the narrow canyons on his way to the cottage, and was delayed. There was a small Hammond organ in the corner of the room and George whiled away the time by composing a song about being stuck in a house on Blue Jay Way while his friends were lost in the fog.
Blue Jay Way is a notoriously hard street to find – you can be geographically close and yet separated by a ravine. “By the time we got there the song was virtually intact,” says Derek Taylor. “Of course, at the time I felt very bad. Here were these two wretchedly jet-lagged people and we were about two hours late. But here, indeed, was a song which turned up in Magical Mystery Tour (the film) through a prism with about eight images, with George in a red jacket sitting and playing piano on the floor.”
Taylor was amused by what people made of the song. One critic thought the line in which George urged his guest not to ‘be long’ was advice to young people telling them not to ‘belong’ (to society, that is). Another acclaimed musicologist believed that, when George said that his friends had ‘lost their way’, he meant that a whole generation had lost direction. “It’s just a simple little song,” says Taylor.
YOUR MOTHER SHOULD KNOW
‘Your Mother Should Know’ by Paul could have been written as early as May 1967, when both John and Paul were working on songs for the Our World television special. Like ‘When I’m 64’, the song was a tribute to the music his father enjoyed singing when he was a young man in Jim Mac’s Jazz Band. Jim McCartney formed his own ragtime band in 1919 and played dates around Liverpool, performing numbers like ‘Birth Of The Blues’ and ‘Stairway To Paradise’. One day, Paul surprised his dad by recording one of his compositions under the title ‘Walking In The Park With Eloise’, under the alias of the Country Hams.
Paul wrote it at Cavendish Avenue and thinks it was affected by the fact that his Auntie Gin and Uncle Harry were staying with him at the time. It was the sort of song that they would have liked. Paul also had in mind the idea of ‘mother knows best’, a lament for those who were no longer close to their parents.
‘Your Mother Should Know’, however, found its way into the Magical Mystery Tour in a scene where the four Beatles, in white tail suits, descend a staircase and are joined by teams of formation dancers. Strictly speaking, any hit that Paul’s mother would have known would have been a hit before she was born in 1909, in the days when hits were not determined by record sales but by sales of sheet music.
I AM THE WALRUS
The sprawling, disjointed nature of ‘I Am The Walrus’ owes much to the fact that it is an amalgamation of at least three song ideas that John was working on, none of which seemed quite enough in its own right. The first, inspired by hearing a distant police siren while at home in Weybridge, started with the words ‘Mis-ter c-ity police-man’ and fitted the rhythm of the siren. The second was a pastoral melody about his Weybridge garden. The third was a nonsense song about sitting on a corn flake.
John told Hunter Davies, who was still researching the Beatles’ official biography at the time: “I don’t know how it will all end up. Perhaps they’ll turn out to be different parts of the same song.” According to Pete Shotton, the final catalyst was a letter received from a pupil of Quarry Bank School, which mentioned that an English master was getting his class to analyze Beatles’ songs. The letter from the Quarry Bank pupil was sent to John by Stephen Bayley who received an answer dated September 1, 1967 (which was sold at auction by Christie’s of London in 1992). This amused John, who decided to confuse such people with a song full of the most perplexing and incoherent clues. He asked Shotton to remind him of a silly playground rhyme which English schoolchildren at the time delighted in. John wrote it down: ‘Yellow matter custard, green slop pie, All
Blue Jay Way is a notoriously hard street to find – you can be geographically close and yet separated by a ravine. “By the time we got there the song was virtually intact,” says Derek Taylor. “Of course, at the time I felt very bad. Here were these two wretchedly jet-lagged people and we were about two hours late. But here, indeed, was a song which turned up in Magical Mystery Tour (the film) through a prism with about eight images, with George in a red jacket sitting and playing piano on the floor.”
Taylor was amused by what people made of the song. One critic thought the line in which George urged his guest not to ‘be long’ was advice to young people telling them not to ‘belong’ (to society, that is). Another acclaimed musicologist believed that, when George said that his friends had ‘lost their way’, he meant that a whole generation had lost direction. “It’s just a simple little song,” says Taylor.
YOUR MOTHER SHOULD KNOW
‘Your Mother Should Know’ by Paul could have been written as early as May 1967, when both John and Paul were working on songs for the Our World television special. Like ‘When I’m 64’, the song was a tribute to the music his father enjoyed singing when he was a young man in Jim Mac’s Jazz Band. Jim McCartney formed his own ragtime band in 1919 and played dates around Liverpool, performing numbers like ‘Birth Of The Blues’ and ‘Stairway To Paradise’. One day, Paul surprised his dad by recording one of his compositions under the title ‘Walking In The Park With Eloise’, under the alias of the Country Hams.
Paul wrote it at Cavendish Avenue and thinks it was affected by the fact that his Auntie Gin and Uncle Harry were staying with him at the time. It was the sort of song that they would have liked. Paul also had in mind the idea of ‘mother knows best’, a lament for those who were no longer close to their parents.
‘Your Mother Should Know’, however, found its way into the Magical Mystery Tour in a scene where the four Beatles, in white tail suits, descend a staircase and are joined by teams of formation dancers. Strictly speaking, any hit that Paul’s mother would have known would have been a hit before she was born in 1909, in the days when hits were not determined by record sales but by sales of sheet music.
I AM THE WALRUS
The sprawling, disjointed nature of ‘I Am The Walrus’ owes much to the fact that it is an amalgamation of at least three song ideas that John was working on, none of which seemed quite enough in its own right. The first, inspired by hearing a distant police siren while at home in Weybridge, started with the words ‘Mis-ter c-ity police-man’ and fitted the rhythm of the siren. The second was a pastoral melody about his Weybridge garden. The third was a nonsense song about sitting on a corn flake.
John told Hunter Davies, who was still researching the Beatles’ official biography at the time: “I don’t know how it will all end up. Perhaps they’ll turn out to be different parts of the same song.” According to Pete Shotton, the final catalyst was a letter received from a pupil of Quarry Bank School, which mentioned that an English master was getting his class to analyze Beatles’ songs. The letter from the Quarry Bank pupil was sent to John by Stephen Bayley who received an answer dated September 1, 1967 (which was sold at auction by Christie’s of London in 1992). This amused John, who decided to confuse such people with a song full of the most perplexing and incoherent clues. He asked Shotton to remind him of a silly playground rhyme which English schoolchildren at the time delighted in. John wrote it down: ‘Yellow matter custard, green slop pie, All
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