John – lead
vocals, acoustic guitar, lead guitar; backing vocals (WWF
version)
Paul – piano; backing vocals (WWF version)
George – sitar, tamboura, guitar, maracas; backing vocals (WWF
version)
Ringo – percussion, drums (Let It Be version)
George Martin – possible organ (WWF version)
Lizzie Bravo, Gayleen Pease – backing vocals (WWF version)
Session musicians – eighteen violins, four violas, four cellos,
three trumpets, three trombones, two guitars, harp, fourteen-voice
female choir (Let It Be version)
‘Across The Universe’ had an unconventional birth, even by the standards of this unconventional album. Before the track wound up on Let It Be, with its lavish orchestra and heavenly choir, it had been a potential single, a potential EP track, and found its way, complete with sound effects, onto a World Wildlife Fund charity LP.
The song was one in which the words preceded the tune, and were in fact written completely independently of any music. Hunter Davies in The Beatles describes how John woke early one morning with the line “Pools of sorrow, waves of joy” stuck in his mind. John himself later recalled how he had been lying awake, irritated about something to do with Cynthia, who was asleep next to him, and with the genesis of the song going round and round his head. Either way, he got up and began scribbling down lines he felt at the time were corny, his writing becoming illegible with embarrassment. He later said the lyrics were
“purely inspirational and were given to me as boom! I don’t own it, you know; it came through like that … Such an extraordinary meter and I can never repeat it! It’s not a matter of craftsmanship, it wrote itself. It drove me out of bed. I didn’t want to write it … It’s like being possessed, like a psychic or a medium.”
John was immensely proud of his “poetry”, and has described it as one of his best lyrics, in fact “it could be the best.” And for this reason if no other, the song is important.
John was characteristically uncertain as to the exact arrangement he wanted for ‘Across The Universe’. Hunter Davies recorded John’s attempts to get across the way he wants his songs to sound.
“When John is talking to George Martin, on a John song, there is a lot of whooshing and wow wow wow, as he tries to let George Martin hear what he can hear in his head. He’s also not as definite as Paul, or doesn’t appear to be, asking the others what they think when they’ve just heard a track played back. Paul tends to say straight away, let’s do it again.”
Engineer Geoff Emerick remembered on the BBC Radio One tribute In My Life, “John would say ‘Give me an orange sound’, and you could tell by his face or mood whether he was happy with that sound. There wasn’t a lot of verbal communication.”
Over the course of recording ‘Across The Universe’, John tried a variety of effects in an attempt to get the right feeling for the song. The sessions started with guitar, tom-toms and tamboura, all Leslied and flanged. Take 2 was clearly promising, as it was given overdubs of sitar, guitar and a lead vocal. This lovely take appears as the final track on Anthology 2. (Oddly, although Mark Lewisohn gives the starting date for recording of ‘Across The Universe’ as 4 February in both The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions and The Complete Beatles Chronicle, his Anthology 2 CD liner notes specifically date take 2 as having been recorded on Saturday, 3 February. This could have been an oversight, although an outtake of its recording is preceded by a voice saying “All right, Ken?” – presumably referring to Ken Scott, the engineer who was in the control room on 3 February but absent the following day, making the Saturday the probable date of the start of the recording. On the other hand, the Recording Sheet for the evening session of 3 February only lists overdubs for ‘Lady Madonna’.)
In any event, take 2 was superseded and a total of six takes were recorded, until the best take – actually numbered seven – was arrived at. Further experimental recording for the song included backwards drum and bass tracks, and a planned add-on piece called ‘Hums Wild’, fifteen seconds of low humming, similar to that proposed for the ending to ‘A Day In The Life’. On the last day of recording, George Martin added a Hammond organ piece, with John playing Mellotron and then tone pedal guitar. John, Paul and George clustered around a single microphone, recording backing vocals. In these processes of trial-and-error, most ultimately fell into the second category, and did not make it onto a final recording. There’s no evidence of a Mellotron, no backwards guitar or humming on either the World Wildlife Fund or Let It Be releases of the song, and on Let It Be John appears to be the only vocalist.
One attempt to add something different and new to the song did make it onto the World Wildlife Fund LP, however. That particular experiment, which seems to illustrate John’s willingness to try anything, and hints at his frustration in capturing the right sound for the track, was the use of girl fans to sing backing vocals. Two of the band of teenage fans who laid permanent siege to the studios whenever the group were recording were hauled in off the street to provide falsetto harmony vocals during the chorus. Though it would seem unlikely that John would be pressured into accepting this solution, he later expressed his disgust about this use of fans as an immediate compromise to his musical requirements, and about the treatment of the song in general. He later said
“The original track was a real piece of shit, I was singing out of tune and instead of getting a decent choir, we got fans from outside, Apple Scruffs or whatever you call them. They came in and were singing all off-key. Nobody was interested in doing the tune originally.”
John felt that the song was seriously undermined in its recording, and let as much be known within weeks of the session. The Beatles Book of April 1968 reported “John and others not entirely happy about the finished recording of ‘Across The Universe’ … Possible that one of the other items they recorded just before the trip to India will be substituted and a new version of ‘Across The Universe’ will be made at a later date.” John laid the blame for the perceived faults in the recording squarely at the feet of his partner. Twelve years after recording the track, John was obviously still angry – as angry as he was about anything during the twenty hours of conversation with Playboy – at what he sees as the destruction of a major piece of work, and talks about it at length.
“The Beatles didn’t make a good record out of it. I think subconsciously sometimes we – I say ‘we’ though I think Paul did it more than the rest of us – Paul would sort of subconsciously try and destroy a great song … Usually we’d spend hours doing little detailed cleaning-ups of Paul’s songs, when it came to mine, especially if it was a great song like ‘Strawberry Fields’ or ‘Across The Universe’, somehow this atmosphere of looseness and casualness and experimentation would creep in … It was a lousy track of a great song and I was so disappointed by it …The guitars are out of tune and I’m singing out of tune because I’m psychologically destroyed and nobody’s supporting me or helping me with it, and the song was never done properly.”
Even during the filming of Let It Be, several months after the recording of the song, he was exasperated at not being able to re-record the track.
“In the movie, when I got to do ‘Across The Universe’, Paul yawns and plays boogie. And I merely say ‘Anyone want to do a fast one?’ [This was actually after a run-through of ‘Dig A Pony’ – and Paul does not seem to yawn on film.] … Year after year that begins to wear you down. I wanted to re-record ‘Across The Universe’ because the original wasn’t very good.”
However, it is difficult to imagine John as a victim in the studio, pressured into accepting detrimental decisions concerning his songs. As George Martin observed
“I thought my communication was pretty good in getting inside his brain and finding out what he wanted. He would always say ‘Yes, great, lovely, OK, fine’ at the playbacks. But only later did he tell people he’d never been really happy with [the recording of] anything he’d written.”
In fact, John got his chance to re-record the song when he went into the studio with David Bowie in 1975. They recorded a version of ‘Across The Universe’, and produced a new song in the studio, ‘Fame’, which gave Bowie his first US number one. However, the new interpretation of the Lennon song is so affected and melodramatic, it should arguably have been quietly forgotten. Although John was presumably happy with the Bowie treatment, either Beatles’ version, however badly played or over-produced, seems truer to the spirit of the song and is much to be preferred.
Back in February 1968, all four Beatles agreed that, of the three tracks that they had just recorded, the next single, which would be released while they were away in India, would be ‘Lady Madonna’, with ‘The Inner Light’ as the B-side. ‘Across The Universe’ was set aside, destined for a unique fate.
Spike Milligan conceived the World Wildlife Fund compilation album, organising contributions both new and old from artists such as the Bee Gees, Cilla Black, the Hollies, Lulu and Cliff Richard. The Beatles’ offering was not only ‘Across The Universe’, but also the title of the LP – No One’s Gonna Change Our World. As it happens, Milligan was visiting the Beatles at Abbey Road studios as they were recording the final overdubs to ‘Across The Universe’ on 8 February. George Martin produced the No One’s Gonna Change Our World album, and, because the Beatles’ song was the first track on the album, he added “wildlife” sound effects, birds twittering and then taking off, overlapping the guitar introduction to the song. He also increased the tape speed by some 5%, raising the pitch by about a semitone. The mix also includes the sitar and tamboura, wah-wah guitar, maracas, tom-toms and, in the coda, a bass-line piano. An organ is just about evident from the last line of the verse, and the girls’ backing vocals are also present, answered by wordless backing vocals from John, Paul and George. No One’s Gonna Change Our World was finally released on 12 December 1969.
The decision to put ‘Across The Universe’ on a Beatles album was taken in January 1970, predating Phil Spector’s arrival on the scene by a couple of months. The Get Back album, compiled by Glyn Johns and at this stage still intended for release, had to be reworked to tie in with music appearing in the film. So ‘Teddy Boy’ was removed (a different version of which would appear on Paul’s McCartney LP three months later), and ‘I Me Mine’ and ‘Across The Universe’ were added. To maintain the “live” approach of the album, Johns mixed out the backing vocal overdubs and the sound effects from ‘Across The Universe’, added a spoken line from John at the beginning and faded the song early to the reprise of the title track, ‘Get Back’. But still the album stayed in EMI’s vaults, until John called in Phil Spector.
After some initial re-mixing of the track, Spector taped orchestral and choral overdubs for ‘Across The Universe’ on 1 April, with Ringo on drums. This was the last recording session for a Beatles album, but was as fraught and tense as many a previous session, thanks to Spector’s way of working. Engineer Brian Gibson remembered Spector as being paranoid, insecure and highly immature. At one point he was tearing around screaming “I wanna hear this!”, “I wanna hear that!” at which point Ringo had a quiet word in his ear, told him that everyone was doing their best and suggested he should cool it.
The result of Spector’s work may be rather over the top, but is apparently nearer to John’s vision of the track than the original. Notwithstanding the addition of a 35-piece orchestra and 14-voice choir, the newer version was slowed down by about the same amount as George Martin sped up the original, resulting in about a whole tone’s difference in pitch between the two. One aspect he was able to do nothing about was the phasing effect on John’s vocal. This was added during a reduction mixdown back in February 1968, and so couldn’t be removed.
Needless to say, come the creation of Let It Be… Naked, Spector’s overdubs – and George Martin’s of course – were removed, although a spiritual ending created with gradual addition of tape delay echo to John’s fading vocal.
Critics are divided now, much as the group was then, as to the merits of ‘Across The Universe’. The song has been criticised for lacking diversity due to the absence of a middle eight. But ‘Dig A Pony’, John’s only other new composition for the album, along with most of his songs on Abbey Road, have no middle eight. That was not the way John was writing at the time. In fact there is greater variety within this song, compared with, for example, ‘Come Together’, as each verse of ‘Across The Universe’ is rhythmically quite different. None of the verses consists of anything as straightforward as a simple pattern of eight bars of 4/4. Each has two sets of three 4/4 bars followed by a non-standard bar –
first verse: 4, 4, 4, 5; 4, 4, 4, 2
second verse: 4, 4, 4, 4; 4, 4, 4, 5
final verse: 4, 4, 4, 2; 4, 4, 4, 4.
It is precisely this contrast of a repeated melody against the disquieting awareness of a changing meter that makes the song remarkable, and sustains the listener’s interest. This and the imagery conjured up by the extraordinary lyric. Alongside the beautifully poetic “Pools of sorrow, waves of joy”, the startling contrast of the ethereal “thoughts meander like a restless wind” with the mundane “inside a letterbox” is audacious, and clearly does not work for some people. Yet this is obviously the effect John wished to achieve with the lyrics. However far thoughts come, from wherever in the universe, they arrive and achieve expression here and now, the manifestation is straightforward, practical and secular. If an attempt is made to define the magic, it disappears and inevitably becomes worldly.
However, taken as a whole, the words are a wonderful paradigm for the writing process itself. John described the idea to Playboy – “Letting it go is what the whole game is. You put your finger on it, it slips away, right?” The words that flowed out like endless rain to John that morning were “Words are flowing out like endless rain…”.
As with ‘Come Together’, there are words in the lyric that are debated – is it “slither wildly as they slip away”, or “slither while they pass, they slip away”? David Bowie, who had John backing him in the studio, sings “wildly”, but the transcription in the Playboy interview is “while they pass”. The booklet accompanying the Let It Be album, The Beatles Get Back, includes the following banter –
John: ‘I Dig A Pigmy’ by Charles Hawtrey and the Deaf Aids. Phase One in which Doris gets her oats.
Paul: Oh sometimes, John, I don’t know.
Ringo: That tongue’ll be the death of you.
John: (musing) Slither wildly like a blind dog … as he crept away across my underpants. Oh, I’m a lyricist all right.
In rehearsals and early takes, John clearly sings “wildly”, and comparing the phrase with the next verse (“…they tumble blindly”) confirms this, but in truth it doesn’t matter. The song is about the creative process, and so in this case the exact creation is not important. As with “Jai guru deva, om”, which is based on the Sanskrit for “Praise to the holy teacher” and was a phrase used by John to help him meditate, the meaning couldn’t be guessed at by the vast majority of his audience. It is the impression made by the whole, rather than details of the specific, that is important.