John – lead
vocals, lead guitar
Paul – harmony vocals, bass
George – lead guitar
Ringo – drums
Blues music is, of course, as old as the hills. Even before the crossover blues boom of the 1960s, led by the likes of Eric Clapton, the Animals and Alexis Korner, blues had made its distinctive presence felt to a white audience. Bob Dylan had fused it with folk, and the previous decade Lonnie Donegan had given a new twist to imports by Leadbelly and Big Bill Broonzy on his hit ‘Rock Island Line’/‘John Henry’. Thanks in particular to Brian Jones and Charlie Watts, the Rolling Stones’ foundation was as one of the first credible white blues bands. And both John and Paul have cited blues musicians, as well as exponents of rhythm and blues, as having had a strong influence on their own music. With regard to this specific song, John mentions the great country blues singer Sleepy John Estes.
So the Beatles emerged from a melting pot of blues influences. Yet they had never really gone back to the roots with the form, in the same way as they had with folk, country or R&B. The derivative ‘12-Bar Original’, recorded in the small hours of that Friday morning back in November 1965, remained unreleased until 1996. And had The Beatles been pared down to a single album, the group may never have released a blues number at all.
‘Yer Blues’ was yet another product of those weeks in Rishikesh. John told Rolling Stone that the title of the song was a deliberate parody of the blues scene – tempered because of his self-consciousness – in a similar way to how they had parodied American music in earlier days. Paul had suggested he come straight out with it and avoid the jokey “Yer”, but nevertheless John had to hide behind a façade of humour.
And yet the words are screamingly personal. The gist of the main verse, “Yes I’m lonely, wanna die”, sets the tone, but the message is forced home by the lengthy cycle of startling imagery within the secondary verses. The final embellishment “Feel so suicidal / Even hate my rock ’n’ roll” is quite shocking. Following hard on the heels of the rollicking ‘Birthday’, this trumps even the most downbeat of John’s output to date. It is particularly telling that the song was written in India “I was meditating about eight hours a day, [and] writing the most miserable songs on earth. In ‘Yer Blues’, when I wrote, ‘I’m so lonely I want to die,’ I’m not kidding. That’s how I felt.” The reference to “Dylan’s Mister Jones”, incidentally, relates to Bob Dylan’s ‘Ballad Of A Thin Man’ from Highway 61 Revisited –
And you say, “Oh my God
Am I here all alone?”
Because something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?
In the demo of the song, recorded at George’s house in May, John felt so “insecure”, like Dylan’s Mister Jones.
The song was recorded on 13 August, in a small storage room, Room 2A, which was effectively an annexe to Studio 2’s control room at Abbey Road. Just what prompted this move is recalled differently by the two engineers on the session. Ken Scott remembers that the previous evening George had decided to record the vocals for his ‘Not Guilty’ in the intimate confines of Studio 2’s control room. Picking up on an off-hand remark by Scott to the effect that Room 2A would be an even more intimate location for recording their next song, John decided to push things a step further, and instruments and microphones were set up in the annexe for recording ‘Yer Blues’. Second engineer John Smith, however, remembers that the group had decided they wanted a clean drum sound for the track, with no spill-over into the mikes of the other instruments, and so set up Ringo’s kit in Room 2A. Having started running through the song, Ringo decided he needed Paul to be with him to play off. Paul then wanted John there for the same reason, and so before long all four were crammed into the annexe.
The fact that the room had no acoustic baffles is evident from the fact that a guitar teeters on the brink of feedback throughout the song. Ringo felt that the tightness of playing together was the highlight of the album: “the four of us were in a box, a room about eight by eight [feet], with no separation. It was this group that was together; it was like grunge rock of the Sixties, really – grunge blues”. (The room, though small, was around twice as big as Ringo remembers. Nevertheless, still quite a squeeze.) The group taped 14 takes of the backing track, before deciding that the final take 14 was best. John and George then re-taped their guitar solos, which come in after the final verse. Although the new solos wiped over the originals on the tape, leakage into the bass and drum microphones means that the sound of the guitars from the original take can still be heard in the final mix, particularly in stereo. The track was then mixed down and two mixes edited together.
The following day Ringo overdubbed an extra snare drum over the guitar solo on this edited rhythm track, and John superimposed his vocal, with Paul added some harmony. The original guide vocal can also be heard at several points throughout the track – the vocal is quite distinct during the instrumental stops at the beginnings of the secondary verses. At these points John appears to have superimposed a different lyric. The effect of this guide vocal is particularly telling after the edit, when John is baring his soul, screaming into a dead microphone. The mono mix of the track was then made at the end of the session.
The edit at 3 minutes 17 seconds is probably the most obvious in any Beatles recording. For the first time, the original four-track tape itself was spliced, instead of the usual procedure of editing the mixed two-track quarter-inch tape. It is generally accepted that the beginning of one take was spliced onto the end of another. Understandable, because Mark Lewisohn writes in The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions that take 6 was mixed down to form takes 15 and 16, and an extract of take 14 was mixed down to create take 17. The final song is the beginning of take 17, with the end of take 16 providing the last 40-odd seconds of the track. However, Lewisohn’s subsequent The Complete Beatles Chronicle changes the story somewhat and, by accident or design, does not mention the origin of take 16. Because close analysis shows that the section after the edit is an exact copy of the beginning of the song, without the vocal overdub. The two parts are identical, and only one take was used for the song.
The count-in is a ‘Taxman’-like piece of skulduggery. A week after the mono mix was made, Ringo’s introductory “Two… three…” was recorded and edited onto the beginning of the master tape as well as the mixed mono tape (made straight after the original recording). The stereo mix was put off for nearly two months, and obviously proved a little tricky as five remixes were needed until George Martin and team were happy. For this track, the mono version is also noticeably longer, the slower fade adding some 12 seconds to the length of the song.