The Beatles by Steve Turner Read Free Book Online

free clinics and legions of exotic street people. Pattie’s sister Jenny was living in the area. “You are our leader, George,” one hippy shouted as he set off walking from the cornerof Haight and Masonic with Pattie, Neil Aspinall and Derek Taylor beside him. “You know where it’s at.”
    George was taken aback at the drug-glazed adoration of those who pushed flowers, poems, posters and drugs at him. “It’s you who should be leading yourself,” he told his would-be followers. “You don’t want to be following leaders – me or anyone else.” When he arrived at a park, George sat on the grass, listened to other people’s songs and then started to sing ‘Baby You’re A Rich Man’.
    The rich man in Paul’s section is reputed to be manager Brian Epstein and in a demo version of the song, John maligns him by singing ‘Baby, you’re a rich fag Jew’. “The point was,” said John, “stop moaning. You’re a rich man and we’re all rich men.”

HELLO GOODBYE
    Alistair Taylor, Brian Epstein’s assistant, remembered once asking Paul how he wrote his songs, and Paul took him into his dining room to give a demonstration on a hand-carved harmonium. He told Taylor to shout out the opposite of whatever he sang as he struck the keys. And so it went – black and white, yes and no, stop and go, hello and goodbye. “I’ve no memory at all of the tune,” Taylor later recounted. “You have to remember that melodies are as common around the Beatles as bugs in May. Some grow into bright butterflies and others shrivel and die. I wonder whether Paul really made up that song as he went along or whether it was running through his head already. Anyway, shortly afterwards, he arrived at the office with a demo tape of the latest single – ‘Hello Goodbye.’”
    The last part of the record, where the Beatles repeat the line ‘Hela, hey, aloha’ came about spontaneously in the studio. (‘Aloha’ is an affectionate form of Hawaiian greeting.)
    If ‘Hello Goodbye’ was nothing more than a word game set to music, in the mystical climate of 1967, Paul was expected to offer a deeper interpretation. In an interview with Disc , he gallantly tried to produce an explanation: “the answer to everything is simple. It’s a song about everything and nothing…to have white. That’s the amazing thing about life.”
    ‘Hello Goodbye’ was released as a single in November 1967 and topped the charts in both Britain and America. The final ‘aloha’ chorus was used in the Magical Mystery Tour film.

ONLY A NORTHERN SONG
    Originally recorded in February 1967 as George’s contribution to Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band , ‘Only A Northern Song’ first saw the light of day in Yellow Submarine. The song was a sly dig at the business arrangements of the Beatles. Their songs had always been published by Northern Songs Ltd, 30 per cent of whose shares belonged to John and Paul, with Ringo and George owning only 1.6 per cent each. This meant that John and Paul, in addition to being the group’s main songwriters, were benefiting again as prime shareholders in the publishing company. As far as Northern Songs was concerned, George was a merely a contracted writer.
    In ‘Only A Northern Song’, George complained that it didn’t really matter what he wrote because the bulk of the money was going into other people’s pockets. Underlying this was his feeling, only expressed publicly after the group had broken up, that his songs were being ignored and that he his contributions were used as mere tokens.
    “At first it was just great (to get one song on each album), it was like, hey, I’m getting in on the act too!” George commented. “After a while I did (come to resent this), especially when I had good songs. Sometimes I had songs that were better than some of their songs and we’d have to record maybe eight of theirs before they’d listen to one of mine.”
    It’s not surprising that George, who in 1964 claimed