Close to the end of 1969, Mr. George Harrison hints upon his last few months as a Beatle. Happy Birthday, George, miss you.

George Harrison was interviewed at Apple Offices in London on October 8, 1969, by David Wigg. Their conversation would air later that month in two parts on the BBC Radio-One program ‘Scene and Heard.' At the time of this interview, the Abbey Road LP was number one on the album charts, released just 12 days earlier.

Wigg would later remember of his meeting with Harrison: "We met at the Apple offices in London... It was an important time for George as he was emerging as a strong songwriting influence. He explained how 'Here Comes The Sun' had come to him while sitting in Eric Clapton's garden, and that 'Something' was for Patti (George's then-wife). He also described what meditation and Hare Krishna meant to him, the Beatles financial problems, and how he came to terms with being a Beatle."

In addition to being a BBC radio personality, David Wigg was also famous for being a columnist for the Daily Express, as well as the London Evening News. In 1976, Wigg would release a double album featuring his interviews with each of the four Beatles, entitled 'The Beatles Tapes.'

GEORGE: "All I'm doing, I'm acting out the part of Beatle George and, you know, we're all acting out our own parts. The world is a stage, and the people are the players. Shakespeare said that. And he's right."

DAVID WIGG: "Do you expect another part, later?"

GEORGE: (giggles) "Oh, many parts. Yes."

DAVID: "Is that why you've come to terms with it?"

GEORGE: "Yes, because you just do whatever you can do. I mean, even if it's being a Beatle for the rest of my life, it's still only a temporary thing. And, I mean really, all we did was get born and live so many years, and this is what happened. I got born seemingly to become Beatle George. But it doesn't really matter who you are or what you are because that's only a temporary sort of tag for a limited sort of period of years."

DAVID: "Do you enjoy it now?"

GEORGE: "It's the same as any job, you know. It's up and down, you know. Life is up and down all the time. And maybe for us, it goes up higher, but it comes down lower. Relativity. So, you know, if we have a bad time, it's really bad. (laughs) And if we have a good time, maybe it's really good. But it's only the same, you know. It's relativity. So, the same law operates for everybody."

DAVID: "Yes."

GEORGE: "It's the same thing like they see showbiz, that thing, and all they think of is, 'Oh, all that money you've got and you've got a big house and car,' and all that sort of thing. But the problems that come along with that are incredible. And I can tell you, everything material that we have, every 100 pounds we've earned, we've got 100 pounds worth of problems to balance it."

DAVID: "Yes."

GEORGE: "It's very ironical in a way because we've all got, maybe, a big house and a car and an office, but to actually get the MONEY that you've earned is virtually impossible. It's like illegal to earn money. Well, not to earn it, it's illegal to keep the money you earn. 'You never give me your money; you only give me your funny paper.' You know, that's what we get. Bits of paper saying how much is earned and what's this and that. But you never actually get it in... uhh..."

DAVID: "...pounds, shillings, and pennies."

GEORGE: "Yes. But I think it's another of life's problems that you never actually solve. Oh, it's very difficult to solve and anyway you've just got to, no matter how much money you've got, you can't be happy anyway. So, you have to find your happiness with the problems you have, and you have to not worry too much about them. And (smiling) Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna Hare Hare."

DAVID: "George, how did you come to record Hare Krishna?" (Radha Krishna Temple, LP produced by George Harrison)

GEORGE: "Because the people from the Radha Krishna Temple were over here since about a year. And I got to know a couple of them because they were in and out of Apple office. And I've known about Hare Krishna Mantra anyway for a number of years. Originally, the Spiritual Master made a record in America which didn't really sell well. And apparently, the people ran off with the money. But I got to know about it. And also in India, you know, they chant those sort of things all over the place. The thing about the word 'Hare' is the word that calls upon the energy that's around from the Lord. Whichever Lord you like, really. But in this case, it happens to be Krishna... which is like the words that Christ said became the Christian Bible. And the words that Krishna said became the sort of Hindu Bible called the Bhagwat Ghita. So, it's just by merely the repetition of that. It's the same if you were just to go round chanting Christ, Christ, Christ, Christ. If you say it long enough, then you build up this identification. Whatever you identify with, you become one with it. So, it's really a method of becoming one with God."

DAVID: "I see."

GEORGE: "It's just another process. It's really the same sort of thing as meditation, but this is the thing-- it has more effect, I think. Or quicker effect, because music is such a powerful force. And it's like God likes me when I work, but loves me when I sing." (chuckles)

DAVID: (laughs)

GEORGE: "But it's really the same end as meditation. The response that comes from it is in the form of bliss. The more you do it, the more you don't wanna stop it, because it feels so nice. Peaceful. I believe in the saying, 'If there's a God, we must see him.' And I don't believe in the idea like, in most churches they say now, you're not gonna see him, he's way above you. Just believe what we tell you and shut up. Well, their whole thing is a different way. It's a process of actually having that realization and direct God perception, which is the thing you can attain through chanting and through meditation. And then you don't have any questions. You don't have to ask the vicar about this because it all becomes clear with the expanded state of consciousness. But you don't get it in five minutes. It's something that takes a long time. So it's really... It's like to give peace a chance, or all you need is love. The thing is, you can't just stand there and say, love, love, love or peace, peace, peace and get it. You have to have a direct process of attaining that. Like Christ said, 'Put your own house in order.' Maharishi said, 'For a forest to be green, each tree must be green.' So, the same for the world to have peace, each individual must have peace. And you don't get it through society's normal channels. And that's why each individual must tend to himself and get his own peace. And that way the whole society will have peace."

DAVID: "George, and what about these rules. Do you support all these things that the Krishna movement support? I mean they don't approve for example of alcohol and drugs."

GEORGE: "I believe in it."

DAVID: "And they recommend a certain kind of food, vegetarian."

GEORGE: "Yeah. Well, there's certain..."

DAVID: "And no sex, unless you're about going to have children, right?"

GEORGE: "Yeah. Illicit. No illicit sex. There are members of this Radha Krishna Temple who are married and now have children. So all that means, you know, not raving around and knocking off everybody. You know, because that's then becomes a bit undisciplined. Because all those emotions like that lust and greed are emotions that have got to be curbed. I believe in being a vegetarian because meat's one of the worst things anybody can eat."

DAVID: "What about the other ones?"

GEORGE: "Which ones?"

DAVID: "No alcohol or drugs."

GEORGE: "Yeah, well, I don't drink alcohol personally, because... I mean, that's one reason why I smoked pot. When I started smoking pot a few years ago, I hope they won't edit this piece out, because I'm not really..."

DAVID: "I hope they won't. I'm sure they won't, I won't let them."

GEORGE: "Ok, the thing was that as soon as I smoked pot, I gave up alcohol because I realized the only reason I was drinking alcohol was to get high. So, I got high much easier without any sickness after it. But the thing is now that to really have pure state of consciousness and good perception that is above the normal state of consciousness that we're aware of; then you must have a perfectly clear mind. So alcohol and any sort of drugs is out. But I haven't taken anything like that personally for a long time. In fact, even before I got busted, I never took it. It just happened that, you know, that they seem to bring it with them, that day." (laughs)

DAVID: "I see."

GEORGE: "So, for that's a different story. (jokingly) Edit, edit!"

DAVID: (laughs)

GEORGE: "Anyway, yes I agree with that. Because to REALLY get high you've got to have a pure system. You know, your mind and body has got to be clear."

DAVID: "Two of the most beautiful songs on 'Abbey Road' are from yourself when we've been so used to Lennon/McCartney compositions and of course people have been commenting this week about 'Something' and 'Here Comes The Sun,' which are your own compositions. How did this all happen? It's so unusual for you to contribute so much to an LP."

GEORGE: "Well, not really. I mean, the last album we did had four songs of mine on it. I thought they were alright. So I thought these, 'Something' and 'Here Comes The Sun' was ok... maybe a bit more commercial but as songs not much better than the songs on the last album. But I've been writing for a couple of years now. And there's been lots of songs I've written which I haven't got 'round to recording. So, you know, in my own mind I don't see what the fuss is because I've heard these songs before and I wrote them, you know quite a while back. And it's really nice that people like the songs, but..."

DAVID: "You don't look upon yourself as a late developer as regards songwriting then? Because it's kind of hit everyone in that way, you know."

GEORGE: "Late, early, you know. What's late and what's early?"

DAVID: (laughs) "But you hadn't really got the reputation as yet as a songwriter, had you?"

GEORGE: "No, no. I wasn't Lennon, or I wasn't McCartney. I was me. And the only reason I started to write songs was because I thought, well if they can write them, I can write them. You know, 'cuz really, everybody can write songs if they want to. If they have a desire to and if they have sort of some musical knowledge and background. And then it's by writing them the same as writing books or writing articles or painting-- the more you do it, the better or, the more you can understand how to do it. And I used to just write songs. I still do. I just write a song, and it just comes out however it wants to. And some of them are catchy songs like 'Here Comes The Sun' and some of them aren't, you know. But to me, there's just songs, and I just write them, and some will be considered as good by maybe the masses and some won't. But to me they're just songs, things that are there that have to be got out."

DAVID: "What inspired 'Something' for example?"

GEORGE: "Maybe Patti, probably."

DAVID: "Really?"

GEORGE: "I wrote it at the time when we were making the last double album. And it's just the first line, 'Something in the way she moves' which has been in millions of songs. It's not a special thing. But it just seemed quite apt. I usually get the first few lines of lyrics and melody both at once. And then I finish the melody usually first and then I have to write the words. Like, there's another song I wrote when we were in India about two years, eighteen months ago, and I wrote it straight away. And the first verse I wrote just said everything I wanted to say, like that. And now I need to write a couple of more verses, and I find it much more difficult. But John gave me a handy tip once, which is, once you start to write the song, try and finish it straight away while you're in the mood. And I've learned from experience. Because you go back to it, and then you're in a whole different state of mind, and it's more difficult. Sometimes it's easier, but on the whole, it's more difficult to come back to something. So I do it now, try and finish them straight away."

DAVID: "Is it the first time that one of your songs has been released as a Beatles single?"

GEORGE: "As an A-side, yeah."

DAVID: As an A-side."

GEORGE: "They blessed me with a couple of B-sides in the past. But this is the first time I've had an A-side. Big deal, eh?"

DAVID: "Yes, and 'Here Comes The Sun.' That sounds a more obvious one. You must have been inspired by the sun, but where were you?"

GEORGE: "The story behind that was, like Paul sung 'You Never Give Me Your Money.' I think, because whatever you're involved with rubs off and influences you. 'You Never Give Me Your Money' is, I think, during all these business things that we had to go through to sort out the past, so it came out in Paul's song."

DAVID: "Was that written as a sort of dig, or was it written as a sort of...?"

GEORGE: "No, I don't think so. I think it's just written as that's what it is, you know. That's what we are experiencing, you know. Paul in particular. But 'Here Comes The Sun' was the same period. We had meetings and meetings and with all this, you know, banks, bankers and lawyers and all sorts of things. And contracts and shares. And it was really awful, 'cuz it's not the sort of thing we enjoy. And one day I didn't come into the office. I just sort of, it was like sagging off school.

DAVID: (laughs)

GEORGE: "And I went to a friend's house in the country. And it was just sunny, and it was all just the release of that tension that had been building up on me. And it was just really nice sunny day. And I picked up the guitar, which was the first time I'd played the guitar for a couple of weeks because I'd been so busy. And the first thing that came out was that song. It just came. And I finished it later when I was on holiday in Sardinia."

DAVID: "What was your own personal response to the Abbey Road album? How do you feel it comparing with previous albums?"

GEORGE: "I thought it was quite nice. On the whole, I think it's a pretty good album."

DAVID: "What are your own personal favorites? Which ones that you really do like?"

GEORGE: "I like... My favorite one is, I think, 'Because.'"

DAVID: "Oh, yes."

GEORGE: "Just because I like three-part harmony. We've never done something like that for years, I think, since a B-side. (sings) 'If you wear red tonight, and what I said tonight.' So I like that. I like lots of them. I like 'You Never Give Me Your Money' and 'Golden Slumbers' and things."

DAVID: "That's beautiful."

GEORGE: "You know, Paul always writes nice melodies. In fact, I don't know where he finds them half the time."

DAVID: (laughs)

GEORGE: "He's amazing for doing that. I like Ringo's song."

DAVID: "Yes."

GEORGE: "Because I mean, most people say, 'Oh well, it's Ringo,' or you know, 'Ha, ha' or something. But it's great that Ringo SHOULD do it. You know, why shouldn't he do it. And it's just like a country and western tune anyway. And it's a happy tune, and it's all that. And I like what he's saying about '...rest our head on the seabed.' And all that. 'We could be warm beneath the storm.'"

DAVID: "The little kids are gonna love that."

GEORGE: "Well, yeah. Maybe some big kids like it. I've heard a few people already who are big kids saying that it's their favorite track on the album. So, you know, you can't... One person may dislike certain things; somebody else likes it. Which makes it difficult doing albums because we're all influenced by different things. And the Beatles has always been a lot of different music. It's never been one sort of 'bag.' (laughs) But the thing is that you can set a high standard and it doesn't necessarily have to be a hit. You know this is one thing. The market for hits is... you know, I just can't figure it out. I know when the Beatles put out a single it's a hit. But I don't know if... sometimes I feel that if somebody else had put out the same thing but done in their way, it mightn't be a hit. I don't know. It's very difficult. I've really decided I haven't got a clue what's commercial and what isn't. And that's the problem, you know, trying to decide what is and what isn't a single. I think the American idea is really good where they just put out an album and the stations over there, you know, they have a lot of independent stations, unlike Britain, you see. That's a problem with Britain; you've got your good old BBC-- full stop. You know, maybe Radio Luxembourg if the weather's fine."

"You know, this is the thing I don't like. It's the Monopolies Commission. Now if anybody, you know, Kodak, or somebody is cleaning up the market with film, the Monopolies Commission, the Government send them in there and say you know, you're not allowed to monopolize. Yet, when the Government's monopolizing, who's gonna send in, you know, this Commission to sort that one out. Britain in a way, you know, it cuts its own throat. Just from my experience of Britain. It's, you know, it's on every level. You know, from your tax right down into every little speck of business. The British Government's policy seems to be, grab as much as you can now because maybe it's only gonna last another six months. I know personally for me, there's no point in me going out and doing a job, doing a show or doing a TV show or anything, you know. Because in Britain, first of all, they can't afford to pay you. And whatever they do pay you is taxed so highly that it ends up that YOU owe THEM money."

DAVID: (laughs)

GEORGE: "So, you know, why bother working? But if my tax is cut then I'd do four times as much work, I'd make four times as much money. They'd take less tax, but they'd make more from me. But they cut their own throat. They do it all over the show, every place you look in Britain it's the same. I mean, it makes me sick sometimes. It's like, one big Coronation Street. And that's Britain. Now in America, there's more people. And there's more good people; there's more bad people. But just generally there's more of everything. So more things get heard, more things get done and, you know, it really pays."

DAVID: "Yes. Would you like to see the Beatles performing on stage live again?"

GEORGE: "Uhh, I don't know. I wouldn't mind playing, you know. I like playing the guitar with people and singing a few songs and stuff. But I don't know as to going on clubs and things like that."

DAVID: "Yes. You can't split, can you."

GEORGE: "No, well, I think it's mental. It's a mental concept. But to physically or spiritually split is impossible. Well, maybe not physically, I mean, spiritually, it's, you know, you can't split."

DAVID: "No. So that doesn't bother you."

GEORGE: "Because, if you're listening, I'm the Walrus too." (laughs)

Please feel free to leave any comments or corrections and share these articles plus the blog's website with your friends, especially Beatles’ fans. You and they might also enjoy knowing more about my Love Songs CD and my novel, BEATLEMANIAC. Just click on the “My Shop” tab near the top of this page for full details.

THE BEATLES HELP PLUG THEIR SECOND FEATURED MOTION PICTURE, HELP!

At the end of their stay in the Bahamas, the following interview was conducted with the Beatles to promote the upcoming theatrical release of the movie 'Help!' Copies of the recorded interview were then sent to American radio stations.

It was created to be an 'Open-end' interview - meaning that once the interview was recorded, the questions were edited out so that local disc jockeys could read scripted questions along with the recording to sound as if they were personally conducting the interview.

Q: "We're on location with the Beatles, and they're here to tell us about an exciting new movie. Tell us where we're talking from this time."

John: We're just talking on the set of the film we just finished in Nassau, Bahamas."

Beatles: (shouting) "'Help!' 'Help!'"

Q: "John, where did this title come from - 'Help'?"

John: "It came from out of Dick Lester's mouth, it came. Our director, friends."

Ringo: "I thought it came out of his shoe."

George: "Well, Dick sort of slowly went up to us, one at a time, punching us, saying 'It's gonna be called HELP!' and we said, 'Yeah, that's a great idea, Dick, sir... sir. We'll call it that.' and that's how it all became about."

Q: "Why did you have so much trouble with the title, Paul? I know you had a different title first. What made 'Help' the final title?"

Paul: "Uhh, 'cuz it was about the best, I'd say. It just sounds right, you know. That's why. 'Help!' There you are."

George: "It fits the story because, you see, people are trying to get us all through it. and so, we need a bit of help, you see."

Paul: "That's right."

Q: "This second picture, John, how does it differ from the first one you made?"

John: "Well, it's in color, for a start. and, I don't know, there's a lot more happening in this. There's a story, you see. In the last one it was just sort of documentary, but this is a real film, almost."

Q: "Did you have any different problems in this one, George, other than in 'A Hard Day's Night'?"

George: "A couple of more problems. (laughs) A couple of more, yes. Because, for a start, we had a big idol... and lots of trick things, you see. Whereas we didn't have any trick things in the last film."

Paul: "Yeah, the business about the idol was that, umm, it was supposed to rise from the water, you see, as a sort of trick..."

John: "and it wouldn't."

Paul: "...and it wouldn't 'cuz the water was always too rough for it. So we've had a bit of trouble with that."

Q: "Does this idol have anything to do with you, Ringo?"

Ringo: "Uhh, yeah. Yeah. I can't tell you what the plot is, but here are some of the questions that we answered. (reads) 'Why were the high priests of the terrible goddess of Kaili interested in the Beatles? What did they want of him? They weren't fans. Two leading scientists hope to rule the world. Paul is threatened by a Beetle - B, double-E, T, L, E.'"

Q: "What happened to you in this picture, Ringo?"

Ringo: "I'm chased by a gang of thugs all the way through it actually."

John: "Yeah, they seem to be chasing Ringo. (reads) 'There's two leading scientists who hope to rule the world.' (giggles) 'and an Eastern beauty saves all our lives from time to time,' it says here."

George: "All I can say is, 'Will John live to sleep in his pit again?'"

Paul: "Right! Or, for instance, 'Will Paul ever get back to his united organ?' - Electric organ, I mean."

Q: "You're kind of veteran movie stars at this point. Do you like this business of making movies, Paul? Is it difficult for you?"

Paul: "Umm, I think all of us really enjoy it. It's something different, you know. We've all forgotten about how difficult it was, or hard it was sort of standing 'round the set all day. You forget about things like that. and it's just nice to be doing something like a film, which is a completely new thing for us, really, you know - we've only ever done one before this one. It's just good seeing rushes and seeing a film get together, and seeing it sort of make itself, you know. Yes, very exciting. Lovely."

Q: "and John, this movie brings us more great songs from the Beatles, too."

John: "There's about seven... I'm not sure. Paul and I wrote eleven and we chose seven out of the eleven."

Q: "I suppose there is a title song."

John: "Yeah, it's called 'Help!,' you know. We think it's one of the best we've written."

Paul: "Sung at the beginning and the end of the picture - made at United Artists with the help of Walter Shenson and Dick Lester... one or two people we ought to plug."

Q: "George, how do you go with this movie making career? How do you take to this business of making movies, getting up early in the morning, getting the make-up, and so forth?"

George: "That's a bit of a drag - getting up in the morning. But umm, apart from that and the waiting 'round, it's great fun. We have a great laugh. Don't we, fellas?"

Paul: "Yes. Yes, we do."

John: "Yes we do."

Ringo: "Yeah it's great except, as George said, getting up in the morning. We hate getting up, you know. It's always difficult to do something you hate."

Paul: "Especially when you go to bed about three in the morning, it's very difficult to get up at six. (jokingly) However, as we never go to bed at three in the morning..."

John: "We only go to bed at five."

(laughter)

Paul: (jokingly) "'Cuz we always go to bed at late evening. No, you know, it's difficult when you go to bed late. Some nights you do, some nights you don't. There you go."

Q: "Ringo, you're a newlywed. What do you expect out of marriage?"

Ringo: "What do I expect? I don't expect anything. I just love being married, you know, and I love my wife. I just want her to be there all the time when I'm there, you know. Now there's no one that can say, 'She can't do this and she can't do that,' you know. If we want to go anywhere or do anything, I'm the boss - we just do it. There's no one to tell us anything else now. It's marvelous, you know, 'cuz we both belong to each other, and you can share everything. It's a great thing being married. you know I enjoy it. Well, I mean, I shouldn't sort of - I'm not an authority on it. (laughs) I've only been married a month. But umm, you know, I love it. It's something you can't explain, you know. It's only people who get married who know this thing."

Q: "John, tell me. Where has this taken you - this second Beatles picture?"

John: "Well, it took us to the Bahamas, Nassau. and we've been to Austria, that was great. and most of it was done in London for us which is also great."

Q: "George, do you like this traveling around to different places?"

George: "It's not bad at all, when you're making a film."

Q: "John, does this traveling around and doing one-night appearances ever become a drag?"

John: "No. If there were no kids I think it would be a drag, you know. We'd say, 'What's happened!' We'd say - How would we say it?"

Paul: "We'd say--"

Beatles: (in unison) "What's happened!"

Paul: "There's not half as much excitement when there's just nobody around, you know. I mean, it's nice occasionally to get a quiet spell. For instance, when we were in the Bahamas, you know, that was nice and quiet. and Austria - pretty quiet. But doing tours and things, you know, that's always more hectic. But it's still good. It's good in a different way, you know - like making films is good and making records is good, but in different ways."

Q: "But there must be times when this hectic life gets to be too much. In fact, a recent article said that you are even rude at times."

John: "Uhh, the article is right. We've been quoted as being rude to people. We're always rude BACK, you know. and we're no more cynical than we ever were, it's just that..."

Ringo: "There's people writing about it now."

John: "...you know, people notice us being cynical because we're public figures, but we've always had the same attitude. We always disliked the same kind of people as we did years ago."

Paul: "But if someone comes up to us and is rude to us, then we'd be idiots to sort of stand there and smile as they were being rude to us, you know. I mean, nobody is gonna take that. and it doesn't matter if they're a public figure or anything. You know, you're just stupid if you don't do something in return. It's okay turning the other cheek, you know. But (laughs) your cheek doesn't oft get smashed up that way."

John: "A woman came up and says, 'I've got a so-and-so year old daughter. But I couldn't care less me-self.' You know, something like that. and I thought it was pretty rude, seeing as we were eating at the time as well - in the middle of a meal. So we were just a bit cold towards her. and she probably thought we had no right to be, but she forgets that we're human, you see."

Q: "At what point do you get used to a phenomenon like this?"

George: "At first, everything was going too quick anyway. We didn't even have enough time to think of what was happening. We just did it, and then suddenly we realized that we were selling records and things. But you know, apart from that, we never thought too much about it. We used to just see how many records were selling and that was it - go and do a show - but we never used to sit 'round and talk about how great we were. So you know, it's just a thing in the back of your head that you're what you are, and you're doing your job, and that's it, you know."

Q: "Now that you've completed your second picture, you boys are not going to give up concerts, are you?"

Paul: "No, of course not. We're doing a big tour, you know, in America - uhh, I don't know how many cities - but it'll be pretty hectic, you know. But it's all good fun. We enjoy it. Filming, making records, concerts. You know us - a laugh a minute! Hah hah hah!"

John: "Hah hah!"

Q: "When you're writing a song for the picture, do you write it for a particular scene?"

Paul: "What happens is that we, uhh..."

George: "We just shove 'em in anywhere." (laughs)

Paul: "Yeah. We just write the songs first, and then just shove 'em in anywhere, as George said. Especially in the sunset scene at the very end of the picture, where the two lovers - that's George and Ringo - are coming towards each other on the beach!"

(laughter)

Paul: (chuckling) "and they just finally meet... well actually, they don't quite meet. They just run past each other and both dive into the sand."

John: "They both light a cigarette."

Paul: "Yeah, that's it. The sun goes down, and it's a sort of a big facade of Oriental beauty, you know what I mean."

John: "Facade Harbuckle."

Paul: "Facade Harbuckle. and then the whole picture just ends up..."

George: "You're telling them too much about the story..."

Paul: "I'm sorry. I've..."

George: "They won't go and see it if you tell 'em all about that."

Paul: "Okay."

John: "But tell 'em about the vintage car race!"

Paul: "The vintage car race!"

John: "Well, that's another scene where we all go from Brighton to Egg-mutton. and none of us win, unfortunately. and it just about ends there."

Q: "It sounds like fun. I want to thank all you boys for talking with us today. We're all looking forward to seeing you in your second motion picture, 'Help!'"

Paul: "This is Paul McCartney saying thank you very much. We hope you all enjoy our film. It's been nice being on your show."

John: "This is John Lennon saying thanks for everything - enjoyed being on your show."

Ringo: "This is Ringo saying thanks for everything - hope you enjoy the film and the songs from the film. We hope to see you all when we come to the states."

George: "and this is George saying goodbye to everybody who's been listening, and also to you for having us on your program. Thank you very much!"

Please feel free to leave any comments or corrections and share these articles plus the blog's website with your friends, especially Beatles’ fans. You and they might also enjoy knowing more about my Love Songs CD and my novel, BEATLEMANIAC. Just click on the “My Shop” tab near the top of this page for full details.

JOHN & PAUL SHARE SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT THEIR LP ALBUM FEATURING EVERY TRACK AS AN ORIGINAL.. A HARD DAYS NIGHT.

A HARD DAY'S NIGHT (Lennon/McCartney)

JOHN 1980: "I was going home in the car and Dick Lester suggested the title, 'Hard Day's Night' from something Ringo had said. I had used it in 'In His Own Write,' but it was an off-the-cuff remark by Ringo. You know, one of those malapropisms. A Ringo-ism, where he said it not to be funny... just said it. So Dick Lester said, 'We are going to use that title.' And the next morning I brought in the song... 'cuz there was a little competition between Paul and I as to who got the A-side-- who got the hits. If you notice, in the early days the majority of singles, in the movies and everything, were mine... in the early period I'm dominating the group. The only reason he sang on 'A Hard Day's Night' was because I couldn't reach the notes. (sings) 'When I'm home/ everything seems to be right/ when I'm home...' --which is what we'd do sometimes. One of us couldn't reach a note but he wanted a different sound, so he'd get the other to do the harmony."

PAUL circa-1994: "The title was Ringo's. We'd almost finished making the film, and this fun bit arrived that we'd not known about before, which was naming the film. So we were sitting around at Twickenham studios having a little brain-storming session... and we said, 'Well, there was something Ringo said the other day.' Ringo would do these little malapropisms, he would say things slightly wrong, like people do, but his were always wonderful, very lyrical... they were sort of magic even though he was just getting it wrong. And he said after a concert, 'Phew, it's been a hard day's night.'"

I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER (Lennon/McCartney)

JOHN 1980: "That's me. Just a song-- It doesn't mean a damn thing."

IF I FELL (Lennon/McCartney)

JOHN 1980: "That was my first attempt at a ballad proper. That was the precursor to 'In My Life.' It has the same chord sequences as 'In My Life' --D and B minor and E minor, those kinds of things. And it's semi-autobiographical, but not consciously. It shows that I wrote sentimental love ballads-- silly love songs-- way back when."

PAUL 1984: "This was our close-harmony period. We did a few songs... 'This Boy,' 'If I Fell,' 'Yes It Is' ...in the same vein, which were kind of like the Fourmost-- an English vocal group, only not really."

I'M HAPPY JUST TO DANCE WITH YOU (Lennon/McCartney)

JOHN 1980: "'I'm Happy Just To Dance With You,' that was written for George to give him a piece of the action. I couldn’t sing it."

PAUL circa-1994: "We wrote 'I'm Happy Just To Dance With You' for George in the film. It was a bit of a formula song. We knew that in (the key of) E if you went to an A-flat-minor, you could always make a song with those chords... that change pretty much always excited you."

AND I LOVE HER (Lennon/McCartney)

JOHN 1972: "Both of us wrote it. The first half was Paul's and the middle-eight is mine."

JOHN 1980: "'And I Love Her' is Paul again. I consider it his first 'Yesterday.' You know, the big ballad in 'A Hard Day's Night.'

PAUL 1984: "It's just a love song. It wasn't for anyone. Having the title start in midsentence, I thought that was clever. Well, Perry Como did 'And I Love You So' many years later. Tried to nick the idea. I like that... it was a nice tune, that one. I still like it."

TELL ME WHY (Lennon/McCartney)

JOHN 1980: "'Tell Me Why...' they needed another upbeat song and I just knocked it off. It was like a black, New York girl-group song."

PAUL circa-1994: "I think a lot of these songs like 'Tell Me Why' were based in real life experiences... but it never occurred to us until later to put that slant on it all."

CAN'T BUY ME LOVE (Lennon/McCartney)

JOHN 1972: "John and Paul, but mainly Paul."

JOHN 1980: "That's Paul completely. Maybe I had something to do with the chorus, but I don't know. I always considered it his song."

PAUL 1984: "We recorded it in France, as I recall. Went over to the Odeon in Paris. Recorded it over there. Felt proud because Ella Fitzgerald recorded it, too, though we didn't realize what it meant that she was doing it."

PAUL circa-1994: "'Can't Buy Me Love' is my attempt to write a bluesy mode. The idea behind it was that all these material possessions are all very well but they won't buy me what I really want."

ANY TIME AT ALL (Lennon/McCartney)

JOHN 1980: "An effort at writing 'It Won't Be Long' --same ilk. C to A minor, C to A minor with me shouting."

I'LL CRY INSTEAD (Lennon/McCartney)

JOHN 1980: "I wrote that for 'A Hard Day's Night,' but Dick Lester didn't even want it. He resurrected 'Can't Buy Me Love' for that sequence instead. I like the middle-eight to that song, though that's about all I can say about it."

THINGS WE SAID TODAY (Lennon/McCartney)

JOHN 1980: "Paul's. Good song."

PAUL circa-1994: "I wrote 'Things We Said Today' on acoustic (guitar). It was a slightly nostalgic thing already, a future nostalgia: we'll remember the things we said today, sometime in the future, so the song projects itself into the future and then is nostalgic about the moment we're living now, which is quite a good trick."

WHEN I GET HOME (Lennon/McCartney)

JOHN 1980: "That's me again... another Wilson Pickett, Motown sound... a four-in-the-bar cowbell song."

YOU CAN'T DO THAT (Lennon/McCartney)

JOHN 1964: "I'd find it a drag to play rhythm all the time, so I always work myself out something interesting to play. The best example I can think of is like I did on 'You Can't Do That.' There really isn't a lead guitarist and a rhythm guitarist on that, because I feel the rhythm guitarist role sounds too thin for records. Anyway, it drove me potty to play chunk-chunk rhythm all the time. I never play anything as lead guitarist that George couldn't do better. But I like playing lead sometimes, so I do it."

JOHN 1980: "That's me doing Wilson Pickett. You know, a cowbell going four-in-the bar, and the chord going 'chatoong!'"

I'LL BE BACK (Lennon/McCartney)

JOHN 1972: "A nice tune, though the middle is a bit tatty."

JOHN 1980: "'I'll Be Back' is me completely. My variation of the chords in a Del Shannon song."

PAUL circa-1994: "'I'll Be Back' was co-written, but it was largely John's idea."

ON SONGWRITING (DURING THE 'HARD DAY'S NIGHT' PERIOD)

PAUL 1964: "Sometimes maybe he (John) will write a whole song himself, or I will, but we always say that we've both written it. Sometimes the lyric does come first, sometimes the tune-- sometimes both together. Sometimes he'll do one line, sometimes I'll do one line. It's very varied."

JOHN 1964: "Paul and I enjoyed writing the music for the film, but there were times when we honestly thought we'd never get time to write all the material. We managed to get a couple finished while we were in Paris, and three more completed in America soaking up sun on Miami Beach."

PAUL 1996: "Most of the songs that John and I wrote together were kinda pulled out of thin air. That was the thing about John and me that I still marvel at... because we had been 16-year olds together. He'd come over to my house and we'd smoke Ty-Phoo tea in my dad's pipe. And because we'd done all that, by the time we got around to 'A Hard Day's Night,' we sort of expected that we sat down together to write a song and have a little bit of fun-- simply because we were used to doing it. That was how we did what we did."

ON RECORDING (DURING THE 'HARD DAY'S NIGHT' PERIOD)

PAUL 1964: "These recent sessions in the studio have shown us one thing. It doesn't get any easier. Already we've got the 'knockers' saying that we can't get to number one again and that we must be running out of ideas. That's where the pressure comes in. The fans are marvelous, but some of the others make it clear they'd like it if we had a flop. We worry much more now and it seems that with every hit it gets that bit tougher. But we're pretty pleased with the material we've got out of it all... even if we finished one of the songs literally as we were getting ready to make a recording of it."

PAUL circa-1994: "Normally John and I would go in the studio, sit down with the guys and say, 'Right, what are we going to do?' I'd say to John, 'Do you want to do that one of yours or shall we do this one of mine? Which shall we play 'em first?' We'd show it to the band over the course of twenty minutes, possibly half an hour. Ringo would stand around with a pair of drumsticks which he might tap on a seat or a packing case. John and I would sit with our two guitars. George would bring his guitar and see what chords we were doing and figure out what he could do. George Martin would sit down with us and then we would separate, go to each instrument and come out ready to fight. And within the next hour we would have done it-- we would have decided how we were going to play the song. If for some reason it needed to be mixed quickly we would go upstairs to the control room, but we often left it up to them and just went home. But as things went on, we might go up to the control room more often."

Please feel free to leave any comments or corrections and share these articles plus the blog's website with your friends, especially Beatles’ fans. You and they might also enjoy knowing more about my Love Songs CD and my novel, BEATLEMANIAC. Just click on the “My Shop” tab near the top of this page for full details.

OUR BELOVED BEATLES SHARE CURRENT AND RECOLLECT COMMENTS ABOUT EACH TRACK FROM THE WHITE ALBUM.

BACK IN THE USSR (Lennon/McCartney)

PAUL 1968: "Chuck Berry once did a song called 'Back In The USA,' which is very American, very Chuck Berry. Very sort of, uhh... you know, you're serving in the army, and when I get back home I'm gonna kiss the ground. And you know-- Can't wait to get back to the States. And it's a very American sort of thing, I've always thought. So this one is like about... In my mind it's just about a spy who's been in America a long, long time, you know, and he's picked up... And he's very American. But he gets back to the USSR, you know, and he's sort of saying, 'Leave it till tomorrow, honey, to disconnect the phone,' and all that. And 'Come here honey,' but with Russian women. It concerns the attributes of Russian women."

JOHN 1980: "Paul completely. I play the six-string bass on that."

PAUL 1984: "I wrote that as a kind of Beach Boys parody. And 'Back in the USA' was a Chuck Berry song, so it kinda took off from there. I just liked the idea of Georgia girls and talking about places like the Ukraine as if they were California, you know? It was also hands across the water, which I'm still conscious of. 'Cuz they like us out there, even though the bosses in the Kremlin may not. The kids do."

PAUL 1986: "I'm sure it pissed Ringo off when he couldn't quite get the drums to 'Back In The USSR,' and I sat in. It's very weird to know that you can do a thing someone else is having trouble with. If you go down and do it, just bluff right through it, you think, 'What the hell, at least I'm helping.' Then the paranoia comes in-- 'But I'm going to show him up!' I was very sensitive to that."

DEAR PRUDENCE (Lennon/McCartney)

JOHN 1980: "'Dear Prudence' is me. Written in India. A song about Mia Farrow's sister, who seemed to go slightly balmy, meditating too long, and couldn't come out of the little hut we were livin' in. They selected me and George to try and bring her out because she would trust us. If she'd been in the West, they would have put her away... We got her out of the house. She'd been locked in for three weeks and was trying to reach God quicker than anybody else. That was the competition in Maharishi's camp-- who was going to get cosmic first. What I didn't know was I was 'already' cosmic." (laughs)

PAUL circa-1994: "He (John) wrote 'Dear Prudence, won't you come out and play...' and went in and sang it to her, and I think that actually did help."

GLASS ONION (Lennon/McCartney)

JOHN 1980: "That's me, just doing a throwaway song, a la 'Walrus' a la everything I've ever written. I threw in the line 'The walrus was Paul' just to confuse everybody a bit more. It could've been the fox terrier is Paul, you know. I mean, it's just a bit of poetry. It was just thrown in like that... The line was put in because I was feeling guilty because I was with Yoko and I was leaving Paul. I was trying... I don't know. It's a perverse way of saying to Paul, you know, 'Here, have this crumb, this illusion, this stroke, because I'm leaving."

OB-LA-DI OB-LA-DA (Lennon/McCartney)

JOHN 1980: "I might've given him a couple of lyrics, but it's his song, his lyric."

PAUL 1984: "A fella who used to hang around the clubs used to say, (Jamaican accent) 'Ob-la-di, ob-la-da, life goes on,' and he got annoyed when I did a song of it, 'cuz he wanted a cut. I said, 'Come on, Jimmy, it's just an expression. If you'd written the song, you could have had a cut.' He also used to say, 'Nothin's too much, just outta sight.' He was just one of those guys who had great expressions, you know."

WILD HONEY PIE (Lennon/McCartney)

PAUL circa-1994: "We were in an experimental mode, and so I said, 'Can I just make something up?' I started off with the guitar and did a multitracking experiment in the control room... It was very home-made-- it wasn't a big production at all. I just made up this short piece and I multitracked the harmony to that, and a harmony to that, and a harmony to that, and built it up sculpturally with a lot of vibrato on the (guitar) strings, really pulling the strings madly-- hence 'Wild Honey Pie.'"

THE CONTINUING STORY OF BUNGALOW BILL (Lennon/McCartney)

JOHN 1980: "Oh, that was written about a guy in Maharishi's meditation camp who took a short break to go shoot a few poor tigers, and then come back to commune with God. There used to be a character called Jungle Jim, and I combined him with Buffalo Bill. It's a sort of teenage social comment song and a bit of a joke. Yoko's on that one, I believe."

PAUL circa-1994: "I remember John singing 'Bungalow Bill' in Rishikesh. This is another of his great songs, and it's one of my favorites to this day because it stands for a lot of what I stand for now. 'Did you really have to shoot that tiger' is its message. 'Aren't you a big guy? Aren't you a brave man?' I think John put it very well."

WHILE MY GUITAR GENTLY WEEPS (Harrison)

GEORGE 1980: "I had a copy of the I Ching-- the Book of Changes, which seemed to me to be based on the Eastern concept that everything is relative to everything else, as opposed to the Western view that things are merely coincidental. The idea was in my head when I visited my parents' home in the North of England. I decided to write a song based on the first thing I saw upon opening any book-- as it would be relative to that moment, at that time. I picked up a book at random, opened it-- saw 'gently weeps' -- then laid the book down again and started the song. Some of the words to the song were changed before I finally recorded it."

GEORGE 1987: "I worked on that song with John, Paul, and Ringo one day, and they were not interested in it at all. And I knew inside of me that it was a nice song. The next day I was with Eric Clapton, and I was going into the session, and I said, 'We're going to do this song. Come and play on it.' He said, 'Oh no. I can't do that. Nobody ever plays on the Beatles records.' I said, 'Look, it's my song, and I want you to play on it.' So Eric came in, and the other guys were as good as gold-- because he was there. Also, it left me free to just play the rhythm and do the vocal. So Eric played that, and I thought it was really good. Then we listened to it back, and he said, 'Ah, there's a problem though; it's not Beatley enough.' So we put it through the ADT (automatic double-track) to wobble it up a bit."

HAPPINESS IS A WARM GUN (Lennon/McCartney)

PAUL 1968: "The idea of 'Happiness Is A Warm Gun' is from an advert in an American paper. It said, Happiness is a warm gun, and it was 'Get ready for the long hot summer with a rifle,' you know, 'Come and buy them now!' It was an advert in a gun magazine. And it was so sick, you know, the idea of 'Come and buy your killing weapons,' and 'Come and get it.' But it's just such a great line, 'Happiness Is A Warm Gun' that John sort of took that and used that as a chorus. And the rest of the words... I think they're great words, you know. It's a poem. And he finishes off, 'Happiness Is A Warm Gun, yes it is.' It's just good poetry."

JOHN 1972: "They all said it was about drugs, but it was more about rock 'n roll than drugs. It's sort of a history of rock 'n roll... I don't know why people said it was about the needle in heroin. I've only seen somebody do something with a needle once, and I don't like to see it at all."

JOHN 1980: "A gun magazine was sitting around, and the cover was the picture of a smoking gun. The title of the article, which I never read, was 'Happiness Is a Warm Gun.' I took it right from there. I took it as the idea of happiness after having shot somebody. Or some animal."

MARTHA MY DEAR (Lennon/McCartney)

PAUL 1968: "You see, I just start singing some words with a tune, you know what I mean. Mainly I'm just doing a tune, and then some words come into my head, you know. And these happened to be 'Martha My Dear, though I spend my days in conversation.' So you can read anything you like into it, but really it's just a song. It's me singing to my dog." (laughs)

PAUL circa-1994: "When I taught myself piano I liked to see how far I could go, and this (song) started off as a piece you'd learn as a piano lesson. It's quite hard for me to play, It's a two-handed thing, like a little set piece. Then when I was blocking out words-- you just mouth out sounds, and some things come-- I found the words 'Martha my dear.' So I made up another fantasy song... I mean, I'm not really speaking to Martha, it's a communication of some sort or affection, but in a slightly abstract way-- 'You silly girl, look what you've done...' Whereas it would appear to anybody else to be a song to a girl called Martha, it's actually a dog, and our relationship was platonic, believe me."

I'M SO TIRED (Lennon/McCartney)

JOHN 1980: "'I'm So Tired' was me, in India again. I couldn't sleep, I'm meditating all day and couldn't sleep at night. The story is that. One of my favorite tracks. I just like the sound of it, and I sing it well."

PAUL circa-1994: "It has that very special line, 'And curse Sir Walter Raleigh/ He was such a stupid git.' That's a classic line, and it's so John that there's no doubt who wrote it. I think it's 100 percent, John."

BLACKBIRD (Lennon/McCartney)

PAUL 1968: "It's simple in concept because you couldn't think of anything else to put on it. Maybe on 'Pepper' we would have sort of worked on it until we could find some way to put violins or trumpets in there. But I don't think it needs it, this one. You know, it's just... There's nothing to the song. It is just one of those 'pick it and sing it,' and that's it. The only point where we were thinking of putting anything on it is where it comes back in the end.... sort of stops and comes back in... but instead of putting any backing on it, we put a blackbird on it. So there's a blackbird singing at the very end. And somebody said it was a thrush, but I think it's a blackbird!"

JOHN 1980: "I gave him (Paul) a line on that one."

PAUL circa-1994: "The original inspiration was from a well-known piece by Bach, which I never know the title of, which George and I had learned to play at an early age-- he better than me actually. Part of its structure is a particular harmonic thing between the melody and the bass line which intrigued me... I developed the melody based on the Bach piece and took it somewhere else, took it to another level, then I just fitted words to it. I had in my mind a black woman, rather than a bird. Those were the days of the civil-rights movement, which all of us cared passionately about. So this was really a song from me to a black woman, experiencing these problems in the states... 'Let me encourage you to keep trying, to keep your faith, there is hope.' As is often the case with my things, a veiling took place. So, rather than say 'Black woman living in Little Rock' and be very specific, she became a bird, became symbolic, so you could apply it to your particular problem."

PIGGIES (Harrison)

GEORGE 1980: "'Piggies' is a social comment. I was stuck for one line in the middle until my mother came up with the lyric, 'What they need is a damn good whacking' which is a nice simple way of saying they need a good hiding. It needed to rhyme with 'backing,' 'lacking,' and had absolutely nothing to do with American policemen or Californian shagnasties!"

JOHN 1980: "I gave George a couple of lines about forks and knives and eating bacon."

ROCKY RACCOON (Lennon/McCartney)

PAUL 1968: "I was sitting on the roof in India with a guitar-- John and I were sitting 'round playing guitar, and we were with Donovan. And we were just sitting around enjoying ourselves, and I started playing the chords of 'Rocky Raccoon,' you know, just messing around. And, oh, originally it was Rocky Sassoon, and we just started making up the words, you know, the three of us-- and started just to write them down. They came very quickly. And eventually, I changed it from Sassoon to Raccoon, because it sounded more like a cowboy. So there it is. These kind of things-- you can't really talk about how they come 'cuz they just come into your head, you know. They really do. And it's like John writing his books. There's no... I don't know how he does it, and he doesn't know how he does it, but he just writes. I think people who actually do create and write... you tend to think, 'Oh, how did he do that,' but it actually does flow... just flows from into their head, into their hand, and they write it down, you know. And that's what happened with this. I don't know anything about the Appalachian Mountains or cowboys and Indians or anything. But I just made it up, you know. And the doctor came in stinking of gin and proceeded to lie on the table. So, there you are."

PAUL circa-1994: "I like talking-blues, so I started off like that, then I did my tongue-in-cheek parody of a western and threw in some amusing lines. The bit I liked about it was him (Rocky) finding Gideon's Bible and thinking, 'Some guy called Gideon must have left it for the next guy.' I like the idea of Gideon being a character. You get the meaning, and at the same time get in a poke at it. All in good fun."

DON'T PASS ME BY (Starkey)

JOHN 1968: "We've just done two tracks, both unfinished. The second one is Ringo's first song that we're working on this very moment. He composed it himself in a fit of lethargy."

WHY DON'T WE DO IT IN THE ROAD (Lennon/McCartney)

JOHN 1972: "Paul. One of his best."

JOHN 1980: "That's Paul. He even recorded it by himself in another room. That's how it was getting in those days. We came in, and he'd made the whole record. Him drumming, him playing the piano, him singing. But he couldn't... maybe he couldn't make the break from the Beatles. I don't know what it was, you know. I enjoyed the track. Still, I can't speak for George, but I was always hurt when Paul would knock something off without involving us. But that's just the way it was then."

PAUL 1981: "There's only one incident I can think of, which John has publicly mentioned. It was when I went off with Ringo and did 'Why Don't We Do It In The Road.' It wasn't a deliberate thing, John and George were tied up finishing something, and me and Ringo were free, just hanging around, so I said to Ringo, 'Let's go and do this.' I did hear John some time later singing it. He liked the song, and I suppose he wanted to do it with me. It was a very John sort of song anyway. That's why he liked it, I suppose. It was very John, the idea of it, not me. I wrote it as a ricochet off John."

I WILL (Lennon/McCartney)

PAUL 1968: "We're not just completely rock & roll. We're not just completely one kind of group. 'Cuz like, when we played in Hamburg, we didn't just do rock all evening 'cuz we had to have these sort of fat old businessmen coming in and saying... (jokingly) or THIN old businessmen, as well, were coming in and saying 'Play a mambo. Can you do a rhumba?' And we couldn't just keep saying no, you know, so we had to get into mambos and rhumbas a bit. So this kind of thing is like a pretty sort of smootchy ballad-- 'I Will.' I don't know if it's getting off the subject, but that's why there's great variety in this LP-- 'cuz in everything we do, you know, we just haven't got one bag, you know. And 'cuz, on one hand, you'll get something like 'I Will,' and then you'll get 'Why Don't We Do It In The Road,' you know. Just completely different things-- completely different feelings... But it's me singing both of them. It's the same fella. Uhh, and I've wrote both of them, you know. So you can't explain it. I don't know why I do 'Why Don't We Do It In The Road' shouting it like that... and then do this sort of smootchy laughing American 'Girl From Ipanema.'"

PAUL circa-1994: "I was doing a song, 'I Will,' that I had as a melody for quite a long time, but I didn't have lyrics to it. I remember sitting around (in India) with Donovan, and maybe a couple of other people. We were just sitting around one evening after our day of meditation, and I played him this one, and he liked it, and we were trying to write some words. We kicked around a few lyrics, something about the moon, but they weren't very satisfactory, and I thought the melody was better than the words... it's still one of my favorite melodies that I've written. You just occasionally get lucky with a melody, and it becomes rather complete, and I think this is one of them-- quite a complete tune."

JULIA (Lennon/McCartney)

JOHN 1972: "Me. Yoko helped me with this one."

JOHN 1980: "Julia was my mother. But it was sort of a combination of Yoko, and my mother blended into one. That was written in India... We wrote tons of songs in India."

PAUL circa-1994: "The interesting thing for me on 'Julia' is the finger-picking (guitar) style. He learned to fingerpick off Donovan or Gypsy Dave... That was John's song about his mum, folk finger-picking style, and a very good song."

BIRTHDAY (Lennon/McCartney)

PAUL 1968: "What happened was 'The Girl Can't Help It' was on television. That's an old rock film with Little Richard and Fats Domino and Eddie Cochran and a few others... and we wanted to see it, so we started recording at five o'clock. And we said, 'We'll do something, We'll make up a backing track.' So we kept it very simple-- twelve bar blues kind of thing. And we stuck in a few bits here and there in it, with no idea what the song was or what was gonna go on top of it. We just said, 'Okay. Twelve bars in A, and we'll change to D, and I'm gonna do a few beats in C.' And we really just did it like that... random thing. And we came back here to my house and watched 'The Girl Can't Help It.' Then we went back to the studio again and made up some words to go with it all. So this song was just made up in an evening. Umm, you know. We hadn't ever thought of it before then. And it's one of my favorites because of that. I think it works, you know, 'cuz it's just... It's a good one to dance to. Like the big long drum break, just 'cuz, normally we might have four bars of drums, but with this we just keep it going, you know. We all like to hear drums plodding on."

JOHN 1972: "Both of us (wrote it.)"

JOHN 1980: "'Birthday' was written in the studio. Just made up on the spot. I think Paul wanted to write a song like 'Happy Birthday Baby,' the old fifties hit. But it was sort of made up in the studio. It was a piece of garbage."

PAUL circa-1994: "We thought, 'Why not make something up?' So we got a riff going and arranged it around this riff. So that is 50-50 John and me, made up on the spot and recorded all in the same evening."

YER BLUES (Lennon/McCartney)

JOHN 1980: "'Yer Blues' was written in India, too. Up there, trying to reach God and feeling suicidal."

MOTHER NATURE'S SON (Lennon/McCartney)

PAUL 1968: "It says 'Born a poor young country boy' and I was born in Woolton hospital actually-- so it's a dirty lie."

JOHN 1980: "Paul. That was from a lecture of Maharishi where he was talking about nature, and I had a piece called 'I'm Just A Child Of Nature,' which turned into 'Jealous Guy' years later. Both inspired from the same lecture of Maharishi."

PAUL circa-1994: "I seem to remember writing 'Mother Nature's Son' at my dad's house in Liverpool... I've always loved the song called, 'Nature Boy' ...'Mother Nature's Son' was inspired by that song. I'd always loved nature, and when Linda and I got together, we discovered we had this deep love of nature in common. There might have been a little help from John with some of the verses.

EVERYBODY'S GOT SOMETHING TO HIDE EXCEPT FOR ME AND MY MONKEY (Lennon/McCartney)

JOHN 1980: "That was just a sort of nice line that I made into a song. It was about me and Yoko. Everybody seemed to be paranoid except for us two, who were in the glow of love. Everything is clear and open when you're in love. Everybody was sort of tense around us-- you know, 'What is SHE doing here at the session? Why is she with him?' All this sort of madness is going on around us because we just happened to want to be together all the time."

SEXY SADIE (Lennon/McCartney)

JOHN 1980: "That was inspired by Maharishi. I wrote it when we had our bags packed, and we're leaving. It was the last piece I wrote before I left India. I just called him, 'Sexy Sadie,' instead of (sings) 'Maharishi what have you done, you made a fool...' I was just using the situation to write a song, rather calculatingly but also to express what I felt. I was leaving the Maharishi with a bad taste. You know, it seems that my partings are always not as nice as I'd like them to be."

HELTER SKELTER (Lennon/McCartney)

PAUL 1968: "Umm, that came about just 'cuz I'd read a review of a record which said, 'And this group really got us wild, there's echo on everything, they're screaming their heads off.' And I just remember thinking, 'Oh, it'd be great to do one. Pity they've done it. Must be great-- really screaming record.' And then I heard their record, and it was quite straight, and it was very sort of sophisticated. It wasn't rough and screaming and tape echo at all. So I thought, 'Oh well, we'll do one like that, then.' And I had this song called 'Helter Skelter' which is just a ridiculous song. So we did it like that, 'cuz I like noise."

JOHN 1980: "That's Paul completely. All that (Charles) Manson stuff was built 'round George's song about pigs and this one... Paul's song about an English fairground. It has nothing to do with anything, and least of all to do with me."

PAUL 1985: "The Who had made some track that was the loudest, the most raucous rock 'n roll, the dirtiest thing they'd ever done. It made me think, 'Right. Got to do it.' I like that kind of geeking up. And we decided to do the loudest, nastiest, sweatiest rock number we could."

LONG LONG LONG (Harrison)

GEORGE 1980: "The 'you' in 'Long Long Long' is God. I can't recall much about it except the chords, which I think were coming from (Dylan's) 'Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands'-- D to E minor, A, and D-- those three chords and the way they moved."

REVOLUTION 1 (Lennon/McCartney)

JOHN 1980: "Completely me. We recorded the song twice. The Beatles were getting real tense with each other. I did the slow version (Revolution 1), and I wanted to put it out as a single: as a statement of the Beatles' position on Vietnam and the Beatles' position on revolution. The first take of 'Revolution' ...well, George and Paul were resentful and said it wasn't fast enough. Now, if you go into the details of what a hit record is and isn't, maybe. But the Beatles could have afforded to put out a slow, understandable version of 'Revolution' as a single, whether it was a gold record or a wooden record."

HONEY PIE (Lennon/McCartney)

PAUL 1968: "My dad's always played fruity old songs like that, you know. And I liked 'em. I like the melody of old songs, and the lyrics actually as well. There's some old lyrics, like, you know-- the woman singing about the man, and she's saying something about 'I wanna have his initial on my monogram.' You know what I mean? There's good lyrics and just good thoughts that you don't sort of hear so much these days, you know. And so, I would quite like to have been a 1920's writer, 'cuz I like that thing, you know. Umm, you know, up in top hat and tails and sort of coming-on to 'em. So this kind of number, I like that thing. But, uhh... So this is just me doing it, pretending I'm living in 1925."

GEORGE 1987: "John played a brilliant solo on 'Honey Pie' --sounded like Django Reinhardt or something. It was one of them where you just close your eyes and happen to hit all the right notes... sounded like a little jazz solo."

PAUL circa-1994: "I very much liked that old crooner style-- the strange fruity voice that they used, so 'Honey Pie' was me writing one of them to an imaginary woman, across the ocean, on the silver screen, who was called Honey Pie. It's another of my fantasy songs. We put a sound on my voice to make it sound like a scratchy old record. So it's not a parody, it's a nod to the vaudeville tradition that I was raised on."

SAVOY TRUFFLE (Harrison)

GEORGE 1977: "'Savoy Truffle' on The White Album was written for Eric (Clapton). He's got this real sweet tooth, and he'd just had his mouth worked on. His dentist said he was through with candy. So as a tribute I wrote, 'You'll have to have them all pulled out after the Savoy Truffle.' The truffle was some kind of sweet, just like all the rest-- cream tangerine, ginger sling-- just candy, to tease Eric."

GEORGE 1980: "'Savoy Truffle' is a funny one written whilst hanging out with Eric Clapton in the '60s. At that time he had a lot of cavities in his teeth and needed dental work. He always had a toothache, but he ate a lot of chocolates-- he couldn't resist them, and once he saw a box he had to eat them all. He was over at my house, and I had a box of 'Good News' chocolates on the table and wrote the song from the names inside the lid. I got stuck with the two bridges for a while, and Derek Taylor wrote some of the words in the middle-- 'You know that what you eat you are.'"

CRY BABY CRY (Lennon/McCartney)

JOHN 1968: "I've got another one here... a few words... I think I got them from an advert. 'Cry baby cry, make your mother BUY.' I've been playing it over and over on the piano. I've let it go now, but it will come back if I really want it. Sometimes I get up from the piano as if I've been in a trance, and I know I have let a few things slip away which I could have caught had I wanted something."

JOHN 1980: "A piece of rubbish."

REVOLUTION 9 (Lennon/McCartney)

GEORGE 1969: "Revolution Number 9 was all right, but it wasn't particularly like a Beatles thing. But then again, you know, it worked very well in the context of all those different songs."

JOHN 1971: "I thought I was painting in sound a picture of revolution, but I made a mistake, you know. The mistake was that it was anti-evolution."

JOHN 1980: "The slow version of 'Revolution' on the album went on and on and on, and I took the fade-out part, which is what they sometimes do with disco records now and just layered all this stuff over it. It was the basic rhythm of the original 'Revolution' going on with some twenty (tape) loops we put on, things from the archives of EMI. We were cutting up classical music and making different-size loops, and then I got an engineer tape on which some test engineer was saying, 'Number nine.' All those different bits of sound and noise are all compiled. There were about ten (tape) machines with people holding pencils on the loops-- some only inches long and some a yard long. I fed them all in and mixed them live. I did a few mixes until I got one I liked. Yoko was there for the whole thing, and she made decisions about which loops to use. It was somewhat under her influence, I suppose. Once I heard her stuff-- not just the screeching and the howling but her sort of word pieces and talking and breathing and all this strange stuff, I thought, My God, I got intrigued... so I wanted to do one. I spent more time on 'Revolution 9' than I did on half the songs I ever wrote. It was a montage."

GOOD NIGHT (Lennon/McCartney)

RINGO 1968: "Everybody thinks Paul wrote 'Goodnight' for me to sing, but it was John who wrote it for me. He's got a lot of soul, John has."

PAUL 1968: "John wrote it, mainly. It's his tune, uhh, which is surprising for John-- 'cuz he doesn't normally write this kind of tune. It's a very sweet tune, and Ringo sings it great, I think. The arrangement was done by George Martin, uhh, 'cuz he's very good at that kind of arrangement, you know-- very sort of lush, sweet arrangement."

JOHN 1980: "'Good Night' was written for Julian, the way 'Beautiful Boy' was written for Sean... but given to Ringo and possibly overlush."

PAUL circa-1994: "I think John felt it might not be good for his image for him to sing it, but it was fabulous to hear him do it, he sang it great. We heard him sing it in order to teach it to Ringo and he sang it very tenderly. John rarely showed his tender side, but my key memories of John are when he was tender, that's what has remained with me-- those moments where he showed himself to be a very generous, loving person. I always cite that song as an example of the John beneath the surface that we only saw occasionally... I don't think John's version was ever recorded."

ADDED BONUS:

HEY JUDE (Lennon/McCartney)

JOHN 1968: "Well, when Paul first sang 'Hey Jude' to me... or played me the little tape he'd made of it... I took it very personally. 'Ah, it's me,' I said, 'It's me.' He says, 'No, it's me.' I said, 'Check. We're going through the same bit.' So we all are. Whoever is going through a bit with us is going through it, that's the groove."

JOHN 1972: "That's his best song."

PAUL 1974: "I remember I played it to John and Yoko, and I was saying, 'These words won't be on the finished version.' Some of the words were: 'The movement you need is on your shoulder,' and John was saying, 'It's great!' I'm saying, 'It's crazy, it doesn't make any sense at all.' He's saying, 'Sure it does, it's great.'"

JOHN 1980: "He said it was written about Julian. He knew I was splitting with Cyn and leaving Julian then. He was driving to see Julian to say hello. He had been like an uncle. And he came up with 'Hey Jude.' But I always heard it as a song to me. Now I'm sounding like one of those fans reading things into it... Think about it: Yoko had just come into the picture. He is saying. 'Hey, Jude'-- 'Hey, John.' Subconsciously, he was saying, 'Go ahead, leave me.' On a conscious level, he didn't want me to go ahead. The angel in him was saying, 'Bless you.' The devil in him didn't like it at all because he didn't want to lose his partner."

PAUL 1985: "I remember on 'Hey Jude' telling George not to play guitar. He wanted to do echo riffs after the vocal phrases, which I didn't think was appropriate. He didn't see it like that, and it was a bit of a number for me to have to 'dare' to tell George Harrison-- who's one of the greats-- not to play. It was like an insult. But that's how we did a lot of our stuff."

PAUL circa-1994: "There is an amusing story about recording it... Ringo walked out to go to the toilet, and I hadn't noticed. The toilet was only a few yards from his drum booth, but he'd gone past my back, and I still thought he was in his drum booth. I started what was the actual take-- and 'Hey Jude' goes on for hours before the drums come in-- and while I was doing it I suddenly felt Ringo tiptoeing past my back rather quickly, trying to get to his drums. And just as he got to his drums, boom boom boom, his timing was absolutely impeccable."

REVOLUTION (Lennon/McCartney)

JOHN 1968: "On 'Revolution' I'm playing the guitar, and I haven't improved since I was last playing, but I dug it. It sounds the way I wanted it to sound."

JOHN 1972: "I should never have put that in about Chairman Mao. I was just finishing off in the studio when I did that."

JOHN 1980: "The statement in 'Revolution' was mine. The lyrics stand today. It's still my feeling about politics. I want to see the plan. That is what I used to say to Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. Count me out if it is for violence. Don't expect me to be on the barricades unless it is with flowers. For years, on the Beatles' tours, Brian Epstein had stopped us from saying anything about Vietnam or the war. And he wouldn't allow questions about it. But on one of the last tours, I said, 'I'm going to answer about the war. We can't ignore it.' I absolutely wanted the Beatles to say something about the war."

ON THE CONCEPT BEHIND THE WHITE ALBUM (during the time of its initial release)

JOHN 1968: "What we're trying to do is rock 'n roll, 'with less of your philosorock,' is what we're saying to ourselves. And get on with rocking because rockers is what we really are. You can give me a guitar, stand me up in front of a few people. Even in the studio, if I'm getting into it, I'm just doing my old bit... not quite doing Elvis Legs but doing my equivalent. It's just natural. Everybody says we must do this and that but our thing is just rocking. You know, the usual gig. That's what this new record is about. Definitely rocking."

PAUL 1968: "People seem to think that everything we do and sing is a political statement, but it isn't. In the end, it is always only a song. One or two tracks will make some people wonder what we're doing, but what we're doing is just singing songs."

JOHN 1968: "We've gone past those days when we wouldn't have used words because they didn't make sense-- or what we thought was sense. But of course, Dylan taught us a lot in this respect."

PAUL 1968: "It's a return to a more rock and roll sound. We felt it was time to step back because that's what we wanted to do. You can still make good music without going forward. Some people want us to go on until we vanish up our own B sides."

JOHN 1968: "Most of this session has been written on guitar 'cuz we were in India and only had our guitars there. They have a different feel about them. I missed the piano a bit because you just write differently. My piano playing is even worse than me guitar. I hardly know what the chords are, so it's good to have a slightly limited palette, heh heh."

PAUL 1968: "On 'Sgt Pepper' we had more instrumentation than we'd ever had so it was more of a production, but we didn't really want to go overboard like that this time. And we've tried to play more like a band this time-- only using instruments when we had to, instead of just using them for the fun of it. We wrote them with guitars. And, on a lot of his, John picks the guitar because he learned off Donovan when we were in India-- Donovan showed him how to fingerpick. And while he was learning fingerpicking, I was sort of playing acoustic as well, you know. We decided not to try and cover them up like we might do normally."

JOHN 1968: "We wrote about thirty new songs between us. Paul must have done about a dozen. George says he's got six, and I wrote fifteen. And look what meditation has done for Ringo-- after all this time he wrote his first song."

GEORGE 1969: "I think in a way it was a mistake doing four sides. Because first of all, it's too big for people to really get into it. For reviewers and also the public. Maybe now people have bought it, and if they've really listened to it since it was out, then you know, they'll all have their own favorites. That was the great thing about it-- there was all different types of music and types of songs. I find it heavy to listen to myself. In fact, I don't listen to it myself. I listen to mainly side one which I like very much, with Glass Onion, and I like (Happiness Is A) Warm Gun."

REMEMBERING THE WHITE ALBUM SESSIONS

RINGO 1976: "I had left the band on the White Album. We're doing this album, and I'm getting weird-- saying to me-self, 'I've gotta leave this band. It's not working,' you know. So I just said, 'Okay, I'm going on holiday,' and I went away for two weeks. (laughs) And, uhh, that's when I left the band. And then I got a telegram from John saying, 'Great drums' on the tracks we'd done. And I came back, and it was great, 'cuz George had set up all these flowers all over the studio saying welcome home. So then we got it together again."

PAUL 1987: "The White Album was the tension album. We were all in the midst of the psychedelic thing, or just coming out of it. In any case, it was weird. Never before had we recorded with beds in the studio and people visiting for hours on end, business meetings and all that. There was a lot of friction. It was the weirdest experience because we were about to break up-- that was tense in itself."

Special Addition to wonderfully appease your ears and eyes – Paul goes through the White Album track by track giving his interpations: https://binged.it/2nzO221

Please feel free to leave any comments or corrections and share these articles plus the blog's website with your friends, especially Beatles’ fans. You and they might also enjoy knowing more about my Love Songs CD and my novel, BEATLEMANIAC. Just click on the “My Shop” tab near the top of this page for full details.