music.
John was fascinated by Ellis because he stood at the converging point of rock’n’roll and literature. Ellis arranged for the Beatles to back him early on at a beat music and poetry event at the Jacaranda Club. In July 1960, Record Mirror reported that ‘ the bearded sage’ was thinking of bringing a Liverpool group called the ‘Beetles’ to London to play behind him as he performed his poetry
. “I was quite a star for them at that time because I had come up from London and that was a world they didn’t really know about,” says Ellis. “I stayed with them for about a week in their flat at Gambier Terrace. John was fascinated by the fact that I was a poet and that led to deep conversations.”
Shortly after introducing John to the delights of polythene, Ellis left England and has spent much of the time since travelling. So far removed has he been from the British pop scene, that he had never even heard ‘Polythene Pam’ until contacted for this book. He does recall with some pride, though, that in 1973 John wrote to the alternative newspaper International Times to correct them about the circumstances of the Beatles’ first drug experiences: “The first dope, from a Benzedrine inhaler, was given the Beatles (John, George, Paul and Stuart) by an English cover version of Allen Ginsberg – one Royston Ellis, known as ‘beat poet’…So, give the saint his due.”
SHE CAME IN THROUGH THE BATHROOM WIN DOW
This song was inspired by the activities of an Apple Scruff who climbed into Paul’s house in St John’s Wood when he was away for the day. “We were bored, he was out and so we decided to pay him a visit,” remembers Diane Ashley. “We found a ladder in his garden and stuck it up at the bathroom window which he’d left slightly open. I was the one who climbed up and got in.”
Once she was inside the house, she opened the front door and let the rest of the girls in. Fellow Apple Scruff Margo Bird remembers: “They rummaged around and took some clothes. People didn’t usually take anything of real value but I think this time a lot of photographs and negatives were taken. There were really two groups of Apple Scruffs – those who would break in and those who would just wait outside with cameras and autograph books. I used to take Paul’s dog for a walk and got to know him quite well. I was eventually offered a job at Apple. I started by making the tea and ended up in the promotions department working with Tony King.”
