John – lead
vocals, guitars, organ
Paul – harmony vocals, bass, electric piano
George – lead guitar
Ringo – drums
Side two’s short “electric” track begins with an appropriately weary ascent on the guitar, reversing the gentle descent that closes ‘Martha My Dear’, which gives way to wonderfully realistic whining and musical tossing and turning, as John is prey to a weary body and racing mind.
The track is another of those written by John in India. Many of John’s Indian songs deal with other people – Prudence, Bill, Sadie, as well as Julia – and are not the result of self-examination. ‘Me And My Monkey’ was tangentially inspired by the Indian trip, ‘Yer Blues’ and ‘Revolution’ are more universal, and ‘Cry Baby Cry’ is something of a throwaway. But ‘I’m So Tired’ remains the song in which John shares his experience of Indian life. “I’m meditating all day and couldn’t sleep at night.” He was also in some mental turmoil regarding Cynthia, who was with him, and Yoko, who wasn’t. The lyric is quite specific – “I don’t know what to do … my mind is set on you”. We can even guess that he wrote the song in early March as that would have made it “three weeks” since he’d seen Yoko.
The Kinfauns demo of this track shows that a little judicious pruning had occurred between May and October. The earlier version repeats the first verse after the Sir Walter Raleigh verse, and then adds a bridge –
When I hold you in your arms
When you show each one of your charms
I wonder should I get up and go to the funny farm
Although this was clearly a bridge-in-progress (hived off to sow another seed in ‘Happiness Is A Warm Gun’), the final version is wisely much more succinct as it omits not only the repeated verse and bridge, but also an extended repeat-to-fade of “I’d give you everything I’ve got for a little peace of mind”.
(What this deleted bridge also highlights is the contrast between this Cynthia-related song and the Yoko-inspired ‘Happiness Is A Warm Gun’, even down to the distancing and possibly Freudian (but equally possibly deliberate) “When I hold you in your arms”.)
The track was recorded very quickly – started and finished, along with ‘The Continuing Story Of Bungalow Bill’, in one session (albeit a 16-hour one). Fourteen takes of vocal, guitars, bass and drums were taped, and then further vocals, guitars, drums, electric piano and organ overdubbed, filling the eight tape tracks. The stereo sound of this track illustrates well how the ambience created by the recording has changed with the developing studio techniques. The group were playing in the studio with their amps turned up higher than before, meaning that, for example, the guitar sound would leak into the drum and vocals microphones, and the drums would leak into the guitar and bass microphones. As the instruments were recorded on separate tracks of the tape and mixed across the stereo spectrum, this leakage would create a sense of space. For ‘I’m Only Sleeping’, Ringo’s drums are panned left, while John’s live vocal, with drum leakage, is placed in the centre, and the guitars, also with ambient drum sound, are panned right.
The verse begins with a quick run-through of a conventional chord sequence – but note that unusual G#7 (VII7) on “tired”, that gently nudges you awake should you be drifting back off to sleep. This is followed by a slightly different but highly conventional I–vi–IV–V turnaround, with the refrain asserting a more even and earnest A–E–D–A (I–V–IV–I) spread over six bars.
But the genius of the song is its capturing of the feeling of a mind refusing to submit to its own craving for unconsciousness. The weary, dragging verses put a befuddled case for why he really should be dead to the world, but still an obsession is preventing any hope of calmness. He’s restlessly tossing between A major and a hint of A minor (by augmenting that E, and thoughtlessly lobbing in a C natural or two).
The refrain builds with a frantic but futile energy, a musical equivalent of wrestling with the eiderdown – even if he rang her, she’d only make a joke out of it, which, in his worn out frustration he couldn’t counter, and so he resorts to screaming for some crumb of acknowledgement from her of his feelings in order to get a little peace of mind. And, brilliantly, on the reminder of his desperate need for “peace of mind”, he falls back and starts the same old cycle with another weary, dragging verse.
The obvious companion piece to ‘I’m So Tired’ is ‘I’m Only Sleeping’ from 1966. The previous song’s approach was from a different angle, that of being unable to stay awake, but still spoke of lying awake and staring at the ceiling “waiting for that sleepy feeling”. Yet the two songs have more in common than mere subject matter.
Sleep was clearly important to John, and he evidently loved his bed. Long before he and Yoko hit upon the idea of staging bed-ins for peace, much of his writing made reference to sleep – right back to “I should be sleeping like a log”. Even on the White Album, the closing track is John’s ‘Good Night’. Sleep tight. His close friend Pete Shotton remembers that “the one thing John hated more than going to bed at night was getting out of it the next day”. Paul’s assessment was that “being tired was one of his themes … I think we were all pretty tired but he chose to write about it”. John rated this as one of his favourite Beatle tracks. “I just like the sound of it, and I sing it well.”
The song ends with John wearily muttering what sounds like, but probably isn’t, “monsieur, monsieur how about another one”. He should have known better – conspiracy theorists point out that the phrase, when reversed, sounds like “Paul is dead, man. Miss him, miss him”. More tedious grist to the tiresome mill.