The Beatles (16 page)

GOLDEN SLUMBERS

Paul was at his father's house in Cheshire tinkering around on the piano. Flicking through a songbook belonging to his step-sister Ruth (James McCar tney had since remarried), he came across the traditional lullaby ‘Golden Slumbers'. Unable to read the music, he went ahead and made up his own melody, adding new words as he went along.

‘Golden Slumbers' was written by the English writer and dramatist Thomas Dekker, who was a contemporary of Shakespeare. The song was first published in
The Pleasant Comedy of Old Fortunatus
(1600).

A Londoner born around 1570, Dekker was the author of
The Shoemaker's Holiday
(1600),
The Honest Whore
(1604),
The Gull's Hornbook
(1609),
The Roaring Girl
(1611) and the posthumously published
The Syn's Darling
(1656).

HER MAJESTY

Written by Paul in Scotland, ‘Her Majesty' was originally part of the medley, coming between ‘ Mean Mr Mustard' and ‘Polythene Pam' but, on hearing a playback, Paul didn't like it and asked for it to be edited out.

The engineer who cut it out then recycled it to the end of the tape so that it wouldn't be destroyed. Paul must have heard another playback with ‘Her Majesty' now tacked on as an apparent afterthought. He liked it enough to keep it there. Because the edit was only meant to be rough, the last chord of ‘Mean Mr Mustard' was pressed into service to start ‘Her Majesty', which ends abruptly because its own final note was left behind at the beginning of ‘Polythene Pam'.

The Beatles met Queen Elizabeth to receive their MBEs on October 26, 1965. Afterwards, asked what they thought of her, Paul answered: “She's lovely. She was very friendly. She was just like a mum to us.” Years later, Paul confessed to having had a crush on the young Elizabeth when he was a boy.

‘Her Majesty' has the dubious distinction of being the final track on the last album the Fab Four were ever to record together.

CARRY THAT WEIGHT

Although ‘Carry That Weight' appears to be just another song in the medley and is credited as such on the album, it was in fact recorded with ‘Golden Slumbers' as a single. It's a nice touch because it brings the sequence back to where it started with the subject of money, business and the burdens of being a superstar.

The lyric expressed Paul's fears about the Beatles in their twilight days. He later said that the arguments over finance and management plunged him into the “darkest hours” of his life so far. The atmosphere around the Beatles had changed from light to heavy. “At certain times things get to me so much that I can't be upbeat any more and that was one of the times,” he told his biographer Barry Miles.

THE END

As the final proper track on the last album recorded by the Beatles, ‘The End' was to become the song which signed off their studio career. Philosophical to the last, Paul says that ultimately the love you ‘take' is equal to the love you ‘make'. He may have been saying no more that ‘you take out what you put in', but John was sufficiently impressed to declare it a “very cosmic line” proving that “if Paul wants to, he can think.”

Paul saw the couplet as a musical equivalent of the rhyming couplets with which Shakespeare ended some of his plays, a summary and also a signal that the events of the drama were now ended.

It certainly provided a neat symmetry to their recording career – which started with the gawky pleadings of lovesick teenagers in ‘Love Me Do', and matured to reveal enigmatic words of wisdom from the group who transformed popular music.

LIVE AT THE BBC

In 1982 Kevin Howlett looked through the BBC's archives of radio sessions with the Beatles and produced a programme called
Beatles At The Beeb.
Shortly afterwards, discussions began between EMI and the BBC to get the material released. However, it wasn't until 1994 that the right climate prevailed between the Beatles, Apple and EMI which enabled the project to be actualised.

Howlett took the BBC tapes to George Martin at Abbey Road where Martin digitally remastered the 58 tracks which survived from the 88 songs which the Beatles had played live on BBC radio. In fact, only 57 of the tracks had survived in the BBC archives. The 58th was secured from a fan who had contacted Howlett in 1988, during the transmission of another Beatles series.

These robust live performances didn't have the benefit of multitrack recording facilities, overdubs or remixes and so provide an undoctored example of what the Beatles sounded like during the peak of their performing career. John and Paul learned to write songs by emulating the great singles of their youth. Trying these cover versions out on audiences taught them what worked and helped them to understand why. Bit by bit they began to drop the cover versions for songs of their own which created the same mood.

Live At The BBC
illustrates this growth. Of the songs they cover, 76% were from between 1954 and 1959, when they were serving their apprenticeship in Liverpool. Almost half the cover songs were written by a handful of writers they revered – Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Carl Perkins, Goffin and King and Leiber and Stoller.

The double album
Live At The BBC
was released in November 1994 and went on to sell over 8 million copies.

I'LL BE ON MY WAY

‘I'll Be On My Way' was the only unreleased Lennon-McCar tney song to be included on Live At The BBC and, as such, the first Lennon-McCartney song played by the Beatles to be released since May 1970.

Written by Paul in 1961 in emulation of Buddy Holly it was included in the group's reper toire over the next two years but wasn't played at the Decca audition, an indication that it had already fallen out of favour. It was given to their stable mate Billy J. Kramer who used it as the flip side of ‘Do You Want To Know A Secret?' in April 1963.

The lyric serves as a reminder that the Beatles didn't start out as artistic visionaries but simply rearranged existing clichés. Here ‘June light' turns to ‘moon light' (naturally) and the lovelorn narrator is forced into exile where ‘golden rivers flow' and ‘the winds don't blow'. It sounds like the rim of an active volcano, but maybe Paul had something else in mind.

John, typically, poured scorn on the song when asked about it in 1980: it was precisely the sort of pop that had always made him uncomfortable because it stifled the individual point of view with a raft of stock phrases. Paul wasn't quite so harsh when he looked back. It was “a bit too June-moon” he conceded, but it had “worked out quite well” for the group in their early shows.

ANTHOLOGY 1–3

The three double albums that comprise the
Anthology
set owe their genesis to an exercise in 1984 when engineer John Barrett was given the task of collating all the Beatles material in EMI's archives. Out of hundreds of hours of recordings he identified three unreleased tracks. EMI made test pressings and approached the remaining Beatles with the suggestion of an album. At the time, no agreement on a release could be reached.

Five years later, in an unrelated move, Apple's long-time manager Neil Aspinall revived a documentary idea he'd abandoned in 1969. He wanted to collect together all the best film footage of the Beatles for a television series that would tell their story in their words. He wanted the remaining Beatles to come together and record some new incidental music. The project would be called
The Long And Winding Road.

The album of unreleased songs and the documentary series eventually coalesced into
Anthology.
The planned incidental music was dropped in favour of recording two new Beatles tracks. “As the thought of the three of us sitting down in a studio got nearer, I got cold feet about it,” said Paul. “I thought, Does the world need a three-quarter Beatle record? But what if John was on, the three of us and John, like a real new record? If only we could pull off the impossible, that would be more fun, a bigger challenge.”

The apparently impossible was pulled off when Yoko agreed to let them use two demo cassettes of unfinished songs by John as the basis for new Beatles tracks. These eventually became singles which helped to promote not only the six-hour documentary series but the
Anthology
albums.

Anthology
was not a soundtrack to the documentary series but an aural counterpart made up of alternative takes, unreleased tracks, live performances, early demos and brief snatches of interview. Out of the 139 songs on the collection, 28 were cover versions.

The greatest interest was naturally in the 21 new Beatles compositions, some of which had only previously been heard performed by other artists or on rare bootlegs. These ranged from poor-quality home recordings that were purely of historical value to completed studio tracks that had been ousted from albums only for reasons of space.

The general critical response to these rarities was that the Beatles original judgment to drop them or give them away had been sound. They could probably have had a hit with ‘Come And Get It' and it's hard to see why ‘Not Guilty' didn't find a place on
The White Album
but otherwise none of these ‘new' songs enhanced their reputation. They merely confirmed what we had assumed, which was that the Beatles had already given us their best.

FREE AS A BIRD

‘Free As A Bird' was essentially a novelty single designed to attract attention to the
Anthology
project. The novelty was that it would be the first new Beatles single in 25 years and would, in sound at least, reunite the most popular pop group the world has known.

There was feverish media excitement surrounding the release of the record, which was encouraged by EMI's publicity department. An early press release read, “The single, copies of which are currently under armed guard outside the UK, will be released worldwide on MONDAY DECEMBER 4 [1995].”

Nothing could hope to live up to these expectations but, in the event, ‘Free As A Bird' was plausibly Beatles-sounding (circa 1969) although obviously hampered by the restraints of having been built around a discarded fragment of a John Lennon song that had been recorded on a cassette machine.

The events that led to the recording began on January 1, 1994 when Paul called Yoko to wish her a Happy New Year This act of reconciliation led to further conversations and then a meeting when Paul attended John's induction into the Rock'n'Roll Hall Of Fame. During this time together they discussed the possibility of the remaining Beatles working on John's home demos. Yoko offered three tracks for consideration – ‘Real Love', ‘Grow Old With Me' and ‘Free As A Bird'.

“I liked ‘Free As A Bird' immediately,” Paul said. “I liked the melody. It had strong chords and it really appealed to me…The great thing was that John hadn't finished it. On the middle eight he was just blocking out lyrics that he didn't have yet. That meant that we had to come up with something, and that now I was actually working ‘with John'.”

John probably first worked on the song at home in New York during the latter part of 1977. On October 4th of that year he and Yoko held a press conference in Japan to announce that they were both putting their careers on hold to concentrate on raising their son Sean.

Several of the songs he began during this period dealt with his new life as a house husband. In ‘I'm Stepping Out', ‘Watching The Wheels', ‘Beautiful Boy' and ‘Cleanup Time' he wrote of the strange sense of freedom he felt in abandoning the life of a celebrity for domestic duties.

Like many people psychologically wounded in early life, John craved attention and then spurned it when it came. Interviewed by
Rolling Stone
in 1970 his first comment was, “If I had the capabilities of being something other than I am, I would. It's no fun being an artist.” His final comment, after being asked how he saw himself at 64, was in a similar vein. “I hope we're a nice old couple living off the coast of Ireland or something like that – looking at our scrapbook of madness.”