The Beatles by Steve Turner Read Free Book Online Page A

“security is the only thing I want. Money to do nothing with, money to have in case you want to do something”, ultimately became the Beatle least keen to resurrect the Beatles.

ALL TOGETHER NOW
    ‘All Together Now’ was written in the studio in May 1967 with Paul as main contributor. It was intended as another ‘Yellow Submarine’ and John was delighted later when he heard that British soccer crowds were singing it.
    One of the effects of psychedelia was a renewed interest in the innocence of childhood and nursery rhymes would begin to affect their post-Pepper work. Folklorist Iona Opie, editor of The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes , believes that as the lines sound so familiar, it draws more on a shared memory: “I can’t distinguish any particular influence on ‘All Together Now’,” she says. “So many ABC rhymes exist and there are counting rhymes like ‘One, two, three, four, Mary at the cottage door..’ which come pretty close. The song seems to come out of a universal subconscious.”
    Paul has confirmed that he saw it in the tradition of children’s songs (“It’s a Play Away command song”) but that he was also playing with the dual meaning of ‘all together now’ which could be either a music-hall-style invitation to participate or a slogan for world unity. Paul Horn remembers the song being sung while they were in India but instead of singing ‘H, I, J, I love you’ they would sing ‘H, I, Jai Guru Dev’ in honour of Maharishi’s spiritual master.

HEY BULLDOG
    ‘Hey Bulldog’ was recorded on February 11, 1968, when the Beatles were at Abbey Road to make a promotional film for ‘Lady Madonna’. Paul suggested that instead of wasting time pretending to record ‘Lady Madonna’, they should tape something new and so John produced some unfinished lyrics he’d written for Yellow Submarine. John explained to the others how he heard the song and they all threw in suggestions for the words. One line John had written – ‘Some kind of solitude is measured out in news’ – was misread and came out as ‘Some kind of solitude is measured out in you’. They decided to keep it.
    The bulldog of the title never existed before the recording. The original lyric mentioned a bullfrog but, to everyone’s amusement, Paul started to bark at the end of the song. Because of this, they retitled it.
    Erich Segal, the author of Love Story , was one of the screenwriters on Yellow Submarine. Years later, he claimed that ‘Hey Bulldog’ had been written for him because the bulldog was the mascot of Yale University where he was a lecturer in classics!

IT’S ALL TOO MUCH
    George was the Beatle who most often spoke in spiritual terms about his experience of LSD. ‘It’s All Too Much’, recorded in May 1967, was written, George said, “in a childlike manner from realizations that appeared during and after some LSD experiences and which were later confirmed in meditation”.
    Through images of silver suns and streaming time, the song attempted to articulate the feeling of personal identity being swallowed up by a benign force. Three months after this recording, George met the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and began to view his LSD experience as a signpost rather than a destination. “LSD isn’t a real answer,” he said in September 1967. “It doesn’t give you anything. It enables you to see a lot of possibilities that you may never have noticed before but it isn’t the answer. It can help you go from A to B, but when you get to B you see C, and you see that to get really high, you have to do it straight. There are special ways of getting high without drugs – with yoga, meditation and all those things.”

MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR
    Flying home to London on April 11, 1967, after visiting Jane Asher in Denver for her 21st birthday party, Paul began to work on an idea for a Beatles television special. The group felt that they had outgrown the ‘caper’ format which had made them such a big hit in the