John – lead
vocals, guitar, tambourine
Paul – backing vocals, bass, drums, piano, flügelhorn
George – backing vocals, lead guitar
Mal Evans – backing vocals, tambourine
John McCartney, Jackie Lomax – backing vocals
Coincidentally, the Beatles recorded the second track on the album immediately after the first, and as Ringo was still away, Paul again played drums. For this recording, however, the group decided to visit Trident Studios in the heart of London, to avail themselves of its eight-track facility. They had recorded ‘Hey Jude’ at Trident, but after recording ‘Dear Prudence’ with the luxury of eight-track, they decided that they could no longer settle for anything less. On hearing that Abbey Road did have an eight-track recorder of its own, which was still being tested, they decided to commandeer it. They recorded the next track for the album, ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’, using the new equipment. But, for now, it was over to Wardour Street for an eight-track session.
While he was in India, John had developed a new picking style to guitar playing. He had tried to master this in earlier times – one attempt is captured on Anthology 2 with the demo of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, but after a few bars of uneven plucking he concedes to himself “I cannae do it, I cannae do it” and reverts to strumming. But the two months in India had allowed John to develop as a musician as well as a composer. Patiently coached by Donovan, he learnt to pick simple acoustic riffs, and so add a new texture to his songs. ‘Dear Prudence’ was the first example the public encountered carrying this new style, but John was to use it abundantly on this album, and consistently throughout the remainder of his recording career. It featured in much of the best of his coming work – ‘Happiness Is A Warm Gun’, ‘Julia’, ‘I Want You’, ‘Because’.
The song is famously about Mia Farrow’s younger sister who was with John and the others at the ashram. She had been meditating rather earnestly and was spending most of the day in her hut. John’s recollection was that Prudence “seemed to go slightly balmy, meditating too long, and couldn’t come out of the little hut that we were living in. They selected me and George to try to bring her out because she would trust us. If she’d been in the West, they would have put her away.” For her part, Farrow remembers not being told of the song until she was leaving Rishikesh.
The incident gave John an excuse to write a song about the beauty of nature, something to which life in the ashram, and the lectures of Maharishi had opened his eyes. This rather commonplace hook on which to hang the song gave it a grounding in real life, and the vignette made it a more successful venture than the rather mawkish unreleased ‘Child Of Nature’ – “Sunlight shining in my eyes / As I face the desert skies / And my thoughts return to home / Yes my thoughts return to home”. ‘Dear Prudence’ extols the virtues of simple enjoyment of nature as much as those of transcendental meditation. Even the formation of the clouds and the messages within birdsong can offer their own inherent pleasures.
The demo of the song that John recorded in May shows the song to have been completely worked out while in India, as it is almost identical to the released version, even down to the lyrically uneven lines “Look around, round / Look around, round, round / Look around”. Almost the only difference between the two is a repeat of this section before the final heavier verse. His spoken ending to the demo, explaining it was about a girl at Rishikesh, India, who wanted them to know that “sooner or later she would go completely beserk under the care of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi”, does deflate the song’s simple statement, and was wisely and inevitably omitted from the version on The Beatles.
As if to avoid any kind of confrontation, the song’s harmony sticks to the safe territory of D. John retuned his bottom E string to D (as did George) and played a style that more or less consistently held the bottom three strings open, while gliding up and down the top three strings. The introduction fades in with a gradual descent from these top three strings over the constant D of the lower strings. When it lands on D, it remains there, but the descent is continued by the bass notes in a D–C–B–Bb rotation. The simplicity of this descent is very subtly skewed by Paul’s bass, as he starts the cycle at the bottom, offering us A–C–B–Bb.
The cycle is only broken on reaching “won’t you come out to play”, resolving on the same bVII–IV–I chord sequence as the ‘Hey Jude’ sing-along.
John meanwhile builds the song nicely, coaxing Prudence out with gentle developments – the single bass note on the third beat, joined by a hi-hat dominated drum pattern and swirling bass for the second half of the verse. The second verse settles into a groove, and falsetto backing vocals join the fun. A second (rhythm) and third (lead) guitar play along with the “look around” section, the latter remaining to take part in the third verse. After this, having presumably got Prudence on board, all hell breaks loose as Paul, filling in for Ringo, leads the band into freeform jamming, also adding glistening piano arpeggios. He then brings them back into line for a final celebratory chorus (“The sun is up” has now become an anthem) with a full glissando downward sweep on the piano and regular on-beat drumming. The lead guitar arches upward to greater heights, finally hitting top D and repeating it for the climactic “won’t you come out to play”. It collapses into uneven reverberation as the intro becomes the outro and the picking guitar fades into the distance.
Apart from the “won’t you come out to play” phrase, the song ventures away from the harmonic safety of D on just one other occasion – during the “look around, round” section it shifts imperceptibly until the final “look around” and the unusual and effective F–Ab–G–D (bIII–bV–IV–I).
The group spent three days at Trident working on the song, and, playing to the benefits of the eight-track facility, developed a new way of working. They could now build the song track by track, wiping out previous takes until they were happy with the recording. This means that technically the final recording is “take one”, but this belies an awful lot of recording that was made to reach this. Day one was spent laying down the basic track of guitar and drums, with vocals, bass and tambourine added the following day. The tambourine is usually ascribed to Paul, but this seems to be on the same track as the bass and so was probably Mal Evans – in fact, Evans’ track-by-track summary in the Beatles Book of November 1968 notes that “John and I play tambourines”. On the last day, the track was polished off with the addition of Paul’s piano and brief flügelhorn contributions (the latter seemingly lost in the mix). The luxury of Trident’s eight-track facility meant that no reduction mix was needed to free up tracks for overdubbing. At least one mono mix was made at Trident when the group returned there in early October for a week’s recording at an alternative studio, which included a striking final “won’t you come out to play” effectively a cappella. However, the final mono and stereo mixing was done at Abbey Road the following week.
Paul’s cousin John, who happened to be visiting at the time, and Jackie Lomax found themselves involved in the 29 August session, joining Mal Evans by adding backing vocals and handclaps to the track. They all contributed massed applause at the end of the track, though this was ultimately mixed out of the recording. Although George Harrison was heavily involved in Jackie Lomax’s career at the time, and he was often at Abbey Road studios, this is Lomax’s only recorded appearance on a Beatle track.