The Beatles (6 page)

‘Hello Goodbye’ was released as a single in November 1967 and topped the charts in both Britain and America. The final ‘aloha’ chorus was used in the
Magical Mystery Tour
film.

ONLY A NORTHERN SONG

Originally recorded in February 1967 as George’s contribution to
Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
, ‘Only A Northern Song’ first saw the light of day in
Yellow Submarine.
The song was a sly dig at the business arrangements of the Beatles. Their songs had always been published by Northern Songs Ltd, 30 per cent of whose shares belonged to John and Paul, with Ringo and George owning only 1.6 per cent each. This meant that John and Paul, in addition to being the group’s main songwriters, were benefiting again as prime shareholders in the publishing company. As far as Northern Songs was concerned, George was a merely a contracted writer.

In ‘Only A Northern Song’, George complained that it didn’t really matter what he wrote because the bulk of the money was going into other people’s pockets. Underlying this was his feeling, only expressed publicly after the group had broken up, that his songs were being ignored and that he his contributions were used as mere tokens.

“At first it was just great (to get one song on each album), it was like, hey, I’m getting in on the act too!” George commented. “After a while I did (come to resent this), especially when I had good songs. Sometimes I had songs that were better than some of their songs and we’d have to record maybe eight of theirs before they’d
listen
to one of mine.”

It’s not surprising that George, who in 1964 claimed “security is the only thing I want. Money to do nothing with, money to have in case you want to do something”, ultimately became the Beatle least keen to resurrect the Beatles.

ALL TOGETHER NOW

‘All Together Now’ was written in the studio in May 1967 with Paul as main contributor. It was intended as another ‘Yellow Submarine’ and John was delighted later when he heard that British soccer crowds were singing it.

One of the effects of psychedelia was a renewed interest in the innocence of childhood and nursery rhymes would begin to affect their post-Pepper work. Folklorist Iona Opie, editor of
The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes
, believes that as the lines sound so familiar, it draws more on a shared memory: “I can’t distinguish any particular influence on ‘All Together Now’,” she says. “So many ABC rhymes exist and there are counting rhymes like ‘One, two, three, four, Mary at the cottage door..’ which come pretty close. The song seems to come out of a universal subconscious.”

Paul has confirmed that he saw it in the tradition of children’s songs (“It’s a
Play Away
command song”) but that he was also playing with the dual meaning of ‘all together now’ which could be either a music-hall-style invitation to participate or a slogan for world unity. Paul Horn remembers the song being sung while they were in India but instead of singing ‘H, I, J, I love you’ they would sing ‘H, I, Jai Guru Dev’ in honour of Maharishi’s spiritual master.

HEY BULLDOG

‘Hey Bulldog’ was recorded on February 11, 1968, when the Beatles were at Abbey Road to make a promotional film for ‘Lady Madonna’. Paul suggested that instead of wasting time pretending to record ‘Lady Madonna’, they should tape something new and so John produced some unfinished lyrics he’d written for
Yellow Submarine.
John explained to the others how he heard the song and they all threw in suggestions for the words. One line John had written – ‘Some kind of solitude is measured out in news’ – was misread and came out as ‘Some kind of solitude is measured out in you’. They decided to keep it.

The bulldog of the title never existed before the recording. The original lyric mentioned a bullfrog but, to everyone’s amusement, Paul started to bark at the end of the song. Because of this, they retitled it.

Erich Segal, the author of
Love Story
, was one of the screenwriters on
Yellow Submarine.
Years later, he claimed that ‘Hey Bulldog’ had been written for him because the bulldog was the mascot of Yale University where he was a lecturer in classics!

IT’S ALL TOO MUCH

George was the Beatle who most often spoke in spiritual terms about his experience of LSD. ‘It’s All Too Much’, recorded in May 1967, was written, George said, “in a childlike manner from realizations that appeared during and after some LSD experiences and which were later confirmed in meditation”.

Through images of silver suns and streaming time, the song attempted to articulate the feeling of personal identity being swallowed up by a benign force. Three months after this recording, George met the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and began to view his LSD experience as a signpost rather than a destination. “LSD isn’t a real answer,” he said in September 1967. “It doesn’t give you anything. It enables you to see a lot of possibilities that you may never have noticed before but it isn’t the answer. It can help you go from A to B, but when you get to B you see C, and you see that to get really high, you have to do it straight. There are special ways of getting high without drugs – with yoga, meditation and all those things.”

MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR

Flying home to London on April 11, 1967, after visiting Jane Asher in Denver for her 21st birthday party, Paul began to work on an idea for a Beatles television special. The group felt that they had outgrown the ‘caper’ format which had made them such a big hit in the cinema and now Paul was keen to make films himself, working with an 8mm camera and composing electronic soundtracks.

Encouraged by the experimental mood of the times, Paul envisaged making an unscripted film where characters and locations were chosen in advance , but the story was improvised on camera. His plan was to put the Beatles alongside an assorted collection of actors and colourful characters on a strange coach journey through the English countryside.

As Hunter Davies reported in the
Sunday Times
the day before
Magical Mystery Tour
was shown on British television: “(They had decided that the film) would be Magical, so that they could do any ideas which came to them, and Mysterious in that neither they nor the rest of the passengers would know what they were going to do
next… ‘The whole thing will be a mystery to everyone,’ Paul told the rest of the Beatles, ‘including us.’”

There were two main inspirations behind
Magical Mystery Tour.
The first was the British working-class custom of the ‘mystery tour’, an organized day trip by coach, where only the driver knows the destination. The second was American novelist Ken Kesey’s idea of driving through America on a psychedelically painted bus. The sign on the front of Kesey’s bus read ‘Furthur’ (sic) and the one on the back – ‘Caution. Weird load’. The bus was full of counter-culture ‘freaks’ who Kesey fed loud music and copious amounts of drugs just to see what would happen. His driver was Neal Cassady, the model for Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s
On The Road.
The story of their adventures was eventually told in Tom Wolfe’s book
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

The Beatles were aware of Kesey’s activities and later, when the Apple record label was founded, Kesey visited the office in Savile Row to record a spoken-word album.

On April 25, Paul arrived at Abbey Road studios with nothing more than the song title, the first line and a general idea for the tune. He said he wanted his new song to be like a commercial for the television programme, letting viewers know what was in store. Mal Evans was dispatched to find some real mystery tour posters from which they could lift phrases but, after visiting coach stations, returned empty-handed. When the backing track had been recorded, Paul asked everyone to shout out words connected with mystery tours which Mal wrote down. They came up with ‘invitation’, ‘reservation’, ‘trip of a lifetime’ and ‘satisfaction guaranteed’, but it wasn’t enough and so the vocal track was filled with gobbledy-gook until Paul returned two days later with a completed lyric.

Paul’s words were a mixture of traditional fairground barking and contemporary drug references. To the majority of the audience ‘roll up, roll up’ was the ringmasters invitation to the circus. To Paul it was also an invitation to roll up a joint. The Magical Mystery Tour was going to ‘take you away’, on a trip. Even the phrase ‘dying to take you away’ was a conscious reference to the
Tibetan Book Of The Dead.

The track was used over an opening sequence made up of scenes from the film with an additional spoken section which declared: “When a man buys a ticket for a magical mystery tour, he knows what to expect. We guarantee him the trip of a lifetime, and that’s just what he gets – the incredible Magical Mystery Tour.”

FOOL ON THE HILL

Paul started work on ‘Fool On The Hill’ in March 1967 while he was writing ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’, although it wasn’t recorded until September.

Hunter Davies observed Paul singing and playing “a very slow, beautiful song about a foolish man sitting on the hill”, while John listened staring blankly out of the window at Cavendish Avenue. “Paul sang it many times, la la-ing words he hadn’t thought of yet. When at last he finished, John said he’d better write the words down or he’d forget them. Paul said it was OK. He wouldn’t forget them,” comments Davies.

The song was about an idiot savant, a person everyone considers to be a fool but who is actually a misunderstood visionary. Paul was thinking of gurus like Maharishi Mahesh Yogi who were often derided and an Italian hermit he once read about who emerged from a cave in the late 1940s to discover that he’d missed the entire Second World War. An experience which is said to have contributed to Paul’s image of the fool standing on the hill is recounted by Alistair Taylor in his book
Yesterday.

Taylor recalls an early morning walk on Primrose Hill with Paul and his dog Martha, where they watched the sun rise before realizing that Martha had gone missing. “We turned round to go and suddenly there he was standing behind us,” wrote Taylor. “He was a middle-aged man, very respectably dressed in a belted raincoat. Nothing in that, you may think, but he’d come up behind us over the bare top of the hill in total silence.”

Both Paul and Taylor were sure that the man hadn’t been there seconds earlier because they’d been searching the area for the dog.
He seemed to have appeared miraculously. The three men exchanged greetings, the man commented on the beautiful view and then walked way. When they looked around, he’d vanished. “There was no sign of the man,” said Taylor. “He’d just disappeared from the top of the hill as if he’d been carried off into the air! No one could have run to the thin cover of the nearest trees in the time we had turned away from him, and no one could have run over the crest of the hill.”

What added to the mystery was that immediately before the man’s appearance Paul and Taylor had, provoked by the beautiful view over London and the rising of the sun, been mulling over the existence of God. “Paul and I both felt the same weird sensation that something special had happened. We sat down rather shakily on the seat and Paul said, ‘What the hell do you make of that? That’s weird. He was here, wasn’t he? We did speak to him?’

“Back at Cavendish, we spent the rest of the morning talking about what we had seen and heard and felt,” continues Taylor. “It sounds just like any acid tripper’s fantasy to say they had a religious experience on Primrose Hill just before the morning rush hour, but neither of us had taken anything like that. Scotch and Coke was the only thing we’d touched all night. We both felt we’d been through some mystical religious experience, yet we didn’t care to name even to each other what or who we’d seen on that hilltop for those few brief seconds.”

In
Magical Mystery Tour
, the song was used over a sequence with Paul on a hilltop overlooking Nice.

FLYING

The Beatles had recorded two previous instrumentals – ‘Cry For A Shadow’ in Germany in 1961 (when backing Tony Sheridan as the Beat Brothers) and the unreleased ‘ 12-Bar Original’ in 1965. ‘Flying’ was the only instrumental to be released on a Beatles’ record.

Used as incidental music for
Magical Mystery Tour
, ‘Flying’ emerged out of a studio jam. Originally titled ‘Aerial Tour Instrumental’, it was registered as a group composition and featured a basic rhythm track with additional mellotron, backwards organ and vocal chanting. The cloud scenes over which ‘Flying’ was heard in the film, were originally shot by Stanley Kubrick for
2001 Space Odyssey
but never used.

BLUE JAY WAY

‘Blue Jay Way’ was written by George in August 1967 during his visit to California with Pattie, Neil Aspinall and Alex Mardas. On arrival in Los Angeles on August 1, they were driven to a small rented cottage with a pool on Blue Jay Way, a street high in the Hollywood Hills above Sunset Boulevard. It belonged to Robert Fitzpatrick, a music business lawyer who was on vacation in Hawaii.

Derek Taylor, formerly the Beatles’ press officer and now a publicist working in Los Angeles, was due to visit them on their first night in town, but got lost in the narrow canyons on his way to the cottage, and was delayed. There was a small Hammond organ in the corner of the room and George whiled away the time by composing a song about being stuck in a house on Blue Jay Way while his friends were lost in the fog.

Blue Jay Way is a notoriously hard street to find – you can be geographically close and yet separated by a ravine. “By the time we got there the song was virtually intact,” says Derek Taylor. “Of course, at the time I felt very bad. Here were these two wretchedly jet-lagged people and we were about two hours late. But here, indeed, was a song which turned up in
Magical Mystery Tour
(the film) through a prism with about eight images, with George in a red jacket sitting and playing piano on the floor.”

Taylor was amused by what people made of the song. One critic thought the line in which George urged his guest not to ‘be long’ was advice to young people telling them not to ‘belong’ (to society, that is). Another acclaimed musicologist believed that, when George said that his friends had ‘lost their way’, he meant that a whole generation had lost direction. “It’s just a simple little song,” says Taylor.