A Hard Day's Write – Steve Turner, 1999 ★★½

Words of Love

Behind every Beatles song is a story. In his cleverly-titled A Hard Day’s Write, Steve Turner runs through the complete Fab Four songbook in a manner that may not always satisfy but will certainly engage Beatles fans, and may interest more casual readers, too.

During a 14-year period that saw them go from callow teens to jaded pop stars, the Beatles crafted over 200 original songs. Simply listing all of them is no small feat. Explaining how each came to be proves more challenging.

Turner explains this up front: Not every song has a great story behind it. Some of the earlier material, particularly the soundtracks for the films A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, was written to deadline and owed more to the vernacular of other songs than the Beatles’ own experience.

Turner is a longtime rock journalist who has covered the Beatles since before their 1970 breakup, in addition to writing biographies of other notable entertainers. That he knows of what he writes is clear. But the end result is mixed. Like he says, not every song has a great story behind it, but the format of the book requires him to give one anyway.

Some of the stories Turner tells are more familiar. “Yesterday,” the band’s most covered song, was conceived by Paul McCartney in a dream. For a while he called it “Scrambled Eggs,” asking people if they recognized the song because he was sure he couldn’t have come up with something so perfect just by waking up. He had.

Other songs’ origins are more obscure. The title “Eight Days A Week” came from a chauffeur complaining about his workload. The words “A Hard Day’s Night,” oft-said to have been a wisecrack by Ringo Starr, first appeared in John Lennon’s 1964 book of verse, In His Own Write. George Harrison randomly opened a book at his parents’ home, intending to write a song using the first words he saw. The result: “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.”

Turner is not the most engaging writer, and his analysis of song meanings are too often reductive. Lennon, abandoned by his birth parents, writes defensively about abandonment and loss. McCartney, the people-pleasing smoothie, presents his love songs as exercises in wish fulfillment where the woman’s place is satisfying her man.

Paul McCartney, at left, and John Lennon in 1964. Turner agrees that the two worked as a unit more in the early days of their musical partnership, but still served as each other's sounding boards thereafter. Image from https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/21855/paul-mccartney-rivalry-with-lennon-was-very-necessary.

Turner’s strengths are his contacts with people with roles big and small in the Beatles’ career, as well as his ability to connect individual songs to their place in the band’s musical growth:

Maureen Cleave, the London journalist who had already helped out on the lyrics for A Hard Day’s Night, felt that John should start to use words of more than one syllable. “Help” was his first serious attempt to do this, and he managed to incorporate “self-assured,” “appreciate,” “independence” and “insecure” within the song.

Alistair Taylor, longtime assistant to Beatles manager Brian Epstein, explains how McCartney came up with the hit song “Hello Goodbye” by tossing off random words and challenging Taylor to name their opposites: “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.”

Some neat discoveries, too: In 2009, when the book was updated for a third time, it was still news to a lot of people that there was a real Lucy behind the song “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds.” One day Lennon’s son Julian came home with a picture he drew of his nursery-school classmate Lucy O’Donnell. The image of her floating in the sky surrounded by stars, combined with the title Julian gave his piece, not only triggered the Beatles’ most famous psychedelic number but bestowed upon it an iconic name.

Turner interviewed Lucy O’Donnell way back in 1994 for the book’s first edition, getting her thoughts about her small but indelible mark on music history. [She became a teacher for special-needs children, and died of lupus at age 46, in 2009.]

Some still insist “Lucy” is a song about dropping acid. Just look at the song’s initials: L. S. D. Turner’s book provides a necessary corrective. There’s even an image of Julian’s drawing included in this well-illustrated book.

What four-year-old Julian brought home from school in 1967: His classmate Lucy didn't learn she inspired a famous song until nine years later - by which time it had become a #1 pop hit for Elton John. Image from https://akarealmusic.wordpress.com/2013/04/27/lucy-in-the-sky-with-diamonds/

It is amusing to spot the number of drug references the Beatles didn’t make but were blamed (or credited) for anyway, as related here by Turner. One of McCartney’s songs, “Fixing A Hole,” was said to reference heroin use. Actually, Turner explains, it was about fixing a hole in a leaky roof at Paul’s rundown Scottish home. “People just couldn't believe Paul was talking about fixing holes in the DIY sense,” Turner notes.

In “A Day In The Life,” another song like “Lucy” and “Hole” from the Beatles’ landmark 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band, Paul contributed a verse about riding a bus, having a smoke, and going “into a dream.” Even George Martin, the Beatles’ producer, describes it to Turner as a pot reference. But Turner counters Paul was just recalling a cigarette break from his bus rides to school.

A Paul song from the year before, “Got To Get You Into Your Life,” suggests a romantic or spiritual connection but is actually about drugs. Such substance-inspired cheerleading was rare for the band.

One of the most notable revelations in Turner’s book is the story behind another Pepper track, “She’s Leaving Home.” McCartney was actually inspired to write the song by the real-life story of Melanie Coe, a London teen whose running away from home was written up in the Daily Mail in February, 1967. By an incredible coincidence, Coe had appeared with the Beatles four years before on a television show.

Turner’s book includes both a photo of Coe as she appeared with the band on “Ready Steady Go” and some recent comments from Coe herself to the author. “I heard the song when it came out and thought it was about someone like me but never dreamed it was actually about me,” she explains.

In addition to Coe, O’Donnell, and Julian Lennon, Turner’s book reels in some other big names in Beatledom: Director Dick Lester talks about songs the Beatles wrote for the films A Hard Day’s Night and Help! while James Taylor says he was flattered by Harrison’s incorporating his song title “Something In The Way She Moves” into the lyrics of “Something.”

Ivan Vaughan’s place in Beatle history is secure enough already: He introduced Lennon and McCartney to each other back in 1956. But Ivan’s wife, Jan, also played a role in the band’s success nine years later, when she used her French skills to help Paul with the verses to “Michelle.”

Turner interviews Jan about the experience, and sheds light on how the song originated, as a jokey act Paul put on imitating a hipster he had once observed in Liverpool: “It remained a party piece with nothing more than Charles Aznavour-style Gallic groanings as accompaniment until, in 1965, John suggested that Paul should write proper words for it and include it on the album.”

The Beatles put down "Hey Bulldog" in the studio. According to Turner: 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. Image from https://twitter.com/thebeatles/status/227781201862209536

Turner’s book includes some dicey information. The origins of the Abbey Road track “Polythene Pam” are traced to a Liverpool girl who claims she ate polythene while the band played at the Cavern Club there. Sometimes it feels like Turner was too eager to take down stories from fringe people and paint them as gospel. There are also odd discrepancies in the book, like the number of pre-fame Lennon/McCartney compositions estimated as “over 100” and “closer to 20” on different pages.

Turner’s treatment of various Beatles song depends on which Beatle wrote them. He can’t muster up much enthusiasm or interest in Harrison’s compositions, giving them one or two paragraphs each with the exception of “Something.” McCartney and Lennon’s songs, occasionally collaborative but more often just individually authored over a co-credit, get more respect, though Turner has his critical blind spots, as when he writes dismissively about Lennon’s “And Your Bird Can Sing”:

Whereas in 1964 he would have knocked off a made-to-measure love song to fill out the empty spaces on an LP, by 1966, and under pressure, he was capable of coming up with a perfectly tailored piece of meaningless psychedelia.

The book is illuminating in the main, though lacking the intoxicating sweep of other compendiums of Beatle lore. For every song Turner connects to a fascinating story, like how “I Am The Walrus” originated with Lennon hearing a police siren outside his Weybridge home, another gets dismissed as a “work song” designed to fill out an album.

One wishes Turner could have spent more time on the stories, and perhaps built up his sketchier accounts. But as he notes in the introduction, the definitive take on any of these songs really awaits a review of diaries and surviving Beatles’ accounts that hasn't quite reached us. What you get instead here is rather diverting, sometimes illuminating, but frustratingly incomplete.