Lennon talking about Beatles' songs
Builder
somewhere. But it's great stuff to read.
===============================================
Across the Universe: It was one that drove me out of bed. I didn't want to
write it. I was just slightly irritable and I went downstairs and I couldn't
get to sleep until I put it on paper, and then I was able to go to sleep. It
is a lousy track of a great song. I was so disappointed by it. The guitar is
out of tune and I'm singing out of tune because I was psychologically
destroyed. Nobody was supporting me or helping me with it, but we would
spend hours doing little detail cleaning on Paul's. When it came to mine,
somehow this atmosphere of looseness and casualness -- "Let's try a few
experiments" -- would come over. It was subconscious sabotage, yeah. He will
say this doesn't exist, that I'm paranoid, but I'm not paranoid. It's the
absolute truth. So I just gave the song to the World Wildlife Fund with no
plans to do anything else with it, but then Phil Spector dug it up for "Let
It Be."
===============================================
All My Loving: "All My Loving" is Paul, I regret to say [laughing]. Put that
laughter in brackets, right? It is a damn good piece. [Singing] "All my
loving, I will send to you. . . ." But I do play a pretty mean guitar in
back.
===============================================
And I Love Her: "And I Love Her" is Paul again. That was his first
"Yesterday." You know, the big ballad. I believe I put something in the
middle eight.
===============================================
Any Time at All: An effort at writing "It Won't Be Long." The old C to A
minor, like "Michelle."
===============================================
Baby You're a Rich Man: That is a combination of two separate pieces, Paul's
and mine, put together and forced into a song. One half was all mine
[singing]: "How does it feel to be one of the beautiful people, now that you
know who you are, da da da da. . . ." And then Paul comes in with [singing]:
"Baby you're a rich man. . . ." Because he just had this "Baby you're a rich
man" around.
===============================================
Back in the U.S.S.R.: Paul completely. I play the six-string bass on that --
the [singing while mock bass playing] "Da da da da. . . ." Try to write that
with your typewriter.
===============================================
Ballad of John and Yoko: Guess who wrote that one. There is only me and Paul
playing on the record. George and Ringo weren't there. I wrote it in Paris
on our honeymoon. We had it before we were married. It's a piece of
journalism, a folk song. It's like a traditional folk ballad.
===============================================
Beautiful Boy: Well, what can I say? It's about Sean. The music and lyric
came at the same time.
===============================================
Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite: The whole song is from a Victorian
poster, which I bought in a junk shop. It is so cosmically beautiful. It's a
poster for Pablo Fanques Fair, which is a genuine thing that must have
happened the 1800s. Everything in the song is from that poster, except the
horse wasn't called Henry. Now, there were all kinds of stories about Henry
the Horse being heroin. I had never seen heroin in that period. No, it's all
just from that poster.
===============================================
Birthday: That, like all the "Beatles" [White] album, was written in India.
Once we had our mantra, we sat in the mountains eating lousy vegetarian food
with a lot of time to write all those songs. Paul wanted to write a song
about birthdays, so he did that one. It's a piece of garbage, but there is
one interesting sound in it: We put the piano through a guitar amplifier and
put the tremolo in, which may have been the first time that happened.
===============================================
Blackbird: I gave Paul a line on that one, an important line, but it's
really all him. Paul is good at that kind of guitar thing. So is John
Denver.
===============================================
(The Continuing Story of) Bungalow Bill: At the Maharishi's meditation camp,
there was a guy who took a short break to go away and shoot a few poor
tigers and then came back to commune with God. I combined two characters for
the name -- Jungle Jim and Buffalo Bill. It's a sort of teenage
social-comment song. It's a bit of a joke. Yoko's on that one, singing along
with me.
===============================================
Can't Buy Me Love: That is Paul completely. There is a middle eight I
probably helped on. Let's see. [Singing] "Can't buy me love, can't buy me
love, love . . . money can't buy me love. Money can't da da da. . . . I
don't care too much for money, money can't buy me love. Can't buy me love. .
. ." Maybe I had something to do with the chorus. I don't know. I always
considered it his song.
===============================================
Carry That Weight: That's Paul. I think he was under strain in that period.
===============================================
Cleanup Time: It's a piano lick with words added. It's pretty
straightforward if you read the lyrics. I was talking to [producer] Jack
Douglas on the phone from Bermuda. We were talking about the Seventies and
about people getting out of drugs and alcohol and those kinds of things. And
he said, "Well, it's cleanup time, right?" and I said, "It sure is." That
was the end of the conversation. I went straight to the piano and just
started boogieing and "Cleanup Time" came out. Then I had the music and
thought, What is this about? I only had the title. So then I wrote the story
on top of the music. It's sort of a description of John and Yoko in their
palace, the Palace of Versailles, the Dakota. [Singing] "The queen is the
counting house, counting up the money; the king is in the kitchen. . . ."
===============================================
Come Together: It's me, writing obscurely around an old Chuck Berry thing.
Though it's nothing like the Chuck Berry song, they took me to court because
I admitted this once years ago. I left in one line, which is not just
Berry's: "Here come old flat top." I could have changed it to "Here comes
old iron face." The song remains independent of Chuck Berry or anybody else
on this earth. The thing was created in the studio. The lyrics are
gobbledygook and Come Together was an expression that [Timothy] Leary had
come up with when he was running for President. They'd asked me to write
them a campaign song. I tried and tried and tried and couldn't come up with
it. But I came up with this "Come Together," which would have been no good
for them. They couldn't have had a campaign song like that, right? But Leary
attacked me years later, saying I ripped him off. Well, I had written
another little thing called [singing] "Come together and join the party. . .
." It never got further than that. And they never came back to ask for the
song. I didn't rip him off. I had the song there waiting for him. It's a
funky record. It's one of my favorite Beatle tracks or one of my favorite
Lennon tracks, I'd say. It's funky, it's bluesy and I'm singing pretty well.
I like the sound of the record. You can dance to it. I'd buy it.
===============================================
A Day in the Life: Just as it sounds. I was reading the paper one day and I
noticed two stories. One was the Guinness heir who killed himself in a car.
That was the main headline story. He died in London in a car crash. On the
next page was a story about 4000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire. In the
streets, that is. They were going to fill them all. Paul's contribution was
the beautiful little lick in the song "I'd love to turn you on."
===============================================
Day Tripper: Mine. Clearly. The lick, the guitar break and the whole bit.
It's just a rock-'n'-roll song. Day trippers are people who go on day trips,
right? It was kind of, You are just a weekend hippie, get it?
===============================================
Dear Prudence: Me. Written in India. It's a song for Mia Farrow's sister,
who went slightly balmy, meditating too long, who wouldn't come out of the
little hut that we were living in. [Singing] "Dear Prudence, won't you come
out to play. . . ." They selected me and George to try and bring her out
because she would trust us. We got her out of the house -- she'd been locked
in for three weeks and wouldn't come out. She was trying to find God quicker
than anyone else. That was the competition in Maharishi's camp: who was
going to get cosmic first. What I didn't know was that I was already cosmic.
[Laughs]
===============================================
Dear Yoko: Ah, what can I say? [Singing] "Even after all these years..." It
says it all. The track's a nice track and it happens to be about my wife,
instead of "Dear Sandra" or some other person that another singer would sing
about who may or may not exist.
===============================================
Dr. Robert: Another of mine. It's mainly about drugs and pills, you know. It
was about myself. I was the one who carried all the pills when we were on
tour in the early days. Later, the roadies did it.
===============================================
Drive My Car: Paul's song. It has a Motown bass line. He got this "drive my
car" thing and the "beep beep beep" in the studio. I think we just threw it
in.
===============================================
Eight Days a Week: "Eight Days a Week" was the running title for "Help!"
before they came up with "Help!" And it was Paul's effort, though I helped
on a lot of it. It was his effort at getting a single for the movie, which
luckily turned out to be "Help!," which I wrote like bam bam, like that, and
got the single. They gave us the title and Paul wrote the song, but it was
never a good song. They changed the movie's name because "Help!" was a
better title.
===============================================
Eleanor Rigby: Paul's first verse, and the rest of the verses are basically
mine. Paul had the theme, the whole bit about Eleanor Rigby in the church
where a wedding had been. He knew he had this song and he needed help, but
rather than ask me to do the lyrics, he said, "Hey, you guys, finish up the
lyrics," while he sort of fiddled around with the track or the arranging or
something at another part of the giant studio at EMI. I sat there with Mal
Evans, a road manager who was a telephone installer, and Neil Aspinall, a
student accountant who became a road manager, and it was the three of us he
was talking to. I was insulted and hurt that he had thrown it out in the air
that way. Actually, he meant for me to do it, but he wouldn't ask. That was
the kind of insensitivity he had, which made me upset in the later years.
It's just the kind of person he is. It meant nothing to him. I wanted to
grab a piece of the song, so I wrote it with them sitting at that table,
thinking, How dare he throw it out in the air like that? Part of it we
worked out together: Paul didn't have the middle -- "Ahh, look at all the
lonely people." He and George and I were sort of sitting around the room
throwing things around and I left to go to the toilet. I heard someone say
that line and I turned around and said, "That's it!" I remember we first put
Father McCartney in place of Father McKenzie, but Paul thought his dad would
get upset by it. I can't take credit for the violins and the beautiful
arrangement. Jane Asher, who Paul was with at that time, turned him on to
Vivaldi and he got the arrangement straight out of his work. [Pretending to
play violin, singing] "Father McCartney, writing the words of a sermon that
no one will hear. . . ."
===============================================
The End: Paul's. Another unfinished song for "Abbey Road." It had a nice
line in it: "The love you take is equal to the love you make." It proves
that if Paul wants to, he can think.
===============================================
The Fool on the Hill: Paul again, proving that he can write lyrics if he's a
good boy.
===============================================
For No One: Paul's. One of my favorite pieces of his, too. That and "Here
There and Everywhere." A nice piece of work, I think.
===============================================
From Me to You: We were writing it in a van on an early tour heading for
Scotland or Newcastle or somewhere like that. The first line was mine. Then
we took it from there. It was far bluesier when we wrote it. That was truly
a combination-written song. It was written together singing into each
other's noses.
===============================================
Get Back: Paul's. That's a better version of "Lady Madonna." It's a
potboiler record. I think there's some underlying thing about Yoko in there.
Every time Paul sang the line "Get back to where you once belong," he'd look
at Yoko. Maybe he'll say I'm paranoid.
===============================================
Getting Better: It is a diary form of writing. All that "I used to be cruel
to my woman, I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved"
was me. I used to be cruel to my woman, and physically -- any woman. I was a
hitter. I couldn't express myself and I hit. I fought men and I hit women.
That is why I am always on about peace, you see. It is the most violent
people who go for love and peace. Everything's the opposite. But I sincerely
believe in love and peace. I am a violent man who has learned not to be
violent and regrets his violence. I will have to be a lot older before I can
face in public how I treated women as a youngster.
===============================================
Give Peace a Chance: All we were saying is give peace a chance. I didn't
write it with Paul, but he got credit on the song, because I wasn't ready to
take his name off yet.
===============================================
Glass Onion: It's just a throwaway song, à la everything I've written. The
"walrus was Paul" line was just to confuse everybody a bit more and,
especially, because I felt slightly guilty because I'd got Yoko and he'd got
nothing and he was losing me, 'cause I was going to quit. The walrus is
really just a bit of poetry that didn't mean anything. It could have been "I
am the fox terrier" and then this song would have gone, "Well here's another
clue for you all, the fox terrier was Paul."
===============================================
Good Day Sunshine: Paul's song completely. Maybe I threw in a line or
something.
===============================================
Good Morning, Good Morning: "Good Morning" is mine. It's a throwaway, a
piece of garbage, I always thought. The "Good morning, good morning" was
from a Kellogg's commercial. I always had the TV on very low in the
background when I was writing and it came over and then I wrote the song.
===============================================
Good Night: "Good Night" was written for Julian, the way "Beautiful Boy" was
written for Sean. I gave it to Ringo. It was possibly overlush.
===============================================
Got to Get You into My Life: Paul's. One of his best songs, I think. The
lyrics are good and I didn't write them. When I say that he can write lyrics
if he takes the effort, here's an example. The song actually describes his
experience taking acid; at least it's a result of that.
===============================================
Happiness Is a Warm Gun: No, it's not about heroin. A gun magazine was
sitting there with a smoking gun on the cover and an article that I never
read inside called "Happiness Is a Warm Gun." It took it right from there. I
took it as the terrible idea of just having shot some animal. It was at the
beginning of my relationship with Yoko and I was very sexually oriented
then. When were weren't in the studio, we were in bed. I call Yoko Mother or
Madam just in an offhand way. The rest doesn't mean anything. It's just
images of her.
===============================================
Happy Xmas (War Is Over): Yoko and I wrote it together. There's nothing more
to say about it. It was still the same message: We're just responsible as
the man who pushes the button, you know. The idea that somebody either is
going to give us power or has taken our power; that somebody has made us go
to war or not made us go to war; that God in the sky is a separate thing,
that we're separate nations, religions, whatever. It's all the same garbage.
As long as people imagine that someone is doing something to them and that
they have no control, then they have no control.
===============================================
A Hard Day's Night: It was pure commercial writing. The title came from an
off-the-cuff remark of Ringo's; you know, one of those malapropisms, only
not a real malapropism. It was a Ringoism. I put it in "In His Own Write"
and Dick Lester saw it and said we were going to use it for the title of the
movie and the next morning, I brought in the song. There was a little
competition between Paul and I about who got the A side and who got the
singles. If you notice the early days, the majority of singles -- in the
movies and everything -- were mine. And then, only when it became
self-conscious and inhibited did Paul start dominating the group a little
too much for my liking. But the early period is obviously I dominating the
group. I did practically every single with my voice except for "Love Me Do."
They were either my song or my voice or both. The only reason he sang on "A
Hard Day's Night" was because I couldn't reach the notes. [Singing] "When
I'm home, ev'rything seems to be right, when I'm home, feeling..."
===============================================
Hello Little Girl: That was me. That was actually my first song. [Singing]
"When I see you every day I say mmm hummm, hello little girl. . . ." It was
also a play on the song from the Thirties or Forties that went [singing,
again] "It's delightful, it's delicious, it's da de da de da. . . . Isn't it
a pity that you're such a scatterbrain. . . ." [Laughing] That always
fascinated me for some reason or another. It was probably connected to my
mother. She used to sing that one. It's all very Freudian. So I made "Hello
Little Girl" out of it. It was supposed to be a Buddy Holly-style song.
===============================================
Help!: I just wrote the song because I was commissioned to write it for the
movie. But later, I knew I really was crying out for help. It was my fat
Elvis period. You see the movie: He -- I -- is very fat, very insecure, and
he's completely lost himself. And I am singing about when I was so much
younger and all the rest, looking back at how easy it was.
===============================================
Helter Skelter: Paul completely. All that Manson stuff was build around
George's "Piggies" and this song of Paul's about an English fairground. It
has nothing to do with anything, and least of all to do with me.
===============================================
Here There and Everywhere: Paul's song completely, and one of my favorite
Beatle songs.
===============================================
Hey Jude: Paul 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. . . . 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.
===============================================
How Do You Sleep? It was like Dylan doing "Like a Rolling Stone," one of his
nasty songs, venting my anger or frustration or whatever and using Paul as
the object of it.
===============================================
I Am the Walrus: The first line was written on one acid trip one weekend.
The second line was written on the next acid trip the next weekend, and it
was filled in after I met Yoko. Part of it was putting down Hare Krishna.
All these people were going on about Hare Krishna, Allen Ginsberg in
particular. The reference to "Element'ry penguin" is the elementary, naïve
attitude of going around chanting, "Hare Krishna," or putting all your faith
in any one idol. I was writing obscurely, à la Dylan, in those days. The
walrus comes from "The Walrus and the Carpenter." "Alice in Wonderland." To
me, it was a beautiful poem. It never dawned on me that Lewis Carroll was
commenting on the capitalist and social system. I never went into that bit
about what he really meant, like people are doing with the Beatles' work.
Later, I went back and looked at it and realized that the walrus was the bad
guy in the story and the carpenter was the good guy. I thought, Oh, shit, I
picked the wrong guy.
===============================================
I Call Your Name: That was my song. The bulk of the "I call your name" part
was written around the time Paul was writing "Love Me Do," when there was no
Beatles and no group. And I just had it around. It was my effort at a kind
of blues original, and then I wrote the middle eight just to stick it in the
album when it came out years later. It was one of my first attempts at
writing a song.
===============================================
I Feel Fine: That's me completely, including the guitar lick and the first
feedback on any record anywhere. I defy anybody to find a record -- unless
it is some old blues record from the Twenties -- with feedback on it before
"I Feel Fine." Everybody was doing feedback and far-out stuff, but nobody
was putting it on record. It is the first feedback. I claim it for the
Beatles. Before Hendrix, before The Who, before anybody.
===============================================
If I Fell: That's my first attempt to write a ballad proper. "In My Life"
was the first one that worked as a ballad. This one has the same chord
sequence -- just around D and D minor and E minor, those kinds of things. It
is semi-autobiographical. It is really about this girl -- not about Cyn. It
has an intro like a Fifties song: "If I fell in love with you, would you
promise to be true [breaks into song] and help me understand. . . ." Paul
may have helped with the middle eight. So that shows I wrote sentimental
love ballads, silly love songs, way back then.
===============================================
I'll Be Back: Me completely. My variation on the chords of a Del Shannon
song. Paul wrote one, too. Mine was "I'll Be Back."
===============================================
I'll Follow the Sun: That's Paul again. It would be a funny tale: "Tomorrow
may rain, so I'll follow the sun. . . ." It's another early McCartney,
written almost before Beatles, I think.
===============================================
I'm Happy Just to Dance with You: That was written for George. I couldn't
have sung it.
===============================================
I'm Losing You: It's a song about the past, but I actually started writing
it when I called from Bermuda and I couldn't get through to Yoko. I was just
mad as hell, feeling lost and separate. But it's also a description of the
separation period in the early Seventies when I physically couldn't get
through. So it's not a specific incident referring to anything.
===============================================
I'm So Tired: I wrote it in India. I couldn't sleep. I'd been meditating all
day and then I couldn't sleep at night. We were not supposed to leave the
room because of this thing about staying in one room for five days. So I was
so tired I couldn't get to sleep. That's it. It's one of my favorite tracks.
===============================================
Imagine: Dick Gregory gave Yoko and me a little kind of prayer book. It is
in the Christian idiom, but you can apply it anywhere. It is the concept of
positive prayer. If you want to get a car, get the car keys. Get it?
"Imagine" is saying that. If you can imagine a world at peace, with no
denominations of religion -- not without religion but without this
my-God-is-bigger-than-your-God thing -- then it can be true. The song was
originally inspired by Yoko's book "Grapefruit." In it are a lot of pieces
saying, imagine this, imagine that. Yoko actually helped a lot with the
lyrics, but I wasn't man enough to let her have credit for it. I was still
selfish enough and unaware enough to sort of take her contribution without
acknowledging it. I was still full of wanting my own space after being in a
room with the guys all the time, having to share everything. So when Yoko
would even wear the same color as me, I used to get madly upset: We are not
the Beatles! We are not fucking Sonny and Cher!
===============================================
In My Life: It was the first song I wrote that was consciously about my
life. Before, we were just writing songs à la Everly Brothers, Buddy
Holly -- pop songs with no more thought to them than that. The words were
almost irrelevant. "In My Life" started out as a bus journey from my house
at 250 Menlove Avenue to town, mentioning all the places I could recall. I
wrote it all down and it was boring. So I forgot about it and laid back and
these lyrics started coming to me about friends and lovers of the past. Paul
helped with the middle eight.
===============================================
Instant Karma: It just came to me. Everybody was going on about karma,
especially in the Sixties. But it occurred to me that karma is instant as
well as it influences your past life or your future life. There really is a
reaction to what you do now. That's what people ought to be concerned about.
Also, I'm fascinated by commercials and promotion as an art form. I enjoy
them. So the idea of instant karma was like the idea of instant coffee,
presenting something in a new form. I just liked it.
===============================================
I Should Have Known Better: That's me. It's just a song. It doesn't mean a
damn thing.
===============================================
It's Only Love: It's mine. I always thought it was a lousy song. The lyrics
are abysmal. I always hated it.
===============================================
I Want to Hold Your Hand: We wrote that in the basement of Jane Asher's
house.
===============================================
Julia: Mine. Julia was my mother. The song was actually a combination of an
imagery of Yoko and my mother blended into one, you see.
===============================================
Lady Madonna: Paul. Good piano, but the song never really went anywhere.
Maybe I helped him on some of the lyrics, but I'm not proud of them, either.
===============================================
Let It Be: That's Paul totally. It had nothing to do with the Beatles. It
could have been Wings. I think he was inspired by "Bridge Over Troubled
Water." He wanted to write one.
===============================================
Like Dreamers Do: That is Paul. That was another one he had written when he
was a teenager and sort of resurrected and polished up to give to people
later on. That is on the audition tape that we sent to Decca, which since
came out as a bootleg. I sing "To Know Her Is to Love Her" and "Hello Little
Girl" and Paul sings "Like Dreamers Do."
===============================================
Little Child: That was another effort by Paul and me to write a song for
somebody. It probably was Ringo, because I think that's who we gave it to.
The better songs, whether they were written together inspirationally like
"She Loves You" and "From Me to You" or separately like "All My Loving,"
were inspired songs. They came from elsewhere and were delivered to us. The
ones we tried to write usually didn't work. They ended up on the B sides or
as tracks on records. And they sounded like it.
===============================================
The Long and Winding Road: That's Paul. He had a little spurt before we
finally split up. I think the shock of what was happening between Yoko and
me gave him the creative spurt for "Let It Be" and "The Long and Winding
Road." That was the last gasp from him.
===============================================
Lovely Rita: That's Paul writing a pop song. He made up people like Rita,
like a novelist. You hear lots of McCartney influence going on now on the
radio: these stories about boring people being postmen and writing home. I'm
not interested in writing about people like that. I like to write about me,
because I know me. I don't know anything about secretaries and postmen and
meter maids.
===============================================
Love Me Do: Paul's song, written when he was a teenager. I might have helped
on the middle eight, but I couldn't swear to it. I know he had the song
around, even in Hamburg, way, way before we were songwriters.
===============================================
Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds: My son Julian came in one day with a picture
he painted of a school friend of his named Lucy. He had sketched in some
stars in the sky and called it "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." The other
images were from "Alice in Wonderland." There was also the image of the
female who would someday come save me -- a "girl with kaleidoscope eyes,"
who would come out of the sky. It turned out to be Yoko, though I hadn't met
Yoko yet. So maybe it should be "Yoko in the Sky with Diamonds."
===============================================
Magical Mystery Tour: Paul's song. I helped with the lyrics, but it was
Paul's concept.
===============================================
Maxwell's Silver Hammer: That's Paul. I hate it. All I remember is the
track. He made us do it a million times. He did everything he could to make
it into a single. It never was and it never could have been. We spent much
more money and time on that song that on any other song on the whole album.
===============================================
Mean Mr. Mustard: Me writing another piece of garbage. I'd read somewhere in
the paper about this mean guy who was hiding five-pound notes, not up his
nose but somewhere else, and so I wrote about him. And no, it had nothing to
do with snorting cocaine.
===============================================
Michelle: "Michelle" is Paul up until the middle eight, where I suggested
this bit from Nina Simone. [Singing] "I love you." That bit. Going French
was Paul's idea.
===============================================
Mind Games: It was originally called "Make Love, Not War," but that was such
a cliché that you couldn't say it anymore. So I wrote the same message in an
obscure way -- mind games, mind guerrillas. It's the same as "Imagine" or
anything else. It's a nice track; I've always liked the sound of it. The
words are just expressing the same thing we were saying in the Sixties: love
and peace, without using the words love and peace. Love and peace became a
joke.
===============================================
New York City: That's mine, a bit of journalese, you know, a ballad. In New
York, I could walk around, where I still couldn't walk around in London.
===============================================
Nobody Loves You when You're Down and Out: Well, that says the whole story.
That exactly expressed the whole period I was apart from Yoko. I always
imagined Sinatra singing that one. I don't know why. It's kind of
Sinatrasque. He could do a perfect job with it. Are you listening, Frank?
You need a song that isn't a piece of nothing. Here's one for you. The horn
arrangement, everything's made for you. But don't ask me to produce it.
===============================================
No Reply: That's my song. That is the one that Dick James, the publisher
came and said was the first song I had ever written that resolved itself.
You know, with a story and. . . . It was my version of "Silhouettes." I had
the image, you know, of walking down the street and seeing her silhouette in
the window and not answering the phone, although I never called a girl on
the phone in my life. Phones aren't part of the English child's life like
cars are.
===============================================
Norwegian Wood: "Norwegian Wood" is my song completely. It's the first pop
song that ever had a sitar on it. I asked George to play this guitar lick on
the sitar. In the song, I guess I was very careful and paranoid, because I
didn't want my wife at the time to know that there really was something
going on outside the household. I always had some sort of affair going, so,
in the song, I was trying to be sophisticated in writing about an affair, in
such a smoke-screen way that you couldn't tell it was real. I can't remember
any specific woman that it was to do with. I don't know how the hell I got
to Norwegian wood.
===============================================
Nowhere Man: Me. It just came, the complete melody and the words, after six
hours of trying to write a song. [Singing] "Making all his nowhere plans for
nobody. . . ."
===============================================
Oh! Darling: That's a great song of Paul's that he didn't sing too well. I
always thought I could have sung it better. It was more my style than his.
But he wrote it, so what the hell, he was going to sing it. If he had any
sense, he would have let me sing it. [Laughing]
===============================================
Oh Yoko: I express myself through song and that's the song. It was a very
popular track. Everybody wanted it as a single, but I was sort of shy and
embarrassed, maybe because it didn't represent my image of myself of the
tough, hard-biting rock-'n'-roller with the acid tongue, you see.
===============================================
It's Only Love: It's mine. I always thought it was a lousy song. The lyrics
are abysmal. I always hated it.
===============================================
I Want to Hold Your Hand: We wrote that in the basement of Jane Asher's
house.
===============================================
Julia: Mine. Julia was my mother. The song was actually a combination of an
imagery of Yoko and my mother blended into one, you see.
===============================================
Lady Madonna: Paul. Good piano, but the song never really went anywhere.
Maybe I helped him on some of the lyrics, but I'm not proud of them, either.
===============================================
Let It Be: That's Paul totally. It had nothing to do with the Beatles. It
could have been Wings. I think he was inspired by "Bridge Over Troubled
Water." He wanted to write one.
===============================================
Like Dreamers Do: That is Paul. That was another one he had written when he
was a teenager and sort of resurrected and polished up to give to people
later on. That is on the audition tape that we sent to Decca, which since
came out as a bootleg. I sing "To Know Her Is to Love Her" and "Hello Little
Girl" and Paul sings "Like Dreamers Do."
===============================================
Little Child: That was another effort by Paul and me to write a song for
somebody. It probably was Ringo, because I think that's who we gave it to.
The better songs, whether they were written together inspirationally like
"She Loves You" and "From Me to You" or separately like "All My Loving,"
were inspired songs. They came from elsewhere and were delivered to us. The
ones we tried to write usually didn't work. They ended up on the B sides or
as tracks on records. And they sounded like it.
===============================================
The Long and Winding Road: That's Paul. He had a little spurt before we
finally split up. I think the shock of what was happening between Yoko and
me gave him the creative spurt for "Let It Be" and "The Long and Winding
Road." That was the last gasp from him.
===============================================
Lovely Rita: That's Paul writing a pop song. He made up people like Rita,
like a novelist. You hear lots of McCartney influence going on now on the
radio: these stories about boring people being postmen and writing home. I'm
not interested in writing about people like that. I like to write about me,
because I know me. I don't know anything about secretaries and postmen and
meter maids.
===============================================
Love Me Do: Paul's song, written when he was a teenager. I might have helped
on the middle eight, but I couldn't swear to it. I know he had the song
around, even in Hamburg, way, way before we were songwriters.
===============================================
Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds: My son Julian came in one day with a picture
he painted of a school friend of his named Lucy. He had sketched in some
stars in the sky and called it "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." The other
images were from "Alice in Wonderland." There was also the image of the
female who would someday come save me -- a "girl with kaleidoscope eyes,"
who would come out of the sky. It turned out to be Yoko, though I hadn't met
Yoko yet. So maybe it should be "Yoko in the Sky with Diamonds."
===============================================
Magical Mystery Tour: Paul's song. I helped with the lyrics, but it was
Paul's concept.
===============================================
Maxwell's Silver Hammer: That's Paul. I hate it. All I remember is the
track. He made us do it a million times. He did everything he could to make
it into a single. It never was and it never could have been. We spent much
more money and time on that song that on any other song on the whole album.
===============================================
Mean Mr. Mustard: Me writing another piece of garbage. I'd read somewhere in
the paper about this mean guy who was hiding five-pound notes, not up his
nose but somewhere else, and so I wrote about him. And no, it had nothing to
do with snorting cocaine.
===============================================
Michelle: "Michelle" is Paul up until the middle eight, where I suggested
this bit from Nina Simone. [Singing] "I love you." That bit. Going French
was Paul's idea.
===============================================
Mind Games; It was originally called "Make Love, Not War," but that was such
a cliché that you couldn't say it anymore. So I wrote the same message in an
obscure way -- mind games, mind guerrillas. It's the same as "Imagine" or
anything else. It's a nice track; I've always liked the sound of it. The
words are just expressing the same thing we were saying in the Sixties: love
and peace, without using the words love and peace. Love and peace became a
joke.
===============================================
New York City: That's mine, a bit of journalese, you know, a ballad. In New
York, I could walk around, where I still couldn't walk around in London.
===============================================
Nobody Loves You when You're Down and Out: Well, that says the whole story.
That exactly expressed the whole period I was apart from Yoko. I always
imagined Sinatra singing that one. I don't know why. It's kind of
Sinatrasque. He could do a perfect job with it. Are you listening, Frank?
You need a song that isn't a piece of nothing. Here's one for you. The horn
arrangement, everything's made for you. But don't ask me to produce it.
===============================================
No Reply: That's my song. That is the one that Dick James, the publisher
came and said was the first song I had ever written that resolved itself.
You know, with a story and. . . . It was my version of "Silhouettes." I had
the image, you know, of walking down the street and seeing her silhouette in
the window and not answering the phone, although I never called a girl on
the phone in my life. Phones aren't part of the English child's life like
cars are.
===============================================
Norwegian Wood: "Norwegian Wood" is my song completely. It's the first pop
song that ever had a sitar on it. I asked George to play this guitar lick on
the sitar. In the song, I guess I was very careful and paranoid, because I
didn't want my wife at the time to know that there really was something
going on outside the household. I always had some sort of affair going, so,
in the song, I was trying to be sophisticated in writing about an affair, in
such a smoke-screen way that you couldn't tell it was real. I can't remember
any specific woman that it was to do with. I don't know how the hell I got
to Norwegian wood.
===============================================
Nowhere Man: Me. It just came, the complete melody and the words, after six
hours of trying to write a song. [Singing] "Making all his nowhere plans for
nobody. . . ."
===============================================
Oh! Darling: That's a great song of Paul's that he didn't sing too well. I
always thought I could have sung it better. It was more my style than his.
But he wrote it, so what the hell, he was going to sing it. If he had any
sense, he would have let me sing it. [Laughing]
===============================================
Oh Yoko: I express myself through song and that's the song. It was a very
popular track. Everybody wanted it as a single, but I was sort of shy and
embarrassed, maybe because it didn't represent my image of myself of the
tough, hard-biting rock-'n'-roller with the acid tongue, you see.
===============================================
Old Dirt Road: Harry Nilsson and I wrote it together. It's just a song, you
know. Well, seeing we're stuck in this bottle of vodka together, we might as
well try and do something.
===============================================
One After 909: I wrote it when I was about 17, either right before or after
"Hello Little Girl," and it was resurrected for that album, probably for
lack of material. Nine has always been around. I'm not sure why. I was born
on the ninth of October, I lived at nine Newcastle Road, "Revolution 9."
Numerologically, I'm apparently a number three or six, so I'm not sure where
the nine comes from.
===============================================
Paperback Writer: It's sort of Paul's version of "Day Tripper," meaning a
rock-'n'-roll song with a nice guitar lick on it.
===============================================
Penny Lane: It was Paul's, based on a place I lived. Penny Lane is not only
a street but it's a district, like Times Square or Columbus Avenue. Penny
Lane is a suburban district where I lived with my mother and father up until
the age of four. Well, my father was a sailor, always at sea. My grandfather
lived in the house, too. It was one of those row houses like they always
picture in the early Beatles' life stories and in "Yellow Submarine" -- you
know, drooly versions of the four working-class lads. Anyway, I wrote some
of the lyrics. I can't remember which. It was all Paul's melody.
===============================================
Piggies: That's George's song about pigs. I gave him a line about forks and
knives and eating bacon.
===============================================
Please Please Me: That's me completely. It was my attempt at writing a Roy
Orbison song, would you believe it? I remember the day I wrote it. I
remember the pink eyelet down over the bed sitting in one of the bedrooms in
my house on Menlove Avenue, my auntie's place. I heard Roy Orbison doing
"Only the Lonely" on the radio. Also, I was always intrigued by the words to
a Bing Crosby song that went [singing]: "Please lend a little ear to my
pleas. . . ." I was intrigued by the double use of the word please. So it
was a combination of Roy Orbison and Bing Crosby.
===============================================
Polythene Pam: That was me, remembering a little event I had with a woman in
Jersey, an island off the French coast. A poet, England's answer to Allen
Ginsberg, a beatnik that looked like a beatnik who was from Liverpool, took
me to this apartment of his in Jersey. This was so long ago. This is all
triggering these amazing memories. So this poet took me to his place and
asked me if I wanted to meet this girl, Polythene Pam, who dressed up in
polythene. Which she did. In polythene bags. She didn't wear jack boots and
kilts -- I just sort of elaborated -- and no, she didn't really look like a
man. There was nothing much to it. It was kind of perverted sex in a
polythene bag. But it provided something to write a song about.
===============================================
P.S. I Love You: That's Paul's song. He was trying to write a "Soldier Boy,"
like the Shirelles' track. I might have contributed something. It was mainly
his song.
===============================================
Rain: "Rain" is me. It's the first backward tape on any record anywhere.
Before Hendrix, before The Who, before any fucker. I'd made the basic track
and took a rough mix home. I was so stoned out of my mind that I got back to
the house and, as I usually do, listened immediately to what I had done that
day. I put it on. Somehow, I got it on backward. I sat there, transfixed,
with the earphones on, with a big hash joint, just listening, and the whole
thing was backward! I ran in the next day and said, "I know what to do with
it! Listen to this!" and I played them the tape backward and made them all
play the song backward. I put that on the fade; the fade is me, singing
backward. [Singing backward] "Schwarnicnathenearness. . . ." That was a gift
of God -- of Ja -- you know, he's the god of marijuana, right, so Ja gets
that one. You know, I do confess that maybe one song came out with backward
music on it before "Rain": "They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!" But
that was a whole other thing.
===============================================
Revolution: You look at the song and see my feeling about politics,
radicalism and everything. I want to see the plan. Waving Chairman Mao
badges or being a Marxist or a thisist or thatist is going to get you shot,
locked up. If that's what you want, you subconsciously want to be a martyr.
You see, I want to know what you are going to do after you have knocked it
all down. Can't we use some of it? If you want to change the system, change
the system. Don't go shooting people.
===============================================
Revolution 9: Well, 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 has the
basic rhythm of the original "Revolution" going on with some 20 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, number nine, number nine." All those
different bits of sound and noises are all compiled. There were about ten
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 other songs
I ever wrote. It was a montage.
===============================================
Rocky Raccoon: Paul, can't you tell? Would I go though all that trouble
about Gideons Bible and that sort of thing? He maybe got stuck on a couple
of lines that I helped on, but mainly it's him.
===============================================
Run for Your Life: One of mine, sort of a throwaway. I've never liked it. It
was a favor to George. "I'd rather see you dead, little girl, than to be
with another man" is a line from an old blues song that Presley did.
===============================================
Scared: I was terrified when I wrote it, if you can't tell. It was the whole
separation from Yoko, thinking I lost the one thing I knew I needed. You
know, I think Mick Jagger took the song and turned it into "Miss You." When
I was in the studio, the engineer said, "This is a hit song if you just do
it faster." He was right, because "Miss You" is a fast version of my song. I
like Mick's record better. I have no ill feelings about it. It could have
been subconscious on Mick's part or conscious. Music is everybody's
possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it.
===============================================
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band: Paul wrote it after a trip to
America. The whole West Coast long-named-group thing was coming in, you
know, when people were no longer called the Beatles or the Crickets, they
were suddenly Fred and His Incredible Shrinking Grateful Airplanes. He got
influenced by that and came up with this idea of doing us as somebody else.
He was trying to put something between the Beatles and the public. It took
the "I" out of it some. Like in the early days, saying, "She loves you"
instead of "I love you." So that's the song.
===============================================
Sexy Sadie: It was inspired by the Maharishi. I wrote it when we had our
bags packed and we were leaving India. I called him Sexy Sadie. It said,
"Maharishi, what have you done, you made a fool of me. . . ." My partings,
it seems, are not as nice as I would like them to be.
===============================================
She Loves You: "She Loves You" was written right about the. . . Wait, "From
Me to You" was the third single after "She Loves You," wasn't it? Or was it
the other way around -- "From Me to You" after "Please Please Me"? Well,
"She Loves You" was written by the two of us together. I remember it was
Paul's idea. Instead of singing "I love you" again, Paul decided we would
have a third party passing and latch it onto something else. And that little
detail is apparently in his work now. I'm more inclined to write about
myself. The "woo woo" was taken from The Isley Brothers' "Twist and Shout."
We stuck it in everything -- this, "From Me to You." I don't know where the
"yeah, yeah, yeah" came from. I remember thinking when Elvis did "All Shook
Up" that it was the first time I heard "uh huh," "oh, yeah" and "yeah yeah"
all in the same song.
===============================================
She Said She Said: Mine. It's an interesting track. The guitars are great on
it. It was written after an acid trip in L.A., during a break in the
Beatles' tour where we were having some fun with a lot of girls. And Peter
Fonda came in and kept coming up to me, saying, "I know what it's like to be
dead." He was describing an acid trip he'd been on, but we didn't want to
hear about it. We were on acid and the sun was shining and the girls were
dancing and the whole thing was beautiful and Sixties and this guy -- I
really didn't know who the hell he was; he hadn't made "Easy Rider" or
anything and I knew Henry Fonda vaguely and Jane Fonda hadn't become a sex
symbol or a political, you know, I didn't think much of her, either -- this
guy wearing shades kept coming up and whispering, "I know what it's like to
be dead." It was scary. It was like, Don't tell me about it. I don't want to
know what it's like to be a dead.
===============================================
She's a Woman: That's Paul, with some contributions on some lines from me.
We put the words "Turns me on" in the song. We were so excited to say it,
you know, about marijuana and all that. This was the first use of the
expression on record. Very daring. [Laughs]
===============================================
(Just Like) Starting Over: It's what it says. I wrote it when I was in
Bermuda with Sean, while Yoko was attending to business. It just came out
that way. All the other songs were finished and it and "Cleanup Time" came
out sort of like fun after the work was done. It has the Fiftieish sound
because I have never really written a song that sounded like that period,
although that was my period, the music I identified with. So I just thought,
Why the hell not? In the Beatle days, that would have been taken as a joke.
One avoided clichés. But, of course, now those clichés are not clichés
anymore. I nearly took out the words "Spread our wings and fly" because I
thought, Oh, God, they'll all be saying, "What's that about Wings?" It has
nothing to do with Wings.
===============================================
Strawberry Fields Forever: Strawberry Fields is a real place. After I
stopped living at Penny Lane, I moved in with my auntie, who lives in the
suburbs in a nice semidetached place with a small garden and doctors and
lawyers and that ilk living around -- not the poor slummy kind of image that
was projected in all the Beatles stories. Near that home was Strawberry
Fields, a house near a boys' reformatory where I used to go to garden
parties as a kid with my friends Nigel and Pete. We would go there and hang
out and sell lemonade bottles for a penny. We always had fun at Strawberry
Fields. I used it as an image. Strawberry Fields forever. "Living is easy
with eyes closed. Misunderstanding all you see." It still goes, doesn't it?
Aren't I saying exactly the same thing now? The awareness apparently trying
to be expressed is -- let's say in one way I was always hip. I was hip in
kindergarten. Nobody seems to be as hip as me is what I was saying.
Therefore, I must be crazy or a genius -- "I mean it must be high or low,"
the next line. It was scary as a child, because there was nobody to relate
to. Neither my auntie nor my friends nor anybody could ever see what I did.
It was very, very scary and the only contact I had was reading about an
Oscar Wilde or a Dylan Thomas or a Vincent van Gogh -- all those books that
my auntie had that talked about their suffering because of their visions.
Because of what they say, they were tortured by society for trying to
express what they were. I saw loneliness.
===============================================
Taxman: My contribution to "Taxman," which was one of the first songs George
ever wrote, really, was the words "pennies on your eyes" and some other
lyrics.
===============================================
Tell Me Why: They needed another song -- an upbeat song -- so I just knocked
it off.
===============================================
There's a Place: "There's a Place" was my attempt at a sort of Motown black
thing, but it says the usual Lennon things: "In my mind there's no sorrow."
It's all in your mind.
===============================================
Things We Said Today: It's Paul's. A good song.
===============================================
Ticket to Ride: That's me, one of the earliest heavy-metal records. Paul's
contribution was the way Ringo played the drums.
===============================================
Tip of My Tongue: Paul's garbage, not my garbage.
===============================================
Tomorrow Never Knows: That's me in my Tibetan Book of the Dead period. The
expression "Tomorrow never knows" is another of Ringo's. I gave it a
throwaway title because I was a bit self-conscious about the lyrics, so I
took another Ringoism to sort of take the edge off the heavy philosophical
lyrics.
===============================================
Two Virgins: When I met Yoko, before I realized I was going to live with
her, I was interested in her as an artist. I was always shy with Yoko. One
time, my ex-wife was away somewhere and Yoko and I did acid. We had never
made love. Because I was so shy, instead of making love, we went upstairs
and made tapes. I had this room full of different tapes and loops where I
wrote Beatle stuff. So we made a tape all night. She was doing her funny
voices and I was pushing all different buttons on my take recorder and
getting sound effects. Then, as the sun rose, we made love. That was it.
That was "Two Virgins." We had known each other two years by then. So that
was the record and the album cover of us naked was a way to show purity.
Everybody was sort of upset. The fact that two people were naked. We thought
it was insane that everybody was so upset about it.
===============================================
Watching the Wheels: That's a kind of song version of the love letter from
John and Yoko [which appeared in "The New York Times"]. I've been doing
this -- watching the wheels. People have been saying I'm lazy, dreaming my
life away, all my life. Pop stars were getting indignant in the press that I
wasn't making records. I couldn't believe it; they were acting like
mothers-in-law. I don't know whether it was Mick or who. What's it got to do
with them if I never do another record in my life?
===============================================
We Can Work It Out: Paul's first half, my middle eight. He came to the house
with the first bit and I came up with [singing] "Life is very short and
there's no time for fussing and fighting my friend. . . ."
===============================================
Whatever Gets You Through the Night: As [producer] Jack Douglas put it, that
was a novelty record. It's the only one I've done since I left the Beatles
to get to number one. We didn't get a good take on the musicians, but I
quite like the words. It was more commercial then, say, "Imagine," but in my
opinion, "Imagine" should have been number one and "Whatever Gets You
Through the Night" should have been number 39. It just doesn't make sense.
Who knows?
===============================================
Why Don't We Do It in the Road: That's Paul. He even recorded it all by
himself in another room. That's how it was getting in those days. It's him
drumming, him playing the piano, him singing, just because it was getting to
where he wanted to do it like that. Still, he couldn't break from the
Beatles. I don't know what it was. I can't speak for George, but I know I
was always hurt when Paul knocked off something without involving us in it.
It's a fun track, but there's nothing to it.
===============================================
With a Little Help from My Friends: Paul with a little help from me. I did
some of the lyrics and all those little licks going on in the background
from the second voice.
===============================================
Within You Without You: I think that is one of George's best songs, one of
my favorites of his. I like the arrangement, the sound and the words. He is
clear on that song. you can hear his mind is clear and his music is clear.
It's his innate talent that comes through on that song, that brought that
song together. George is responsible for Indian music getting over here.
That song is a good example.
===============================================
Woman: [From "Double Fantasy."] That's to Yoko and to all women, in a way.
Because of my history of relationships with women is a very poor one -- very
macho, very stupid, very typical of a certain type of man, I suppose, which
is very sensitive and insecure but acting aggressive and macho. You know,
trying to cover up the feminine side, which I still have a tendency to do.
But I'm learning to acknowledge that it's all right to be soft. Because that
side of me is the comfortable side of me. It's like I tend to put my cowboy
boots on when I'm insecure, whereas now I'm in sneakers and it's comfy. So
"Woman" is pretty self-explanatory.
===============================================
Woman Is the Nigger of the World: The statement is something Yoko said in
1968 in a magazine interview. It is such a powerful statement. A few years
later, I turned it into a song. It was actually the first women's liberation
song that went out. It was before "I Am Woman." It was banned again, but it
was talked about. It got the message across. The whole story is the title.
The lyrics are just fill-in. I felt the lyrics didn't live up to Yoko's
title.
===============================================
World Without Love: McCartney. I think he had the whole song before the
Beatles and resurrected it to give to Peter & Gordon. Peter is now the
famous Peter Asher. I don't know what became of Gordon. Anyway, Paul never
sang it. Not on a record, anyway. We always used to crack up at the lyrics.
[Laughing] "Please lock me away. . . ."
===============================================
Ya Ya: It was a contractual obligation to Morris Levy as a result of a court
case. It was a humiliation, and I regret having to be in that position, but
I did it. That's the way it turned out. Julian was playing the drums and I
just left on the piano and sang, "Ya ya."
===============================================
Yellow Submarine: Paul's baby. Donovan helped with the lyrics. I helped with
the lyrics. We virtually made the track come alive in the studio, but it was
based on Paul's inspiration, his idea, his title. I count it as his song. It
was written for Ringo.
===============================================
Yer Blues: Written in India. The same thing: up there trying to reach God
and feeling suicidal.
===============================================
You Know My Name (Look Up My Number): That was a piece of unfinished music
that I turned into a comedy record with Paul. Paul was making a phone call
and I saw the phone book was on the piano. He said something like "You know
the name, look up the number." I just changed it. It was going to be a Four
Tops kind of record. Brian Jones is playing sax on it, I believe.
===============================================
You Never Give Me Your Money: That's Paul, another unfinished song stuck
with the others on "Abbey Road."
===============================================
Your're Gonna Lose That Girl: Me.
===============================================
Your Mother Should Know: Guess who. Paul, of course.
===============================================
You've Got to Hide Your Love Away: That's me in my Dylan period. I am like a
chameleon, influenced by whatever is going on. If Elvis can do it, I can do
it. If The Everly Brothers can do it, me and Paul can. Same with Dylan.
===============================================
yes
"Builder" <nos...@buildit.com>
> Across the Universe: It was one that drove me out of bed. I didn't want to
> write it. I was just slightly irritable and I went downstairs and I
> couldn't
> get to sleep until I put it on paper, and then I was able to go to sleep.
> It
> is a lousy track of a great song. I was so disappointed by it. The guitar
> is
> out of tune and I'm singing out of tune because I was psychologically
> destroyed. Nobody was supporting me or helping me with it, but we would
> spend hours doing little detail cleaning on Paul's. When it came to mine,
> somehow this atmosphere of looseness and casualness -- "Let's try a few
> experiments" -- would come over. It was subconscious sabotage, yeah. He
> will
> say this doesn't exist, that I'm paranoid, but I'm not paranoid. It's the
> absolute truth. So I just gave the song to the World Wildlife Fund with no
> plans to do anything else with it, but then Phil Spector dug it up for
> "Let
> It Be."
This statement puzzles me a bit.
>The guitar is out of tune and I'm singing out of tune because I was
>psychologically
> destroyed.
This is january 1968 and John's guitar is "out of tune" and he "was
psychologically
destroyed". And he ends up blaming it on Paul.
I beleive that John had no idea in what derection he wanted the song to go
and they tried to "please him"
and it ended up being not the best recording thy made.
Soon afterwards they left for India and John came back with a stronger mind.
His White Album songs was terrific.
John was paranoid and I blame it on John being insecure...
It's complete nuts to say that Paul sabotaged his songs when you're hearing
the final results.
I don't know any who beleives in this shit(apart from a certain Derek...)
t...@aerovons.com
He wasn't always the best judge of his own stuff. That first version
of "ATU" is the best to me, magical, childlike and wonderful.
He also got the "Eight Days a Week" thing wrong, it was "Eight Arms to
Hold You" that was the working title for "Help." "Eight Days" was on
"BFS" John;)
TH
MikeLawyr2
>
> - Show quoted text -
Getting things wrong is what bothers me. Disinformation is
perpetuated. Memories lag and sag. We really need for guys like
Lewisohn to dig to the bottom of all this stuff while there are still
people around to verify things. Who played tambourine on We Can Work
It Out? To what extent did Ringo propose drum bits that delighted the
others? Etc.
Frank from Deeetroit
"Builder" <nos...@buildit.com> wrote in message
news:GwVek.1330$Zc5....@bignews8.bellsouth.net...
John sounds terribly insecure about his songs and jealous about Paul's work.
I suspect that the artist is his/her own strongest critic.
Frank from Deeetroit
Another observation, John lived at 251 Menlove Avenue, not 250 Menlove
Avenue as cited here. Could have been incorrectly transcribed.
Musicman59
Frank from Deeetroit
"poisoned rose" <whydoIst...@usenet.com> wrote in message
news:gl8fk.18046$N87....@nlpi068.nbdc.sbc.com...
> "Frank from Deeetroit" <dadur...@voyager.net> wrote:
>
>> Another observation, John lived at 251 Menlove Avenue, not 250 Menlove
>> Avenue as cited here. Could have been incorrectly transcribed.
>
Yes he is a good G-d.
TWICE you quote over 1500 lines just to add a tiny comment at
> the end?
Yes I did.
>
> EDIT!
Ooooops, sorry 'bout that.
Frank
Jeff
Who cares..is my feeling Today.
O'Leary III
> Yes he is a good G-d.
It's go-ng ar-und.
Frank from Deeetroit
"O'Leary III" <moo-RA...@rmb.com> wrote in message
news:obCdnRrSOu7e1eDV...@comcast.com...
> Frank from Deeetroit wrote:
>
>> Yes he is a good G-d.
>
> It's go-ng ar-und.
What's go-ng ar-und?
O'Leary III
>>> Yes he is a good G-d.
>> It's go-ng ar-und.
>
> What's go-ng ar-und?
Mis-ing let-ers.
Frank from Deeetroit
You ob-li-us-y d-n't k-ow w-at G-d is.
O'Leary III
> You ob-li-us-y d-n't k-ow w-at G-d is.
No. I use entire words when I can.
The Arranger
Jehovah, Jehovah, Jehova, Jehova!
The Arranger
abe slaney
wrote:
> You ob-li-us-y d-n't k-ow w-at G-d is.
G-d is P-t Saj-k?
O'Leary III
> How often do you use "obvliously"?
Never.
ermitano
> I'm sure this is a repost - I think I got it from a Playboy interview
> somewhere. But it's great stuff to read.
>
> ===============================================
Thanks for this post. I've never read all this thing completely.
Lennon is paranoid and he knew that. It's really hard to say when
Lennon is talking seriously or not, because he is always making jokes,
but then he is sincere too.. and then exaggerated.
Frank from Deeetroit
> Frank from Deeetroit wrote:
>
>> You ob-li-us-y d-n't k-ow w-at G-d is.
>
>
> No. I use entire words when I can.
>
When God is spelled G-d, it is out of respect. The idea being that whatever
the word "god" is written on, should that object get thrown away or
destroyed, the act of destroying that object is disrespectful to G-d.
That is the reason for the missing letter in G-d.
Frank from Deeetroit
>> whatever
>> the word "god" is written on, should that object get thrown away or
>> destroyed, the act of destroying that object is disrespectful to G-d.
>
>
> Feel the love.
Citation?
RichL
> Citation?
Didn't you hand those out a lot before you retired? ;-)
Frank from Deeetroit
"RichL" <rple...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:XOydnYLV7vDRFePV...@supernews.com...
> Frank from Deeetroit <dadur...@voyager.net> wrote:
>
>> Citation?
>
> Didn't you hand those out a lot before you retired? ;-)
>
>
Yes, early on, before working plain clothes, then before supervision. Hated
writing skids... Revenue maker, not a public educator.
O'Leary III
> Revenue maker, not a public educator.
Like all drug laws.
fatt...@yahoo.com
> what is the clean up song he referenced?
He is referring to Clean Up Time on Double Fantasty.