The Beatles by Steve Turner Read Free Book Online Page B

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
    â€˜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 cinema and now Paul was keen to make films himself, working with an 8mm camera and composing electronic soundtracks.
    Encouraged by the experimental mood of the times, Paul envisaged making an unscripted film where characters and locations were chosen in advance , but the story was improvised on camera. His plan was to put the Beatles alongside an assorted collection of actors and colourful characters on a strange coach journey through the English countryside.
    As Hunter Davies reported in the Sunday Times the day before Magical Mystery Tour was shown on British television: “(They had decided that the film) would be Magical, so that they could do any ideas which came to them, and Mysterious in that neither they nor the rest of the passengers would know what they were going to donext… ‘The whole thing will be a mystery to everyone,’ Paul told the rest of the Beatles, ‘including us.’”
    There were two main inspirations behind Magical Mystery Tour. The first was the British working-class custom of the ‘mystery tour’,