John – lead
vocals, piano, clavioline
Paul – backing vocals, bass, piano
George – backing vocals, guitar
Ringo – drums, tambourine, maracas
Session musician – vibraphone
In the spring of 1967, Brian Epstein seemingly found a neat solution to two problems that had been simmering for a while. On the one hand, there was the question of producing a third movie to satisfy the three-movie deal that the Beatles had with United Artists. Things had moved on to such an extent since A Hard Days Night and Help! that the prospect of getting the four to act in a mainstream film seemed vanishingly remote. Also, Brian had been pestered for some time by Al Brodax, an executive producer at ABC Television in America. Brodax had created the cartoon series The Beatles for ABC, which had been running since 1965. The cartoons were each based on a single song, with a suitably off-the-wall plot involving anything from Japanese ghost ships to gold-sniffing donkeys. Being for an American audience, the voices were made archetypally English. To British ears, they are shockingly un-Scouse, voiced by the American actor Paul Frees and the British character actor Lance Percival. Brodax’s plan was to make a full-length version for cinema release, and only needed the permission of the Beatles’ manager. Eventually, Brian relented and agreed to the film, thus completing the terms of the deal with UA.
So, on 5 June, with Sgt Pepper newly released and recording for the Magical Mystery Tour project in full swing, NEMS Enterprises announced yet another new Beatles project – a feature-length cartoon film, to be called Yellow Submarine. ‘Baby You’re A Rich Man’ was the first song to be recorded specifically for this new project.
In fact, the song was also the first Beatles track recorded at Olympic Sound Studios in Barnes, south-east London. Olympic was notably the favoured venue of the Rolling Stones, who recorded six albums there between 1966 and 1972. After ‘Baby You’re A Rich Man’, the group returned to the studio to tape the ‘All You Need Is Love’ backing track, and a couple of sessions for ‘Something’ and ‘You Never Give Me Your Money’ were held there in May 1969. Unusually, ‘Baby You’re A Rich Man’ was also mixed at Olympic – the single six-hour recording and mixing session being first time the whole recording process had taken place outside Abbey Road. A week later, John and Paul would visit the studio again and add backing vocals to ‘We Love You’, but for now, Mick Jagger, plus possibly other Stones, sat in on ‘Baby You’re A Rich Man’, prompting suggestions that Jagger added backing vocals – or at least handclaps – to the track.
The song itself is an ‘A Day In The Life’-type mix of a song from John and one from Paul, although the two songs are more snippets than full-fledged songs, more along the lines of ‘I’ve Got A Feeling’ than ‘A Day In The Life’. It is the only such song that was released on a single. John’s ‘One Of The Beautiful People’ was based on articles that were beginning to appear in the press about members of the burgeoning hippy culture. It may have been further inspired by A Technicolour Dream, a 14-hour concert, co-organised by Barry Miles in aid of the underground newspaper International Times, which took place at the Alexandra Palace on 29 April, less than two weeks before the recording of ‘Baby You’re A Rich Man’. John was present at the event, which was headlined by Pink Floyd. Coincidentally, Yoko Ono was one of the concert’s other forty performers.
John’s snippet of a song fits reasonably well with Paul’s ‘Baby You’re A Rich Man’ chorus. John spoke of the songs being “forced” together, but it has to be said that the combination does work, not least in the use of chords. The song can be thought of as being in C major, as that’s where we eventually end up, but may also be thought of as so-called G Mixolydian. Either way, both parts, particularly Paul’s, rely heavily on simply G–C changes. John throws in an F and Paul a Bb. There does seem to have been collaboration on at least one half of the song – Paul recalls that “‘tuned to a natural E’ is a line I remember us writing, a slight pun on the word ‘naturally’”. Oddly, the melodies are atypical of the writers’ styles – John’s tune skips around, covering a full octave, whereas Paul’s chorus for the most part hammers away on a single note.
Legend has it that John’s song was a dig at Brian Epstein, who was on record as hating songs with “baby” in the title. Some claim that he sings “baby, you’re a rich fag Jew” in the outro. There’s no evidence for this, but Ray Coleman in his biography of Epstein, claims John once used the paraphrased title when talking to Brian.
The song has a clear and distinctive arrangement. Although the piano and bass combination dominate (the clear, smooth bass sound can be put down to Olympic’s sophisticated mixing console), the instrument that characterises the track is the clavioline, played by John, which produces the whirling, reedy fills between the vocal lines. This keyboard instrument, a forerunner of the synthesiser, but one which could only play one note at a time, happened to be in the Olympic studio on that day, and John pounced upon it for the track. The clavioline, or its variants, had featured most prominently on the songs ‘Runaway’ by Del Shannon from 1961, and the Tornados’ 1962 hit ‘Telstar’, both of which reached number one in both Britain and the US. Also buried in the mix, possibly only audible immediately after “people” at the beginning of verse two, is a vibraphone, played by second engineer Eddie Kramer.
The mono mix was made on the day of recording. The stereo mix was made over four years later, ostensibly for the German version of Magical Mystery Tour. Capitol’s 1967 LP version of Magical Mystery Tour therefore had to make do with a rechannelled mock-stereo mix. The 1971 true stereo version fades more quickly and misses some of the effects of the mono, for instance the echo effect in the pauses after lines such as “far as the eye can see”. For some reason, when the UK version of the Magical Mystery Tour album was compiled by Parlophone in 1976, they used the true stereo version for the cassette format only, whereas the LP used Capitol’s mock-stereo concoction. Naturally, order had been restored by the time the CD releases were produced.
‘Baby You’re A Rich Man’ did end up in Yellow Submarine, but was the victim of cuts due to its producers’ worries about the length of the film. In the US, the entire ‘Hey Bulldog’ chunk of the film was cut, and even for the 1999 DVD release, which restores ‘Hey Bulldog’, ‘Baby You’re A Rich Man’ appears only fleetingly, inexplicably cut just before the vocals enter.