The Beatles (14 page)

YOU KNOW MY NAME

Released as the B side of ‘Let It Be', ‘You Know My Name' was the strangest single ever released by the Beatles and remains one of their least-known songs.

It had first been recorded shortly after the completion of
Sgt Pepper
, after John arrived at Abbey Road wanting to record a song called ‘You Know My Name, Look Up The Number'. When Paul asked to see the lyric, John told him that was the lyric. He wanted it repeated in the style of the Four Tops' ‘Reach Out, I'll Be There' until it sounded like a mantra. The line was a variation on a slogan John had noticed on the front cover of the Post Office's London telephone directory for 1967 which read; ‘You have their NAME? Look up their NUMBER.'

For three days in May and June 1967, the Beatles worked on the song but then abandoned it until April 1969 when the track was taken out for reworking. Although John's original idea of repeating the title phrase was adhered to, the song was transformed from a mantra into what sounded like a karaoke night in Hell, organized by the Goons or the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band.

The only departure from the scripted words came when John twice asked for a big hand for ‘Denis O'Bell', a reference to the Irish-born film producer Denis O'Dell who had been Associate Producer on
A Hard Day's Night
and who had become director of Apple Films and Apple Publicity.

None of the Beatles told O'Dell that they had referred to him in the song and so it came as a shock to him when he started receiving anonymous telephone calls at his home in St George's Square, Pimlico.

ABBEY ROAD

Seven years on from their first recordings at the Abbey Road Studios, the Beatles returned for what proved to be their final sessions. Back in June 1962, they were wide-eyed provincial lads keen to make their mark on the music business. By July 1969, they had become world-weary sophisticates, their lives blighted by struggles over power and money.

The songs on
Abbey Road
reflected their frustrations. They're about legal negotiations, unpaid debts, being ripped off, bad karma and generally bearing the weight of the world on your shoulders. There was even a mock-jolly song about a silver hammer (namely Maxwell's) that is waiting to come down hard on you just when things are starting to get better.

Despite this mood – or perhaps because of it –
Abbey Road
was an outstandingly inventive farewell offering. It features two of George's best songs, ‘Here Comes The Sun' and ‘Something'; a standout track by John, ‘Come Together', and a fascinating medley of half-finished songs skilfully woven together by Paul.

George Martin remembered that after
Let It Be
, Paul came to him and asked him to produce a Beatles' album with the kind of feeling they used to generate together. Martin agreed to help out if the Beatles were prepared to give him their co-operation. “That's how we made
Abbey Road.
It wasn't quite like the old days because they were still working on their old songs and they would bring in the other people to work as kind of musicians for them rather than being a team.”

In Britain,
Abbey Road
was released in September 1969 and stayed at Number 1 for 18 weeks. In America, it was released in October and was at Number 1 for 11 weeks.

COME TOGETHER

‘Come Together' started life as a campaign song for Timothy Leary , when he decided in 1969 that he was going to run as governor of California against America's future president Ronald Reagan.

Leary and his wife Rosemary were invited up to Montreal, where John and Yoko were between the sheets for another major ‘bed in' on the 19th floor of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel. They arrived on June 1, 1969, and were promptly roped into singing on the chorus of ‘Give Peace A Chance', which was recorded in the hotel bedroom. Leary and his wife were rewarded for their participation by having their names included in the lyric.

The next day, John asked Leary if there was anything that he could do to help him in his campaign and was asked if he could write a song to be used in commercials and performed at rallies. Leary's slogan was ‘come together, join the party' – the ‘come together' part coming from the
I Ching
, the Chinese book of changes. “There was obviously a double meaning there,” said Leary. “It was come together and join the party – not a political party but a celebration of life.”

John immediately picked up his guitar and began building on the phrase: ‘Come together right now, Don't come tomorrow, Don't come alone, Come together right now over me, All that I can tell you, Is you gotta be free.' After coming up with a few more versions along the same lines, he made a demo tape and handed it to Leary.

Leary had the song played on alternative radio stations throughout California and began to think of it as his own. However, unknown to him, John had returned to England and within seven weeks had recorded a version with the Beatles. In October, it was released on the flip side of ‘Something', the first single to be taken from Abbey Road.

Leary's campaign to become governor of California came to an abrupt halt in December 1969, when he was charged with possessing marijuana and eventually imprisoned. It was while in prison that Leary first heard
Abbey Road
on a local rock station and ‘ Come Together' came as a complete surprise. “Although the new version was certainly a musical and lyrical improvement on my campaign song, I was a bit miffed that Lennon had passed me over this way… When I sent a mild protest to John, he replied with typical Lennon charm and wit that he was a tailor and I was a customer who had ordered a suit and never returned. So he sold it to someone else.”

The recorded version was largely made up in the studio, the swampy New Orleans bass having been added by Paul. Two of the song lines referring to ‘old flat top' were lifted from Chuck Berry's ‘You Can't Catch Me' and John was later sued for plagiarism. It was hard to deny where the words had come from, although, in this new context, they were nothing more than an affectionate nod towards the music of his youth. John strenuously denied any musical theft.

The conflict was resolved when John promised to record three songs belonging to the publisher of ‘ You Can't Catch Me'. He fulfilled this promise when he recorded Berry's ‘Sweet Little Sixteen' and ‘You Can't Catch Me' for his
Rock'n'Roll
album and Lee Dorsey's ‘Ya Ya' on
Walls and Bridges.

SOMETHING

‘Something' was the first Beatles' A side to be written by George. Its sources of inspiration were Ray Charles, who he imagined singing it, and a 1968 album track by James Taylor titled ‘Something In The Way She Moves', and his wife Pattie.

James Taylor, an American, was signed to the Apple label and his eponymous first album was produced by Peter Asher between July and October 1968. Paul played bass on one track. ‘Something In The Way She Moves' was the last track on the first side of the album and the opening lines were: ‘There's something in the way she moves, Or looks my way or calls my name, That seems to leave this troubled world behind.'

The White Album
was being recorded at Abbey Road at exactly the same time as Taylor was recording at Trident Studios in London's
Soho. Indeed, on October 3, George was at Trident recording ‘Savoy Truffle' with Paul and Ringo and probably heard the track then.

“I've always assumed George must have heard it but I never actually spoke to him about it,” says Taylor. “I'd written ‘Something In The Way She Moves' about two years before I recorded it and, strangely enough I'd wanted to call it ‘I Feel Fine', but of course that was a Beatles' track.

“I often notice traces of other people's work in my own songs,” Taylor continues. “If George either consciously or unconsciously took a line from one of my songs then I find it very flattering. It's certainly not an unusual thing to happen. I'd made a tape of ‘Something In The Way She Moves' and about seven other songs about a couple of months before I met Peter Asher. I know Paul listened to it at Apple but I'm not sure who else listened to it.”

The basic writing of ‘Something' must have taken place in October because George has said that he worked it out on piano in Studio 1, while Paul was overdubbing in Studio 2. The only reason it wasn't included on the White Album was because the track selection had already been completed.

George first offered ‘ Something' to Joe Cocker and Jackie Lomax but then, in May 1969, decided to record it with the Beatles for
Abbey Road.
‘Something' was an enormously successful song for George, becoming the second most covered Beatles' song after ‘Yesterday' (Ray Charles and Smokey Robinson both did versions) and giving him his first American Top 10 hit.

It had always been assumed that he wrote the song about Pattie but in a 1996 interview he said, “I didn't. I just wrote it and then somebody put together a video that used some footage of me and Pattie, Paul and Linda, Ringo and Maureen and John and Yoko… actually, when I wrote it I was thinking of Ray Charles.” However, Pattie still believes that he had her in mind. “He always told me that it was about me,” she says.

MAXWELL'S SILVER HAMMER

A song, driven by strong rhymes, in which medical student Maxwell Edison uses his silver hammer to kill first his girlfriend, then a lecturer and finally a judge. Delivered in a jaunty, vaudevillian style, the only indication of Paul's recent avant-garde leanings was the mention of ‘pataphysics', a word invented by Alfred Jarry, the French pioneer of absurd theatre, to describe a branch of metaphysics.

“John told me that ‘Maxwell's Silver Hammer' was about the law of karma,” says former Apple employee Tony King. “We were talking one day about ‘Instant Karma' (John's 1970 single with Yoko Ono and the Plastic Ono Band) because something had happened where he'd been clobbered and he'd said that this was an example of instant karma. I asked him whether he believed that theory. He said that he did and that ‘Maxwell's Silver Hammer' was the first song that they'd made about that. He said that the idea behind the song was that the minute you do something that's not right, Maxwell's silver hammer will come down on your head.”

OH! DARLING

Paul wanted his voice to sound raw on ‘Oh! Darling', so he sang it through again and again each day for a week before finally recording it. “I wanted it to sound as though I'd been performing it on stage all week,” he said.

Inspired by the rock'n'roll ballads of the late Fifties, Jackie Wilson's in particular, it was a simple song pleading for a loved one to stay in exchange for lifelong devotion.

John never rated Paul's job on vocals and reckoned he could have done better. “It was more my style than his,” he said.

OCTOPUS'S GARDEN

Ringo's second (and last) Beatles' song was inspired by a family holiday in Sardinia which he took in 1968 on board Peter Sellers' yacht. After Ringo had turned down the offer of an octopus lunch, the vessel's captain started to tell him all he knew about the life of octopuses.

“He told me how they go around the sea bed picking up stones and shiny objects to build gardens with,” said Ringo. “I thought this was fabulous because at the time I just wanted to be under the sea too. I wanted to get out of it for a while.”

To most listeners, it was a children's seaside song in the vein of ‘Yellow Submarine' but, in 1969, George revealed that there were hidden dimensions. Even though Ringo only knew three chords on the piano, George said, the drummer was writing “cosmic songs without really noticing it.”

I WANT YOU

Consisting only of the repeated title line and the information that the desire is driving John mad, the lyric of ‘I Want You' was once read out on BBC TV's current affairs programme
24 Hours
as an example of the banalities of pop music.

This incensed John, who was convinced that its simplicity made it superior to ‘Eleanor Rigby' and ‘I Am The Walrus'. To him, this was not a reversion to mindless monosyllabic pop but simply economy of language.

‘I Want You' was written as a love song to Yoko. John admitted the influence she had on his new style of writing, saying that eventually he wanted to compose a perfect song using only one word. A 1964 poem of Yoko's consisted of the single word ‘Water'.

HERE COMES THE SUN

Written by George, ‘Here Comes The Sun' was an expression of delight at being able to slip away from the interminable business meetings which were now taking up so much of the Beatles' time.

In January 1969, John and Yoko met with music business manager Allen Klein and shortly afterwards declared that he would be looking after their business affairs, despite the fact that the New York lawyer John Eastman, brother of Linda, had recently been brought in to represent the Beatles collectively. This was the beginning of a bitter drawn-out conflict over who should manage the Beatles and what should be done about the chaotic state of their finances. Despite the tremendous sales of Beatles' music over the past six years, John claimed, “all of us could be broke in six months”.