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.
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.”
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.
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.”
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.
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