Authors: Hunter Davies
‘They’re now appearing to the public more like they really were before Brian came along, all individuals, doing and saying what they like.
‘The public still think they’re as nice, but perhaps they’re a bit “eccentric” now, that’s all. It’s strange, isn’t it, how people take to an image.’
‘I’m always being asked which Beatle I like best,’ says Mal. ‘I usually say whichever one has just been nice to me.’
It’s all been a continual development. Now and again they appeared to be marking time, but not for long, then they were off and away again. They are always too bored by what they have just done ever to consider repeating it, however successful.
But with each new step they’ve laced the progressive with the traditional, like ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and ‘Yellow Submarine’, or ‘I Am The Walrus’ and ‘Hello, Goodbye’.
There are lots of recognizable steps, if you like looking for recognizable steps. The first rock and roll stage was finished around the spring of 1964, after ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’. The end of the simple beat-group line-up came in August 1965, with ‘Yesterday’ and the introduction of new instruments. The really serious experimentation started in August 1966, with the last track on
Revolver
, and was continued in
Sergeant Pepper
.
Even apparent anomalies can be explained, like ‘All You Need Is Love’. This came out in mid-1967 and seemed to fit more into the 1963–4 period. But it wasn’t, because it was satirical, poking fun at themselves, which is a stage they didn’t reach in their music till 1967. ‘Lady Madonna’, in early 1968, wasn’t really a throwback to 1963 but mock-rock.
But trying to explain it all, slicing it up into nice pieces, is for the musicologists. It’s not just Mr Mann of the London
Times
who’s gone to town on each stage in their career. Serious American musical criticism of the Beatles could fill a book, and probably has done.
The simplest way to look at how they make their music, rather than trying to analyse it, is to split it into the touring days and the post-touring days.
John and Paul had had over six years together, writing and playing their music, by the time they started seriously recording in 1962. In those pre-1962 years they wrote hundreds of songs, most of them now forgotten or lost. Paul still has an exercise book full of them, but they don’t show much. The words are of the simple ‘Love Me Do’, ‘You Know I Love You’ pattern. For the music, all they wrote was a few Do Ray Mes. Only they could work out at the time how the tune was supposed to go. They’ve forgotten now.
It was more vanity, or frustrated professionalism on Paul’s part, that made them write down all their ‘Lennon-McCartney originals’. They knew them all anyway, with playing them hundreds of times in the Cavern.
Once ‘Love Me Do’ – a very old one, from the Quarrymen skiffle days – was recorded, they could have used up their old songs, but they didn’t. They’d done so many already that it was comparatively easy for them to think up new ones for their next records.
They were composed, in those days, by Paul and John playing together on their guitars, just to see what came, either in hotels or on the road. ‘She Loves You’ was written on a coach in Yorkshire. They each tried out their own chords and own bits and pieces, following their own thoughts, until they liked something the other was doing. They then joined in, pushing it forward, then back for the other to have a go.
They deny today that they were deliberately concentrating on simple emotive words like ‘I’ and ‘Me’ and ‘You’. That was just how it happened. They think the words of ‘Love Me Do’ are just as philosophical or poetic as, say, ‘Eleanor Rigby’.
But their songs were simpler in those days. The Beatles were simpler lads, writing songs to play to screaming fans on one-night stands and wanting a simple and immediate reaction.
The songs were written, worked out and perfected on tour. By the time they got into the recording studio they knew them backwards.
‘We were held back in our development,’ says George, ‘by having to go on stage all the time and do it, with the same old guitars, drums and bass. We just had to stick to the basic instruments.
‘For a long time we didn’t know what else you could do. We were just lads down from the North being allowed to make music in the big EMI studios. It was all done very quickly, in one go, on one track, as “Love Me Do” was. We used to do “Love Me Do” better on stage than we did on the record.’
Their first LP,
Please Please Me
, took just one day to record and cost £400.
Sergeant Pepper
took four months and cost £25,000.
Today, now that they have stopped touring, their recording sessions are long and highly complicated.
‘Now that we only play in the studios, and not anywhere else,’ says George, ‘we haven’t got a clue about what we’re going to do. We have to start from scratch, thrashing it out in the studio, doing it the hard way. If Paul has written a song, he comes into the studio with it in his head. It’s very hard for him to give it to us and for us to get it. When we suggest something, it might not be what he wants because he hasn’t got it in his head. So it takes a long time. Nobody knows what the tunes sound like till we’ve recorded them, then listened to them afterwards,’
Nobody knows either how tunes come into their heads in the first place. They don’t know, or can’t remember, how and why they did something. Cross-examining them, unless it is very recent, is impossible, because it’s all gone. The only way is to be there, except that with this method you still can’t see into their heads, but only what is coming out.
‘A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS’
In March 1967 they were getting towards the end of the
Sergeant Pepper
album. They were halfway through a song for Ringo, a Ringo sort of song, which they’d begun the day before.
At two o’clock in the afternoon John arrived at Paul’s house in St John’s Wood. They both went up to Paul’s work room at the top of the house. It is a narrow, rectangular room, full of stereophonic equipment and amplifiers. There is a large triptych of Jane Asher on the wall and a large silver piece of sculpture by Paolozzi, shaped like a fireplace with Dalek heads on top.
John started playing his guitar and Paul started banging on the piano. For a couple of hours, they both banged away. Each of them seemed to be in a trance till the other came up with something good and he would pluck it out of a mass of noises and try it himself.
They’d already got the tune the previous afternoon, a gentle lilting tune, and its name, ‘A Little Help From My Friends’. Now they were trying to polish up the melody and think of some words to go with it.
‘
Are you afraid when you turn out the light
,’ sang John. Paul sang it after him and nodded. John said they could use that idea for all the verses, if they could think of some more questions on those lines.
‘
Do you believe in love at first sight
,’ sang John. ‘No,’ he said, stopping singing. ‘It hasn’t got the right number of syllables. What do you think? Can we split it up and have a pause to give it an extra syllable?’
John then sang the line, breaking it in the middle: ‘
Do you believe
– ugh –
in love at first sight
.’
‘How about,’ said Paul, ‘
Do you believe in a love at first sight
.’
John sang it over and accepted it. In singing it, he added the next line, ‘
Yes, I’m certain it happens all the time
.’
They both then sang the two lines to themselves, la-la-ing all the other lines. Apart from this, all they’d got was the chorus. ‘
I’ll get by with a little help from my friends
.’ John found himself singing ‘
Would you believe
,’ which he thought was better.
Then they changed the order round, singing the two lines ‘
Would you believe in a love at first sight Yes, I’m certain it happens all the time
’, before going on to ‘
Are you afraid when you turn out the light
’, but they still had to la-la the fourth line, which they couldn’t think of.
It was now about five o’clock. Cynthia, John’s wife arrived, wearing sunglasses, accompanied by Terry Doran, one of their (and Brian Epstein’s) old Liverpool friends. John and Paul kept on playing. Cyn picked up a paperback book and started reading. Terry produced a magazine about horoscopes.
John and Paul were singing their three lines over and over again, searching for a fourth.
‘What’s a rhyme for time?’ said John. ‘
Yes, I’m certain it happens all the time
. It’s got to rhyme with that line.’
‘How about, “I just feel fine”,’ suggested Cyn.
‘No,’ said John. ‘You never use the word just. It’s meaningless. It’s a fill-in word.’
John sang ‘
I know it’s mine
’ but nobody took much notice. It didn’t make much sense, coming after ‘Are you afraid when you turn out the light’. Somebody said it sounded obscene.
Terry asked what my birthday was. I said 7 January. Paul stopped playing, although it had looked as if he was completely concentrating on the song, and said, ‘Heh, that’s our kid’s birthday as well.’ He listened while Terry read out the horoscope. Then he went back to doodling on the piano.
In the middle of the doodling, Paul suddenly started to play ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’. John joined in, singing it very loudly, laughing and shouting. Then Paul began another song on the piano, ‘Tequila’. They both joined in again, shouting and laughing even louder. Terry and Cyn went on reading.
‘Remember in Germany,’ said John. ‘We used to shout out anything.’
They played the song again. This time John shouted out different things in each pause in the music. ‘Knickers’ and ‘Duke of Edinburgh’ and ‘tit’ and ‘Hitler’.
They both stopped all the shouting and larking around, as
suddenly as they’d begun it. They went back, very quietly, to the song they were supposed to be working on. ‘
What do you see when you turn out the light
,’ sang John, trying slightly new words to their existing line, missing out ‘afraid’. Then he followed it with another line, ‘
I can’t tell you, but I know it’s mine
.’ By slightly rewording it, he’d made it fit in.
Paul said yes, that would do. He wrote down the finished four lines on a sheet of exercise paper propped up in front of him on his piano. They now had one whole verse, as well as the chorus. Paul got up and wandered round the room. John moved to the piano.
‘How about a piece of amazing cake from Basingstoke,’ said Paul, taking down a piece of rock-hard cake from a shelf. ‘It’ll do for a trifle,’ said John. Paul made a face. Terry and Cynthia were still quietly reading.
Paul got a sitar from a corner and sat down and started to tune it, shushing John to keep quiet for a minute. John sat still at the piano, looking blankly out of the window.
Outside in the front courtyard of Paul’s house, the eyes and foreheads of six girls could just be seen peering over the front wall. Then the girls dropped, exhausted, on to the pavement beyond. A few minutes later they appeared again, hanging on till their strength gave way. John peered vacantly into space through his round, wire spectacles. Then he began to play a hymn on the piano, singing words that he made up as he went along.
‘Backs to the wall, if you want to see His Face.’
Then he seemed to jump in the air and started banging out a hearty rugby song. ‘Let’s write a rugby song, eh.’ No one listened to him.
Paul had got his sitar tuned and was playing some notes on it, the same ones over and over again. He got up again and wandered round the room. John picked up the sitar this time, but he couldn’t get comfortable with it. Paul told him that he had to sit on the floor with his legs crossed and place it in the bowl of his foot. Paul said that George did it that way; it felt
uncomfortable at first, but after a few centuries you got used to it. John tried it, then gave up and placed it against a chair.
‘Heh,’ said John to Terry, ‘did you get to the place?’
‘Yeh, I got you three coats, like George’s.’
‘Great,’ said John, very excited. ‘Where are they then?’
‘I paid by cheque and they wouldn’t let me have them till tomorrow.’
‘Oh,’ said John. ‘Couldn’t you have said who they were for? You should have said they were for Godfrey Winn. I want them now.’
‘They’ll be OK tomorrow,’ said Paul. ‘There’s some more stuff to get tomorrow. Don’t worry.’
Paul then went back to his guitar and started to sing and play a very slow, beautiful song about a foolish man sitting on the hill. John listened to it quietly, staring blankly out of the window, almost as if he wasn’t listening. Paul sang it many times, la-la-ing words he hadn’t thought of yet. When at last he finished, John said he’d better write the words down or he’d forget them. Paul said it was OK. He wouldn’t forget them. It was the first time Paul had played it for John. There was no discussion.
It was getting near seven o’clock, almost time to go round the corner to the EMI recording studios. They decided to ring Ringo, to tell him his song was finished – which it wasn’t – and that they would record it that evening. John picked up the phone. After a lot of playing around, he finally got through, but it was engaged. ‘If I hold on, does that mean I eventually get through?’
‘No, you have to hang up,’ said Paul.
‘IT’S GETTING BETTER’
Another afternoon – it was the first afternoon of spring – and Paul went for a walk with his dog Martha. John still hadn’t arrived for their latest recording work on
Sergeant Pepper
.
He pushed Martha into his Aston Martin and got in beside her and started the car, but it wouldn’t start. He gave it a few bangs, hoping that would do it, then he gave up and got out of
the Aston Martin and into his black-windowed Mini Cooper. He revved up first time. His housekeeper opened the large black doors and he shot through, catching all the fans by surprise. He was away before they realized he’d come out.
He drove to Primrose Hill, where he parked the car and left it, without locking it. He never locks his cars.
Martha ran around and the sun came out. Paul thought it really was spring at last. ‘It’s getting better,’ he said to himself.