Paul – lead and
harmony vocals, lead guitar, piano
John – lead and harmony vocals, lead guitar
George – harmony vocals, six-string bass, tambourine
Ringo – drums
Pattie Harrison, Yoko Ono – backing vocals
It had been quite a while since John and Paul had written together. If songs in which separate parts were written by a different composer – such as ‘Baby You’re A Rich Man’ or ‘A Day In The Life’ – are excluded, the last good old-fashioned “eyeball-to-eyeball” songs appeared on Rubber Soul. Although mainly Paul’s song, ‘Birthday’ seems to have been a joint composition, but the change in the relationship between the two is underlined by the fact that it was more or less written in the studio.
It has been said by many that The Beatles is effectively an album by four individuals. The contrast with the previous album, Sgt Pepper, released eighteen months previously, is stark. The argument is compelling –
– There are four tracks probably featuring Paul as the only Beatle (‘Wild Honey Pie’, ‘Martha My Dear’, ‘Blackbird’, ‘Mother Nature’s Son’).
– For the first time John appears on a track alone (‘Julia’).
– Even Ringo puts in what is effectively a solo performance (‘Good Night’).
– There are also tracks on which only two members of the group appear (‘Don’t Pass Me By’, ‘Why Don’t We Do It In The Road’).
– John does not appear on three of George’s four songs (‘Piggies’, ‘Long Long Long’, ‘Savoy Truffle’).
– George and Ringo spent ten days in America while John and Paul worked on ‘Revolution 9’ and ‘Blackbird’ respectively. On 11 June, these two songs were being recorded in separate studios at Abbey Road.
– There are no vocal duets on the album.
Paul remembers The Beatles as “the tension album … there was a lot of friction”. On 16 July, George Martin’s right-hand man, engineer Geoff Emerick, decided he couldn’t work with the group any more. He could no longer stand the arguing and the swearing. “They were falling apart.”
On 22 August, Ringo left the Beatles.
And yet …
Ringo himself felt that during the sessions for The Beatles, they “were becoming a group again”. After he re-joined the group, he felt the album really took off. There was “lots of group activity going down. I loved the White Album.” Chris Thomas, who took over from George Martin while he was on holiday, and produced a number of tracks, including ‘Birthday’, also thought the group was pulling together strongly, despite breaking off to hold Apple meetings during the sessions. “When they started playing it was a great atmosphere. They’d really rock out.”
So ‘Birthday’ was the White Album’s token collaborative effort, but largely written by Paul. He began the song on his own in the studio. The group had arranged to start a couple of hours early that day, as the film The Girl Can’t Help It was being shown on TV, and they planned to nip round the corner to Paul’s house on Cavendish Avenue for 9 pm to watch it and then come back to the studio to finish the track. Chris Thomas remembers that the group arrived one by one, and by the time they were all there, the song was written. It was a song the sort of lyric that lent itself to group composition. According to Ringo, “Anyone could shout a line … the roadies, the tea lady. If anyone had a line, it would be used.”
The Beatles recorded the backing track on four-track tape, George taking on the six-string bass, then went to watch the film. And then, suitably inspired, they came back to the studio and finished the song. To accommodate the overdubs, at some stage during the evening, it was transferred from four to eight-track tape. (A number of songs on the album began life as four-track recordings, later to be transferred to eight-track. This could have been because the new 3M eight-track recorder was needed elsewhere at Abbey Road, and the Beatles had to share it with other artists.) Onto the basic tape, John and Paul taped the vocals, Mal Evans added the rapid handclaps and Pattie and Yoko contributed the “birthday” backing vocals. The second of Paul’s exhortations to dance shows evidence of having been punched in, as the edited portion is too short to completely replace the earlier take, the end of which immediately follows, giving a broken “da-a-ance / a-ance”.
The stereo mix of ‘Birthday’ is unusual. From the released track, it seems that the basic track of drums, guitar, bass and piano is contained in the stereo centre. All the vocals, handclaps and some extra tambourine and other spurious noises are artificially double tracked onto the outer extremes of the spectrum. This shows up the off-mike noises such as the whispering at the beginning of the drum break and the merriment at the end of the song. Nevertheless, this informality gives the song a feeling of spontaneity.
In fact, this was one of the album’s quickest recordings. Apart from the solo tracks, such as ‘Blackbird’ and ‘Wild Honey Pie’, only ‘Rocky Raccoon’ had thus far been started and finished in a single session. In the last full week of recording for The Beatles, ‘I’m So Tired’ and ‘The Continuing Story Of Bungalow Bill’ would both be completed on the same day.
‘Birthday’ has been described as parodic, but it seems churlish to consider it anything less than an excuse for a good old-fashioned knees-up. It is not one of Paul’s best rockers, being eclipsed by ‘Back In The U.S.S.R.’ and ‘Helter Skelter’, but is a full-blooded jam, injected with a driving riff with a bluesy feel, a searing ad-hoc vocal and enough harmonic interest to sustain it for its two and a half minutes.
The ground bass that underpins the song is reminiscent of ‘Day Tripper’. Although the bass is mixed relatively low, it throws in a double-bar riff.
The structure of the song’s opening is founded on standard twelve-bar blues, followed by a driving four-to-the-bar solo from Ringo, with someone energetically shouting out bar numbers in the background to eight bars of “Yes we’re going to a party party” in straight E.
The surprise comes with the song’s third section and another, rather sudden change of key, this time down to C major. After the build-up of the “party party” section, this new territory soon becomes comfortable, and the invitation to dance is irresistible. The riff now executes a seamless arch to return to its start, until the upward reach for the return to the home key.
Paul’s upright piano, treated to sound like an electric harpsichord, is more prominent during the instrumental repeat, stepping in to vocalise the verse. Mal Evans, writing in the monthly Beatles Book at the time, sheds little light on how this was done, explaining that it was “‘prepared’ to give it a very special sound with reverberation, wow-wow and technical things like that”. The distinctive sound was actually created by manually turning the mid-range boost control of the Vox Conqueror amplifier in time with the music, to give a kind of equalised wah-wah effect, a job carried out by Ken Scott. The guitar and bass, which have been hammering out rhythm and riff hand in hand for most of the song now take on their heavy four-bar stop break, again in unison, very much a feature of the music of the time. The verse is recapped in preparation for a fresh assault, but we are suddenly hit by the end of the song, breathlessly spinning as the bizarre piano sound arpeggiates into the next track.