The Beatles (13 page)

DIG IT

Credited to all four Beatles, ‘Dig It' started as a fledgling song by John called ‘Can You Dig It' which consisted of variations of the title being sung over a riff.

The version released on
Let It Be
was an excerpt from a much longer jam in which all the Beatles made up lines on the spot, hence the shared composer credit.

There was a lot of time spent hanging around reading newspapers when they recorded which might account for the references to the FBI and CIA. Transcripts of studio conversations reveal George talking about blues guitarist B B King and distinguishing him from fellow blues man Freddie King. Matt Busby was the heroic manager of Manchester United, one of England's most popular and successful football teams. Busby would have been in the news because twelve days before this recording he had announced his retirement after 24 years with the club.

LET IT BE

Released as a single in March 1970, ‘Let It Be' sounded as if it had been recorded as the Beatles' swansong yet it dated from January 1969. No one had any idea that it was going to be the last single.

Paul had written ‘Let It Be' out of his general feelings of despair, as the Beatles began to fall apart at the seams. The documentary had started out as a record of a rehearsal followed by a live performance, but it was to become a record of the group's death throes.

By now, John preferred to spend his time with Yoko whose presence around the studio was not welcomed by everyone. George had already quit the group once and was discouraged at the way his songs were being instantly rejected. Even Ringo had taken off for a short holiday during the recording of
The White Album
when the atmosphere got really bad.

Paul was clearly trying to take over the role of leader because he felt that without organization and discipline nothing would be achieved. “I think we've been very negative since Mr Epstein passed away,” Paul can be heard saying in the film. “We haven't been positive. That's why all of us in turn have been sick of the group. There's nothing positive in it. It's a bit of a drag. The only way for it not to be a bit of a drag is for the four of us to think – should we make it positive or should we forget it?”

Although Paul's role may have been necessary, it didn't make him popular. The others began to resent his role as organiser. ‘Let It Be' was written by Paul as a response to all this pressure: “I wrote it when all those business problems started to get me down,” he said. “I really was passing through my ‘hour of darkness' and writing the song was my way of exorcizing the ghosts.”

I'VE GOT A FEELING

‘I've Got A Feeling' was again two unfinished songs strung together, this time Paul's ‘I've Got A Feeling' and John's ‘Everybody's Had A Hard Year'. Paul's song, optimistic as ever, was presumably written for Linda just to tell her that she was the girl he'd always been looking for. John's song was a litany where every line began with the word ‘everybody'.

John had indeed been through a hard year. His marriage to Cynthia had ended, he was separated from his son Julian, Yoko had suffered a miscarriage, he had been arrested on a charge of drug possession and he reckoned his personal fortune had dwindled to about £50,000.

During the filming of
Let It Be,
John ran through ‘Everybody Had A Hard Year' and said, somewhat tongue in cheek, that it was something he had started writing the night before. If this were true, it would date the song's origin to January 1969, but there is BBC film of him shot in December 1968, where he is singing the song with an acoustic guitar in the garden of his Ascot home.

THE LONG AND WINDING ROAD

Like ‘Yesterday', ‘The Long And Winding Road' evokes loss without describing any specific situation. The images of wind and rain suggest feelings of being abandoned in the wilderness, while the long and winding road leading to ‘her door' is the sign of hope.

The imagery actually comes from Paul's experience of staying at High Park, his farm in Scotland, which is exposed to high winds and frequently lashed with rain. The long and winding road itself is the B842, over twenty five miles of twists and turns which runs down the east coast of Kintyre into Campbeltown, the nearest town to the farm.

Paul has said that he had the voice of Ray Charles in mind when he wrote it and that this influenced the use of jazzy chords. The road he envisaged as an endless road because the song is about what is eventually unattainable.

It was released as a single in America in May 1970 and reached the Number 1 spot.

ONE AFTER 909

‘One After 909' could well be the oldest Lennon and McCartney song ever to be recorded by the Beatles. It was one of ‘over a hundred songs' which they often talked about having written before recording ‘Love Me Do' and goes back to that time together at Forthlin Road.

The Beatles first recorded ‘One After 909' in March 1963 during the same session which produced ‘From Me To You' but George Martin was so unimpressed with it that it had never been released. It was an attempt by John, in 1957, to write an American railroad song, after skiffle hits such as ‘Last Train To San Fernando' by Johnny Duncan, ‘Cumberland Gap' and ‘Rock Island Line' by Lonnie Donegan and ‘Freight Train' by the Chas McDevitt Skiffle Group.

“We used to sag (play truant) off school, go back to my house and the two of us would write,” Paul recalled. “There are a lot of songs from back then that we've never reckoned on because they're all very unsophisticated songs…We hated the words to ‘One After 909'.”

When they came to play around with it during the sessions there was chat between John and Paul where they mentioned how they had originally dropped it because they'd always considered the lyric illogical and unfinished.

FOR YOU BLUE

Completed in six takes, ‘For You Blue' was known as ‘George's Blues' and on George's original lyric sheet as ‘For You Blues' but became ‘For You Blue' on the album.

George was always the Beatle most keen to develop his musical skills and it was through this that he developed close friendships with musicians as diverse as Ravi Shankar and Eric Clapton. It also led him to constantly experiment with different tunings, instruments and styles of playing.

Written for Pattie, ‘For You Blue' was an exercise in writing a traditional blues song. George's only comment on it was to say: “It's a simple 12-bar song following all the normal 12-bar principles except that it's happy-go-lucky!”

GET BACK

Paul said that he'd originally written ‘Get Back' “as a political song” and surviving demos show that he was planning a satire on the attitudes of those who felt that immigrants to Britain should be repatriated. It was to be sung from the point of view of someone who didn't ‘dig no Pakistanis taking all the people's jobs' and so was urging them to ‘get back' to where they came from, its satirical intentions could easily have been misconstrued.

Years later, Paul was still having to field questions from journalists who'd heard bootleg editions of this version and who wondered if he'd gone through a racist period. “(The verses) were not racist at all,” he said. “If there was any group that was not racist, it was the Beatles. All our favourite people were always black.”

By the time it was recorded, ‘Get Back' had been transformed into a song about Jojo from Tucson, Arizona, (Linda Eastman lived for a while in Tucson) and Loretta Martin who ‘thought she was a woman, But she was another man'. No story was developed and the original ‘Get back' chorus was retained. Because it was a rock'n'roll song, ‘Get Back' was taken to refer to a return to musical roots and Apple's newspaper advert which bore the slogan ‘The Beatles as nature intended' appeared to confirm this notion. “‘Get Back' is the Beatles' new single,” ran the copy. “It's the first Beatles' record which is as live as can be, in this electronic age. There's no electronic watchamacallit. ‘Get Back' is a pure spring-time rock number.”

It went on to quote Paul saying, “We were sitting in the studio and we made it up out of thin air…we started to write words there and then…when we finished it, we recorded it at Apple Studios and made it into a song to rollercoast by.”

THE BALLAD OF JOHN AND YOKO

‘The Ballad Of John And Yoko' – in which John related the details of his marriage to Yoko in Gibraltar and their subsequent ‘honeymoon' – was recorded in mid-April and released before the end of May. Paul helped with the final verse. The song portrayed the couple as victims about to be ‘crucified': the two are turned back at Southampton docks, can't get a wedding licence in France, then they're misunderstood as they lie in bed ‘for peace' and laughed at when they sit in a bag.

Something John failed to mention was the fact that they were turned back at Southampton dock not because of his notoriety but because they were trying to travel to France without passports. The plane they ‘finally made' into Paris was not a scheduled airliner but an executive jet which John impatiently asked for when he realized that it was impossible to get married on a cross-Channel ferry.

John's decision to get married appeared to have been made suddenly on March 14, 1969, when he and Yoko were being driven down to Poole in Dorset to visit his Aunt Mimi. This was two days after Paul's registry office wedding to Linda. John asked his chauffeur Les Anthony to go on into Southampton and enquire about the possibility of their being married at sea. When this was found to be impossible, John decided to go to Paris and instructed his office to come up with a way of arranging a quiet wedding there. Peter Brown discovered that this couldn't be organized at short notice but that they could marry in Gibraltar because it was a British protectorate and John was a British citizen.

In the end, the couple flew by private plane to Gibraltar on March 20, and went straight to the British Consulate where the registrar, Cecil
Wheeler, conducted a ten-minute marriage ceremony. They were on the ground for less than an hour before taking off for Amsterdam where they had booked the Presidential Suite at the Hilton. Their stay in Amsterdam was to be an extraordinary ‘honeymoon'. Instead of requiring the usual privacy, they invited the world's press to invade their bedroom daily between 10:00 am and 10:00 pm during which time, they said, they would be staying in bed for peace.

Not unnaturally, the world's press hoped that John and Yoko might be intending to consummate their marriage in public. After all, they'd exposed their naked bodies on the cover of their album
Two Virgins
and had recorded the heartbeat of the child that Yoko later miscarried. There seemed to be no area of their lives that they weren't willing to turn into performance art.

To the journalists' frustration, the sight that greeted them in suite 902 was of John and Yoko in neatly pressed pyjamas sitting bolt upright in bed doing nothing more than talking about ‘peace'. It was the perfect deal. The media had an insatiable appetite for articles about the Beatles and John would do almost anything to put over his message about peace. The Amsterdam ‘Bed In' meant that all parties went away satisfied.

For seven days, they lay there holding court while a stream of media people sat and asked serious questions. The coverage was incredible. They did live interviews with American radio stations, made a sixty-minute documentary for themselves and saw their faces appear on the front pages of newspapers world-wide. “Yoko and I are quite willing to be the world's clowns, if by doing it we do some good,” said John. “For reasons known only to themselves people do print what I say. And I'm saying peace. We're not pointing a finger at anybody. There are no good guys and bad guys. The struggle is in the mind. We must bury our own monsters and stop condemning people. We are all Christ and all Hitler. We want Christ to win. We're trying to make Christ's message contemporary. What would he have done if he had advertisements, records, films, TV and newspapers? Christ made miracles to tell his message. Well, the miracle today is communications, so let's use it.”

From Amsterdam, they went to Vienna where they stopped overnight at the Hotel Sacher and ate some of its famous Sacher Tor te (a rich chocolate cake) before watching the television premiere of their film
Rape.

On April 1, they arrived back in London and gave a press conference at the airport. John expected a hostile reception because Yoko (a foreign divorcée, no less) was not considered the ideal partner for a British Beatle. To his surprise, the welcome was warm.

‘The Ballad Of John And Yoko' was recorded by Paul and John with Paul playing bass, piano, maracas and drums, while John played lead and acoustic guitars and sang the vocals.

OLD BROWN SHOE

‘Old Brown Shoe' was one of three songs which George made a demo of at Abbey Road on February 25, 1969. The other two were ‘Something', a future Beatles' single, and ‘All Things Must Pass', the title track of his first solo album in 1970.

The lyric had its origins in George's religious view that we must free ourselves from the reality of the material world as it is illusory. Once absorbed into the divine consciousness, there would be no right versus wrong, body versus soul, spirit versus matter. Rather like Paul had done with ‘Hello Goodbye', George's words were a game based on opposites. It wasn't a song which told much of a story and the intriguing title was pinched from a line about stepping out of ‘this old brown shoe'. (George always had a problem coming up with titles.)

The main inspiration was musical. George had been messing around on a piano one day and hit on a chord sequence he liked. Words were added later.

Recorded two months after being demoed, ‘Old Brown Shoe' became the B side of ‘The Ballad Of John And Yoko'. Much later it was used as a track on the compilation albums
Hey Jude
and
The Beatles 1967–1970.