229. Abbey Road sketches } (home demo).

 

A student wrote “zone-off” instead of “zone-out.” She zoned-off. I dig it. Like, to get-off. Zoned-off to “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)”—but, as often, study / attend to it.

Oversized load & “Old Brown Shoe.” A house on a flatbed. Mom & Dad bought a house on a flatbed & set it where the old house used to be. Stood in the pit where the old house was & Marci said, “Yr grinning, Adam.”

“Sun King” begins w/ nighttime sounds.

Choosing a name fr yrself. “Oh, Darling!” Mom & Dad name you X but yr called Y. What of us who don’t make or acquire a nickname? Anything we don’t need to decide / think about is good.

Steer the car beneath the wheels of a K-Line tractor trailer. “He shut his eyes & came out…” the countdown “1, 2, ah 1, 2, 3, 4.” Cars keep losing the lane. Veering into mine “Oh, I’m losing my cool.”

Or you all came in too late.

A bright blue car full of plants. Not potted plants. Rooted in the upholstery. Grassland in the back seat. Driver in a camo poncho, stalked by a lioness; she’ll wait until the car is in park before she pounces.

225. Old brown shoe } shufflers.

Caught George Harrison’s “Beware of Darkness” on the radio. “Beware of thoughts that linger…”—yes. (As inscribed on a little card plastered on the ceiling at Indica.) “Beware of soft-shoe shufflers.” Ray Bolger sings, “there was just one dance alive / the old soft shoe” in 1957; in 1953 Carol Richards sings that the old soft shoe was “the dance my daughters used to do”—that’s vaudeville. Harrison’s lyric warns of sales pitches—“beware of ABKCO.”

The “Beware of ABKCO” demo was cut in May, 1970; the Beatles finished “Old Brown Shoe” in mid-April 1969. Takes 1 & 2 of “Old Brown Shoe” were recorded on February 25th (along with first takes of “All Things Must Pass” & “Something”); Harrison has it worked out pretty good—what it lacks is Ringo (he’s out of town filming Magic Christian), McCartney’s bass, & Beatle harmonies: “Oo-ah, oo-ah-oo, oo-ah, oo-ah-oo….” A significant lack. A case can be made for the beauty of “Something” sans Beatles, but not “Old Brown Shoe.”

Harrison’s “Old Brown Shoe” lyric “If I grow up, I’ll be a singer / wear a ring on every finger” strikes me as fun—a nod toward Ringo, right? But—why “if” & not when?

210. February 22 - 23, 1969 } from 8pm – 5am.

Mark Lewishon writes “…a number of [Abbey Road’s] songs were well under way by that time. One was ‘I Want You,’ a fine John Lennon song…” A “fine” John Lennon song? And, “…begun now with 35 takes of the basic track and John’s guide vocal (one experimental take was sung by Paul McCartney)…” Is there a McCartney vocal bootleg somewhere? [from The Beatles Recording Sessions, Harmony Books, 1988.] Kevin Howlett writes, “…in a session produced by George Martin, ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’ was recorded from eight o’clock on a Saturday evening through to five on Sunday morning at Trident Studios….” And, “During that night in Soho, there were 35 takes (many of them breakdowns) recorded on three reels of eight-track tape.” [from Abbey Road Anniversary Edition, Apple Corps Limited, 2019.]

Consider the nature of “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)”: lyrically simple / repetitive and musically repetitive (you might object to repetitive; the music changes quite a lot); what would it be like to work on 35 basic rhythm tracks?

When the session was over, did McCartney, the only Beatle still living in London, step out into the brisk air—it was in the mid-30s but with clear skies in London on February 23, 1969—and contemplate a walk back to Cavendish Avenue? It’d be a long walk—52 minutes. Too bad, he might’ve thought, we weren’t at Abbey Road, just a 10-minute walk from his place.

Coming out into the city so early on a Sunday morning, high from a productive session of artistic collaboration with friends—McCartney surely looked up at the sky, smelled the air, wondered if he ought to go straight to bed, or locate a bakery, or if he could find some way to ride the high a little longer—why not walk toward St. John’s Wood?

# # #

Posted to YouTube in 2011 by Astrid Shapiro is “Paul’s house” a 1:42 video that shows “my best friend” (in purple, with a slightly downcast expression) outside the gates at 7 Cavendish Avenue, where McCartney lived in ’69 (and he still owns the house). Their timing is good. The gate is opened for a messenger by someone who works for McCartney, and he’s very friendly. As they’re talking, the front door opens, and another employee steps out, and Astrid and her pal are simply beside themselves.

# # #

And, you can walk with “American drummer Marty Richards” from 7 Cavendish to Abbey Road Studios (posted to YouTube by ursulageorge in 2010). A familiar walk.

191. Fragments } lost & found.

After “Cry Baby Cry,” Paul McCartney sings a little fragment: “Can you take me back where I came from / Can you take me back / Can you take me back where I came from / Brother can you take me back…”—an eerie excerpt from an unfinished cut, McCartney’s plaintive wish not to be lost anymore. To go home. Another fragment, “Golden Slumbers,” McCartney sings, “Once there was a way / to get back home.” From the same period, “Get Back” (“to where you once belonged”) and “Two of Us” (“…you and me Sunday driving / not arriving/ on our way back home / we’re on our way home…”). Is going back home simply a poignant idea that appealed to McCartney aesthetically, or something to do with personal crisis?

The flip-side of his anxious longing for home appears in the fragments of this era too. From the (rather complete) fragment “You Never Give Me Your Money” that begins the Abbey Road b-side suite: “But oh that magic feeling / Nowhere to go.” And another fragment, “The Lovely Linda,” that begins McCartney’s solo break.

178. Turn you on } dead man.

After Leatherface decides not to murder radio DJ Vanita Brock (about 46 minutes into The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, 1986), he rejoins his brother Chop Top in the front office of radio station K-OKLA. In Chop Top’s satchel are stolen LPs (while Leatherface was in the studio with Vanita, Chop Top rummaged through the station’s LP collection—he was excited about Humble Pie’s live album Performance: Rockin’ the Fillmore and he shouted, while flinging 45s, “Music is my life!”). We can only see one of the albums in Chop Top’s satchel—The Beatles’ Abbey Road.

If Toby Hooper (director of Chainsaw 2) wanted to be really obvious, he’d’ve put The Beatles (“The White Album”) in Chop Top’s satchel—the Beatles album most strongly associated with the Manson Family murders. But Abbey Road is obvious enough. It’s the only Beatles album I know with a song about a serial killer (“bang! bang! Maxwell’s silver hammer came down upon his head”); Chop Top murders the station manager a la Maxwell—with a hammer.

What would Chop Top do with his records? Listen to the Beatles sing in harmony about getting high and being inspired by love and making love and sitting in the sun feeling great in love? How does a Chop Top understand a Beatles album? Such musing leads no where.

Thom Yorke (of Radiohead) once expressed to Bono (of U2) his dismay in discovering fans of Radiohead’s music who were also politicians who supported positions antithetical to Radiohead’s politics. I don’t remember specifically what Bono said, but I think it was hopeful, something like, “You want your music to reach people whose minds you hope to change.” That sounds like Bono.

Another answer might be that once you put art into the world you cease to have control over it. The Family can misspell Helter Skelter in blood on a refrigerator door. Toby Hooper can put Abbey Road in Chop Top’s satchel.

176. “We’ll go back in the past } just once.”

Come together over dirty messiah John ‘n’ Yoko over me—what do I know? You and “you’ve got to be free.” On Abbey Road, “Come Together” mocks unclean hippy Kurtz whose wisdom is diseased. The third “shoot” is “shoot me” (Anthology 3 “Come Together”: shoot… shoot… shoot… look out!). “He’s one” becomes “he one” but sounds like “he wants”—“he’s one holy roller,” “he’s one spinal cracker” “he’s one jo jo [go-jo? mojo?] filter.” But Live In New York City “Come Together” wants to be a piece with Lennon’s political songs (“Woman Is the Nigger of the World,” “Attica State,” “Luck of the Irish,” etc.). Come together “over you” and “over me, over you, over there” and at the One to One concert “come together, right now, stop the war!” For “Come Together” to work as a rallying cry slogan (akin to “Give Peace A Chance” and “Power To the People”), you’ve gotta ignore “old flattop” who “just do what he please” and hear only “one thing I can tell you is you’ve got to be free / come together / right now / over me.”

Lennon’s attempt to recast “Come Together” points toward its origin as a campaign song for Mr. Timothy Leary.

[At Madison Square Garden, August 30, 1972, someone in the crowd shouted “Help!”; Lennon laughs (“Ha”) then says, “We'll go back in the past, just once. You might remember this better than I do, actually.” To the band he says, “Okay. Something about a flattop. That's all I know. One two a one two three four!” When they finish performing “Come Together” Lennon says, “Thank you thank you, I nearly got all the words right, too.”]

152. Love is old } love is new.

There’s a note on the Wiki entry “Because (Beatles song)” that claims, “In 2016, the Beatles’ Anthology 3 version [of “Because”] was featured in the trailer for Luc Besson’s film Valerian and the City of A Thousand Planets. That trailer (published on YouTube Nov. 16, 2016) does feature “Because,” with the Beatles’ vocal track high in the mix, but it’s not clear to me it’s the Anthology 3 “version,”—which is, simply, “the exquisite vocal harmonies recorded by John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison for John’s song Because…” with the instrumentation “stripped away to reveal the… voices.” CinemaBlend (“one of the web’s most popular entertainment sites” according to themselves, but really a platform for ads decorated with light entertainment journalism) reports that, “…the preview's use of ‘Because’ by The Beatles is the first time that a master recording from the band has been featured in a film advertisement.” Valerian also strips the song of its original instrumentation, but adds a new instrumental performance.

Whatever. Who cares? I once was anxious about how Beatles songs were used—“Good Day Sun Chips,” the Nike ad with “Revolution” (another with Lennon’s “Instant Karma”), etc. It’s a kind of protectiveness I’ve let go of—Beatles is not who I am, Beatles is not sacred. What’s more, the Beatles I love can’t be destroyed by commodification. What’s more, I like Luc Besson's giddy science fiction films and I like how he uses “Because” in the Valerian trailers. 

“Because” is lyrically simple—and very like Lennon in that period. “Because the wind is high / it blows my mind”—word play quite like “Got to be good looking / ‘cause he's so hard to see” (“Come Together”); and plays with opposites the way Beatles lyrics often do “Love is old, love is new”—“I want a short haired girl / who sometimes wears it twice as long” (“Old Brown Shoe”); and with simple causality “There's nothing you can do that can't be done / nothing you can sing that can't be sung” (“All You Need Is Love”). “Because” is, too, musically simple—simple in the complex way “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” is simple—it repeats with variations, rather than repeating the way most songs do: verse, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, verse, chorus….

For Abbey Road, “Because” is gateway from the “song side”—which extends to side B with “Here Comes the Sun”—and the medley that dominates side B. Or: “Because” is like an incomplete sentence, lyrically and musically, completed by what follows.

The second “official trailer” for Valerian (published on YouTube Mar. 29, 2017) uses “Because” differently than the Nov. trailer. After a 32-second action sequence on a sun-bright desert planet, we arrive in space, at the “City of a Thousand Planets” and then we hear the “ah-a” of the Beatles’ “Because.” A gate from one world to another and an expression of awe.

Pre-Anthology, a recording of “Because” stripped of its instrumentation was a prized bootleg. Aside from the beauty of the three-part harmony, the empty spaces between the vocals were what made it such an extraordinary alternate version. The emptiness reverberates—can I hear Abbey Road studio 3?

But “Because” is not an example of a perfectly good song that’s been over-produced. George Martin’s performance on the spinet electric harpsichord and George Harrison’s Moog synthesizer performance perfectly marry old and new.

135. “The man in the mack” } a ferryman.

Ringo boards the Magic Christian; George “on holiday.” John returns to London with “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” calls on Paul at Paul’s and the two work it out: “John was in an impatient mood,” said Paul, “I was happy to help.” At Abbey Road (studio three, 2pm – 11, April 14, 1969), John sings lead, Paul sings harmony; John’s guitars (lead and acoustic), Paul’s rhythm and piano; eleven takes—“Take ten was the ‘best’ basic track."

“John recorded these sorts of songs with his new group, the Plastic Ono Band,” wrote Mark Lewisohn in The Beatles Recording Sessions, “and had the band existed at this time “The Ballad of John and Yoko” would probably have been theirs.” Paul’s presence brightens John’s song, brings to it a depth that, musically, it lacked. John’s solo record, “New York City”—another account of John and Yoko’s doings—gives a sense of what “The Ballad of John and Yoko” might’ve sounded like if John hadn’t made it Beatles. John’s guitar and Stan Bronstein’s sax on “New York City” attempt to fill it up—it’s manic; “New York City” is aggressive, “The Ballad of John and Yoko” is sly. Paul’s bass, maracas, hand claps, fun! but, “Christ, you know it ain’t easy… the way things are going, they’re gonna crucify me”—isn’t it that sneaky desperation that so startles on Smiths records? “New York City’s” jabs—policemen who shove, “God’s a red herring in a drag”—are hidden in the mix.

Prince died yesterday. Yesterday, coincidentally, I stopped at Rhode Island Historical Cemetery no. 41—a plot surrounded by industrial debris—where’s buried Edwin L. Green, died April 21, 1946, alongside his wife, Marion, who died in 1911, and their unnamed, infant daughter (“our only child”). I like to think about John and Paul in the studio together, in the midst of no little legal acrimony, in the midst of John’s heroin use, days after John’s marriage to Yoko, a month after Paul’s to Linda, at work. At work and able to enjoy the pleasure they found in work and in working together.

Two days later George, Ringo, Paul, and John recorded Harrison’s “Old Brown Shoe.” Philip Norman wrote (John Lennon: The Life), “…an indifferent George Harrison song ‘Old Brown Shoe’.” Indifferent? Christ! What about that song is indifferent? Listen to the way George pronounces his lyric—the blunt “shoe,” the way his delivery pushes and pulls.

“The Ballad of John and Yoko” single, b-side “Old Brown Shoe,” a neat pivot into the Abbey Road sessions, begun that day with “Something.”