Mystery Tours and Discord 1967-8 179

180 The Beatles

Actually, 'Revolution 9' was not the Beatles' first piece of electronic
music. The group had assembled an electronic work during the early

part of the Sgt. Pepper sessions. Directed by Paul McCartney, the

untitled piece ran nearly fourteen minutes and actually had a public

performance in January 1967 at a 'Carnival of Light' concert at the

Roundhouse Theatre in London. But it was never released on disc.

Starr, too, presided over a tape work that used percussion sounds.

Apart from 'Revolution 9', there was little on The Beatles that

broke new ground in the way that tracks on Revolver or Sgt. Pepper
had. And in fact, much the same can be said of the two albums they
would record in 1969, Let It Be and Abbey Road. Lennon, McCartney,
Harrison, and now Starr, were composing first-rate material. Yet if the

Beatles development from 'Love Me Do' to 'I Am The Walrus' was a

story of incessant forward movement and growth, this final phase was
one of consolidation.
The Beatles, in fact, is a fascinating compendium of compositional
and performance styles that how wide-ranging the Beatles'
shows
musical imaginations were, and how versatile they were as performers
and arrangers. There are some marvellous parodies and tributes here,

most of them by McCartney. His 'Back in the U.S.S.R.' plays off the

title of Chuck Berry's 1959 'Back in the U.S.A.', but is actually a take-

off on the Beach Boys' early surf music style. 'Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da'
is calypso. 'Martha My Dear', a song about McCartney's sheepdog,

has its roots in the turn-of-the-century salon song. 'Rocky Racoon'

parodies the storytelling ballads of the American West, and 'Honey

Pie', scored with jazzy winds, is fully in the style popularized by the
crooners of the 1920s. 'Helter Skelter' was meant to show that the

Beatles could rock as hard as any of the bands just coming up; in fact,

McCartney has said that he was inspired by hearing an interview

in which Pete Townshend of the Who says that his group had just

recorded the heaviest, most firebreathing piece of rock ever commit-

ted to record. McCartney wanted to pre-empt them.
Lennon's parodies are less straightforward. 'Happiness is a Warm
Gun' begins as another in Lennon's introspective series, but a dark,
eerie, organ-based opening section gives way to pure blues, and then
at the refrain to a highly effective skewering of the 1950s' doo-wop
vocal style. He toys with the Beatles themselves in 'Glass Onion', a

song that refers to lyrics in several earlier Beatles recordings, and

Mystery Tours and Discord 1967-8 181

includes the kind of red herrings (the claim that Paul was the walrus,

for example) that would keep amateur Beatleologists speculating for

years. And just as McCartney's 'Honey Pie' captured the sound of the
1920s, Lennon's 'Good Night' could easily pass as something from the
Bing Crosby or Frank Sinatra songbooks. Otherwise, his borrowings
are from current styles. He responds to the growing vogue for British
blues-rock in the hard-driving 'Everybody's Got Something to Hide
Except Me and My Monkey', and more stunningly in 'Yer Blues',

itself another thoroughly Lennonesque study in word imagery.

Of course, not everything on The Beatles is referential. Of the
Lennon contributions 'The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill' is

a Lennon fantasy about a safari hunter, and 'Cry Baby Cry' hints
at the Alice in Wonderland-style imagery of 'Lucy in the Sky with

Diamonds,' though without the psychedelia. 'Sexy Sadie', despite the

altered name and sex of the central character, is an acidic assessment

of the Maharishi, couched in a nicely arching melody, and an alluring
texture based on an electronically altered piano sound. The more
sensitive side of Lennon's songwriting is here too. In the graceful,

plaintive 'Julia', he accompanies himself on acoustic guitar, and sings

a pained ode to the memory of his mother, tinged with imagery that
refers to Ono.
McCartney's non-parodic explorations take a few unusual turns.
Besides such straightforwardly attractive, light-textured songs as

'Blackbird', 'Mother Nature's Son', and 'I Will', he toyed with his

listeners' expectations - if only briefly - with 'Wild Honey Pie' and

'Why Don't We Do It In the Road?; two free-wheeling bursts so
uncharacteristic that many listeners at first thought Lennon must
have been behind them.
Starr's 'Don't Pass Me By', the song he had been tinkering with
since 1963, has its roots in country music. Had the Beatles recorded it

on Beatles For Sale or Rubber Soul, it undoubtedly would have come

complete with twangy guitars. But they saw the song differently now.
Instead, they brought in a few piano tracks on which the sound is

electronically processed to imitate a Hammond organ. Also in the

texture are sleigh bells, an eccentric touch for a country song. Yet the

country influence comes through, not least because Martin brought

in a violinist to play a fiddle solo appropriate to a barn dance.
182 The Beatles

Of the seven new songs that Harrison brought to the sessions, five

were recorded and four made it onto the album, each entirely differ-

ent in character and none showing any trace of Harrison's Indian

dabblings. 'Piggies', for example, is social satire in the style of the

day, dressed in a faux-Baroque setting built around harpsichord and
strings. The contrast between the civilized veneer of the music, and

the imagery of the lyrics, in which nattily dressed pigs are shown to

be cannibalistic, was what made the song seem sardonic rather than

heavy-handed. 'Savoy Truffle', a tribute to a friend's sweet tooth

(and a tongue-in-cheek warning about the consequences) is basically

a good-natured throwaway in a hard rock style. And 'Long, Long,

Long' is an introspective love song so dark in texture as to seem ready

to implode.

The best of Harrison's new songs, and one of the album's most
inviting moments, is 'While My Guitar Gently Weeps'. Both the
Esher rehearsal tape and the first formal recording of the song at

Abbey Road show that Harrison originally conceived it as a gentle,

As members of Cream,
Eric Clapton (seated) and
Jack Bruce (left) were
heroes of the nascent British

blues rock movement.

Clapton had been friendly

with Harrison since 1965
when, as a member of the
Yardbirds, he performed on

the Beatles' Christmas Show.

In 1968, he contributed an
exquisitely doleful lead

guitar line to Harrison's

'While My Guitar Gently

Weeps'; Harrison returned

the favour the following

year, co-writing and playing

on Cream's 'Badge'.
Mystery Tours and Discord 1967-8 183

minor key folk-song, slightly mournful but not lugubrious. But his

ideas expanded during the sessions, and the finished version thrives

on textural details. Its introduction, originally a simple walk through

the songs chord progression, ended up featuring a piano repeating

a single note in a varied rhythm for three bars before escaping into

a gloss of the songs melody. Set against this is a strummed acoustic

guitar and a drum pattern punctuated by a quickly closing high hat.

But the most striking aspect of the recording is the lead guitar part,

played by Eric Clapton. Using a wah-wah pedal (which lets a guitarist

pivot between extreme treble and extreme bass timbres), Clapton

added a line that wove around Harrisons vocal, perfectly conveying

the image of a weeping guitar.

Clapton, once a member of the Yardbirds and John Mayan's

Bluesbreakers, was by this time a star of the blues-rock power trio

Cream, and was revered in the rock world as a virtuoso soloist.

For the Beatles and other pop bands of the 1960s, virtuosity in its

showiest form was never a principal concern. Obviously, one had

to come through with solos where required, and the right kinds of

accompaniments; and McCartney's bass lines were certainly virtuosic.

But the extended jamming that Clapton and Cream were known
for — as were musicians like Jimi Hendrix, a black American guitarist
who had moved to London - took instrumental virtuosity in rock to

a new level. The Beatles themselves never took up the challenge,

although they alluded to it in 1969, in a jam at the end of Abbey Road.

The one Harrison song that was recorded but not included on the
album, 'Not Guilty', was nearly as interesting. In it, Harrison sings
about the tensions within the band in terms that barely disguised the
subject. He worked hard on it, recording more than a hundred takes
before he had an acceptable backing track, and then adding aggres-

sive, layered guitars and double-tracked percussion. Perhaps the lyrics

doomed it: it was one thing for Lennon to criticize the Maharishi or
for Harrison to skewer bourgeois society, but 'Not Guilty' aired the
band's own dirty laundry.

There was a certain irony in calling this collection of solo projects

The Beatles, a title that asserts the band's unity. But then, this was the
Beatles as they were: four musicians whose musical personalities had
been forged in the same crucible, but who were now intent on explor-
ing different terrain. And in any case, it was not until Lennon began
184 The Be

publicly airing the group's internal battles, in 1970, that anyone out-

side the group and EMI's engineers knew how fractious things were.

To all appearances, life was still fine in Beatle-land, and The Beatles,

far from exploding that myth, seemed to support it.

_i
 o

The Dick Lester version of our lives in Hard

Day's Night and Help! made it look fun and
games: a good romp? That was fair in the

films but in the real world there was never any

doubt. The Beatles were doomed. Your own
space, man, it's so important. That's why we
were doomed because we didn't have any.

By 1969, Lennon was less

interested in the Beatles'

George Harrison, in I Me Mine, 1980
projects than in promoting
tongue-in-cheek philosophies

such as Bagism - the notion

that if people climbed into

bags so that they could be

heard but not seen, racism
and other prejudices could
be overcome.
186 The Beatles

The Final Year 1969

For the most part, Harrison, Lennon and Starr were content with the
state the Beatles had reached. In the eyes of the world, the group
remained untouchable and untoppleable as pop music royalty. Yet at

the same time, Apple gave them outlets for projects that did not fall

comfortably under the Beatles banner.

Lennon quickly began making use of this freedom, recording and

releasing his experimental collaborations with Ono. Harrison had

brought out Wonderwall and would soon make Electronic Sound, a
collection of Moog synthesizer practice tapes, recorded with the elec-

tronic music composer Bernie Krause (whose name, to his consterna-

tion, was hidden under a wash of silver paint on the album cover) and
other collaborators. Starr's interests, for the moment, were in film.

After his cameo in Candy, he would take on a more extensive role in

The Magic Christian, with Peter Sellers, in February 1969.

McCartney, however, missed the collective spirit of the group's

early days, and he was convinced that giving a few concerts - perhaps
in a controlled environment - would revive that spirit. The recording

studio, he believed, had liberated their imaginations, but had also

fostered an unfortunate insularity, for which the discipline of rehears-

ing and playing for an audience was the logical antidote. The others

had their doubts, although in September 1968 Harrison mused in

interviews about taking over a concert hall and giving performances
for a few months. The next month, McCartney announced that once
The Beatles was finished, the group would work up some of the new
songs for a television taping, and would then perform them live.

Soon there was talk of a three-day booking in mid-December at

the Roundhouse, with proceeds from the sale of 4,500 tickets going
to charity.

But true consensus within the Beatles was a slippery concept by

the end of 1968. As the concert date approached with no sign that

rehearsals might begin, the booking was scrapped, and a new date

(but no venue) was announced for mid-January. In fact, the plan had
The Final Year 1969 187

Ever since his walkabout in

A Hard Day's Night Starr

had been considered the

most natural actor among
the Beatles, and during the

group's final months he

turned to film for a solo
outlet. After a bit-part in

Candy, he co-starred with

Peter Sellers, right, in The

Magic Christian, 1969.

changed yet again. Now, still with an eye towards giving a concert,
the Beatles would get together just after the New Year and begin

preparing new material. The rehearsals would be filmed for a

television special, and then they would go to some exotic location

- a Roman amphitheatre in North Africa, the Sahara desert and even

a big ship in the Mediterranean were mentioned - to play a single
concert, which would also be filmed. They hired Michael Lindsay-
Hogg, the director who had made their promotional films for
'Paperback Writer', 'Rain', 'Hey Jude' and 'Revolution', to film this
endeavour from start to finish. To an extent they carried out their

plan, except that the exotic concert venue turned out to be the roof of
188 The Beatles

their new Apple offices and recording studio in Savile Row, London,
on a cold January afternoon.
With the tensions of the 'White Album' sessions still fresh in

their minds, and with the added pressure of a camera crew following
them around, the Beatles began their rehearsals at Twickenham
Film Studios on 2 January. Because these were not proper recording
sessions, there were no real studio facilities. But the cameras, and a
portable tape recorder used to make reference recordings, captured an

extraordinary amount of detail about the Beatles' working methods

and interaction. We hear them, for example, limbering up on count-
less oldies. Songs by Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, the

Drifters, Bob Dylan, Carl Perkins, Smokey Robinson, the Rolling

Stones, the Temptations and even a few of their own hits are touched
upon. Mostly, these are unbuttoned, unpolished performances.
The real work at hand, of course, was the new material, of which

there was plenty, with contributions from all four Beatles. In fact,

if every new song tried out at these sessions had gone through to

completion, the group could easily have filled another double album.
Besides the songs included on the Let It Be album, these sessions

yielded the first workouts of more than half the songs that would
be recorded later in the year for Abbey Road— including Starr's

'Octopus's Garden', McCartney's 'Maxwell's Silver Hammer', 'Oh!

Darling', 'She Came In Through the Bathroom Window' and
'Her Majesty', and Lennon's 'Sun King', 'Mean Mr Mustard' and
'Polythene Pam', and Harrison's 'Something' - as well as quite a few
songs that found homes on their post-Beatles solo albums.
The reference tapes made by the film crew capture the complete

development of several of the new songs, from the moment the com-
poser played it to the others through to the finished production.
McCartney is heard sitting at the piano or with his bass, singing out
the chords to his songs while the others follow along, or scat-singing

sections that lack lyrics, and sometimes adding vocal harmonies

even before the lyrics are finished. Songs are tried slow and fast, in

electric and acoustic versions, and with different kinds of introduc-

tions and solos.

Often, the lyrics come together gradually while the band is churn-
ing through the chords. 'Get Back', for example, began life as 'No
Pakistanis', a parody — one of several recorded during these sessions —