The Beatles (15 page)

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.”

Paul asked Margo if she could retrieve any of his belongings. “I knew who had done it and I discovered that a lot of the stuff had already gone to America,” she said. “But I knew that there was one picture he particularly wanted back – a colour-tinted picture of him in a Thirties frame. I knew who had taken this and got it back for him.”

Paul completed ‘She Came In Through The Bathroom Window’ in June 1968 during a trip to America to do business with Capitol Records. It was here that he resumed his relationship with Linda Eastman, whom he’d been introduced to the previous summer in London and had since met in New York.

“Paul and Heather and I were in New York going to the airport to come back to England,” remembers Linda. “The name of the taxi driver talking to us was Eugene Quits, so then Paul wrote the line ‘So I quite the police department.’”

According to Carol Bedford, an Apple Scruff who wrote the book
Waiting For The Beatles
, Paul later said to her: “I’ve written a song about the girls who broke in. It’s called ‘She Came In Through The Bathroom Window’.” Diane was surprised to have become the subject of a Beatles’ song. “I didn’t believe it at first because he’d hated it so much when we broke in,” she says. “But then I suppose anything can inspire a song, can’t it? I know that all his neighbours rang him when they saw we’d got in and I’m sure that gave rise to the lines, ‘Sunday’s on the ‘phone to Monday/Tuesday’s on the ‘phone to me’.”

Now married with four teenage children, Diane keeps a framed photo of herself with Paul on her kitchen shelf and looks back on her days as an Apple Scruff with affection. “I don’t regret any of it. I had a great time, a really great time.”

GOLDEN SLUMBERS

Paul was at his father’s house in Cheshire tinkering around on the piano. Flicking through a songbook belonging to his step-sister Ruth (James McCar tney had since remarried), he came across the traditional lullaby ‘Golden Slumbers’. Unable to read the music, he went ahead and made up his own melody, adding new words as he went along.

‘Golden Slumbers’ was written by the English writer and dramatist Thomas Dekker, who was a contemporary of Shakespeare. The song was first published in
The Pleasant Comedy of Old Fortunatus
(1600).

A Londoner born around 1570, Dekker was the author of
The Shoemaker’s Holiday
(1600),
The Honest Whore
(1604),
The Gull’s Hornbook
(1609),
The Roaring Girl
(1611) and the posthumously published
The Syn’s Darling
(1656).

HER MAJESTY

Written by Paul in Scotland, ‘Her Majesty’ was originally part of the medley, coming between ‘ Mean Mr Mustard’ and ‘Polythene Pam’ but, on hearing a playback, Paul didn’t like it and asked for it to be edited out.

The engineer who cut it out then recycled it to the end of the tape so that it wouldn’t be destroyed. Paul must have heard another playback with ‘Her Majesty’ now tacked on as an apparent afterthought. He liked it enough to keep it there. Because the edit was only meant to be rough, the last chord of ‘Mean Mr Mustard’ was pressed into service to start ‘Her Majesty’, which ends abruptly because its own final note was left behind at the beginning of ‘Polythene Pam’.

The Beatles met Queen Elizabeth to receive their MBEs on October 26, 1965. Afterwards, asked what they thought of her, Paul answered: “She’s lovely. She was very friendly. She was just like a mum to us.” Years later, Paul confessed to having had a crush on the young Elizabeth when he was a boy.

‘Her Majesty’ has the dubious distinction of being the final track on the last album the Fab Four were ever to record together.

CARRY THAT WEIGHT

Although ‘Carry That Weight’ appears to be just another song in the medley and is credited as such on the album, it was in fact recorded with ‘Golden Slumbers’ as a single. It’s a nice touch because it brings the sequence back to where it started with the subject of money, business and the burdens of being a superstar.

The lyric expressed Paul’s fears about the Beatles in their twilight days. He later said that the arguments over finance and management plunged him into the “darkest hours” of his life so far. The atmosphere around the Beatles had changed from light to heavy. “At certain times things get to me so much that I can’t be upbeat any more and that was one of the times,” he told his biographer Barry Miles.

THE END

As the final proper track on the last album recorded by the Beatles, ‘The End’ was to become the song which signed off their studio career. Philosophical to the last, Paul says that ultimately the love you ‘take’ is equal to the love you ‘make’. He may have been saying no more that ‘you take out what you put in’, but John was sufficiently impressed to declare it a “very cosmic line” proving that “if Paul wants to, he can think.”

Paul saw the couplet as a musical equivalent of the rhyming couplets with which Shakespeare ended some of his plays, a summary and also a signal that the events of the drama were now ended.

It certainly provided a neat symmetry to their recording career – which started with the gawky pleadings of lovesick teenagers in ‘Love Me Do’, and matured to reveal enigmatic words of wisdom from the group who transformed popular music.