THE BEATLES – Songwriting
Capitol Records did release “Yesterday” b/w “Act Naturally” as a 45 in the U.S. on September 13, 1965, and it was a major hit. “Yesterday” topped the Billboard Music Charts for 4 weeks – with one million sold within 5 weeks of its release – and was the fifth Number One single among six in a row for the Beatles – a record at that time. Still, in the Capitol Records files, “Act Naturally” was always considered to be the “A” side of this single.
“Yesterday” was included on a four-song EP by the Beatles that topped the British charts, but even the EP was not released until nearly six months later (on March 4, 1966). Ten years later, on March 8, 1976, “Yesterday” finally came out as a single in the U.K. and reached #8 on the charts.
“Yesterday” is included on the British release of Help! but not on the American release; it is basically the title song of the U.S.-only Beatles album, Yesterday and Today.
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The article in Wikipedia on the Beatles’ most famous album starts off like this: “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is the eighth studio album by the English rock band the Beatles. Released on 1 June 1967, it was an immediate commercial and critical success, spending 27 weeks at the top of the albums chart in the United Kingdom and 15 weeks at number one in the United States. Time magazine declared it ‘a historic departure in the progress of music’, and the New Statesman praised its elevation of pop to the level of fine art. It won four Grammy Awards in 1968, including Album of the Year, the first rock LP to receive this honor.”
Despite the fact that Sgt. Pepper is far from being the unanimous choice by rock critics as the greatest Beatles album, no one can dispute that it made the biggest impact on the rock music scene – rather amazing, considering that they had already been the leading rock band in the world for over three years. In a career that is loaded with superlatives, the Beatles still have 3 of the 20 biggest selling albums in history nearly a half-century after the music’s creation, with Sgt. Pepper at #13 (having an estimated 32 million in worldwide sales), 1 at #18 (a collection of the band’s Number One songs), and Abbey Road at #20.
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The Beatles made the decision in August 1966 to quit touring and become strictly a studio band – few rock bands have done this as it is difficult to make a living as a musician on album sales alone. This freed them to be experimental in their later albums by creating music that would be nearly impossible to recreate in an arena. I am reminded of a comment that one band made who performed at the college when I was a freshman at North Carolina State University (I think it was Chicago). Audience members were calling out requests; at one point, one of the bandmembers said: “No, we haven’t learned that one yet.” It didn’t occur to me for decades that turning out a song in a studio and learning to play it live at a concert could be two very different things.
Paul McCartney came up with the idea of reimagining the Beatles as a military band from the Edwardian era (early 20th Century); they did not really stick to that time period, but they were definitely looking backwards.
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One of the early fruits of this new stance is a Beatles single from that period, “Penny Lane” b/w “Strawberry Fields Forever”. Penny Lane is a real street in Liverpool, near one of John Lennon’s boyhood homes; the actual place that Paul McCartney was writing about was a bus stop where he would have to change buses when going to John’s house (and vice versa). Strawberry Field is a Salvation Army children’s home in Liverpool; in his song, John was writing about the garden there where he used to play as a child. Originally planned for the Sgt. Pepper album, EMI Records pressured the band into releasing them only as a single; the songs were later included on the U.S. version of the Magical Mystery Tour album.
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In Sgt. Pepper’s title song, the album opens with a framing device that, despite being “the band you’ve known for all these years”, serves to introduce the Beatles as “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”, along with “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)” near the end of the album. There were even rumors that the band was going to officially change its name, but of course that never happened. Before launching into their second song, the singer is introduced as “Billy Shears”; then Ringo Starr begins singing “With a Little Help from My Friends”.
Wikipedia reports: “To date, [Ringo] Starr has closed every concert performed by each version of his All Starr Band, with this song [‘With a Little Help from My Friends’]. After he is done singing, Starr tells the audience, ‘Peace and love . . . peace and love is the only way . . . and good night’, then walks off the stage. . . .
“[Paul] McCartney and Ringo Starr . . . performed the song [‘With a Little Help from My Friends’] together on The Night That Changed America: A Grammy Salute to The Beatles, a commemorative show on 27 January 2014, that marked 50 years after the band’s first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.”
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Barely one year later, in October 1968, Joe Cocker released a cover of “With a Little Help from My Friends” – a Number One single in the UK – which gets my vote as the most satisfying Beatles cover of all time. His version of the song is very different from how the Beatles performed it, and that is what covers should be as far as I am concerned. Joe Cocker is backed by a stellar band that includes Jimmy Page on guitar (the first Led Zeppelin album came out in the following year), B. J. Wilson of Procol Harum on drums, Chris Stainton on bass, and distinctive organ by Tommy Eyre. Cocker’s frantic performance of the song was a highlight of the Woodstock film of the original Woodstock Music & Art Fair gathering in 1969.
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Regarding the Sgt. Pepper album highlight “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, Wikipedia has this to say: “[John] Lennon’s son Julian [Lennon] inspired the song with a nursery school drawing he called ‘Lucy — in the sky with diamonds’. Shortly after the song’s release, speculation arose that the first letter of each of the title nouns intentionally spelled LSD. Lennon consistently denied this, insisting the song was inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland books, a claim repeatedly confirmed by Paul McCartney. Despite persistent rumors, the song was never officially banned by the BBC.”
John Lennon though was up front about intending “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” to be a psychedelic song, and the lyrics are about as good as it gets psychedelically, both from the imagery and from the word usage:
Follow her down to a bridge by a fountain
Where rocking horse people eat marshmallow pies
Everyone smiles as you drift past the flowers
That grow so incredibly high
Newspaper taxis appear on the shore
Waiting to take you away
Climb in the back with your head in the clouds
And you're gone
Where rocking horse people eat marshmallow pies
Everyone smiles as you drift past the flowers
That grow so incredibly high
Newspaper taxis appear on the shore
Waiting to take you away
Climb in the back with your head in the clouds
And you're gone
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Perhaps because of the possible LSD reference in “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, rumors of drug references in other lyrics by the Beatles also became manifest. Wikipedia reports: “Concerns that some of the lyrics in Sgt. Pepper refer to recreational drug use led to the BBC banning several songs from British radio, such as ‘A Day in the Life’ because of the phrase ‘I’d love to turn you on’, with the BBC claiming that it could ‘encourage a permissive attitude towards drug-taking.’ . . . They also banned ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!’ because of the lyric which mentions ‘Henry the Horse’, a phrase that contains two common slang terms for heroin. Fans speculated that Henry the Horse was a drug dealer, and ‘Fixing a Hole’ was a reference to heroin use. Others noted lyrics such as ‘I get high’ from ‘With a Little Help from My Friends’, ‘take some tea’ – slang for cannabis use – from ‘Lovely Rita’, and ‘digging the weeds’ from ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’.” I had heard about “Horse” but not “Henry”; maybe any word starting with “H” could refer to heroin.
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The inspiration for some of the songs on Sgt. Pepper came from something they had heard or seen: John Lennon adapted “Good Morning Good Morning” from a commercial for Kellogg’s Corn Flakes; and Paul McCartney wrote “She’s Leaving Home” after reading about teenage runaways in an article in The Daily Telegraph.
Most famously, John Lennon wrote the bulk of “A Day in the Life” based on several items that were in the January 17, 1967 edition of the Daily Mail. Wikipedia quotes one of them: “There are 4,000 holes in the road in Blackburn, Lancashire, or one twenty-sixth of a hole per person, according to a council survey. If Blackburn is typical, there are two million holes in Britain’s roads and 300,000 in London.” John evidently added the part about how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.
Paul McCartney’s contributions to “A Day in the Life” include the key lyric, “I’d love to turn you on”. Also, as given in Wikipedia: “McCartney provided the middle section of the song, a short piano piece he had been working on independently, with lyrics about a commuter whose uneventful morning routine leads him to drift off into a dream. McCartney had written the piece as a wistful recollection of his younger years, which included riding the bus to school, smoking, and going to class. This theme matched with the original concept of the album which was going to be about their youth.”
The impetus for “A Day in the Life” though was the death of a childhood friend of both John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Tara Browne; Browne, an heir to the Guinness fortune, had died in an auto accident in 1966 when he was 21 years old. An article in the Daily Mail the same day as the “hole” article talked about a custody matter regarding his two children. Wikipedia quoted Lennon about this part of the song: “I didn’t copy the accident. 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 similarly part of the fiction.”
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The most remarkable story behind the songwriting on the Sgt. Pepper album is “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” While the Beatles were making a promotional film for “Strawberry Fields Forever”, John Lennon found a poster for a circus performance dating from the 1840’s in an antique store. He later said of the song: “Everything from the song is on that poster, except the horse wasn’t called Henry.”
The title, “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” is practically in the center of the poster. Other lines on the poster figure into the lyrics, almost verbatim in some cases:
Mr. Henderson will undertake the arduous task of throwing twenty-one somersets, on the solid ground.
Mssrs. Kite and Henderson, in announcing the following entertainments, assure the public that this night’s production will be one of the most splendid ever produced in this town, having been some days in preparation.
Over men & horses, through hoops, over garters, and lastly through a hogshead of real fire!
In this branch of the profession Mr. H challenges the world!
Several of the people mentioned in the song were prominent in the circus world at that time. The poster is headlined “Pablo Fanque’s Circus Royale”; Fanque owned a circus back in Victorian times. John Henderson performed with his wife Agnes Henderson throughout Europe and Russia in the 1840’s and 1850’s. Mr. Kite is believed to be William Kite; he worked for Pablo Fanque from 1843 to 1845. “Somerset” is an early term for what we call a somersault, and that word made it into the song’s lyrics.
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Lennon/McCartney appears by most of the Beatles’ songs, but starting at least with Revolver, I began to notice that George Harrison was writing many of my favorite Beatles songs. His contribution to Sgt. Pepper was “Within You Without You”; that song and “A Day in the Life” quickly became my favorite songs on that mammoth album.
On Revolver, which I bought after Sgt. Pepper actually, George Harrison wrote the lead-off song, “Taxman” plus “Love You To” and “I Want to Tell You”. George wrote the first song on Side 2 of Abbey Road, “Here Comes the Sun” – whose title is reflected in a later song on the album, “Sun King” in the lyric, “Here comes the sun king” – as well as “Something”, perhaps George Harrison’s finest composition for the Beatles. As a double-A–sided single with “Come Together”, “Something” is the only song Harrison wrote that the Beatles took to the top of the charts. Also, “Something” has been recorded by about 150 other artists, making it the second most covered Beatles song (after “Yesterday”).
For Yellow Submarine, just four new songs were included on that album, and IMHO, George Harrison wrote the two best by far: “Only a Northern Song” and “It’s All Too Much”. The two Lennon/McCartney songs are “Hey Bulldog” and “All Together Now”; “Yellow Submarine” and “All You Need is Love” had been released previously.
But it was on The Beatles (“the white album”) where George Harrison really shone both as a performer and as a songwriter. By contrast, much of the Lennon/McCartney material were story songs about animals – Harrison also wrote one of these, “Piggies” – and throwaways like “Why Don’t We Do it in the Road”. One of Harrison’s songs got included on each of the four sides of the double LP; and his Side 1 contribution in particular, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” is a real tour de force. Eric Clapton plays lead guitar on the song (uncredited). The middle verse goes:
I look at the world and I notice it’s turning
While my guitar gently weeps
With every mistake we must surely be learning
Still my guitar gently weeps
While my guitar gently weeps
With every mistake we must surely be learning
Still my guitar gently weeps
I don’t know how you were diverted
You were perverted too
I don’t know how you were inverted
No one alerted you.
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Wikipedia lists some of the accolades that have come to “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”: “‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ is ranked at number 136 on Rolling Stone’s ‘The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time’, number 7 on the magazine’s list of ‘The 100 Greatest Guitar Songs of All Time’, and number 10 on its list of ‘The Beatles’ 100 Greatest Songs’. In an online poll held by Guitar World magazine in February 2012, ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ was voted the best of Harrison’s Beatle-era songs. In October 2008, Guitar World ranked [Eric Clapton]’s playing at number 42 in its list of the ‘100 Greatest Guitar Solos’.”
The other George Harrison songs on The Beatles are all standout cuts on the album and illustrate the variety that George has brought in his songwriting all along: “Piggies”, “Long, Long, Long”, and “Savoy Truffle”.
Many rock critics have noted that the sheer length of All Things Must Pass – the triple LP (including the bonus disk Apple Jam) that George Harrison released after the Beatles broke up – showed the volume of excellent Harrison compositions that never made it onto any Beatles albums. Eric Clapton was one of the key musicians in those recording sessions; the two also co-wrote one of my favorite songs by Cream, “Badge”.
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The Beatles also includes “Don’t Pass Me By”; other than “Octopus’s Garden” (from Abbey Road), this is the only song written solely by Ringo Starr (listed under his real name, Richard Starkey as is normal in songwriting credits) that appears on an official Beatles album. Starr also shares a songwriting credit with John Lennon and Paul McCartney on “What Goes On” (from Rubber Soul), and the instrumental “Flying” (on Magical Mystery Tour) shows all four bandmembers as the writers.
Ringo Starr had written “Don’t Pass Me By” many years earlier and first played the song for the rest of the band not long after he joined the Beatles in August 1962. “Don’t Pass Me By” is a simple but clever song and provides a glimpse of the post-Beatles output from the band’s drummer; as I have written before, Ringo has arguably the best body of work as a solo artist of any of the four Beatles. Starr would typically have a lead vocal performance on each Beatles album – examples include “Yellow Submarine”, “Act Naturally”, “Boys”, and the terrific Carl Perkins cover, “Honey, Don’t” – but hardly any of his songwriting made it onto the Beatles’ disks.
(June 2015)
