The Beatles (5 page)

A DAY IN THE LIFE

For ‘She Said She Said’, John had combined two unfinished songs but here, for the first time, he put together an unfinished song of his own with one of Paul’s to build the most ambitious track on the album.

John’s songwas prompted by his interminable newspaper reading. The ‘4000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire’, was picked from the Far And Near column in the
Daily Mail
dated January 17, 1967, where it was reported that a Blackburn City Council survey of road holes showed that there was one twenty-sixth of a hole in the road for each resident of the city. When John was stuck for a rhyme for ‘small’ to finish off the line ‘Now they know how many holes it takes to fill…’ his old school friend Terry Doran suggested ‘the Albert Hall’.

The film about the English army winning the war was of course
How I Won The War
, that wouldn’t be premiered until October 1967 but had been talked about a lot in the press.

The man who ‘blew his mind out in a car’ was Tara Browne, an Irish friend of the Beatles and a well-known socialite, who died in a car accident on December 18, 1966. The coroner’s report was issued in January 1967. “I didn’t copy the accident,” John told Hunter Davies. “Tara didn’t blow his mind out. But it was in my mind when I was writing that verse.” The details of the accident in the song – not noticing traffic lights and a crowd forming at the scene – were made up. Paul, who contributed lines to this part of the song, didn’t know at the time that John had Tara Browne in mind. He thought he was writing about ‘a stoned politician’.

Browne was driving down Redcliffe Gardens in Earls Court after midnight, when a Volkswagen emerged from a side street into his path. He swerved and his Lotus Elan ploughed into a stationary van. He was pronounced dead on arrival at a local hospital. The autopsy revealed that his death was the result of “brain lacerations due to fractures of the skull”. His passenger, model Suki Potier, escaped with bruises and shock.

Tara Browne, great grandson of the brewer Edward Cecil Guinness and son of Lord Oranmore and Browne, was part of a young aristocratic elite who loved to mingle with pop stars (but he wasn’t a member of the House of Lords). Although only 21 at the time of his death, he would have inherited a £1,000,000 fortune at the age of 25 and was described on his death certificate as a man “of independent means” with a London home in Eaton Row, Belgravia. After schooling at Eton, Browne married at 18 and fathered two boys before separating from his wife and taking up with Suki Potier. He frequented London nightspots such as Sibylla’s and the Bag O’Nails and had become particularly friendly with Paul and Mike McCartney and Rolling Stone Brian Jones. For his 21st birthday, he had the Lovin’ Spoonful flown to his ancestral home in County Wicklow, Ireland. Mick Jagger, Mike McCartney, Brian Jones and John Paul Getty were amongst the guests. Paul was with Browne when he first took LSD in 1966.

Paul’s unfinished song, a bright and breezy piece about getting out of bed and setting off for school, was spliced between the second and third verses of John’s song. “It was another song altogether but it happened to fit,” Paul said. “It was just me remembering what it was like to run up the road to catch a bus to school, having a smoke and going into class…It was a reflection of my schooldays. I would have a Woodbine (a cheap unfiltered British cigarette) and somebody would speak and I would go into a dream.”

The references to having a smoke, dreams and ‘turn-ons’ meant that the track was banned from the airwaves in many countries. There were even some who were convinced that the holes in Blackburn, like the holes Paul had been keen to fix, were those of a heroin user.

In 1968 Paul admitted that ‘A Day In The Life’ was what he called ‘a turn-on song’. “This was the only one on the album written as a deliberate provocation,” he said. “But what we want to do is to turn you on to the truth rather than on to pot.” George Martin comments: “The ‘woke up, got out of bed’ bit was definitely a reference to marijuana but ‘Fixing A Hole’ wasn’t about heroin and ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ wasn’t about LSD. At the time I had a strong suspicion that ‘went upstairs and had a smoke’ was a drug reference. They always used to disappear and have a little puff but they never did it in front of me. They always used to go down to the canteen and Mal Evans used to guard it.”

MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR

With
Sgt Pepper
behind them, the Beatles immediately plunged into recording soundtracks for two very different films –
Yellow Submarine
and
Magical Mystery Tour.

Yellow Submarine
, a feature-length animation project, wasn’t initiated by the group but they took a keen interest in its development. The Beatles were happy to see themselves turned into cartoon characters and contributed storylines as well as four original songs. The script was by a team of screenwriters, one of whom was Erich Segal, author of the best-selling novel,
Love Story
. A psychedelic fantasy,
Yellow Submarine
concerns a happy kingdom called Pepperland, which is taken over by the villainous Blue Meanies. The fab four ride to the rescue in a yellow submarine from Liverpool, eventually conquering the Meanies through the combined power of Love and Music.

Magical Mystery Tour
was an experimental 50-minute colour feature for television. It started off as Paul’s project but the whole group was heavily involved in all aspects of production. They financed, directed, cast and scripted the film, as well as appearing in it themselves.

Along with the single ‘All You Need Is Love’/’Baby You’re A Rich Man’, the songs from this period are the most psychedelic of the Beatles’ career.
Magical Mystery Tour
was released in America as an album in November 1967 and in Britain as a double extended-play disc in December. The
Yellow Submarine
soundtrack, which included an orchestral side from George Martin, wasn’t released until January 1968, shortly after
The Beatles.

This eclectic bunch of songs would make a fitting farewell to 1967, the year of the Summer of Love, before the more sober reflections of
1968. The new year marked a fresh period in the Beatles’ songwriting, when cleaning up, straightening out and getting back to basics became the order of the day.

Magical Mystery Tour
, which was first seen on British television on December 26, 1967, was a critical failure, which consequently received only limited exposure in America. The music was much more successful; the British double EP reached Number 2 in the singles charts and the American album went to Number 1.

The
Yellow Submarine
film was released in July 1968 and was a commercial success in America, although it was never put on full release in Britain. The album, which featured other artists as well as the Beatles, reached the Number 3 spot in Britain and Number 2 in America.

ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE

Early in 1967, the Beatles were approached by the BBC to take part in what would be the first-ever, live global television link: a 125-minute programme broadcast to 26 countries with contributions from national broadcasting networks in Europe, Scandinavia, North America, Central America, North Africa, Japan and Australia.

To mark the occasion, the Beatles were asked to write a simple song that would be understood by viewers of all nationalities. Writing began in late May, with Paul and John working on separate compositions, until John’s ‘All You Need Is Love’ emerged as the obvious choice. The song was not only musically and lyrically uncomplicated but also it perfectly captured the aspirations of international youth in the summer of 1967. This was the time when the war in Vietnam was at its most intense and the ‘love generation’ showed its opposition by staging a number of peaceful protests. “It was an inspired song and they really wanted to give the world a
message,” said Brian Epstein. “The nice thing about it is that it cannot be misinterpreted. It is a clear message saying that love is everything.”

In calling for universal love, ‘All You Need Is Love’ extended the message that John had first tried to put across in ‘The Word’ in 1965. He was fascinated by the power of slogans to unite people and was determined to create something with the timelessness of ‘We Shall Overcome’ (a labour union song popularized in the Sixties by folk singer Pete Seeger). When asked in 1971 whether songs like ‘Give Peace A Chance’ and ‘Power To The People’ were propaganda songs, he answered, “Sure. So was ‘All You Need Is Love’.. I’m a revolutionary artist. My art is dedicated to change.”

The viewers of
Our World
on June 25, 1967 saw a re-creation of a Beatles recording session: rhythm tracks had been laid down on June 14 and the live input was instantaneously added and mixed for transmission. A party atmosphere was created in Abbey Road’s Studio One by inviting Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, Eric Clapton and Keith Moon to hold balloons, wave placards and join in on the chorus. George Martin accentuated the message of international unity by opening the song with bars from La Marseillaise (France), and closing it with snatches from ‘In The Mood’ (America) the Brandenburg concerto (Germany) and ‘Greensleeves’ (England).

The single was released on July 7, and became the anthem of the Summer of Love, a paean to peace, love and understanding. “We had been told that we’d be seen recording it by the whole world at the same time,” said Paul. “So we had one message for the world – love. We need more love in the world.”

BABY YOU’RE A RICH MAN

As with ‘ A Day In The Life’, two unfinished songs were sewn together to create ‘Baby You’re A Rich Man’, which opens with John’s section, originally titled ‘One Of The Beautiful People’, and then moves up a gear for Paul’s ‘rich man’ chorus.

‘The beautiful people’ was a term applied to the hip in-crowd who, with their long hair, free love and dope, created an alternative to ‘straight’ society. They used the word ‘beautiful’ freely in their conversations to describe anything of which they approved. “At the back of my mind somewhere…there is something which tells me that everything is beautiful,” said Paul in a stoned interview with
International Times
in January 1967. “Instead of opposing things like ‘Oh, I don’t like that television show’ or ‘No, I don’t like the theatre’ I know really that it’s all great and that everything’s great and there’s no bad ever if I can think of it all as great.”

In 1967, San Francisco was regarded as the city of the beautiful people because it was here that the hippy movement was first spotted by the media and where the first psychedelic ‘happenings’ and open-air ‘tribal gatherings’ had taken place. Although the Beatles played San Francisco in 1964, 1965 and 1966, they didn’t really get to explore the city until 1967. Paul was the first to visit, on April 4, when he dropped in on a Jefferson Airplane rehearsal and jammed on guitar. George was next, on August 7, when he came to Haight Ashbury, the San Francisco district that had given birth to underground newspapers, psychedelic poster art, communes, crash pads, head shops, free clinics and legions of exotic street people. Pattie’s sister Jenny was living in the area. “You are our leader, George,” one hippy shouted as he set off walking from the corner
of Haight and Masonic with Pattie, Neil Aspinall and Derek Taylor beside him. “You know where it’s at.”

George was taken aback at the drug-glazed adoration of those who pushed flowers, poems, posters and drugs at him. “It’s you who should be leading yourself,” he told his would-be followers. “You don’t want to be following leaders – me or anyone else.” When he arrived at a park, George sat on the grass, listened to other people’s songs and then started to sing ‘Baby You’re A Rich Man’.

The rich man in Paul’s section is reputed to be manager Brian Epstein and in a demo version of the song, John maligns him by singing ‘Baby, you’re a rich fag Jew’. “The point was,” said John, “stop moaning. You’re a rich man and we’re all rich men.”

HELLO GOODBYE

Alistair Taylor, Brian Epstein’s assistant, remembered once asking Paul how he wrote his songs, and Paul took him into his dining room to give a demonstration on a hand-carved harmonium. He told Taylor to shout out the opposite of whatever he sang as he struck the keys. And so it went – black and white, yes and no, stop and go, hello and goodbye. “I’ve no memory at all of the tune,” Taylor later recounted. “You have to remember that melodies are as common around the Beatles as bugs in May. Some grow into bright butterflies and others shrivel and die. I wonder whether Paul really made up that song as he went along or whether it was running through his head already. Anyway, shortly afterwards, he arrived at the office with a demo tape of the latest single – ‘Hello Goodbye.’”

The last part of the record, where the Beatles repeat the line ‘Hela, hey, aloha’ came about spontaneously in the studio. (‘Aloha’ is an affectionate form of Hawaiian greeting.)

If ‘Hello Goodbye’ was nothing more than a word game set to music, in the mystical climate of 1967, Paul was expected to offer a deeper interpretation. In an interview with
Disc
, he gallantly tried to produce an explanation: “the answer to everything is simple. It’s a song about everything and nothing…to have white. That’s the amazing thing about life.”