The Beatles (7 page)

YOUR MOTHER SHOULD KNOW

‘Your Mother Should Know’ by Paul could have been written as early as May 1967, when both John and Paul were working on songs for the
Our World
television special. Like ‘When I’m 64’, the song was a tribute to the music his father enjoyed singing when he was a young man in Jim Mac’s Jazz Band. Jim McCartney formed his own ragtime band in 1919 and played dates around Liverpool, performing numbers like ‘Birth Of The Blues’ and ‘Stairway To Paradise’. One day, Paul surprised his dad by recording one of his compositions under the title ‘Walking In The Park With Eloise’, under the alias of the Country Hams.

Paul wrote it at Cavendish Avenue and thinks it was affected by the fact that his Auntie Gin and Uncle Harry were staying with him at the time. It was the sort of song that they would have liked. Paul also had in mind the idea of ‘mother knows best’, a lament for those who were no longer close to their parents.

‘Your Mother Should Know’, however, found its way into the
Magical Mystery Tour
in a scene where the four Beatles, in white tail suits, descend a staircase and are joined by teams of formation dancers. Strictly speaking, any hit that Paul’s mother would have known would have been a hit before she was born in 1909, in the days when hits were not determined by record sales but by sales of sheet music.

I AM THE WALRUS

The sprawling, disjointed nature of ‘I Am The Walrus’ owes much to the fact that it is an amalgamation of at least three song ideas that John was working on, none of which seemed quite enough in its own right. The first, inspired by hearing a distant police siren while at home in Weybridge, started with the words ‘Mis-ter c-ity police-man’ and fitted the rhythm of the siren. The second was a pastoral melody about his Weybridge garden. The third was a nonsense song about sitting on a corn flake.

John told Hunter Davies, who was still researching the Beatles’ official biography at the time: “I don’t know how it will all end up. Perhaps they’ll turn out to be different parts of the same song.” According to Pete Shotton, the final catalyst was a letter received from a pupil of Quarry Bank School, which mentioned that an English master was getting his class to analyze Beatles’ songs. The letter from the Quarry Bank pupil was sent to John by Stephen Bayley who received an answer dated September 1, 1967 (which was sold at auction by Christie’s of London in 1992). This amused John, who decided to confuse such people with a song full of the most perplexing and incoherent clues. He asked Shotton to remind him of a silly playground rhyme which English schoolchildren at the time delighted in. John wrote it down: ‘Yellow matter custard, green slop pie, All mixed together with a dead dog’s eye, Slap it on a butty, ten foot thick, Then wash it all down with a cup of cold sick’.

John proceeded to invent some ludicrous images (‘semolina pilchards, elementary penguins’) and nonsense words (‘texpert, crabalocker’), before adding some opening lines he’d written down during an acid trip. He then strung these together with the three
unfinished songs he’d already shown Hunter Davies. “Let the fuckers work that one out”, he apparently said to Shotton when he’d finished. Asked by
Playboy
to explain ‘Walrus’ some 13 years later, he remarked that he thought Dylan got away with murder at times and that he’d decided “I can write this crap too.”

The only serious part of the lyric, apparently, was the opening line with its vision of the unity behind all things.

The ‘elementary penguin’ which chanted ‘Hare Krishna’ was John having a dig at Allen Ginsberg who, at the time, was chanting the Hare Krishna mantra at public events. The walrus itself came from Lewis Carroll’s poem ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’.

The ‘eggman’ was supposedly a reference to Animals’ vocalist Eric Burdon who had an unusual practice of breaking eggs over his female conquests while making love and became known among his musical colleagues as the ‘egg man’. Marianne Faithfull believes that ‘semolina pilchard’ was a reference to Det. Sgt. Norman Pilcher, the Metropolitan police officer who made a name for himself by targeting pop stars for drug possession.

The recording of ‘I Am The Walrus’ began on September 5. It lasted on and off throughout the month because George Martin was trying to find an equivalent to the flow of images and word play in the lyrics by using violins, cellos, horns, clarinet and a 16-voice choir, in addition to the Beatles themselves. On September 29, some lines from Shakespeare
(King Lear
Act IV Scene VI) were fed into the song from a BBC broadcast.

LADY MADONNA

‘Lady Madonna’ was the first single to show that the way forward for the Beatles now lay in returning to the basic rock’n’roll of their early days. After
Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
and
Magical Mystery Tour
, it was assumed that musical progression would mean more complexity, but the Beatles again defied expectations.

The main riff was taken from Johnny Parker’s piano playing on the instrumental ‘Bad Penny Blues’, a 1956 hit in Britain for jazz trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton and his band, that had been produced by George Martin. “We asked George how they got the sound on ‘Bad Penny Blues’,” said Ringo. “George told us that they used brushes. So I used brushes and we did a track with just brushes and piano and then we decided we needed an off-beat, so we put an off-beat in.” Lyttelton didn’t mind at all, as Parker had taken the riff from Dan Burley anyway. “You can’t copyright a rhythm and rhythm was all that they had borrowed,” he said. “I was very complimented. Although none of the
Beatles cared for traditional jazz, they all knew and liked ‘Bad Penny Blues’ because it was a bluesy, skiffley thing rather than a trad exercise.” (Dan Burley and His Skiffle Boys, formed in 1946, was the source of the description ‘skiffle music’ first applied to the folk-blues-country style of Lonnie Donegan in Britain during the early 1950s.)

The song was intended by Paul to be a celebration of motherhood which started with an image of the Virgin Mary but then moved on to consider all mothers. “How do they do it?”, he asked when interviewed by
Musician
in 1986. “Baby at your breast – how do they get the time to feed them? Where do they get the money? How do you do this thing that women do?”

The singer Richie Havens remembered being with Paul in a Greenwich Village club when a girl came up to him and asked whether ‘Lady Madonna’ had been written about America. “No,” said Paul. “I was looking through this African magazine and I saw this African lady with a baby. And underneath the picture it said ‘Mountain Madonna’. But I said, oh no – Lady Madonna – and I wrote the song.”

Released as a single in March 1968, ‘Lady Madonna’ went to Number 1 in Britain but stalled at Number 4 in America.

THE INNER LIGHT

On September 29, 1967, John and George were guests of David Frost on the live late-night television show
The Frost Report.
The subject of this edition was Transcendental Meditation and it included an interview with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, filmed earlier the same day at London Airport.

In the invited audience at the studio in Wembley, north London was Sanskrit scholar Juan Mascaró, a Cambridge professor. The following month, Mascaró wrote to George enclosing a copy of
Lamps Of Fire
, a collection of spiritual wisdom from various traditions that he had edited. He suggested that George might consider putting verses from the Tao Te Ching to music, in particular a poem titled ‘The Inner Light’.

In his preface to
Lamps Of Fire
, first published in 1958, Mascaró wrote: “The passages of this book are lamps of fire. Some shine more and some shine less, but they all merge into that vast lamp called by St John of the Cross ‘the lamp of the being of God’.”

‘The Inner Light’ was the first song of George’s to appear on a single when it became the B side of ‘Lady Madonna’.

HEY JUDE

As John and Yoko started living together, not surprisingly, divorce proceedings began between John and Cynthia. An interim agreement was reached whereby Cynthia and Julian were allowed to stay at Kenwood while the two respondents took up residence in a Montagu Square flat in central London.

Paul had always enjoyed a close relationship with John’s son Julian, then five years old and, to show support for mother and child during the break-up, he drove down to Weybridge from his home in St John’s Wood bearing a single red rose. Paul often used driving time to work out new songs and, on this day, with Julian’s uncertain future on his mind, he started singing ‘Hey Julian’ and improvising lyrics on the theme of comfort and reassurance. At some point during the hour-long journey, ‘Hey Julian’ became ‘Hey Jules’ and Paul developed the lines ‘Hey Jules, don’t make it bad, Take a sad song and make it better’. It was only later, when he came to flesh out the lyric, that he changed Jules to Jude, feeling that Jude was a name that sounded stronger. He had liked the name Jud when he’d seen the musical
Oklahoma.

The song then became less specific. John believed it was addressed to him, encouraging him to make the break from the Beatles and build a new future with Yoko (‘You were made to go out and get her…’). Paul felt that, if it was addressed to anyone, it was to himself, dealing with the adjustments he knew that he was going to have to make as old bonds were broken within the Beatles.

The music drove the lyric, with sound taking precedence over sense. One line in particular – ‘the movement you need is on your shoulder’ – was intended as a temporary filler. When Paul played the song to John, he pointed out that this line needed replacing, saying it
sounded as if he was singing about his parrot. “It’s probably the best line in the song,” said John. “Leave it in. I know what it means.”

Julian Lennon grew up knowing the story behind ‘Hey Jude’ but it wasn’t until 1987 that he heard the facts first-hand from Paul, whom he bumped into in New York. “It was the first time in years that we’d sat down and talked to each other,” says Julian. “He told me that he’d been thinking about my circumstances all those years ago, about what I was going through and what I would have to go through in the future. Paul and I used to hang out quite a bit – more than dad and I did. Maybe Paul was into kids a bit more at the time. We had a great friendship going and there seem to be far more pictures of me and Paul playing together at that age than pictures of me and dad.”

“I’ve never really wanted to know the truth about how dad was and how he was with me,” Julian admits. “I kept my mouth shut. There was some very negative stuff talked about me – like when he said that I’d come out of a whisky bottle on a Saturday night. Stuff like that. That’s tough to deal with. You think, where’s the love in that? It was very psychologically damaging and for years that affected me. I used to think, how could he say that about his own bloody son!”

Julian hasn’t studied the words of ‘Hey Jude’ for some time but finds it hard to get away from the song. He’ll be in a restaurant when he’ll hear it played, or it’ll come on the car radio when he’s driving. “It surprises me whenever I hear it,” he says. “It’s very strange to think that someone has written a song about you. It still touches me.”

‘Hey Jude’ was the most successful Beatles’ single ever. It topped the charts around the world and, before the end of 1967, over five million copies had been sold.

THE BEATLES

The Beatles
, or
The White Album
as it is commonly referred to,, confounded expectations because of its simplicity. It was as if the group had decided to produce the exact opposite of
Sgt Pepper.
Long album title? Let’s just call it
The Beatles.
Multi-coloured cover? Let’s go white. Clever overdubs and mixes? Let’s use acoustic guitars on a lot of the tracks. Other-worldly subject matter? Let’s sing about cowboys, pigs, chocolates and doing it in the road.

The change was in part due to the Beatles’ interest in the teachings of Indian guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Pattie Harrison had attended a lecture given by him in February 1967 and six months later she encouraged George and the rest of the Beatles to hear him speak at the Hilton Hotel in Park Lane, London. As a result of this meeting, they all embarked on a ten-day course on Transcendental Meditation, at University College, Bangor, in North Wales.

While in Bangor, on Sunday, August 27, 1967, they learned that Brian Epstein had been found dead at his Belgravia flat. The loss of Epstein, who had managed their career since early 1962 and had become something of a father figure, may well have made the Beatles even more open to the guidance of the Maharishi, whom they visited in India in February 1968.

The trip to India not only brought calm and self-reflection to their fraught lives but also rekindled their musical friendships. Paul Horn, an American flautist who was there at the same time, believes that meditation was a great stimulus for them. “You find out more about yourself on deeper levels when you’re meditating,” he said. “Look how prolific they were in such a relatively short time. They were in the Himalayas away from the pressures and away from the
telephone. When you get too involved with life, it suppresses your creativity. When you’re able to be quiet, it starts coming up.”