Today I’m picking up from yesterday’s entry on Disc 1 of The White Album in my continuing series on “The Beatles in their Own Words.”

“Birthday”

McCartney: We thought, ‘Why not make something up?’ So we got a riff going and arranged it around this riff. We said, ‘We’ll go to there for a few bars, then we’ll do this for a few bars.’ We added some lyrics, then we got the friends who were there to join in on the chorus. So that is 50-50 John and me, made up on the spot and recorded all on the same evening. I don’t recall it being anybody’s birthday in particular but it might have been, but the other reason for doing it is that, if you have a song that refers to Christmas or a birthday, it adds to the life of the song, if it’s a good song, because people will pull it out on birthday shows, so I think there was a little bit of that at the back of our minds.

Lennon: That, like all The Beatles album, was written in India. Once we had our mantra, we sat in the mountains eating lousy vegetarian food with a lot of time to write all those songs. Paul wanted to write a song about birthdays, so he did that one. It’s a piece of garbage, but there is one interesting sound in it: We put the piano through a guitar amplifier and put the tremolo in, which may have been the first time that happened.
“Yer Blues”

Lennon: The funny thing about the camp was that although it was very beautiful and I was meditating about eight hours a day, I was writing the most miserable songs on earth. In “Yer Blues,” when I wrote, ‘I’m so lonely I want to die,’ I’m not kidding. That’s how I felt.

(the “camp” that Lennon is referring to here is the Maharishi’s camp in India.)

Starr: “Yer Blues,” on the White Album, you can’t top it. It was the four of us. That is what I’m saying: it was really because the four of us were in a box, a room about eight by eight, with no separation. It was this group that was together; it was like grunge rock of the sixties, really – grunge blues.

“Mother Nature’s Son”

McCartney: I seem to remember writing “Mother Nature’s Son” at my dad’s house in Liverpool. I often used to do that if I’d gone up to see him. Visiting my family I’d feel in a good mood, so it was often a good occasion to write songs. So this was me doing my mother nature’s son bit. I’ve always loved the song called “Nature Boy”: ‘There was a boy, a very strange and gentle boy…’ He loves nature, and “Mother Nature’s Son” was inspired by that song. I’d always loved nature, and when Linda and I got together we discovered we had this deep love of nature in common. There might have been a little help from John with some of the verses.

“Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except For Me And My Monkey”

Lennon: That was just a sort of nice line that I made into a song. It was about me and Yoko. Everybody seemed to be paranoid except for us two, who were in the glow of love. Everything is clear and open when you’re in love. Everybody was sort of tense around us – you know, ‘What is she doing here at the session? Why is she with him?’ All this sort of madness is going on around us because we just happened to want to be together all the time.

“Sexie Sadie”

Lennon: That’s about the Maharishi, yes. I copped out and I wouldn’t write ‘Maharishi, what have you done? You made a fool of everyone.’ But now it can be told, Fab Listeners.

Harrison: John had a song he had started to write which he was singing: ‘Maharishi, what have you done?’ and I said, ‘You can’t say that, it’s ridiculous.’ I came up with the title of Sexy Sadie and John changed ‘Maharishi’ to ‘Sexy Sadie’. John flew back to Yoko in England and I went to Madras and the south of India and spent another few weeks there.

“Helter Skelter”

McCartney: I was in Scotland and I read in Melody Maker that Pete Townshend had said: ‘We’ve just made the raunchiest, loudest, most ridiculous rock ‘n’ roll record you’ve ever heard.’ I never actually found out what track it was that The Who had made, but that got me going; just hearing him talk about it. So I said to the guys, ‘I think we should do a song like that; something really wild.’ And I wrote “Helter Skelter.”

You can hear the voices cracking, and we played it so long and so often that by the end of it you can hear Ringo saying,’I've got blisters on my fingers’. We just tried to get it louder: ‘Can’t we make the drums sound louder?’ That was really all I wanted to do – to make a very loud, raunchy rock ‘n’ roll record with The Beatles. And I think it’s a pretty good one.

McCartney: I was using the symbol of a helter skelter as a ride from the top to the bottom – the rise and fall of the Roman Empire – and this was the fall, the demise, the going down. You could have thought of it as a rather cute title but it’s since taken on all sorts of ominous overtones because Manson picked it up as an anthem, and since then quite a few punk bands have done it because it is a raunchy rocker.

McCartney: Charles Manson interpreted that “Helter Skelter” was something to to with the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. I still don’t know what all that stuff is; it’s from the Bible, Revelation – I haven’t read it so I wouldn’t know. But he interpreted the whole thing – that we were the four horsemen, “Helter Skelter” was the song – and arrived at having to go out and kill everyone.

“Long Long Long”

Harrison: The ‘you’ in “Long, Long, Long” is God. I can’t recall much about it except the chords, which I think were coming from “Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands” – D to E minor, A, and D – those three chords and the way they moved.

“Revolution 1″

Lennon: I wanted to put out what I felt about revolution. I thought it was time we fucking spoke about it, the same as I thought it was about time we stopped not answering about the Vietnamese war when we were on tour with Brian Epstein and had to tell him, ‘We’re going to talk about the war this time, and we’re not going to just waffle.’ I wanted to say what I thought about revolution.

I had been thinking about it up in the hills in India. I still had this ‘God will save us’ feeling about it, that it’s going to be all right. That’s why I did it: I wanted to talk, I wanted to say my piece about revolution. I wanted to tell you, or whoever listens, to communicate, to say ‘What do you say? This is what I say.’

Lennon: When George and Paul and all of them were on holiday, I made “Revolution,” which is on the LP and “Revolution 9.” I wanted to put it out as a single, I had it all prepared, but they came by, and said it wasn’t good enough. And we put out what? “Hello, Goodbye” or some shit like that? No, we put out “Hey Jude,” which was worth it – I’m sorry – but we could have had both.

Lennon: George and Paul were resentful and said it wasn’t fast enough. Now, if you go into the details of what a hit record is and isn’t, maybe. But The Beatles could have afforded to put out the slow, understandable version of “Revolution” as a single, whether it was a gold record or a wooden record. But, because they were so upset over the Yoko thing and the fact that I was again become as creative and dominating as I was in the early days, after lying fallow for a couple of years, it upset the applecart. I was awake again and they weren’t used to it.

“Honey Pie”

McCartney: Both John and I had a great love for music hall, what the Americans call vaudeville… I very much liked that old crooner style, the strange fruity voice that they used, so “Honey Pie” was me writing one of them to an imaginary woman, across the ocean, on the silver screen, who was called Honey Pie. It’s another of my fantasy songs.

McCartney: We put a sound on my voice to make it sound like a scratchy old record. So it’s not a parody, it’s a nod to the vaudeville tradition that I was raised on.

Harrison: John played a brilliant solo on “Honey Pie” – sounded like Django Reinhardt or something. It was one of them where you just close your eyes and happen to hit all the right notes… sounded like a little jazz solo.

“Savoy Truffle”

Harrison: “Savoy Truffle” on The White Album was written for Eric. He’s got this real sweet tooth and he’d just had his mouth worked on. His dentist said he was through with candy. So as a tribute I wrote, ‘You’ll have to have them all pulled out after the Savoy Truffle’. The truffle was some kind of sweet, just like all the rest – cream tangerine, ginger sling – just candy, to tease Eric.

Harrison: “Savoy Truffle” is a funny one written whist hanging out with Eric Clapton in the ’60s. At that time he had a lot of cavities in his teeth and needed dental work. He always had a toothache but he ate a lot of chocolates – he couldn’t resist them, and once he saw a box he had to eat them all. He was over at my house, and I had a box of Good News chocolates on the table and wrote the song from the names inside the lid. I got stuck with the two bridges for a while and Derek Taylor wrote some of the words in the middle – ‘You know that what you eat you are’.

“Cry Baby Cry”

Lennon: “Not mine. A piece of rubbish.”

(in fact, the song was written by Lennon and in my opinion it’s definitely not rubbish.)

“Revolution 9″

Lennon: The slow version of “Revolution” on the album went on and on and on and I took the fade-out part, which is what they sometimes do with disco records now, and just layered all this stuff over it. It was the basic rhythm of the original “Revolution” going on with some 20 loops we put on, things from the archives of EMI. We were cutting up classical music and making different-size loops, and then I got and engineer tape on which some test engineer was saying, ‘Number nine.’

Lennon: “Revolution 9″ was an unconscious picture of what I actually think will happen when it happens; just like a drawing of a revolution. All the thing was made with loops. I had about 30 loops going, fed them onto one basic track. I was getting classical tapes, going upstairs and chopping them up, making it backwards and things like that, to get the sound effects. One thing was an engineer’s testing voice saying, ‘This is EMI test series number nine’. I just cut up whatever he said and I’d number nine it. Nine turned out to be my birthday and my lucky number and everything. I didn’t realize it: it was just so funny the voice saying, ‘number nine’; it was like a joke, bringing number nine into it all the time, that’s all it was.

Lennon: All those different bits of sound and noise are all compiled. There were about 10 machines with people holding pencils on the loops – some only inches long and some a yard long. I fed them all in and mixed them live. I did a few mixes until I got one I liked.

Lennon: Yoko was there for the whole thing and she made decisions about which loops to use. It was somewhat under her influence, I suppose. Once I heard her stuff – not just the screeching and the howling but her sort of word pieces and talking and breathing and all this strange stuff, I thought, My God, I got intrigued… so I wanted to do one. I spent more time on “Revolution 9″ than I did on half the songs I ever wrote. It was a montage.

Lennon: I don’t know what influence “Revolution 9″ had on the teenybopper fans, but most of them didn’t dig it. So what am I supposed to do?

McCartney: “Revolution 9″ was quite similar to some stuff I’d been doing myself for fun. I didn’t think that mine was suitable for release, but John always encouraged me.

“Good Night”

Starr: Everybody thinks Paul wrote “Good Night” for me to sing, but it was John who wrote it for me. He’s got a lot of soul, John has.

Lennon: “Good Night” was written for Julian the way “Beautiful Boy” was written for Sean, but given to Ringo and possibly overlush.

McCartney: I think John felt it might not be good for his image for him to sing it but it was fabulous to hear him do it, he sang it great. We heard him sing it in order to teach it to Ringo and he sang it very tenderly. John rarely showed his tender side, but my key memories of John are when he was tender, that’s what has remained with me; those moments where he showed himself to be a very generous, loving person. I always cite that song as an example of the John beneath the surface that we only saw occasionally… I don’t think John’s version was ever recorded.

Starr: I sang John’s song “Good Night.” I’ve just heard it for the first time in years and it’s not bad at all, although I think I sound very nervous. It was something for me to do.

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