Here comes the sun, and I say
It’s all right
Little darling
It’s been a long, cold lonely winter
Little darling
It feels like years since it’s been here
Little darling I feel like ice is slowly melting
Little darling
The smiles returning to the faces
Little darling
It seems like years since it’s been here
Sun, sun, sun, here it comes
Sun, sun, sun, here it comes
Little darling it feels like years since it’s been clear
Because
Yoko was tinkling away on the piano, playing Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ (she had studied piano as a gel, her father having hoped she would become a concert pianist). John was lolling, as ever, on the sofa, probably with a few relaxing medications to help him along. He asked if she could play some of the chords in the reverse order–and the resulting sounds inspired him to write ‘Because’. The connection with Beethoven was well spotted by Wilfrid Mellers: ‘The affinity between the enveloping, arpeggiated X sharp minor triads, with the sudden shift to the flat supertonic is, in the Lennon and Beethoven examples, unmistakable.’
In the early days, academic musicologists like Mellers tended to compare the Beatles’ songwriting to Schubert’s, so the Beethoven reference was interesting. One of their fave numbers in the Cavern days had been ‘Roll Over Beethoven’. When asked what they thought about Beethoven, Ringo usually said he liked his work very much, ‘especially his poems’.
The lyrics, once again, are sparse, just twelve lines, but they are quite poetic, combining Wordsworthian rhythms with modern usage: ‘Because the world is round, it turns me on. Because the wind is high, it blows my mind. Because the sky is blue, it makes me cry.’ It would have been easy to have mucked it up by having blue at the end, as they might have done back in 1962. Both Paul and George said it was their favourite song on Abbey Road. John was more matter-of-fact: ‘The lyrics speak for themselves, they’re clear, no bullshit, no imagery, no obscure references.’
Only five lines in John’s hand have turned up, all a bit faded. They are written on the back of a business letter from John Eastman (representing Paul) to the other Beatles, during their interminable Apple rows. It gives us a date, 8 July 1969, and again reflects John’s habit of writing lyrics on any old scrap lying around.
‘Because’, from Abbey Road, five lines in John’s hand, written on the back of a legal letter about yet another row concerning Apple, NEMS and Allen Klein, their one-time business manager.
Because the world is round it turns me on
Because the world is round… aaaaaahhhhhh
Because the wind is high it blows my mind
Because the wind is high… aaaaaaaahhhh
Love is old, love is new
Love is all, love is you
Because the sky is blue, it makes me cry
Because the sky is blue… aaaaaaahhhh
You Never Give Me Your Money
This was one of those songs I could never get out of my head back when I first heard it. The opening four lines seemed to go round and round inside my brain. ‘You never give me your money, you only give me your funny paper / and in the middle of negotiations / you break down.’ Easy to sing, as it’s almost all on the same note.
And then I could never remember how it went after that, the reason being that nothing really flowed on, nothing was connected. The song was made up of three if not four scraps of songs put together, using up leftovers.
The first part, about not being given the money, came out of the Apple squabbles. None of them ever seemed to have any real money, it was always bits of paper and forms purporting to show where it had all gone, where it was going. There might also have been a double meaning–Paul saying to John that you never give me yourself, now you are with Yoko. But that could be reading too much into it.
The next verse jumps rather awkwardly into the problems of a student, out of college, with no money. The last verse jumped again, to a sweet dream that had come true–meaning Linda, his loveheart, turning up to save him. So, quite a lot of scraps of lyrics, but not enough to make a whole song.
Sun King
We were now well into the second side of the album and from here to the end it is all short, unfinished pieces, filling up the side, unloading their minds, knowing it was going to be their last ever new album so better clear the decks in case we never come this way again. The songs run into each other, as a mad medley. In fact the working title was ‘A Huge Medley’.
‘Sun King’ was a mere scrap, just seven lines–in fact three lines, with the other four made up of nonsense. The Sun King was Louis XIV of France. John, supposedly had been reading Nancy Mitford’s biography of the Sun King, or at least a review of it.
For the final four lines, John reverted to singing gibberish, throwing in all the stupid foreign phrases he could think of: mi amore, obrigado, quando, mundo–in cod Italian/Portuguese/Spanish.
You could argue this was very avant-garde and revolutionary, like John Cage composing silent music, making a philosophical statement about the nature of art. Was John suggesting that words themselves were a nonsense? Who needs them, why do we tie ourselves to them, surely any words can be treated as lyrics, so come on, let’s see if we can do it. Or was he just being bloody lazy? Or having a joke? Whatever the answer, it amused him at the time and filled two and a half minutes on the album.
Mean Mr Mustard
‘Sun King’ segues straight into ‘Mean Mr Mustard’ which then blends into ‘Polythene Pam’, and so on. They are connected in this way because they are all scraps, part songs, unfinished, embryos, not apparently good enough, or with no one willing enough to build them up and launch them as fully fledged, grown-up songs.
‘Mr Mustard’ was by John–‘a bit of crap I wrote in India’–based on a newspaper story about a miser who hid cash in his rectum, some sort of tramp, a dosser, a down and out. When John saw a homeless person sleeping in a park, or a dirty old man begging in the street, he used to say that he would probably have ended up that way himself, had the Beatles not come along. Perhaps he was thinking of his dad, Alfred, who wandered off to sea and survived doing odd jobs like washing up in hotel kitchens.
‘Keeps a ten bob note up his nose’ was not, John maintained, a drug reference, but the sort of thing he imagined Mr Mustard doing, to hide whatever money he had. Ah, ten bob notes, I remember them well. A real note, not a coin, which was worth half an old pound note, both of them long gone. In the song, mean Mr Mustard has a sister, originally named Shirley, but changed to Pam in order to lead us into the next song…
Polythene Pam
Also written in India by John. This one goes back to their dodgy, dingy Cavern days, telling of some insalubrious female fan who dressed up in polythene–a synthetic plastic material that had just become popular in the 1950s. Two different girls have come forward and said they were the original–one who ate polythene and the other who enjoyed three-in-a-bed sessions with John wearing nothing but polythene bags. The song finished with a ‘yeah yeah’, in a heavy Scouse accent–another period touch. Before merging straight on into the next song.
There is a manuscript for ‘Polythene Pam’–not many from the Medley have survived or emerged–which has nine lines in John’s best hand, but now a bit faint. In the final line there is a correction, but I can’t read it. The rhymes are rather forced and the reference to the News of the World is now archaic (the paper closed in 2012).
Until I properly studied the finished lyrics–as they were not enclosed with the album–I had missed ‘killer-diller’, or at least failed to understand what he was trying to say, never having heard the expression. Now I see it written down, and have looked it up, I learn that it is American usage, coined just before the war, and refers to someone or something that is excellent, not to say fab. I wonder how John knew it? We never used it in Carlisle, and we were awfully cosmopolitan.
‘Polythene Pam’, from Abbey Road, in John’s hand but rather faint and some words hard to read.
Well you should see Polythene Pam
She’s so good-looking but she looks like a man
Well you should see her in drag
Dressed in her polythene bag
Yes you should see Polythene Pam
Yeah yeah yeah
Get a dose of her in jackboots and kilt
She’s killer-diller when she’s dressed to the hilt
She’s the kind of a girl that makes the News of the World
Yes you could say she was attractively built
Yeah yeah yeah
She Came In Through The Bathroom Window
This is probably the best of the medley of short songs–written by Paul and based on a girl who actually did come through his bathroom window. She was one of the so-called Apple Scruffs who hung around Paul’s house and the Abbey Road Studios, day and night, hoping for a glimpse. John, Ringo and George were usually spared this attention at their homes, living out in the suburbs in gated communities, but Paul was in the heart of London, and very handy for the studios. He also tended to indulge them, going out to say hello, pose for photographs, even asking the more sensible-looking ones to take Martha for a walk or do little jobs for him.
On this occasion, while Paul was away, some of them managed to find a ladder and climbed in through a bathroom window. Others poured in and went through Paul’s clothes and belongings, one of which was a photograph of his father he particularly treasured. The neighbours spotted the girls, rang the police and each other–hence ‘Sunday’s on the phone to Monday’. The photograph was eventually returned.
After the first couple of lines, setting the narrative, the lyrics are a bit of a hotchpotch, not apparently connected, not meaning much, more like a John song, throwing in half-remembered phrases: ‘And so I quit the police department’ is said to have been inspired by a Los Angeles traffic cop named Eugene Quits. Or it could have referred to Pete Shotton, his boyhood friend, who did for a time become a policeman. But the tune is good.
The manuscript, in Paul’s hand, on Apple Corps headed notepaper, looks like a version written out for somebody in the studio, perhaps George. At the end has been added: ‘Another Lennon and McCartney original’.
She came in through the bathroom window
Protected by a silver spoon
But now she sucks her thumb and wonders
By the banks of her own lagoon
Didn’t anybody tell her?
Didn’t anybody see?
Sunday’s on the phone to Monday,
Tuesday’s on the phone to me
She said she’d always been a dancer
She worked at 15 clubs a day
And though she thought I knew the answer
Well I knew but I could not say.
And so I quit the police department
And got myself a steady job
And though she tried her best to help me
She could steal but she could not rob.
Didn’t anybody tell her?
Didn’t anybody see?
Sunday’s on the phone to Monday,
Tuesday’s on the phone to me
Oh yeah.
‘She Came In Through The Bathroom Window’, from Abbey Road, in Paul’s hand, again on Apple notepaper. There must have been a lot of it lying around, handy for writing out lyrics.
Golden Slumbers
Paul wrote this at his father’s house, ‘Rembrandt’, a rather smart villa with a conservatory and vines growing. Jim had moved there, thanks to Paul’s financial help, abandoning their old family council house in Forthlin Road. By this time Jim had married Angie, whose daughter Ruth was learning the piano. Propped up on the piano was the sheet music of the well-known lullaby, ‘Golden Slumbers’. Paul took the title and wrote his own version.
There are few words, just eight lines. The first two lines are Paul’s–‘Once there was a way to get back homewards’–but the next six are taken almost word for word from the old lullaby, originally a poem written by Thomas Dekker in 1603. No sign of any credit for the words on the Abbey Road sleeve, but I suppose you don’t have to worry about being sued when the author has been dead almost four centuries.
It’s a sweet lullaby, nice melodies, but I never cared for the bit when he suddenly breaks into loud rocker mode, shattering the mood, before he goes back again to the soft going-to-sleep music.
Again, we move straight on, into the next tune in the Medley. Back before the shift in the balance of power, the Beatles had wanted to do a whole album where there were no breaks, but EMI had vetoed the idea, preferring songs to be clearly separated. On this their last album, the Beatles achieved one minor ambition.
Carry That Weight
As with ‘You Never Give Me Your Money’, Paul is feeling the weight of all the Apple arguments and the court cases, and his rows with Klein.
The notion of a weight having to be carried might also have been in Paul’s mind in another sense, thinking of them as ex-Beatles: how would they cope, making music or anything else by themselves, saddled with the burden of having been Beatles. But this is probably a bit fanciful on my part.
After the first two lines–and there are only five lines in total–Paul reverts to the earlier song, and the words, repeating ‘You Never Give Me Your Money’ melody, but with slightly different wording, ‘I never give you my pillow’. So it becomes a parody of his own parody.
And then goes straight on into…
The End
Which was the end, of the medley, of the album, and of the Beatles. They did record one more song after Abbey Road was completed–George’s ‘I Me Mine’, but after Abbey Road came out in September 1969, the Beatles had effectively died.
Despite the lack of lyrics–just three lines, two of which are pretty good–there is a musical finale with the three guitarists doing battle. They each have a little solo–and even Ringo is persuaded, for the first time ever on a Beatles record, to do a drum solo. Then it all rises to a farewell crescendo, before Paul sings that final couplet: ‘And in the end the love you take / is equal to the love you make.’
It sounds vaguely familiar, almost Shakespearian, but perhaps that’s because it has been quoted so often. Paul said he wanted to finish, like the Bard, with a couplet, then exit left. Interesting that he went out on words, with a final lyrical flourish. Words did matter to them.
John thought the couplet was good, even if in talking about it to Playboy he got the words wrong, quoting it as ‘the love you get is equal to the love you give’. But he did call it cosmic, which was praise enough.
Her Majesty
But, hee hee, having indicated it was the end, and done their farewells, and guitar flourishes, there is then quite a long pause. On the album sleeve it clearly lists the last song as ‘The End’, so clearly, nothing can be left. After all, with such an extended sequence of songs all strung together, it must surely all be over now. Then you suddenly hear Paul strumming away. It was originally part of the medley, then edited out. It supposedly appeared at the end of the master tape by accident. It lasts just twenty-three seconds, the shortest ever Beatles number.
And he has a good joke. He tells us that Her Majesty is a pretty nice girl, though she doesn’t have a lot to say, but some day he wants to make her his. More affectionate teasing. As a schoolboy of nearly eleven, in June 1953, Paul had won an essay competition for the Queen’s Coronation, writing about our lovely young Queen.
The Queen was still with us in 2014, and so was Paul and also Ringo–unlike the ten-bob note. And Her Majesty did knight Paul. So I am sure he would agree she was a pretty nice girl…
The Beatles’ last ‘public’ performance on the roof of Savile Row in London in January 1969.