The Beatles, The #1 Artist of the Rock Era, Part Six

 

(Continued from Part Five)

In 1966, the Beatles released the album Yesterday and Today only to American audiences.  Although the song is also included on their next album, their parody of "Dr. Robert" first appears here.

 

"Dr. Robert" is Robert Freymann, a 60-year-old physician from Germany who had a New York City clinic on East 78th Street.  Freymann gave amphetamine-laced shots of vitamin B-12 regularly to celebrity patients.  

Lennon and McCartney wrote it between the end of their British tour on December 12, 1965 and before their first recording session for their next album on April 6, 1966.  Harrison played maracas on the track, recorded on April 17, and vocals were added on the 19th, with Lennon delivering the biting sarcastic lead.

Another song first introduced on the album Yesterday and Today is "And Your Bird Can Sing"; "bird" being a British slang term for "girl".  Harrison and McCartney played the signature dual-harmony lead guitar parts live without overdubbing.

 

"If I Needed Someone" also appeared on Yesterday and Today and also later on the European release of Rubber Soul.

The group learned something about culture on their travels.  When they toured the Philippines after the release of Yesterday and Today, they had an unintentional incident when due to their naivete and that of Epstein, they declined an invitation to have breakfast with Imelda Marcos, first lady of the country.  Epstein's policy was never to accept such official invitations, but in this case, it was considered a slight to the Marcos regime.  The riots that followed the offense put the group in danger and they were able to escape but not without much stress.  

The group encountered more difficulty as the result of comments made by Lennon in a March interview with British reporter Maureen Cleave.  "We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first - rock 'n' roll or Christianity," Lennon was reported to have said.

Lennon's comments caused an uproar among conservatives in the U.S., The Vatican protested, and the group's records were banned by Spain, Holland and South Africa.  Lennon said at a press conference that he was referring to how other people view their success and apologized for his comments.

The Beatles released the album Revolver, another album that advanced Rock in both songwriting complexity and experimentation in the studio but also its diversity of material, featuring everything from groundbreaking string arrangements to psychedelia. 

As they had first done on "Drive My Car", the Beatles worked past midnight on 25 of the 33 recording sessions for Revolver. Lennon and McCartney knew they needed a song for Ringo.  Remember the scene in A Hard Day's Night where John, Paul, and George each got a bundle of fan letters while Ringo got an entire pile?  That was based on real life.  In America, especially, Ringo was the most popular Beatle, the affable everyday Beatle.  So Ringo needed a song.

"Yellow Submarine" combined two separate pieces from both John and Paul.  McCartney thought up the idea, a children's song for Ringo about a yellow submarine with a catchy chorus in which the other vocalists could prop up Starr's lead, as he explained in the book Anthology:

           I remember lying in bed one night.  In that

           moment before you're falling asleep - that

           little twilight moment when a silly idea 

           comes into your head - and thinking of

           "Yellow Submarine":  "We all live in a

           yellow submarine..."  I quite like children's

           things; I like children's minds and

           imagination.  So it didn't seem uncool to

           me to have a pretty surreal idea that was

           also a children's idea.  I thought also,

           with Ringo being so good with children -

           a knockabout uncle type - it might not be

           a bad idea for him to have a children's

           song, rather than a very serious song.  He

           wasn't that keen on singing."

This wasn't a song that demanded perfection; it's theme was fun!  It also played into Martin's previous career as a comedy record producer.  Martin suggested raiding the EMI closet of trinkets to create sound effects, including whistles, chains, tin cans, and even garbage bins.  Roadie Mal Evans famously strapped a marching band bass drum to his chest and led a line of EMI staffers as well as Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, Marianne Faithful, and Harrison's wife Pattie Boyd around the space for the final refrain.

"Yellow Submarine" was a #1 song in every major country except the United States, where it was #2, and sold over one million copies.  

If Rubber Soul was a giant leap forward for the group, Revolver was a daring sonic adventure.  The Beatles covered an ever-expanding list of subjects on the album.  

One of the Beatles' most-loved songs is this one.  "My mum's favorite cold cream was Nivea, and I love it to this day.  That's the cold cream I was thinking of in the description of the face Eleanor keeps "in a jar by the door".   

As Paul wrote in an article in the New Yorker magazine last month:

           Growing up, I knew a lot of old lades--partly

           through was was called Bob-a-Job Week,

           when Scouts did shores for a shilling.  You'd

           get a schilling for cleaning out a shed or

           mowing a lawn.  I wanted to write a song

           that would sum them up.  

           "Eleanor Rigby" is based on an old lady

            that I got on with very well.  I found out

            that she lived on her own, so I would go

            around there and just chat, which is sort of

            crazy if you think about me being some

            young Liverpool guy.  

            Later, I would offer to go and get her

            shopping.  She'd give me a list and I'd

            bring the stuff back, and we'd sit in her

            kitchen.  I still vividly remember the

            kitchen, because she had a little crystal-

            radio set.  Crystal radios were quite 

            popular in the 1920's and '30's.  So I

            would visit, and just hearing her stories

            enriched my soul and influenced the

            songs I would later write.

            

The Beatles employed a string octet for "Eleanor Rigby", which Jonathan Gould calls "a true hybrid, conforming to no recognizable style or genre of music" in his book Can't Buy Me Love:  The Beatles, Britain and America.  Although "Eleanor Rigby" reached #1 in Canada and New Zealand, it shockingly stalled at #11 in the United States, making it the cream of the crop in our listing of The Top Unknown/Underrated Songs of the Rock Era*.

 

An example of the transformative studio techniques the group began to employ is "Tomorrow Never Knows".  Lennon got inspiration for his lyrics from Timothy Leary's The Psychedelic Experience:  A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead.  Recording of the track involved staffing by engineers or band members at eight tape decks at various locations in the studio.  Each deck randomly varied the movement of a tape loop the band had recorded and Martin created the master recording by sampling the incoming data fed by each tape deck.  In 2021, this may seem like no big deal, although few artists are able to do it; it was revolutionary at the time.

McCartney wrote this song while was sitting around Lennon's pool.  Both he and Lennon mention this as one of the most underrated Beatles songs.  Paul, John and George recorded the amazing harmony vocals over three days--"Here There And Everywhere".

Harrison was beginning to emerge as a prominent songwriter in his own right.  Frustrated to this point in getting his compositions on Beatles albums due to the quality of Lennon & McCarty songs, Harrison landed three on Revolver, including "Taxman", the first political song to be included by the group.  But George didn't write it alone.

 

"I remember the day he (George) called to ask for help on 'Taxman', one of his first songs," Lennon said in 1980.  "I threw in a few one-liners to help the song along because that's what he asked for," John continued.  "It had been John and Paul for so long; he'd been left out because he hadn't been a songwriter up until then."

 

The Beatles' songwriting had progressed to where they were either singing to themselves, as in a mirror, or to a good friend.  John Robertson, in his book The Complete Guide to the Music of the Beatles called "For No One" "another remarkable McCartney ballad, melodically sophisticated and lyrically mature."

 

John wrote "I'm Only Sleeping" as a tribute to staying in bed, which he often did even when he wasn't sleeping.  The yawning effect in the song is actually a guitar recorded backward.  You can hear a few seconds before the yawn comes in, John said, "Yawn Paul."

One night when the Beatles were staying at a house in Benedict Canyon from August 23-28, 1965, the group had a few friends over.  All at once, actor Peter Fonda came over and sat next to John--no one knows how he got there.  Peter leaned over to John and said, "I know what it's like to be dead."  

Fonda was referring to an accident when he was a boy and accidentally shot himself in the stomach, but Lennon had no idea what Peter was talking about and didn't like the experience.

John remembered the event and later recorded himself experimenting with lyrics while playing acoustic guitar, as such:  "He said, I know what it's like to be dead, I said...I said, I must be out of my head, he said..."  He didn't have much and so put the song aside.  

Lennon then changed the "he" to "she" and wrote the middle eight.  "The beginning had been around for days and days and so I wrote the first thing that came into my head," Lennon said later, "and it was 'When I was a boy', in a different beat but it was real because it just happened.  A lot of childhood was coming out, anyway...that was pure."

Geoff Emerick, in his book Here, There And Everywhere, said at the very end, when most of Revolver was mixed and ready to be mastered, "someone realized that the album was a song short...if they were too short, there would be complaints - or worse yet, returns - from consumers.  Not only was there a release date set, and a hungry public clamoring to hear the finished album, but the Beatles were booked to begin a European tour just days after the sessions ended, so there was no time to spare.

 

John said he had an as let untitled song that hadn't been fully worked out yet, but with the band set to be in Munich, Germany two days later, they had no choice but to finish it in the studio.  He tried to whip up the rest of his bandmates to work hard to finish it and evidently irritated Paul to the point where he walked out of the studio.  "She Said She Said" features a backwards guitar solo.

We want to hear the other contributions from Harrison with two more.  "All I needed to do was keep on writing and maybe eventually I would write something good," he said at the time.  

This song from George is "about the avalanche of thoughts that are so hard to write down or say or transmit."  It is believed that Harrison wrote in in the middle months of the year at Kinfauns, his home in Surrey, England pictured above.

 

In the book Revolver:  How the Beatles Reimagined Rock 'n' Roll, author Robert Rodriguez says this song reflects Harrison's search for increased awareness, and "the faster and more wide-reaching his thoughts came, the greater the struggle to find the words to express them."  Here is  "I Want To Tell You".

Harrison intended for this next song to be a love ballad for his new wife Pattie.  But his new faith kept tugging at him, about how life was short and the importance of living life prudently.  "Love You To" features North Indian classical instrumentation, consisting of a tabla, a pair of hand drums, his sitar and a tambura.

Two months after this song was recorded, Harrison met sitar guru Ravi Shankar, who agreed to train George on the instrument.  “It is strange to see pop musicians with sitars. I was confused at first. It had so little to do with our classical music. When George Harrison came to me, I didn’t know what to think," Shankar said in a 1971 documentary.  But I found he really wanted to learn. I never thought our meeting would cause such an explosion, that Indian music would suddenly appear on the pop scene."

Revolver's tone was far more dark than anything the Beatles had released previously; half of the 14 songs have some form of "die" or "dead" in their lyrics.  So this happy song, which leads off side two, is a positive, welcome change.  "It was really very much a nod to the Lovin Spoonful's "Daydream", the same traditional, almost trad-jazz feel," Mc Cartney said in the Barry Miles biography Many Years From Now.  "That was our favorite record of theirs," Paul said.  Here is "Good Day Sunshine".

We are halfway through our tribute to The #1 Artist of the Rock Era*, the Beatles.  Join us for Part Seven!