Al Coury presenting a platinum record to Linda Ronstadt and me.

The letter H is an extremely rich, productive letter in terms of Beatles stuff. So let us start with a song that opens with a legendary, instantly recognizable chord.

There are no prizes for guessing which song I am talking about—it is, of course, “A Hard Day’s Night.” I’m cheating a little bit by leaving off the “A” and considering this an H song because I think of it as “Hard Day’s Night.” The title is allegedly based on something Ringo said, and “It’s been a hard day’s night” does indeed sound very Ringo-ish. It was also the title song of the brilliant film directed in such an original way by the amazing Dick Lester. It is interesting that the reason A Hard Day’s Night was shot in black and white wasn’t to be cool—though it was. It was because of the parsimonious budget. United Artists didn’t want to spend the money to shoot it in Technicolor because they were certain that the Beatles were going to be a wholly ephemeral phenomenon, here today, gone tomorrow. But, of course, it has now been tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, and they are very far from gone. And the black-and-white film now looks timeless.

But let us return to the song, and the incredible chord that begins it, which has been much discussed. One can find tons of information and speculation online. Exactly what notes are or are not in that chord? The Beatles and George Martin have each answered that question slightly differently, and the reality seems to be that there are several instruments involved, and they each may be playing slightly different chords. There is a G7 with a suspended fourth at the heart of it, but George Harrison described it once as an F major with a G on top, which is not the same thing. I am convinced the truth is that no one is quite sure. While sonically speaking the Rickenbacker twelve-string is certainly the primary ingredient that gives the chord its intense and aggressive tone, harmonically it is more complicated because other guitars were overdubbed, plus George Martin’s piano and Paul’s bass, not all playing precisely the same chord, and it all gets mixed together. Who can be sure that everyone remembers exactly what they played all those years ago? One can find numerous claimants online and in books to a total understanding and successful untangling of “the chord,” but they are not all the same. I prefer to allow the chord to keep its air of mystery! To imagine that somehow several musicians and several instruments combined to create a sonic and harmonic miracle which survives to this day. One way or the other, it is one of the best beginnings to a record that anyone ever invented, and it was the Beatles who did it.

If we are talking about the letter H and about Beatles movie songs, we can stay on both these subjects and find ourselves conveniently positioned to consider another great song that was also the title of a Beatles movie. Just a couple of days short of a year after they recorded “A Hard Day’s Night” (April 16, 1964), on April 13, 1965, they recorded “Help!”—the title song for their next movie.

John sang lead on this song, of which he was the primary composer. It apparently began life as a slow mournful cry for help, but it ended up as kind of an almost jolly cry for help and certainly a big hit cry for help. But it was Paul who introduced this song to me. He played it for me before the Beatles recorded it, and I learned it just for fun because I thought it was a brilliant and unique song. I sat next to him while he played it, so I was able to figure out the chords—though it is not so easy learning from a left-handed guitarist! A little while after that, before the record was released, Gordon and I were on tour in the United States on the Dick Clark Caravan of Stars with the Shirelles, the Drifters, and a whole bunch of other American acts. And I couldn’t resist shamelessly showing off to this busload of stars and saying, “Look, let me play you a bit of this. This is going to be the Beatles’ next single!” I am not sure they believed me. I confess it was kind of cheesy of me, but as I said, I couldn’t resist.

I played as much of “Help!” as I could remember just to show off that I’d heard it ahead of time. And then when the record came out and it was all over the radio, they said, “Oh, it was true. He really had learned one verse of the next Beatles single.” That was a big deal because everything the Beatles did was so magical.

Not a story I am entirely proud of (pathetic, really), but it does at least accurately recall the intense and almost desperate anticipation with which the world waited for any new music from the best band in the land.

Help! is generally considered not quite as great a movie as A Hard Day’s Night but still a good one and very funny and entertaining. Ringo was the star, and he was terrific. Ringo had a total naturalness on-screen that made him stand out and, in some ways, grounded the whole movie, however fantastical it became. The film also featured Leo McKern, a favourite actor of mine who finally became famous in the U.S. years later as Rumpole of the Bailey.

The Beatles had talked about various other ideas for a second movie including, strangely, a brief discussion about The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings, in which they would have played the four hobbits. It was just an idea that floated about for a while—Stanley Kubrick was even mentioned as a possible director—but it does have a certain fascination, though who knows whether the Tolkien people would ever have entertained the concept. That certainly would have changed the future of the movie business. Peter Jackson might not have been able to make his fantastic series of blockbuster movies. You never know.

I also recall a meeting at Apple with the actor and producer Patrick McGoohan to see what ideas he might have because we were all committed fans of The Prisoner, the brilliantly surreal TV series he created after he initially came to TV fame via Danger Man (Secret Agent in the U.S.). You might even remember that in the very last episode of The Prisoner there was a long and mysterious underground corridor filled with jukeboxes playing “All You Need Is Love”—so the admiration was clearly mutual!

So, let’s be fair now and turn to a George Harrison song. One of George’s very best and most loved and most famous songs begins with the letter H: “Here Comes the Sun.” He wrote it in Eric Clapton’s garden while waiting for Eric, and it was recorded at EMI Studios in July and August 1969. George deserves our unstinting admiration for the brilliantly original acoustic guitar part alone—quite apart from the beautiful song for which it became the foundation. Astonishing in its chord changes, its unexpected harmonic leaps and apparent modulations—all while actually remaining in one key and one tempo. And George proves himself again to be the master of the well-placed arpeggio. He also made brilliant use of one of the very first Moog synthesizers. A huge and unwieldy machine (the term “user friendly” had not been invented), and yet George coaxed some perfectly beautiful sounds from it—in celebration of those rare moments when the sun makes an appearance in an English country garden.

And to complete the picture, we must include Ringo. I’ve mentioned him in this chapter as an actor but not as a musician. He made a good record of a song beginning with H—“Hey! Baby,” produced by Arif Mardin and written by Margaret Cobb and Bruce Channel, Bruce being the artist who originally recorded the song.

I confess that when Ringo’s version opens, I do pine ever so slightly, if momentarily, for the Bruce Channel signature harmonica intro (always the danger in covering a hit everyone knows), but once Ringo’s version kicks in for real, I love the giant and boisterous singalong quality it has. And Arif’s horn arrangement is superb.

Another very cool H track in the Beatles’ world is “Helen Wheels,” an excellent song written by Paul and Linda McCartney and recorded by Wings. Apparently, they came up with the idea for the song while driving to London from their house in Scotland in a Land Rover to which they had given the nickname Helen Wheels. I was never in Paul’s place in Scotland; it is in the middle of nowhere and supposed to be spectacular. I am very fond of the Scottish landscape myself, bleak and even jagged in some ways but in beautifully muted colours and with an overall starkness that I find very appealing. An interesting thing about the song “Helen Wheels” is that it was apparently admired and chosen for a single by a promotion guy at Capitol Records called Al Coury, a brilliant man who ended up becoming the president of the company. Al and I first became friends back in the ’60s, when Al was a local promotion guy and I was on tour with Gordon. He was always really good at picking hit records, which I witnessed personally years later when he picked a song called “You’re No Good” which I had just finished producing with Linda Ronstadt and about which we were all very excited. Al was in the studio with us, and I played him the track. He said, “I will make that record number one, I promise!” And he was correct. He did it, and apparently he did the exact same thing for Paul McCartney with “Helen Wheels.” Al was one of the greatest promo men in the history of the record business. Paul McCartney and I both owe him a debt, and we thank him.

Now, you may not be reading this chapter at the right time of year, but I do have to mention a very important H song that John Lennon wrote: “Happy Xmas (War Is Over).” It is extremely hard to write a brand-new Christmas song that stands up alongside all the classics and becomes a regular part of a lot of people’s Christmas repertoire, but John managed it. This was a majestic and appealing song in the first place, and John made a great record of it.

Lots of people have covered it since, and at Christmastime lots of people sing it live. I produced a cover version of it myself. I was cutting a Christmas album with the amazing Neil Diamond, a terrific singer and songwriter and one of the most charming, smartest, and self-effacing artists with whom it has been my pleasure to work. I thought “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” would be a good choice for Neil because it would suit his huge and majestic baritone. When making a record for Neil, one never has to worry about dwarfing his vocal with too much accompaniment—it is impossible! His voice is utterly commanding, so I went for size and added many layers of powerful stuff, and it just made his voice sound bigger and better. Finally, I added a children’s choir on top because such is the nature of Christmas, and it suits the message of the song. The one I used was, not surprisingly, the choir at my own daughter’s school, so it included my daughter, Victoria Asher, at the age of about eight. This was actually her first appearance on a record but by no means her last. As some of you may know, she ended up in the band Cobra Starship, making some hit records with them and being on the radio quite a bit. Now she writes, co-writes, and records on her own as Vicky-T, as well as working in film, her first love.

Turning from a song that John Lennon wrote, I’d like to mention one that John did not write but did sing. We all know that Ringo recorded a version with the Beatles of Carl Perkins’s great song “Honey Don’t,” but until somebody pointed it out to me, I did not realize that John also sang it—and sang it very well. He performed it live during one of the Beatles’ sessions at the BBC. The BBC did many live sessions with the Beatles and other bands in the ’50s and ’60s because there was a time limit on playing records (what was called needle time) each week, so the only way that the BBC could actually broadcast much pop music was to invite the bands to sing live in the studio. Fortunately, they had very good studios and equipment and engineers, which is why the BBC has ended up with this treasure trove of fantastic artists from back in the day. I had the pleasure of attending a few of the Beatles’ live BBC sessions—one of the only possible opportunities to hear the Beatles play and sing live without screaming girls drowning them out—and they sounded truly amazing. In accordance with Malcolm Gladwell’s theory that it takes ten thousand hours to master a skill, I realized immediately how hours and hours of hard work and live gigs under fairly brutal circumstances had forged the band into an invincible musical quartet of singular synchronicity and style with four powerful singers.

While we are exploring the letter H, I have been thinking about the Beatles’ friends and people they really admired, one of whom was certainly an H and a good one. That was Harry Nilsson, a terrific guy, an amazing singer, a brilliant musician with an astonishing brain.

John, because he admired Harry so much, produced an album with him called Pussy Cats. It was a generally good album, especially considering that they were both pretty much going nuts at the time. This was during John’s “Lost Weekend,” a period when he was overdoing everything a bit and perhaps having too much fun. And that affected the record, I guess, because, to be honest, some of the tracks do not sound quite as good as they should. For example, they recorded the classic rock and roll song “Rock Around the Clock,” made famous by Bill Haley and His Comets. Considering that the track was produced by John Lennon, with three amazing drummers playing on it—Ringo, Jim Keltner, and Keith Moon—it should have sounded incredibly huge, impressive, and sonically miraculous. But I’ve got to say I was a little disappointed with the way the record came out. Three drummers (especially those three drummers) should sound earth-shattering, but this team did not end up with this result. Drugs can be fun, but they can also be destructive to any sensible organization of the creative process and can sometimes make you think you are accomplishing more than is in fact the case. I still like the Pussy Cats album and recommend giving it a listen while keeping these caveats in mind!

Around the same time, in that same group of sessions that John was producing, he was also beginning work on his own album Walls and Bridges. And that of course had a huge No. 1 hit on it—also, by the way, promoted and forecast for No. 1 by the great Al Coury. It was “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night,” with Elton John playing piano. John and Elton had become good friends, and in November 1974 John would join Elton onstage at Madison Square Garden in New York, to play a few songs during Elton’s concert there. In addition to “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night,” they played “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” which Elton had just released as a single, and their own version of “I Saw Her Standing There,” a song we associate more with Paul McCartney. John even said to the audience, introducing the song, “We thought we’d do a number of an old, estranged fiancé of mine, called Paul. This is one I never sang; it’s an old Beatles number, and we just about know it.” And what a great version it turned out to be.

While we’re on the subject of hard-driving rock and roll numbers associated with Paul McCartney, let’s stop for a moment at a big H song, “Helter Skelter.” In the studio, this was a conscious effort to make the loudest, dirtiest, crunchiest rock and roll track of all time. To catch up with and to outdo bands like the Who, who could be seen as “heavier” than the Beatles. And perhaps to inadvertently launch metal and punk on their eventual musical course? Perhaps. But certainly nothing to do with inspiring some total lunatic in California to associate the song with the Book of Revelation or some such nonsense, fail to even understand what helter skelter means, and embark on a horrifying and insane course of action.

The term helter skelter is much more common in the UK than in the U.S. and has two distinct meanings. As an adjective it means “in disordered haste.” As a noun it is an old-fashioned fairground ride, of a sort common at the outdoor fairs I used to go to as a child, and I know Paul did, too. A brightly painted wooden tower with a spiral staircase inside and a spiral slide down the outside. One took a mat (like a doormat) from a pile at the entrance and then climbed up the inside staircase to the top, waited one’s turn at the entrance to the slide, sat on the mat, and slid down, repeating the process as often as one could be bothered to get back in the queue. Hence: “When I get to the bottom I go back to the top of the slide / Where I stop and I turn and I go for a ride / Till I get to the bottom, and I see you again.”

Helter skelter.

Leaving our doormats behind, if you ask people to name their favourite Beatles song beginning with H, I bet this next one might come out very close to the top. It was written by Paul, sitting by John Lennon’s swimming pool in Weybridge while waiting for John. A brilliant song, “Here, There and Everywhere.” The Beatles certainly made a very fine record of it, the three-part background “Ahhs” (straightforward triads, nothing fancy—no Brian Wilson swoops or anything like that) are lovely, but essentially the arrangement is very simple. “Here, There and Everywhere” is first and foremost a triumph of the art of songwriting—the combination of a beautiful and moving lyric with a delicious and memorable melody.

Now here is an H curiosity, the song “Hello Little Girl.” It was written by John Lennon (reputedly the first song he ever wrote) and recorded by the Fourmost, another band managed by Brian Epstein. I am a huge Brian Epstein fan. When James Taylor and I left Apple and we agreed that I would become James’s manager, I looked at Brian as a role model. Like me, he had never been a manager before (he ran a record shop, and I was a performer), and his success proved that one did not have to have any specialized inside knowledge of the music business or unique skills; that intelligence, a willingness to learn, an absolute belief in the talent and ability of one’s artist, an absolute commitment to their welfare and success, and fierce determination could actually do the trick—and we both had those qualities for sure. This does not mean that either Brian or I entirely avoided any business missteps or artistic mistakes—far from it, I am sure—but we were honest and determined, and we did get the job done. And in each case, we expanded our management operation beyond our original signings (the Beatles and James Taylor, respectively) to include other acts. One of those, for Brian, was the Fourmost.

Henry Diltz took this photo of James Taylor and me just before he shot the cover for Sweet Baby James, the first American album I produced for James.

The Fourmost were a comedy group as well as a singing group. They were pretty funny, but they had only a couple of minor hits, and “Hello Little Girl” was one of them. John did sing it himself with the Beatles, but they never officially released it—though they did perform it as part of their (unsuccessful) audition for Decca Records in January 1962.

I am going to conclude by addressing two songs that begin with “Hey.” The first is “Hey Bulldog,” which is one of those songs that is more popular among listeners today than I imagined it would be. On the various SiriusXM listener surveys, it always ranks high. I like it, but it would not be in my top twenty. But allow me to move from a relatively insignificant “Hey” song (in my view) to undoubtedly the greatest “Hey” song ever written. (I think it even beats Hank Williams’s “Hey, Good Lookin’,” which is a close runner-up, along with Carole King’s “Hey Girl” and Bruce Channel’s “Hey! Baby.”)

And of course that final H song is “Hey Jude.” It is one of the best Beatles songs ever written, a magnificent song from Paul, building on a strong piano foundation and featuring great work by Ringo on the drums and beautiful background vocals by John and George. It was also, for those interested in such technical matters, the first song the Beatles recorded on more than four tracks. What is truly astonishing is that everything they had recorded up to that point, including Sgt. Pepper, was accomplished with only four separate tracks—recorded on one-inch, four-track Studer machines at EMI Studios—which drastically constricted the way you made records. It’s one of the reasons that working in mono was much more practical than working in stereo, because you kept having to bounce things down to one track to free up more space on the next reel of tape. And once sounds were bounced together, they were bound together forever in that specific balance (which could not be changed) and neither could they be spatially separated in a stereo mix. So it was quite an adventure trying to fit things together with only four tracks to work with.

It turns out that EMI Studios had been in possession of an eight-track machine for about a year that none of us knew about because they were keeping it in a back room and tweaking it to get it up to EMI standards. But another studio, Trident Studios, did have an eight-track, and they had no such qualms—when the studio owners (the brothers Barry and Norman Sheffield) took delivery, they just opened the box, plugged in the machine, and went for it. That is one of the reasons I chose Trident to record James Taylor’s first album. Paul McCartney very kindly came over and visited one of our sessions, and he played bass for us on a song for that album called “Carolina in My Mind.” Paul realized then how cool it would be to work on eight-track and decided to bring all the Beatles over to try recording a song there. And that’s why they all came over to Trident to record “Hey Jude” in an eight-track format.

I had the good fortune of being invited to attend the end of that session. They had pretty much recorded everything, and they were in the process of starting to mix it. I arrived and heard “Hey Jude” on the gigantic Tannoy speakers at Trident Studios, and it totally blew my mind. If you can imagine hearing that song for the very first time, when you have no idea where it’s going musically, it was an extraordinary experience. When the whole second half began (where the “nah nahs” kick in), I didn’t know that all that stuff was going to happen or that it would go on so long or that it would be so totally amazing or that all of Paul’s great sung interjections and soulful licks would appear when they did. I was totally knocked out. The arrangement is so masterful—and as each new sonic element enters (the tambourine! the strings! the horns!), one’s excitement level and musical joy escalate exponentially.

“Hey Jude” broke a lot of rules. Everyone thought it was much too long to be a hit single. It changed the way we all made records because we now thought, Wow, you can get that big, and you can add that many things, and you can stretch things out, and you can break some of the rules about what makes an obvious pop record—and still be successful. Well, yes, if you were the Beatles, you could. And it was just another example of the Beatles’ colossally iconoclastic revolutionary impact.