You tell me that you’ve got everything you want
And your bird can sing
But you don’t get me, you don’t get me
You say you’ve seen seven wonders and your bird is green
But you can’t see me, you can’t see me
When your prized possessions start to weigh you down
Look in my direction, I’ll be round, I’ll be round
When your bird is broken will it bring you down
You may be awoken, I’ll be round, I’ll be round
You tell me that you’ve heard every sound there is
And your bird can swing
But you can’t hear me, you can’t hear me
For No One
After Paul’s sunny day sunshine song, this is back to a love ballad, but a sad, regretful, wistful, heartbreaking song. It appears to describe the breakup between Paul and Jane.
Paul wrote it in 1966 when he and Jane were on a skiing holiday together in Switzerland. He remembers writing this song while in the bathroom. Originally he said it wasn’t really about Jane, just a relationship that was going wrong, but later he admitted it had followed an argument with Jane. The rift must have healed though. The couple subsequently got engaged (in 1968).
From a literary point of view, it is interesting that he constantly flits between the second person–‘Your day breaks’ and third person: ‘She wakes up’. Quite tricky, keeping a pattern without confusing the listener, and avoiding clichés. ‘You see nothing’–meaning it literally and metaphorically–is, I suppose, a Lennon–McCartney cliché by now, but it’s their own cliché.
The music is impeccably put together, with a wonderful French horn solo by Alan Civil, perhaps the best-known hornist of his day and Principal Horn Player with the London Philharmonic. Civil came in, was told roughly what was wanted by George Martin and Paul, composed his own bit, played and went home, earning only his session fee.
The manuscript version, again at Northwestern University (they say in Paul’s hand), shows that this too had a different title–‘Why Did It Die?’–which is more brutal and explicit than the one eventually used. The line that the original title was taken from appears halfway down the page and was cut, along with all the others which followed:
Why did it die?
You’d like to know
Cry and blame her
–you wait
You’re too late
As you’re deciding why the wrong one wins the end begins
And you will lose her
Why did it die
I’d like to know
Try–to save it
You want her
You need (love) her
So make her see that you believe it may work out
And one day you may need each other.
Your day breaks, your mind aches
You find that all the words of kindness linger on
When she no longer needs you
She wakes up, she makes up
She takes her time and doesn’t feel she has to hurry
She no longer needs you
And in her eyes you see nothing
No sign of love behind the tears
Cried for no one
A love that should have lasted years!
You want her, you need her
And yet you don’t believe her when she said her love is dead
You think she needs you
You stay home, she goes out
She says that long ago she knew someone but now he’s gone
She doesn’t need him
Your day breaks, your mind aches
There will be times when all the things she said will fill your head
You won’t forget her
And in her eyes you see nothing
No sign of love behind the tears
Cried for no one
A love that should have lasted years.
Another song, in Paul’s hand, which began with a different title–‘Why Did It Die?’, which became ‘For No One’, from Revolver, 1966.
Dr Robert
The first song overtly about drugs. It is pretty clear that Dr Robert was supplying substances in a special cup, to pick you up–but it need not have been illegal drugs. LSD–or acid, as it was usually called–was not made illegal until 1966 and along with amphetamines it was prescribed by doctors. Almost all the Beatles experts have subsequently identified a well-known New York society doctor called Dr Robert who prescribed drugs to celebrity patients. Personally I think it was more likely that John had in mind a young and trendy London dentist. It was at a private dinner party at this individual’s house that John and George had their first LSD trip in 1965–after it was slipped into their coffee disguised as a sugar lump. The reference to the National Health in the lyrics does suggest a UK setting.
John later said that he himself was Dr Robert, for he was the Beatle who carried the pills on tour in the early years.
It is a fairly mocking song about fashionable medical people who supply anything–again, a most unusual topic for a pop song. And it is witty. There is a short chorus–‘Well, well, well, you’re feeling fine’–where they sing in harmony like a chiming Christmas choir–making a pun on the word well.
I Want To Tell You
George’s third song on the album, and the lyrics are well up to John or Paul’s standards, with well-polished lines and serious subject matter. The topic is the difficulty of communicating, the games we play, and how we don’t know why we feel the way we do.
Although there are no Indian instruments, there is an Indian feel to the bit of wailing at the end, and it’s there in the lyrics too, with the suggestion of karma, meeting ‘next time around’–i.e. in the next life–and also ‘I could wait forever’. Lines like these gave a clue to the sort of Indian mysticism and philosophy George was getting into. And in due course the rest of the Beatles would follow. George, in a sense, was taking over from John as the group leader, as Indian music and thought began to dominate their lives over the next two years.
George didn’t have a title for it at first, and it was filed in the studio as ‘Laxton’s Superb’, the name of another apple, then it became ‘I Don’t Know’–the response George Martin got from George when he asked what it was called. It would have made a good title. In the end, it took its name from the first line.
The early manuscript, which George reproduced in I Me Mine, has quite a few differences from the finished song and includes some rather limp phrases, such as ‘you rang me up’ and ‘pass the time’.
‘ “I Want to Tell You” is about the avalanche of thoughts that are so hard to write down or say or transmit,’ writes George. He goes on to add that, if he were to write it again, he would change the line in the middle from ‘it’s only me, it’s not my mind’ and make it ‘It isn’t me–it is my mind’.
Then he adds a final thought: ‘The mind is the thing that hops about telling us to do things and that–when what you need is to lose (forget) the mind. A passing thought.’
My head is filled with things to say
When you’re here
All those words, they seem to slip away
When I get near you
The games begin to drag me down
It’s alright
I’ll make you maybe next time around
But if I seem to act unkind
It’s only me
It’s not my mind
That is confusing things
I want to tell you
You rang me up, and I don’t know why
Maybe you will be that one thing to get me by
I don’t mind
I could wait forever
I’ve got time
Sometimes I wish I knew you well
Then I could speak my mind
And tell you
Maybe you’d understand
I want to tell you
I feel hung up, and I don’t know why
I don’t mind
I could wait forever
I’ve got time
I’ve got time
I’ve got time
‘I Want To Tell You’, from Revolver, 1966, an early, corrected manuscript in George’s hand.
Got To Get You Into My Life
I always took this as another of Paul’s love songs–about a girl he wants in his life, whom he can’t do without. It has a fast, thumping beat, and Paul enjoys himself putting on his high-pitched voice when he repeats ‘Got to get you into my life’. It ends with him singing the final refrain in a sort of jazz or soul improvisation, which is interesting as the Beatles, back when they were starting out at the Cavern, always said they hated jazz and the jazz fans in their Marks & Spencer pullovers–partly because the Cavern had originally been a jazz club and they were not allowed to play rock’n’roll in the early days.
Now that I have reread the words carefully, I realize there is no mention of a girl, or any female presence. So could it, shock horror, have been about drugs all along? Was that the ride he was taking, in order to see another kind of mind there? Was it a joint or suchlike that he wanted to get into his life, and not a girl?
Paul confirmed this in Barry Miles’ 1997 book: ‘It’s actually an ode to pot, like someone else might write an ode to chocolate or claret. If anyone asks me for real advice, I would say stay straight. But in a stressful world, it really is one of the best tranquilizer drugs.’
Tomorrow Never Knows
This is their most psychedelic song, their most Indian, and so far their most influential in that it had an effect on millions of young people in America and Europe.
The title never appears in the song. It was one of Ringo’s blurted-out remarks that John was forever writing down (other Ringo remarks, never used in a song, included ‘slight bread’ for sliced bread and ‘safely beds’ for safe in bed).
The first line makes it clear it is about drugs: ‘Turn off your mind and float downstream’. And it is about the use of drugs to create, supposedly, a religious experience. But what the song is really about is religion and the Indian Buddhist concepts of transcendentalism and reincarnation, the need to subdue the ego and enter the void. Under LSD, people often begin to think life is all an illusion. Several influential thinkers of the time experimented with the drug, including Aldous Huxley.
Many of the references are from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. In a letter to Dr Lester Grinspoon of Harvard Medical School, written in 1979, John revealed that he had come across the Tibetan Book of the Dead after reading about it in Timothy Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience. Leary was the American high priest of LSD and his book was a treatise on the good he thought it could do, setting people free from their minds and their bodies so that they wouldn’t end up as drones for capitalist, war-mongering governments that wanted them to bomb innocent civilians with napalm in Vietnam.
The song became a feature of many stoned parties of idealistic, right-on, young men and women in the middle sixties.
The music is of course marvellous, and, yes, mind-blowing. As well as Indian instruments, like sitar and tambura, it features many specially devised and original sound effects swirling and whooshing and wailing. A lot of these they brought in from home after experimenting with backwards loops on their tape machines. John wanted it to sound like a group of chanting Tibetan monks, on the top of a mountain, and for him to be like a faint Dalai Lama in the distance–which George Martin and engineer Geoff Merrick, knowing their duties, managed to create.
However the final three lines of the lyric suggest another way of getting through life, without necessarily giving up your mind and body and entering the void–and that is to ‘play the game Existence to the end’. Or the beginning of the beginning…
In an interview with Rolling Stone journalist Jonathan Cott, John admitted that he didn’t know what he was trying to say in ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’: ‘You just find out later. It’s really like abstract art. When you have to think about it to write it, it just means you’ve been laboured at it. But when you just say it, man, it’s a continuous flow. The people who analyse the songs–good on ’em–I don’t mind what they do with them.’
The manuscript, in John’s hand, is an early version with phrases not used in the final recording, such as ‘all the colours of the earth you’ll hear’ and ‘there’s no dying’.
It was remarkable final track from a remarkable album. They’d travelled so far, it’s hard to believe that only four years had passed since ‘Love Me Do’. In lyrics and sounds, they had progressed so far, becoming more complex and profound, yet still with a mass audience, selling millions of records round the world. While educating themselves they had educated their audience.
Turn off your mind relax and float down stream
It is not dying, it is not dying
Lay down all thought, surrender to the void,
It is shining, it is shining.
That you may see the meaning of within
It is being, it is being
That love is all and love is everyone
It is knowing, it is knowing
That ignorance and hate may mourn the dead
It is believing, it is believing
But listen to the colour of your dreams
It is not living, it is not living
Or play the game Existence to the end
Of the beginning, of the beginning…