The Beatles (17 page)

For John, a stable family home had been the one thing that had always eluded him. With Sean and Yoko, he was determined to hang on to what he had got. ‘Free As A Bird' was written to express his delight at being set free from the demands of celebrity and from the artistic pressure of having to compete with his earlier selves. He was, as he sings, ‘home and dry'.

For the middle section of the song John had only the couplet ‘Whatever happened to/The life that we once knew?', lines reminiscent of the belief he had expressed in ‘Help!', ‘Strawberry
Fields Forever' and ‘In My Life' that his childhood was the most idyllic time of his life. Paul's additional lines subvert this train of thought, turning it into a longing for healed relationships – presumably his own with John.

Recording took place in February and March of 1994 at Paul's studio in Sussex with production credits being shared between the Beatles and former Electric Light Orchestra vocalist/guitarist Jeff Lynne. John's original cassette was transferred to tape and the sound digitally remastered. “We then took the liberty of beefing the song up with different chord changes and different arrangements,” said George Harrison.

The project was approached as if John was still alive and that he and Paul were still working on each other's unfinished songs. “We came up with this holiday scenario,” said Paul. “I rang up Ringo and said let's pretend that John's gone on holiday and he's sent us a cassette and said, ‘Finish it up for me'.”

George Martin, who had produced every other Beatles single, gave it a cautious blessing but felt that it lacked dynamics because they hadn't been able to successfully separate the piano and vocals on the original cassette and had put it in a rigid time beat to make overdubbing easier.

“They stretched it and compressed it and put it around until it got to a regular waltz control click and then they were done,” he said. “The result was that, in order to conceal the bad bits, they had to plaster it fairly heavily so that what you ended up with was quite a thick homogeneous sound that hardly stops.”

‘Free As A Bird' reached number two in the British charts and number six in America.

REAL LOVE

‘Real Love' was a song John had worked on for at least two years and, although many people weren't aware of it, a version was used in the 1988 soundtrack to Andrew Solt's documentary
Imagine.

It began as a song called ‘Real Life', the verses of which later became ‘I'm Stepping Out', posthumously released on
Milk And Honey.
The remaining chorus – ‘It's real life/Yes, it's real life' – he obviously thought too good to throw away. The theme of the tune – I'm back to what really counts in life – was the essential theme of all his post-Beatle work. He was still stripping away myths, dispensing with the unnecessary and in this case, getting down to the reality of kitchens, cigarettes, babies, newspapers and early morning blues.

The revamped song was coming closer to the version that the Beatles would work on. The references to ‘little girls and boys' and ‘little plans and schemes' were now there.

When he finally changed the chorus from ‘real life' to ‘real love' the theme became the transforming love of Yoko Ono. He said many times in interview that he felt that she was the woman that all his longings for love and acceptance had been directed towards even before he met her. She was the ‘ girl with kaleidoscope eyes'. She was, as he wrote in his essay
The Ballad Of John And Yoko
, “Someone who I had already known, but somehow had lost.”

In February 1995, Jeff Lynne deleted extraneous noises on John's cassette copy of ‘Real Love' and transferred the mono recording to two 24-track analogue tapes at Paul's Sussex studio. Paul, George and Ringo added guitars, drums, bass, percussion and backing vocals. At one point Paul even used his upright bass which once belonged to Bill Black and was used on Elvis Presley's ‘Heartbreak Hotel'.

CHRISTMAS TIME (IS HERE AGAIN)

Particularly for the British, the Beatles became inextricably linked to the Christmases of the 1960s. Six of their albums were released to capitalise on the Christmas market and four of their singles were Christmas number ones. In 1963 and 1964 they presented special Christmas shows in London theatres which were a mixture of music and pantomime and had support acts ranging from the Yardbirds to Rolf Harris.

Between 1963 and 1969 they produced a flexidisc exclusively for members of their official fan club which offered spoken greetings from each Beatle and some light hearted conversation. The earliest messages were clearly scripted but as their music developed so did the discs. In 1965 they fooled around with a version of ‘Auld Lang Syne' and the next year Paul wrote a mini-pantomime for the group.

‘Christmas Time (Is Here Again)', the only original song written for fan club members, came out in 1967, the year that
Magical Mystery Tour
was being screened on Boxing Day. The unedited version, recorded on November 28th, was over six minutes long and parts of it were used to punctuate a satirical sketch written by all four Beatles.

Although it largely consists of a single line repeated like a musical mantra, ‘Christmas Time (Is Here Again)' is illustrative of their fascination with children's songs and rhymes which began with ‘Yellow Submarine' in 1966. This in part reflected nostalgia for the Liverpool of the 1940s but was also part of the psychedelic tendency to regress to simpler states of mind where it wasn't out of place for an adult to wear ripped jeans, blow bubbles and think buttercups were ‘far out'.

IN SPITE OF ALL THE DANGER

A rough recording transferred from a slightly worn 78 rpm shellac disc cut in the spring or summer of 1958, this has historical value in that it is the earliest taping of the soon-to-be Beatles as well as being the group's first songwriting effort to make it into the archives.

It was recorded on a £400 portable tape recorder at a small studio housed in the terraced home of a 63-year-old electrical goods shop owner in the Kensington district of Liverpool. The Quarry Men, which then consisted of John, Paul, George, pianist John Duff Lowe and drummer Colin Hanton, paid 17 shillings and six pence (87p) to have two songs.cut.

The first song they chose was ‘That'll Be The Day', a September 1957 hit in Britain for the Crickets (with Buddy Holly), and the second was the McCartney-Harrison number ‘In Spite Of All The Danger'.

“It says on the label that it was me and George but I think it was written by me and George played the guitar solo,” said Paul in 1995. “It was my song. It was very similar to an Elvis song.”

It was in fact very similar to a particular Elvis song – ‘ Trying To Get To You' – which was written by Rose Marie McCoy and Margie Singleton and recorded by Elvis on July 11 1955. It was the only Sun recording by Elvis ever to use a piano and was released as a single in September 1956.

John Duff Lowe remembers ‘In Spite Of All The Danger' as being the only original song the Quarry Men played at the time.

“I can well remember even at the rehearsal at his house in Forthlin Road Paul was quite specific about how he wanted it played and what he wanted the piano to do,” he says. “There was no
question of improvising. We were told what we had to play. There was a lot of arranging going on, even back then.”

It was recorded on a single microphone and Lowe thinks that it must have gone straight to disc because he can't recall waiting around for it to be transferred from tape and there are mistakes in John's vocal which would otherwise have been corrected.

The disc was then passed on from member to member and eventually came down to Lowe who kept it in a sock drawer until 1981 when a colleague suggested to him that it might have some commercial value. He had it valued by Sotheby's which led to the discovery of the disc being reported by
Sunday Times
columnist Stephen Pile in July 1981.

“Before mid-day on that Sunday Paul McCartney had called my mum in Liverpool,” says Lowe. “I eventually spoke to him on the ‘phone and we had long conversations over the next few days because he wanted to buy it from me.

“I was living in Worcester at the time and he sent his solicitor and his business manager up. I deposited the disc in a small brief case at the local Barclay's Bank and we met up in a small room the bank kindly let me use. The deal was done, I handed the record over and we all went home.”

Although Paul didn't have a specific project in mind at the time, part of the deal was that Lowe had to assign over all rights to the track and promise not to perform the song for the next fifteen years. “That took us up to August 1996,” says Lowe. “Isn't it strange that two months later the final album in the
Anthology
set came out?”

YOU'LL BE MINE

Recorded in the summer of 1960 on a borrowed tape machine at Paul's family home at Forthlin Road this is the first recording of a Lennon and McCartney song, although that's the extent of its interest. It sounds like nothing more than a couple of minutes of musical hilarity put together by teenagers in awe of the sound of their own voices.

Without a drummer but with the addition of fourth guitarist Stuart Sutcliffe, the group were rehearsing for their upcoming stint in Hamburg and decided on an Inkspots parody with John delivering a melodramatic spoken section that owed a lot to his fascination with the Goons. Appropriately, the whole tracks concludes with a wild squeal of laughter. You can almost imagine them wetting themselves as they played it back again and again.

CAYENNE

Paul has said that the instrumental ‘Cayenne', or ‘Cayenne Pepper' as it was originally titled, was written before he met John, probably at the age of 14 when he got his first £15 guitar. Another instrumental he wrote around the same time, ‘Cat's Walk', was recorded by the Chris Barber Band in 1967 as ‘Cat Call'.

When Paul committed ‘Cayenne' to tape in the summer of 1960 rock'n'roll instrumentals were a regular chart phenomenon. Since January there had been hit singles by Johnny and the Hurricanes, the Ventures, Duane Eddy, Bert Weedon, Sandy Nelson, Jerry Lordan, the John Barry Seven and the Shadows.

“It's not brilliant,” Paul said recently of ‘Cayenne', “But when you listen to it you can hear a lot of stuff I'm going to write. So, it's interesting from that point of view.”

CRY FOR A SHADOW

When this track was recorded in June 1961, Cliff Richard and The Shadows were Britain's premier rock and roll act. Since his first hit with ‘Move It' in October 1958 Cliff had been in the Top Ten ten times and the Shadows were now making their own instrumental hits.

Although the Beatles found Cliff a bit too tame for their liking, they were early admirers of the Shadows. Paul learned the opening chords of ‘Move It' from watching lead guitarist Hank Marvin's finger movements on the
Oh Boy!
TV show and, when Cliff first played the Liverpool Empire on October 12, 1958, Paul was in the audience.

‘Cry For A Shadow', an instrumental intended to sound like mock Shadows, was credited to Harrison/Lennon. It was the Beatles' first composition to make it onto record when it appeared on Tony Sheridan's 1962 German album
My Bonnie
where the ‘backing group' were listed as the Beat Brothers.

The composition came about by accident. Rory Storm was in Germany and had asked George to play him a recent Shadows hit – ‘Apache' or ‘Frightened City' – and George played something new, either because he couldn't remember the Shadows' tunes or as a joke on Storm. At first he called it ‘Beatle Bop' but then, out of homage to his original inspiration, he called it ‘Cry For A Shadow'.

“It doesn't sound like ‘Frightened City' or ‘Apache',” says Shadows guitarist Bruce Welch. “What it has in common with the Shadows is that it has the same instrumentation that we used but melodically it's nowhere near either of them.

“What I had heard was that it was done as a piss-take because at that time we had a stranglehold on the British group scene and we'd never been to Germany as almost every other group did.” The song
was recorded in Germany when the orchestra leader and record company producer Bert Kaempfert hired the Beatles for 300 Deutschmarks to back Sheridan on a Polydor record. Norwich-born Sheridan, a veteran of London's 2 I's coffee bar, had spent a lot of time in Germany and Kaempfert wanted him to do rocked-up versions of such standards as ‘My Bonnie' and ‘When The Saints Go Marching In'. The Beatles were allowed their own spot on ‘Ain't She Sweet' and ‘Cry For A Shadow'.

Brian Epstein, who was responsible for getting the Beatles out of leather jackets and into tailored suits, encouraged them to emulate the Shadows in their attire and on-stage courtesies. The two groups first met in 1963 at a party in London and in June of that year Hank, Bruce and Brian Locking came to Paul's 21st in Liverpool.

LIKE DREAMERS DO

Merseybeat consisted largely of covers of recent American hits and selections from Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Ray Charles and Jerry Lee Lewis. The Beatles stood out initially by discovering unknown acts and obscure B-sides but even these were soon copied and became standard fare on Merseyside.

This was what pushed them into serious songwriting. It was the only guarantee of uniqueness. If you had your own material then you were set apart from the copyists.

It was this situation that prompted them into serious writing. Their goal was to come up with material that not only went down well with their audiences but which remained unique to their act. Paul has said that ‘Like Dreamers Do' was one of the first of his own compositions that he tried at the Cavern. This implies that he wrote it for the Cavern audience but the Quarry Men were performing it as far back as 1958. What he probably meant was that it was one of the first songs from his back catalogue that he felt confident enough to slip into the Beatles regular set.