There is not a lot to say about the lyrics as John himself has little to say, using a vocabulary of just twelve words–‘I want you / I want you so bad / it’s driving me mad’ and ‘she’s so heavy’.
When I asked John why there were so few words, he told me, ‘This is about Yoko. She’s very heavy. There was nothing else I could say about her other than “I want you”. Someone said the lyrics weren’t very good, but there was nothing more I wanted to say.’
And yet the song lasts for seven minutes and forty-four seconds, making it the second longest Beatles number. (The longest is ‘Revolution 9’ at eight minutes and twelve seconds, third is ‘Hey Jude’ at seven minutes four seconds.) The reason for the length is that it is mainly an instrumental number, almost an orchestral exercise on a theme, coming back to the same notes, the same words, but in a slightly different way, worrying about it, unable to leave it alone, like a sore, returning to it all the time. The wailing, nagging, trancelike music fits with the words, even if neither of them goes anywhere.
Another minimalistic lyric, as if they were running out of words, had used them all up, or were getting tired, or perhaps not helping each other to correct and improve as they had done in the past. Most of the songs on Abbey Road were completed and arranged by the original begetter, which was not the way they’d worked in the past.
In this instance, George’s inspiration only ran to ten or so lines, with a lot of repeating–but it is still a very cheerful, hopeful, excellent song. George had decided to sag off (i.e. play truant) from yet another Apple round-table board meeting about their finances and organization. He was fed up with signing endless forms, which they didn’t really understand, and went off to Eric Clapton’s garden. While walking round, communing with nature, he realized spring was coming, the awful winter of discontent at Apple could not possibly go on for ever–so on an acoustic guitar borrowed from Clapton, he wrote this song. One of George’s best–which just seems to have come to him, out of plein air.
John was not involved in the recording, and missed bits of a few other Abbey Road sessions, as he had been injured in a car crash in Scotland with Yoko. The others just bashed on without him–something they would never have done seven years earlier. When John was eventually recovering, he and Yoko had a double bed from Harrods set up in the studio at Abbey Road. Yoko arranged for a microphone to be suspended over her head so she could offer her comments–which did not exactly thrill Paul.
In the manuscript, despite the limited number of words, George couldn’t be bothered to write them all out so he used abbreviations like L.D. and H.C.T.S. He has written the words on what appears to be a sheet of headed paper with some sort of Eastern image and verses. (Could it be Sanskrit? Any suggestions?)